No matter what our teens do, just remember that it can be much, much worse. A 16-year-old from Melbourne, Australia made headlines this past weekend when he hosted a house party that wound up being attended by over 500 people which spun so far out of control that a police helicopter, 30 police officers and even the dog squad had to be called in. The total clean up and damage bill looks like it will top $20,000. But that’s not the worse of the teen’s troubles:

“Detectives have interviewed two 16-year-old youths over incidents on the weekend. One male has been charged with producing child pornography and creating a public nuisance,” a police statement, released tonight, read.

The first boy had been bailed to appear at a children’s court on February 22, while a brief was being prepared in relation to the other boy, the statement added.

Today’s arrests capped a mad four days with the law finally catching up with one of the youths, who has become a media celebrity.

We’ll admit we were band geeks in high school — trombone, specifically. So we know the gooey mass of saliva that can collect in those things. And so does the band teacher at a New Caney, Texas high school who decided to come up with a new way to punish a student for forgetting his trumpet — have the entire brass section empty their spit valves into his hand. All 21 of them. Eww!

“With the diseases going around nowadays, that’s very unsanitary for one thing and there are ways to correct a child without going to that extreme,” said parent Jimmie Mikel.

“That’s just totally wrong,” added parent Mary Sargent. “The teacher needs to be punished for that because the kid’s got to live with the embarrassment for the rest of his life. That just ain’t right.”

Keene says he was made aware of the January 4 incident after his son went to his school counselor asking to be transferred out of band class. The school district has since put the teacher on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation.

We’re not sure what the new “diseases going around nowadays” are — seems a bit hyperbolic — but it’s still gross and inappropriate, nonetheless. We had a pretty nut job band teacher back in our day, and even he didn’t do anything as over-the-top as this. Perhaps the triangle player missing the beat AGAIN just put him over the edge.

And look at the bright side, Mr. Humiliated New Caney Student, the next homecoming game you’ll get to watch from the stands instead of on the field marching around in a dorky costume.

Dennis Quaid is speaking out about the drug overdose accident that almost killed his two twins. Quaid is claiming that the hospital misled him, telling him over the phone that his kids were “fine” instead of relaying the seriousness of the situation.

But about two hours before that call, nurses had noticed his daughter oozing blood from an intravenous site on her arm and a spot on her heel, state records show. The Quaids said no one notified them, and they feel betrayed and misled.

“Our kids could have been dying, and we wouldn’t have been able to come down to the hospital to say goodbye,” Quaid told the newspaper.

Hospital spokesman Richard Elbaum declined to address most of the Quaids’ allegations directly.

Continuing with the parade of Britney Spears’ erratic behavior, the fallen pop princess failed to show up in court today for a custody hearing. Perhaps it’s for the best, as an outside observer she doesn’t seem quite up to the whole parenting task right now…

A throng of photographers and reporters waited outside the downtown courthouse to see if Spears would come to what one attorney described as “the most significant hearing in the case so far.” Law enforcement officers watched over the scene.

But Spears has had trouble making recent legal dates: On Dec. 12, she called in sick for a court-ordered deposition, then arrived nearly two hours late at an attorney’s office on its rescheduled date, Jan. 3.

Federline’s attorney, Mark Vincent Kaplan, told The Associated Press on Sunday that he didn’t know if Spears would come at today’s hearing, and he indicated that it would be important for her to be there to take the opportunity to try to persuade the court restore visitation.

“You can’t phone this one in,” he said.

Note to all you dumbass child abusers out there: if you’re going to beat your kid, you might not want to do it in front of a security camera.

A Michigan man is under arrest for beating a toddler in a convenience store, police said.

The store’s security camera caught the man hitting, kicking and stepping on his girlfriend’s 2-year-old son, authorities said.

The man also appears to knock the child down with a cooler door, police said.

Public service announcement of the day: make sure to vet those babysitters as much as humanly possible… a babysitter in Witchita, Kansas has been arrested in the death of an 18-month-old in her care after police saw the child’s injuries didn’t quite jibe with what the suspect was telling them:

“She said she’d been babysitting, he fell off the couch and stopped breathing so she brought him to the hospital,” said Captain Randy Landen, Wichita Police Department.

Police say the baby had substantial trauma to his body, including bruising, scratches and brain injuries.

The 24 year old babysitter, Heidi Dieball let the mother and baby live with her. She was watching the boy while the mother was out with her boyfriend. Police say the mother is not a suspect in the case.

For quite some time, a large number of people have pointed their finger at thimerosal, a mercury based preservative in vaccines, as the primary culprit in the rise in autism cases throughout the United States despite the lack of scientific evidence. A new study may put that causality case even further back — a recent report shows that autism cases in California are still on the rise, despite the ban of thimerosal several years ago:

Researchers from the state Department of Public Health found the autism rate in children rose continuously during the 12-year study period from 1995 to 2007. The preservative thimerosal hasn’t been used in childhood vaccines since 2001, but is used in some flu shots.

