Friday links

Items that might once have grown into full posts:

• Troops face high times: 10 foot marijuana plants provide good cover for Taliban. (H/T to Jon)
• Racism accusations against 14-year-old girl: she spends some time in a police cell for asking to be moved to a different group in her class.
• Of course, it could have been worse . . . she might have been carrying a comb
• Samantha Burns chronicles the life and times of breast implants: game show prizes and gracing wanted posters.
• Going the SUV owners one better. Tanks for the memories.
• Rogier van Bakel talks about Damsels In This Dress:

If we insist — by applying social pressure, as in the U.K., or by making laws, as in France — that Muslim women must not wear the hijab or the burkha, then we should logically also require nuns to (at least in public) shed their habit. We should then perhaps also nix yarmulkes and turbans, à la the French. Come to think of it, is a golden cross or a star of David or a Wiccan pentangle worn around the neck an example of people potentially making others uncomfortable, inappropriately shoving their religion into others' faces? Do we allow orthodox Jews to wear black hats and side curls? May teenage girls wear WWJD bracelets without risking setting us off? Could Amish folks pose an affront to our secular or "neutral" preferences when they openly wear straw hats and ride horse-drawn buggies?

Live and let live. If Muslim women want to dress in dour black tents, or if the Pope is hellbent on proudly preening his pointy hat, I'll be the last person to stop them. At the same time, of course, I do reserve the right to laugh like a hyena at their chosen outfits (that picture above, for instance, really tickles my funny bone). And they shouldn't be surprised, much less hurt, if others shun them or regard them with suspicion based on those get-ups and on what those get-ups signify.