conuly

'I Love My Hair' Video Inspired By Father's Love of Daughter

Here's the video. I'm watching it and wondering - did Muppets always have tongues and uvulas?

After reading the article, I did something I'm a little ashamed of. I... I read the comments. *blush* And some people - wow, do they ever miss the point! So let's get down to that here.

( Read more... )

But there were other comments as well.

It's a Korman book. Good book. The whole plot revolves around our protagonists trying to simultaneously do their impossible weekend homework (ten questions on random subjects with no clue how to find out the answers, the goal is to learn how to think creatively and find information) and work on their radio show. Naturally, their brains come up with "have a quiz show!" because, after all, nobody is going to call in an answer unless they KNOW the answer, right? So now they just have to keep their teacher from finding out.

And it hit me, midway through this book, that nowadays it makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, plots of books rarely make sense when you think about them, because if they made sense they'd be boring (who wants to read about their own life, seriously?), but more than that. Nowadays, if I gave a kid a list of ten random questions and asked them to find the answers, they wouldn't agonize about it, they'd just go to Google. End of problem.

(My mother, when watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire", gets very annoyed whenever they phone-a-friend. She says it'd be so easy to have your friend go to google for you, but none of them do that. I wonder what happens if you phone your friend at the very moment your friend is in the bathroom. Do they answer from the bathroom? On national TV?)

It's cheesy and corny, sure, but I like it.

Mostly.

This time they have a dead body in a garbage chute. How do they find it? Some girl tried to put a pizza box in it. The cops come, they talk about the event, we even see a picture of the sign on the chute - NO RECYCLABLES.

In NYC, you have to recycle your glass, metal, plastic, and paper. It's the law, and it has been since I moved to Staten Island, some 16, 17 years ago. I just went online and checked - yup, on the little fliers they hand out every school year, it says pizza boxes are recyclables. You can get a ticket for this!

And here's these cops, and last episode they just had a budget cut, and they don't say anything? Don't they have a quota? (Of course they have a quota, everybody knows they have a quota!) Oh, I know - they're homicide. Listen, dead bodies aren't recyclable. You don't get a ticket for that. You get a ticket for not recycling your pizza boxes.

*sighs*

Ignorance.

Also? It's currently pouring outside. Torrentially. This has been the wettest June ever.

One on a pitcher plant that literally eats shit.

( Read more... )

An article on the changing orders by kids of fast food

( Read more... )

You've probably seen this Snopes page....

Go read the article on the prison

( Read more... )

And another article confirming that TV on even in the background slows speech development.

Jo Frost has seen some 80 different sets of crappy parents. I know what they say about happy families being all the same and unhappy families being different, but seriously, how different can they all have been? That show is so formulaic I can recite the next 10 episodes in my sleep, so how is it that she thinks she can realistically affect shock and horror every single time? How horrified can she be? It's nothing new, is it? Honestly, you knew this family had problems, that's why they agreed to be humiliated on national television!

I've seen it in movies (Monsters, Inc. comes to mind) and on TV, and even in books.

I really hate when we have a pre-verbal child who communicates amazingly well with neat, accurate pictures.

Let's clear this up once and for all. If you have a pre-verbal child, and they're at an age where being pre-verbal is expected (once they pass that, all bets are off, of course), chances are that their "art" is pretty damn abstract. More like what the rest of us would call "scribbles". Sure, they may *say* it's a flower, if you prompt them into labeling it at all, but it could just as easily be a truck and nobody would know the difference. (Heck, at that age, you can easily ask them "What is that?" and get the answer "I don't know" or ask "Is that a flower?" and then, after being told "yes" go "I thought it was a truck!" and hear them say "Oh, it is a truck". There you go.)

Even when they start doing representational art (and I'm assured by people who know more about this than I do that the early age for this is three, at which point most kids are talking in sentences, even if nobody outside their family understands them), they're not going to draw these amazing, easy-to-recognize pictures. They're going to draw circles with lots of lines and call them spiders. Or suns. Or flowers. They'll do blocks with a few lines and dots and say they're people. Or cats. Or elephants. They'll do squiggly circles, those are hearts. Or lakes. Or clouds. Or wheels. Or the letter o. Or flowers. Or I don't know what.

So, a kid who can't talk and turns to art in frustration? Well, I won't go so far as to say it's totally impossible but... yeah, actually, it mostly is. If they can't talk, and you don't find that strange? Odds are that they can't draw either. And even if they can, you're sure as heck not gonna know what they mean when they do.

Oh, and while we're on the topic of artwork, a special note to certain parents (who, I'm sure, will have no idea I mean them):

I see you and your ilk all the time when out and about. You have to have a piece of artwork for the memory books.

Thing is? It's not your spider, or jellyfish, or paper flower. It's your toddler's.

And it's not about the product anyway, it's the process.

So when your kid isn't putting the eyes on "just right", don't correct them. When your kid doesn't want to color in the entire surface of the paper plate, but just wants to scribble on it? That's fine. Don't correct your child, and for crying out loud, stop taking the project away from your kids to do it right! Grow the fuck up already! Your kid is two, and you're already trying to thwart his/her budding creativity!

