COFFEE BREAK
Saturday, January 30, 2016
PARENTS TALK BACK
Caught your
child sexting:
Now what?
M
ore than 100 teens in
Canon City, Colorado,
were saved from a sexting
scarlet letter last month.
Prosecutors decided not to
press child pornography or
other charges, which would
have forced the middle and
high school students to register
as sex offenders for swapping
and collecting hundreds of
nude pictures.
Some teens had
evaded parental
oversight by
using the private
Photo Vault app,
which allows
naked pictures
to be hidden on
Aisha
smartphones.
Sultan
The early
Parents talk back
data on the rate
of adolescents
exchanging sexually explicit
pictures or messages, known as
sexting, has been all over the map,
ranging from the low single digits
to upwards of a third of teens.
According to recent research by
Jeff Temple, associate professor
and psychologist at University of
Texas Medical Branch, anywhere
from 20 to 30 percent of teens will
send or receive an explicit text. By
college, that number is around 50
percent. And 70 percent of teen
girls have been asked to send a
naked picture of themselves, he
said.
Teens engaged in sexting
minimize or dismiss the legal and
emotional risks involved. But in 30
states, sexting could carry felony
charges under child pornography
laws and put participants on a sex
offender registry. There are 20
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address sexting; of those, 11 treat
it as a misdemeanor, allowing
informal sanctions such as
counseling, according to the
Cyberbullying Research Center.
When Temple has the
opportunity to discuss these risks
with students, he begins by asking
them if they wear a seat belt in the
car. Every hand in the crowd goes
up. Then he asks, “Why?”
The students say they want to
be protected in case there is an
accident.
“But the chances are slim,” he
says.
“But just in case,” a student
typically responds.
Ah, just in case. This is where
he wants them.
He tells them to think about
how slim the chances of getting
caught sexting seem.
It’s unlikely. But what if?
Then, the consequences can
be enormous — life-altering. It’s
a crash in which reputations and
futures get burned.
Yet anytime there is a big bust
of a school sexting ring, which
happens regularly in big cities and
small towns all across the country,
parents express shock.
Temple says parents do their
children a real disservice if they
don’t pay attention to their online
lives. They have to know how
popular apps like Instagram,
Snapchat and Tumblr work so they
can help their children become
responsible digital citizens.
Sexting creates a perfect storm
of parental avoidance: unfamiliar
technology combined with the
uncomfortable topic of their child’s
emerging sexuality. But staying in
a state of denial does nothing to
protect your kids.
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that sexting typically precedes real-
life sex. And teen girls who sexted
were more like to be associated
with other risky behavior, he said.
“Risky behaviors tend to cluster
together,” he said, not that one
necessarily causes another.
His advice to parents who catch
their teens with compromising or
inappropriate texts on their phones
is not to panic or freak out. It’s a
chance to talk about consequences
and boundaries. It signals a need
for closer monitoring, but it is
also an opportunity to talk about
healthy relationships, digital
citizenship and safe sex, he said.
“What does it mean to be
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Until our laws catch up to the
ways in which technology has
impacted teen interactions, parents
have to continue to use stories
like Canon City’s to talk to their
children about sexting.
Otherwise, kids risk being
branded for life by a teenage
mistake.
Ŷ
Aisha Sultan is a St. Louis-
based journalist who studies
parenting in the digital age
while trying to keep up with her
tech-savvy children. Find her on
Twitter: @AishaS.
East Oregonian
Page 9C
Instagrams of ‘Dog Named Jimmy’
turned owner’s life around
By SUE MANNING
Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — Rafael
Mantesso turned 30 in an empty
New York apartment after divorce
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shelf bare. The only things he had
left were his cellphone and a pit
bull named Jimmy Choo that his
neighbors went out of their way to
avoid.
When he turned 33 on Jan.
14, Mantesso still owned that
apartment and it’s still vacant.
But it’s for sale now. And people
can’t get enough of his 6-year-old
bull terrier — from the Instagram
sketches-plus-photos of Jimmy
that went viral, the book “A Dog
Named Jimmy” and a collection
of Jimmy-inspired bags and purses
for the high-end fashion brand
Jimmy Choo. (Mantesso’s ex-wife
had named the dog for her favorite
shoes.)
There are future plans too:
a calendar, endorsements and
launching the charitable Jimmy
Foundation. Meanwhile, Mant-
esso is working at an advertising
agency in Sao Paulo in his native
Brazil, and doing the occasional
photo shoot.
