It may have not hindered Ronald McDonald's career—or Chris Evans' for that matter—but being a red-headed British boy is nothing short of a nightmare for Tyler Walsh.
The flame-haired 12-year-old from Bristol has been bullied to such an extent that his school recently recommended he be taught in isolation. All because of his hair colour. And that's not the only ginger-related discrimination going on...
Tyler's mother Emma, not surprisingly, found the suggestion abhorrent. "Tyler is effectively being bullied out of school for being red-headed," she said. "It should be the bullies who are excluded from school, not their victim."
She admits that Tyler has been bullied from the minute he started secondary school. In one incident he was even chased into the street, where he was punched and kicked by a gang of boys. The police were called to the scene. They admonished the bullies, yet they appeared in class the next day.
Then the bullying was worse than ever.
After Yate International Academy suggested he be kept apart from the other children, his outraged mom pulled Tyler son out of the school.
"It is not fair that Tyler should be bullied out of school. He wants to learn and has been getting excellent grades," said 33-year-old Ms Walsh. "Yate International Academy has punished one boy, when a whole group were involved. I think it is absolutely disgusting."
Disgusting, for sure. Clearly this school, and many others like it, needs to brush up on its anti-bullying policy. Ms Walsh plans to take the matter up with the Academy principal, Roger Gilbert and with the education watchdog, Ofsted.
What, in your opinion, is the most effective strategy for schools to follow in bullying cases such as this? Know of any success stories firsthand?
If you thought Lego was just a boring building toy, the derring do of a couple 17-year-olds from Scarborough may make you think twice.
Unlike a lot of teens, Mathew Ho nor Asad Muhammad weren't preoccupied with partying or girls. And also unlike this teen, they couldn't afford the ticket. So they spent every Saturday of the past four months devising a science project of their own that would give them a taste of space.
Ho and Muhammad, who respectively share interests in engineering and aerospace, thought it would be fun to launch a homemade balloon carrying a Lego passenger and four cameras into space.
The whole thing took 97 minutes but provided some astonishing footage from an estimated 24 kilometres above sea level. According to the Star's report—that's "three times the typical cruising altitude of a commercial aircraft."
Take that, Armstrong. The little Lego spaceman even carried a miniature Canadian flag.
“We didn’t really believe we could do it until we did,” says Ho of the project which cost $400 to complete. A project which University of Toronto astrophysics professor Dr. Michael Reid claimed showed "a tremendous degree of resourcefulness,” the kind usually undertaken by PhD students.
The future is no doubt bright for Ho and Muhammad who became friends in middle school, and have applied to university programs in commerce and engineering, respectively.
“People would walk into the house and see us building this fantastical thing with a parachute from scratch, and they would be like, ‘What are you doing?,” says Ho. “We’d be like, ‘We’re sending cameras to space.’ They’d be like, ‘Oh, okayyyyy….’”
See, kids, what else you can do with your iPhone...
While one mom gave birth in the front seat of a moving car (after just one push if you don't mind), another may just have laughed her baby into the world.
As most of us know from grueling personal experience, labour usually takes a while, what with all that waiting and pacing before the main event. To kill the time, and to provide some comic relief, this dad began rapping to his wife's fetal monitor.
As the couple prepared to welcome their fifth child, Kingston Josiah, the fetal monitor started bleeping. That's when dad Charles McDaniel found the beat and dropped it, according to MSNBC.
Move over, Jay-Z! Although expecting LaQuita tittered for a bit, she eventually lost it, swatting the camera in an effort to stop her free-stylin' hubby.
Eventually the couple gave birth to a son by C-section. I wonder if he will grow up to share his dad's gift.
Did your partner do anything silly or zany to pass the time during the early stages of labour?
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