Weekly Daily Brickbats Archive 2008 March 22-31

The University of Georgia says student evaluations of their professors are confidential. But students shouldn't take the university at its word. Professor Joseph Disponzio received very negative evaluations from a student in two of his classes, evaluations that also contained anti-gay remarks. He took them to administrators and told them whom he suspected the student was. The university hired a handwriting and document examiner who confirmed the evaluations were written by student Brian Beck. The University Judiciary found Beck guilty of disruption of the evaluation process and harassment. It ordered him to apologize to Disponzio and write an essay on how his remarks affect the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual community.

In Santa Clara County, California, a judge has ordered Richard Treanor and Carolyn Bissett to cut down two of the redwood trees in their backyard. The trees cast shadows over their neighbor's solar panels. That neighbor, Mark Vargas, complained to the district attorney, who charged the couple with violating the state's Solar Shade Control Act, which bans trees and shrubs that shade more than 10 percent of someone else's solar panels between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Treanor and Bissett say the will appeal the court decision.

A U.S. Air National Guard plane was supposed to release a dummy bomb over a practice field in Kansas. Instead, the pilot dropped the 22-pound bomb on an apartment building in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Guard officials didn't realize what had happened until Tulsa police called them the next day.

Amanda Rouse was on a California school bus with 40 elementary school students when the driver fell from her seat and hit her head. The quick-thinking 15-year-old jumped from her seat and pulled the bus to a stop. The bus struck two parked cars but no one was injured. Yet Rouse says Marina High School officials gave her a Saturday detention because she wasn't supposed to be on the bus in the first place. She had felt sick on the way to school and had asked the bus driver to take her back to the bus yard.

Pakistan's Telecommunication Authority blocked access to YouTube because someone had placed a trailer for an upcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders on the site. The film reportedly will argue that the Koran inspires "intolerance, murder and terror." YouTube later removed the trailer, saying it violated the site's terms of use. But before that happened, Pakistan's efforts to censor YouTube reportedly led to the site being unavailable across the globe for several hours.