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in the “naked” apartment three
years ago, Jimmy did a happy
dance through all the rooms.
Mantesso picked up his phone and
started shooting photos of Jimmy’s
contagious dance of joy.
“When I sat in my empty living
room, Jimmy was happy, running
from one side to the other side, in
circles, crazy. The apartment was a
playground to him. He was loving
that empty place. That energy was
amazing. I looked at him and said
to myself, ‘Oh my God, I was
thinking everything was lost and I
had the most important thing in the
house — Jimmy,”’ Mantesso said
in his Portuguese accented-En-
glish.
Jimmy is a white dog but his
ginger and red ears contrasted with
Rafael Mantesso via AP
This 2013 photo provided by artist Rafael Mantesso shows his bull terrier, Jimmy Choo, with a piano
keyboard that Mantesso has drawn in on the loor around him, at his studio in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
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At some point, Mantesso picked
up a piece of white cardboard,
drew a skeleton with a red heart on
it, put it in front of Jimmy and took
a photo.
He liked it, put it on Instagram
(#jimmythebull) and they were in
business.
The ideas came fast. Mantesso
would put Jimmy in a pose and the
dog would freeze while he took
photos. “Everyone ask, ‘How do
you make a crazy dog freeze in
position you want?’ I think Jimmy
knows that I want him in that posi-
tion and he just stay,” Mantesso
said.
Mantesso credits a tweet by
actor Ashton Kutcher for putting
focus on his early Jimmy art.
Kutcher retweeted a drawing
depicting the spaghetti scene from
“Lady and the Tramp,” where
the dogs are slurping strands of
spaghetti. Views went from 10,000
to 100,000 that night, Mantesso
said.
Jimmy also kept Mantesso
going at a time when he was
feeling down. Because of Jimmy,
Mantesso had to take a walk twice
a day. Because he had to buy
Jimmy food, he bought food for
himself. And because of Jimmy,
he was motivated to keep taking
pictures. He liked what he was
doing so much that they worked
side by side for 90 uninterrupted
days, he said.
Eventually “A Dog Named
Jimmy” was ready for the
publisher, and there is also a
Jimmy deck of cards. Some of
Mantesso’s images show the dog’s
paws or his pink-and-black spotted
mouth. Others show him posed
with a human hand, while others
feature Jimmy with black-and-
white sketches of simple objects
or scenes — a piano keyboard,
antlers, cartoon characters.
They’ve come a long way since
people demanded that Mantesso
muzzle the pit bull. “People still
cross the street when they see
Jimmy, but now it’s to ask if they
can take pictures with him,” he
said, adding that Jimmy’s received
fan mail from over 100 countries.
His planned Jimmy Foundation
will fund pet food drives, spay
and neuter clinics and adoption
campaigns at shelters throughout
Brazil.
He doesn’t accept every
endorsement offer, but he did say
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fashion house and Porsche.
“They want my dog to drive a
Porsche convertible. I said, ‘Come
on, I want to drive it too.”’
OUT OF THE VAULT
Folk song inspiration dies at Pendleton mental hospital
A
n African-American
woman who died January
8, 1952, at the age of
75 at the Eastern Oregon State
Hospital in Pendleton claimed to
be the inspiration for “Frankie and
Johnny,” a popular folk song in the
early 20th century whose notoriety
continued long after her death.
According to an Internet article
by Paul Slade, Frankie Baker
was a 24-year-old prostitute
working the St. Louis, Missouri,
vice district the late 1890s, and
Allen (Albert) Britt, 17, a talented
ragtime piano player, acted as
her pimp in addition to being
her lover. The couple shared
an apartment on Targee Street
and Baker took care of Britt
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In Baker’s version of
events she and Britt had a
“misunderstanding” in their
apartment about
2 a.m. on Oct.
15, 1899, after
she caught him
with another
prostitute, Alice
Pryar. At the
murder trial
Baker claimed
Renee
Struthers she shot Britt
in self-defense,
Out of the vault
saying he came
after her with a
knife during a heated argument,
and had also beaten her up a few
days before the shooting. She
was acquitted, and the judge
returned her gun.
The song “Frankie Killed
Allen” was written by St.
Louis balladeer Bill Dooley
shortly after the shooting and
was making the rounds of the
neighborhood even before Britt
died on Oct. 19. A variant of
Dooley’s song was published by
Frank and Bert Leighton in 1912
as “Frankie and Johnny” with
the words that appear in modern
folk song books. At least 256
recordings of the song have been
made including folk, country and
jazz versions.
