There's a new Meg Landry book out...

Stork Raving Mad.

I'm not really spoiling (spoilering?) much if I say that only a few chapters in and Meg has discovered a dead unpleasant person in her house. Same old, same old. The series is far enough in that she's not going to be a suspect, even though she stumbled across the body in her own home. They already covered the "Oh-my-isn't-it-suspicious-about-the-bodies" thing several books ago, didn't they? Every mystery series eventually has to pass this hurdle, and then the cops stop being suspicious forever after (especially if one of them is the heroine's boyfriend, naturally). They've acknowledged that the whole premise is silly and it will never come up again. Got it.

But thinking logically, if these characters knew they were in a book series - wow, what an opportunity! What I really want to see one day is a book, several books in of course, where the housewife/teacher/mom/librarian/blacksmith (that's Meg!) snaps and just goes on a rampage and kills everybody who gets in her way, safe and secure in the knowledge that she'll never be caught because, duh, she's the heroine!

And then she can be caught and go on to solve (or unsolve, when it's a wrongful conviction) crimes in prison. Or can NOT be caught, very Roger Ackroyd (am I allowed to reference books I haven't read? I'm going to anyway), that doesn't matter. It'd be something different, anyway.

But no. None of these people ever realizes the potential of their... interesting predicament.

Over in little_details somebody is asking what constellations are visible from Manhattan

The answer is, of course, none at all, but she's postulating a magical ceiling that ignores light pollution, tall buildings, and looking like a tourist.

This got me briefly looking up constellations - here on Staten Island I can reliably see three, maybe four - Cassiopeia (the w), the Big Dipper (the one everybody knows), Orion (the OTHER one everybody knows), and occasionally something else which is probably a constellation but I don't know what.

And that's about it. I understand why these stars were picked out of the sky - they must be very bright if I can see them and not others. Wikipedia has a list of former constellations up. I knew that other cultures don't always divide the sky the same way, but I didn't know you could just take a constellation and say "Well, we're not going to count this anymore, sorry". It's not like Pluto at all! Constellations have no scientific meaning, do they? They're just groups of stars that seem to make pictures due to our vantage point and perverse desire to see patterns in every random happenstance we come across.

I know it's not like the stars care, certainly, or like suddenly they move just because we don't recognize one constellation or another, but the very thought of this... I don't know, it's just weird to me.

Happy 4th of July!

If this is not your holiday, you can still be happy! Be happy every day this week for all I care : )

And wherever you are, take a moment to be kind to your web-footed friends, thanks. Man, that song used to confuse me so much. Here you are, watching TV, and a commercial comes on about a mattress or car sale (what patriotic holidays have to do with selling mattresses or cars, I don't know, but let's move on now) and in the background... Be Kind To Your Web-Footed Friends! It took me a L O N G time to figure out why they did that.

Esther Brandeau was, of course, the first Jewish woman to set foot in New France

She did this while dressed as a man.

You know, you really have to wonder after a while exactly what percentage of sailors and soldiers and pirates and stagecoach drivers and what-all else were either openly defying gender norms or were hiding a big secret.

And just think - those links? Those are just the people we know about! Hell, for all we know every other woman to have ever existed may have done a stint in a typically male job! It's like Monstrous Regiment but with fewer monsters and more real people!

Yesterday, on the bus, I saw a toddler with his mom.

Could NOT have been older than just two. If he was even that old!

And he was sitting and his mother said "Don't touch the bottom of your shoes. They're DIRTY." And he sat, and he thought, and he figured out what his mom had said - and he touched the bottom of his shoes! And his mother was upset, of course. (Meanwhile, she didn't mind at all that he was clutching a filthy playground ball that was every bit as dirty as the bottom of his shoes, but that's her issue, not mine.)

I LOL'd. No, I really did. I didn't give her any random, unsolicited advice, but I'll give it to you.

Don't do that.

Your little baby and your little toddler? He doesn't speak good English yet. Nor does he speak good Chinese, or good Spanish, or good whatever else you want him to speak. He just doesn't. And when you give him a complex statement like "Don't do this", he stops and thinks and tries to figure out what you're saying.

And the very first part of figuring out what you're saying is deciding what "do this" means. In this case, it was "touch the bottom of your shoes". But once he's exerted that tremendous effort, the picture that's VERY clear in his mind is the "do this" part.

And here's this baby with no real impulse control, struggling to understand what you say... and the thought is as good as the deed. As soon as he pictures himself "doing this" (touching the bottom of his shoe) he ups and does it. You don't want this.

So what can you do instead? I'm just thinking, but here's a few ideas....

1. You can ignore it, if it's not that serious. Children don't die from touching their shoes, no matter how clean you might want to make the world. Heck, Ana didn't even die from a year and a half of eating ABC gum from the sidewalk!

2. You can sorta ignore it. After the shoe-touching the kid's mom pulled out the hand sanitizer. I have an Opinion about that, but that's for another day. In this case, after he touched his shoes the FIRST time (as I'm sure he must have) she could've simply said "That's dirty. When we touch our shoes, we wash our hands" and left it at that.

3. You can give him something else to do. This is probably the most effective, though not with a particularly stubborn child. (But does anything work with stubborn children?) "Keep your hands on your lap" or "Hold on tight to your ball!" or (my old standby) "Can you clap your hands? Now can you put them on your head?" will distract him from the fascinating subject of HIS FEET OMG HIS FEET! without putting silly ideas in his head.

Of course, nothing is perfect, but I think any one of these ideas is bound to work better than reminding your kid that whatever-it-is is an option. That's what you do NOT want to do.