Doctors say the latest study adds to existing evidence refuting a link between thimerosal exposure and autism risk and should reassure parents that the disorder is not caused by vaccinations. If there was a risk, they said, autism rates should have dropped between 2004 and 2007.

The findings show “no evidence of mercury poisoning in autism” since there was no decline in autism rates even after the elimination of thimerosal, said Dr. Eric Fombonne, an autism researcher at Montreal Children’s Hospital who had no role in the research.

Nice lesson to teach your kid. A 6-year-old girl in Garland, Texas entered an essay contest at Club Libby Lu, penning a tear jerker about her father dying in Iraq, in the hopes of winning four tickets to an ultra-sold-out Hannah Montana tickets. Now, we’ve certainly pulled similar boneheaded stunts when we were kids, but the bad part of this tale was that the girl’s mother was in on it:

The mother had told company officials that the girl’s father died April 17 in a roadside bombing in Iraq, company spokeswoman Robyn Caulfield said.

“We did the essay and that’s what we did to win,” Priscilla Ceballos, the mother, said in an interview with Dallas TV station KDFW. “We did whatever we could do to win.”

She had identified the soldier as Sgt. Jonathon Menjivar, but the Department of Defense has no record of anyone with that name dying in Iraq. Caulfield said the mother has admitted to the deception.

Club Libby Lu is apparently mulling over whether or not to take away her tickets. What’s there to think about? They need to rip the tickets right out of her hands, give them to a more deserving kid right in front of her face and send her home crying to her mommy.

UPDATE: Club Libby Lu has decided to take away the tickets from Ceballos’ daughter — YOINK!

Ever wonder how a pregnant woman is able to carry such a large weight in front of her, without simply falling over? Yeah, us neither — just one of those things we take for granted. Well fortunately for us some apparently bored researches decided to look into the matter, and determined that a pregnant woman’s natural stance during pregnancy is a product of evolution. It’s now been shown that pregnant “pre-humans” had the same stance in an effort to reduce back pain — so those of you with backaches during pregnancy can be thankful it wasn’t worse…

The bodies of women do two things when they are pregnant — they adjust their stance to move the centre of gravity to accommodate the growing foetus, and the lower vertebrae have evolved a distinct shape to allow this shifting to take place without damaging the spine, Katherine Whitcome of Harvard University and colleagues found.

“It was one of these things like, ‘Oh my god, no one’s ever thought of this,’ and it looks so obvious,” Liza Shapiro of the University of Texas at Austin, who helped supervise the work, said in a telephone interview.

Whitcome and Shapiro followed 19 women through their pregnancy, using digital cameras and motional analysis equipment to map the changes in stance and movement as the months passed.

“What women do when their pregnancy reaches about half of the expected mass … they shift backwards,” Shapiro said.

Expect this to be put in the arsenal of the anti-vaccine crowd — the drug company Merck & Co. discovered a sterilization problem at one of their factories and are recalling over one million doses of a widely used childhood vaccine:

The company is not aware of any harm to children who received the vaccine, known as Hib, which prevents meningitis and pneumonia. It is a three-dose shot recommended for all children under five and is usually given to infants starting at two months old.

The recall involves 10 lots of Hib vaccine and two lots of a combination vaccine for both Hib and hepatitis B, a Merck spokeswoman said.

The Illinois legislature is proposing a bill that would ban the use of aluminum/metal bats by kids under 13 years old. Coaches, parents or teachers caught letting the kids use the bats would face a fine of up to $500. The reason is that the aluminum bats are supposedly more dangerous than wood, because the ball can be hit harder and faster. We don’t know enough about baseball to confirm or deny whether these concerns are valid, but it wouldn’t be the first time politicians have gone off half-cocked about an issue they know nothing about. One little league coach thinks this is one of those times:

Phil Rizzo, who runs Little League District 13 — covering 18 leagues in Bartlett, Hanover Park, Streamwood, South Elgin, Carpentersville and other suburbs — wants coaches, players and their families to speak out against a state ban on metal bats.

“If we didn’t believe it was safe, we would have gone to wooden bats a long time ago,” Rizzo said.

He’s been involved with youth baseball for nearly 20 years and says no complaints have come up about aluminum bats.

Wood bats reduce hitting averages and break more frequently than metal ones, forcing leagues and families to spend more money buying replacements, he said.

“This bill is a mistake based on bad information,” Rizzo said.

Chalk up a victory for Chicago’s most famous atheist, Rob Sherman. Federal Judge Robert Gettleman ruled on a lawsuit brought by Sherman against local school district 214 over Illinois’ newly mandated moment of silence, claiming it violated separation of church and state and it seems Judge Gettleman agrees:

[Gettleman] today issued a preliminary injunction barring a suburban school district from implementing the state’s new law mandating a moment of silence at the start of classes, calling the statute too vague and “likely unconstitutional.”

