$90,000 to stay at home and write rap

Nope, it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. $90,000 is the amount that a school in Pennsylvania will have to pay an eight-grader for expelling him for posting violent rap lyrics on the web! The Accidental Lyricist says: “We should be so lucky”.

Joking aside, this is another in the longish list of cases where people are being held accountable for lyrics that they write – even if no crime takes place. The background in this case is the number of murders that have taken place in US schools, making educational authorities very twitchy. But you still have to question the sanity of a court that awards that amount of money for an expulsion. All we ever got was a detention on Wednesday afternoon.