The story of Frankie and
Johnny also inspired several
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West, Cary Grant, Elvis Presley,
Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer,
and actor John Huston wrote and
produced a puppet play in 1930
titled “Frankie and Johnnie”
after interviewing Baker and
Britt’s former neighbor in
Missouri.
Baker left St. Louis in 1900
and eventually ended up in
Portland, Ore., where she worked
as a prostitute for a few years
before opening a shoeshine shop
in 1925. She always deplored
the fact that money was being
made from the song, and that
she never received a dime.
Baker also claimed that the song
and subsequent movies were
defamatory, and sued twice for
damages; she lost both times.
Frankie Baker was committed
to the state mental hospital in
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Pendleton described the tiny
Baker as a gentle, docile patient.
She died after suffering a
paralytic stroke and was buried in
Los Angeles by her brother.
Ŷ
Renee Struthers is the
Community Records Editor for
the East Oregonian. See the
complete collection of Out of
the Vault columns at eovault.
blogspot.com
ODDS & ENDS
Kevin Robertson, the restaurant’s chef, lives
above the eatery. He says being subjected to
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torture.
Lizard found in kindergartner’s
salad becomes new class pet
PRINCETON, N.J. (AP) — A New
Jersey elementary school science class has
a new pet after a lizard was discovered in a
student’s salad after being refrigerated for
days.
Riverside Elementary School science
teacher Mark Eastburn told NJ.com the
3-inch green anole lizard was found in
a bundle of tatsoi greens last week by a
kindergartner.
The lizard had been cold and lifeless after
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has since been warmed and lives in a cage in
Eastburn’s class.
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lab,” he said.
The lizard, dubbed “Green Fruit Loop,”
came from Florida. Eastburn said green anole
lizards live in the southeastern states, from
Texas to North Carolina.
“It probably has some moderate
adaptation to the cold which is why it made
it through,” Eastburn said.
The tatsoi had been bought from
Whole Earth Center, a natural foods store
in Princeton. Mike Atkinson, the store’s
produce manager, said the greens are cleaned
as they’re stocked and that the lizard must’ve
been tucked away in a leaf.
“I’ve been in produce for 17 years and
I’ve never heard of a lizard making it to the
customer,” Atkinson said.
He said he doesn’t think the lizard would
have made it in conventional, non-organic
box.
“It might normally surprise or freak out
conventional shoppers, but the majority
of organic shoppers realize that produce is
grown on a farm and there’s lots of bugs and
animals that live on a farm too,” Atkinson
said.
Decades later, Michigan library
gets book back
Mark Eastburn via AP
This photo taken Jan. 22 shows a 3-inch
green anole lizard that was found in a
bundle of tatsoi greens last week by a
kindergartner at Riverside Elementary
School in Princeton, N.J.
HOLLAND, Mich. (AP) — A book has been
returned to a library in western Michigan — 49
years later.
The borrower told the library that he was a
college student in 1967 when he checked out
a book about World War II from the Herrick
library in Holland. He wrote in a letter that
the book was stored in a trunk that hadn’t
been opened until recently. He also provided a
donation with his letter.
Library director Diane Kooiker declined to
identify the title of the book or the man’s name,
citing privacy. She said he sent $100.
In his letter, the man described it as a
“modest donation” on what could be a
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Kooiker tells The Grand Rapids Press that
honest people sometimes can misplace a book.
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Garbage truck fueled by natural
a day at vacant building
gas explodes in N.J.
NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. (AP) — An
instrumental rendition of the University of Iowa
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every day since last summer over speakers
mounted on a vacant building in the city of
Niagara Falls.
And it’s driving the neighbors crazy.
The music starts in the mid-afternoon and
repeats in about 50-second loops for the next
seven hours before turning off.
The owners of a restaurant directly across the
street from the building say they have been told
by police that the music’s volume and the time
it’s being played don’t violate any city noise
ordinances.
HAMILTON, N.J. (AP) — Authorities say
no one was injured when a garbage truck fueled
by natural gas exploded “like a missile” in New
Jersey. Tuesday’s blast in Hamilton damaged
four homes.
One of the truck’s four natural gas tanks
blasted a hole in a nearby home and debris
tore a hole in the roof of a neighboring home.
Windows were broken and the siding melted on
two other houses.
Police say the truck’s operators evacuated
the vehicle when they saw smoke coming into
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