Gettleman asked the parties in the case to return to the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse Thursday when he could consider making the injunction statewide. The Illinois attorney general’s office is considering stepping into the litigation.

Gettleman said the Silent Reflection and Student Prayer Act isn’t specific enough about what is a “moment” and when it should take place. It also may cross the line into unconstitutionality by giving students a choice to pray, the judge said.

Previous Illinois law allowed any teacher to hold an optional moment of silence within their classroom, but the current law makes it compulsory.

Those of us wistfully gazing at eBay and Craigslist as the price for Hannah Montana tickets soar into the hundreds — if not thousands — can on one hand feel sympathy for this group of parents. A class action lawsuit has been filed against Interactive Media Marketing, Inc. and Smiley Miley, Inc., owners of the Hannah Montana Fan Club website, alleging that the site misled people to register with the hope that their $29.95 annual fee would get them higher priority to buy tour tickets.

On the other hand, the phrase caveat emptor comes to mind. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the number of members could easily surpass the total number of tickets available (membership was also provided to those who purchased the latest Hannah Montana CD), and the site did say in their fine print that there were no ticket guarantees. So it does sound like a bit of sour grapes:

“Thousands of people joined the club based on the understanding that by joining they would be able to purchase Hannah Montana concert tickets before they were offered for sale to the general public,” said Peirce. “In reality the vast majority were unable to obtain concert tickets.”

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Kerry Inman, a New Jersey woman who joined the Hannah Montana fan club.

She was shut out when she tried to purchase tickets to the Hannah Montana concert in Atlantic City, N.J. through the web site.

“The scenario that the Inman family went through — paying for a membership, then logging on to purchase tickets as soon as possible-this scenario has been replayed thousands, if not tens of thousands of times over the past few months,” said Peirce.

Hey, don’t know if you’ve heard, but Hannah Montana seems to be a bit popular right now. Can you believe it? Good thing we have some hard hitting journalism from the Dallas Morning News letting us in on the “Hannahmania” and why Ms. Cyrus is so popular, even though anyone that’s watched more than 5 minutes of the show with their kids can figure that one out.

So what is going on here? Why, pray tell, have little girls (and by extension their parents) gone nuts over a rhyming-named character with a raspy voice? Here are 10 reasons, thanks to statistical data, professional insight and, most importantly, the wise words of second-grade girls.

1. “She sings really good” was the first answer from most of the second-graders as they ate their sandwiches at Bluebonnet Elementary in Fort Worth. They also like her “sparkly” clothes, her funny TV show and the fact that she has her priorities in order. (OK, they didn’t put it like that.) Her TV brother wants to be popular, “but she really doesn’t care about that,” says student Skyla Fisher. “If she gets a chance to, she’ll probably go for it, but usually she doesn’t care.” As her pal Maddy Waite put it, “She’s a nice girl.” Which brings us to the next reason.

2. To parents, she’s as pure as the Disney-manufactured snow. This explains why Mom and Dad aren’t opposed to treating their kids to her concert, even if it means taking out a bank loan. (A recent check on stubhub.com showed 67 tickets available for the Fort Worth show, ranging from $145 to $1,600 each.) Hey, in a world full of fallen pop sweethearts (oh, Britney!) and other assorted tawdriness, we’re apparently willing to pay for a night of good, clean fun.

3. That “superhero in disguise” thing gets them every time. Just as no one ever clued into the fact that Clark Kent was the Man of Steel, Miley-Hannah also has her friends on the show fooled. How can this be? Second-grader Bailey Strother has a logical answer: “Because she has a ton of makeup on and has a wig on.” Ah, yes. Just like Clark’s clever glasses.

Read the rest of this painfully obvious list if you have nothing better to do.

A study back in February tried to link a cause and effect that the earlier a child lost their virginity, the more likely they were to end up juvenile delinquents. While on a rudimentary level that seems it could be true as an 11-year-old with an active sex life is probably not getting too much in the way of parental guidance, but now it appears to be patently false:

That new analysis, a reworking of the same data the Ohio team used, is one of several recent instances in which a more precise parsing of data has begun to turn longstanding societal presumptions on their head. By bringing evidence to bear on complex social issues, these studies are forcing individuals and policy makers to rethink such hot-button topics as the benefits of breast-feeding, the risks of teen child-bearing and, in the latest example, the harms long presumed to result from teen sex.

Like many of the newer studies, the latest one — led by Paige Harden, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville — uses the powerful techniques of behavioral genetics. The field specializes in studies on twins, which can help tell whether behavioral traits are the result of genes or the social environment and which have periodically stirred controversy when they focused on the genetic underpinnings of criminality and intelligence.