San Mateo County, CA is charging the television media circus $51,000 for space near Peterson courthouse, tent not included:

The 16 assigned spaces, which are about 13 feet by 17 feet, will be used for television reporters to store equipment, work and conduct interviews. Each station must provide their own tent.
In addition, television stations must pay $7,500 a month for space to park their satellite trucks. Twenty spaces set aside for journalists in a nearby lot cost $200 a month each. Reporters are not being charged, however, for space in a media center being set up about a block away.
Altogether, the “tent city” for television media would raise $816,000 for the county, about a third of which has already been spent on preparations for the trial, Alms said.
The $51,000 fee amounts to about $230 per square foot. At the height of the dot-com boom, prime office space in San Francisco leased for about $80 per square foot.

Too bad they don’t make the price so prohibitive that none of the TV networks end up covering the trial.

Opportunity is off to the races on Mars:

Controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory received confirmation of the successful drive at 3:01 a.m. Pacific Standard Time via a relay from the Mars Odyssey orbiter and Earth reception by the Deep Space Network. Cheers erupted a minute later when Opportunity sent a picture looking back at the now-empty lander and showing wheel tracks in the martian soil.
For the first time in history, two mobile robots are exploring the surface of another planet at the same time. Opportunity’s twin, Spirit, started making wheel tracks halfway around Mars from Meridiani on Jan. 15.
“We’re two for two! One dozen wheels on the soil.” JPL’s Chris Lewicki, flight director, announced to the control room.
Matt Wallace, mission manager at JPL, told a subsequent news briefing, “We knew it was going to be a good day. The rover woke up fit and healthy to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run,’ and it turned out to be a good choice.”

I’m sure the rover appreciates the musical inspiration.
You can follow the action here.

I’m don’t follow the status of Georgia public education too closely. But if Joseph Jarrell’s column accurately describes proposed changes to its high school history curriculum, the system is headed in the wrong direction:

The new curriculum calls for teaching only the period from 1500 to the 21st century. Students will no longer study such figures as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, William the Conqueror or Joan of Arc.
“The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” will not be mentioned. The development of democratic government in Greece and the fall of the Roman Empire will be skipped. Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha and Confucius are not to be found in the new curriculum. Great civilizations like ancient Egypt will no longer merit study, and the concept of feudalism will not be discussed.
The present 11th-grade U.S. history course covers the Exploration period to today. In the proposed changes, teachers will spend two or three weeks discussing the foundation of our country, with the remaining time devoted to studying events from 1876 to the present. Gone is any mention of the Louisiana Purchase or Lewis and Clark. There will be no discussion of Indian removal and the Trail of Tears.
. . .
Search in vain for discussion of the Civil War; that topic is off limits. In a course entitled “American History,” students will not study our most devastating war. There is no mention of Fort Sumter, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee or anything else associated with those years.
Though teachers supposedly have no time to discuss topics essential to understanding our heritage, the curriculum suggests they have their students write a 1920s radio drama. Teachers are also encouraged to assign essays about dating in the Jazz Age and to show segments from “All in the Family,” “Good Times” and “Chico and the Man.”

No discussion of the Civil War? In Georgia? Segments from “Good Times”?
To borrow a line from Johnnie Mac, “You cannot be serious!” Why even have a history class if you’re going to skip the most significant events? This is one of the nuttiest things I’ve read in a while. Definitely educational experimentation gone awry.
Via Calpundit.
UPDATE: Looks like I may have been too quick with this post. Ricky links to this Georgia Department of Education release stating that Joseph Jarrell’s op-ed is misleading–students will actually be learning about some of the aforementioned events in elementary school. If that’s the case, I’m not sure what’s up with the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Apparently they check submissions about as well as the Knoxville News-Sentinel does.

Something about an “Insta Star,” who “is in part credited in Tennessee with being an inspiration for the start of the Rocky Top Brigade.”

I rarely agree with Tennessee State Senator Tim “Roadkill” Burchett, but I give him props for attempting to combat junk food being sold in public schools. I don’t necessarily agree with his proposal to ban the sale of food at school vending machines, but something must be done to curb the growing trend of youth obesity. If you think health care costs are high now, just wait until we add another generation of obese, diabetes-plagued kids.
The Tennessee Dietetic Association is offering an alternative solution which is probaly more practical than banning vending machines:

[The TDA] backs a similar measure that would generally limit food items sold to kindergarten through eighth-grade students to ones that meet certain nutritional standards.
The items don’t include soft drinks, candy or chips.

School districts, which receive an average of $250,000 in vending machine income, are opposed to anything which might impact their cash cows.
If money is the issue, we we should simply make up the difference with increased funding. That’s a small price to pay if we can improve our children’s long-term health.