Seriously. If it's so important to you, ask the teacher and get your own damn craft stuff and do your own damn project. Maybe, if you're really nice, we can even hang it up in the window for you. Wouldn't that be fun?

Some people....

Edit: Just noting that feebeeglee's kids don't count in this, they're pretty exceptional. And she has a lot of kids :) so she should know! I still maintain that this sort of thing is nowhere near common enough to merit its frequency in fiction.

Two or three episodes a day. Well, it won't kill them, and everybody in the house BUT them and me sleeps in, so they need to be contained.

In the past, I've watched Dora. God is that an obnoxious show. If you have to cajole children into participating, you're doing it wrong. It's insulting to everybody to be asked an already insultingly simple question, and then be nagged into giving the reply, or have to sit through several seconds of silence before the answer is given.

But you know what really annoys me about this show? What really, really annoys me?

Nobody on that show seems to understand that the possessive of Boots is not Boots, but Boots'. Maybe it's just me, but if I were refering to Boots' boots, or his books, or his birthday, I'd say "Boots-iz such-and-fuch" not merely "Boots such-and-fuch".

Drives me batty.

All I can say now is wow. So much of the last season makes a heck of a lot more sense now.

Now I just have to watch BSG. I was so tired last night that I decided to just fall asleep, I wouldn't enjoy it.

I finally decided to cave and start watching the second season of Torchwood. I guess I'll just watch it all in just a few sittings. Not sure why - it sure backfired when I did that with B5, god, I was paranoid about the government for weeks.

Well, this is only a few episodes, not five full seasons. Should be a bit less overdosy.

So I'm watching the first episode, and it occurs to me - instead of saying "Don't kiss him", wouldn't it have made more sense to say ( spoiler )

I mean, granted, it's not like she really planned this all out, he kinda ( spoiler ), but maybe she would have been prepared for this eventuality and more serious about never taking her eyes off the guy if she'd been properly warned.

Well - it had to happen somehow or another. Otherwise there's not much of a plot, is there?

( Read more... )

And then other people rush to say I'm *not* judgmental.

Frankly, it doesn't bother me one way or another. Maybe I judge people unfairly. Maybe I don't. I figure that other people's views of how judgmental I am or am not say a lot more about them than they do about me anyway.

I'm saying this for a reason.

The reason?

_{I'm watching Wife Swap right now.}

This is my super secret guilty pleasure that nobody knows about at all. Even you. You don't know this! You'll forget as soon as you're done reading!

And the reason I like watching this show? Probably the same reason as a lot of folks - these people don't know me or what I think of them, and they've chosen to put themselves up for public discussion, so I think it's fine time for judge-a-rama over here.

Woohoo! Totally guilt free!

And here's my first judgment - the people who make this show? They're totally prejudiced against strict families. Ye gods. It's not even subtle.

I can download videos off of YouTube and save them to my computer and watch them in DivX. No, really.

Funnily enough, this coincided with me realizing that there's a ton (well, half a ton, anyway) of Sesame Street videos on YouTube, which culminated in my ephiphany that the show was better before now. (Don't get proper Sesame Street anymore, you young whippersnappers!)

And that caused me to start thinking two things. One, THEY ought to sell old seasons of Sesame Street on DVD, instead of all that Elmo, and two, I wish I knew the lyrics and music to some of those songs.

Now, the lyrics to a lot of fairly obscure Sesame Street are online, but where do I get the melodies? WHERE, I ask you? WHERE????

Help?

You know who you are :)

( Read more... )

Okay, so it's only kinda about Dora. Sue me.

Yes, the start of BSG again! And, like, those other shows.

[Poll #530596]

And started (belatedly) watching Babylon 5.

*taps foot*

People, you all said it was good. And it is. But I never would've started watching it if I'd realized how paranoid it'd make me! I mean, I was cynical before, but after watching seasons one and two in a little under a week, I'm starting to think that the government is full of massive conspiracies, that the world is full of small, petty-minded people willing to sell us out for a tiny bit of personal profit, that the forces of darkness are infecting everyone alive and I need to HIDEHIDEHIDE.

Well. I mean, I thought that before, but now it's worse. It does end well, right?

Edit: A couple of questions. Are we really expected to believe that any organization would unironically call itself the Ministry of Peace? I mean, it hasn't been that long, only a few hundred years. So either everyone has forgotten about 1984, in which case the odds of an organization actually calling itself the Ministry of Peace, with the precise nickname "Minipax" are slim, or people haven't forgotten 1984, in which case the odds are even slimmer.

I mean, I can believe that people would unintentionally echo Chamberlain and not realize how thoughtless the words are, but I find it hard to believe that they'd accidentally stumble upon the words from one of the most influential books of only a couple of hundred years earlier.

Kinda like every sci-fi series eventually has an episode (or sometimes several unrelated episodes) where one jingoistic species has people talking about Final Solution. Guys! We get the Holocaust references even without the key phrases. We really don't need to have it hammered into our skulls!