CAUCASIAN AMERICANS: BASIC SKILLS WORKBOOK is reviewed on this lively website about Native American literature. It apparently helps children develop empathy for this often-misunderstood ethnic group. There is also this capable assault on that mawkish “Chief Seattle” iconography.
Archive for August, 2001
Dental hygiene
How To Tell If You Were Adopted: “Only adopted, or ‘rejected,’ children have to brush their teeth.”
O&J update
pics/james090401.png” align=”left” rightmargin=5>From Frances, an update on Oliver and James, L & L’s newest cousins:”After sleeping through the night (except when their hands have disappeared up their sleeves, causing untold annoyance when they want to suck their thumbs), they mostly enjoy themselves greatly during the day nowadays. ~tmkuster/images/oliver090401.png” align=”right”>They especially like to smile at anyone [...]
Read this to me
OK, it’s a little dorky and middle-brow, and we could go on and on about overexposure sapping the power of critical cultural signifiers and everything, but come on: this is pretty stirring stuff, if you let yourself think about it. Everybody in Chicago (my home town!) is reading the same book together for a few [...]
Literary classics
Are these boom times for Kid Lit or what? “Surely it says something about Powell’s loyalists that ‘Captain Underpants and The Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman’ is currently our bestselling book — we’re just not sure exactly what.” That from the ever-so-literate Powell’s Books email newsletter that arrived this morning. On a work trip [...]
O Cattle Belt Taco!
Reason No. 1,352 why there’s obviously something wrong with me: This kind of thing just makes my day. Laura has already picked out “Mom” and “Hannah;” perhaps in a couple of years she’ll be ready for: “Straw? No! Too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts.”
Higher education
I guess the first day of kindergarten went well. Laura was as excited about it as you might expect. For a couple of weeks she has been asking every day if it was tomorrow. I stayed home late so that Mary and Lillian and I could all be there for the big drop-off, and made [...]
Stick around
I wonder what some of these online-branded-content outfits are doing to stay alive. Most of them I don’t miss, but I’m glad this one is still with us. For publishing this informative piece on girls and self-confidence, I vote them another, say, six months of life.
Michelle
Michelle Whittington died Sunday. For several years she was the head teacher at Playmates Preschool’s Young 5 section, which is for kids who are almost ready for kindergarten but aren’t old enough, or old enough but not ready. She built it into a strong, joyful, lively place, a little fog-belt Summerhill. When Laura got there [...]
Peru
Needs no comment. Courtesy of Michael Smith again, the intrepid Peru journalist/blogmaster.
Hackers and hams
My dad was a big ham radio buff when I was growing up. I’ve always wondered why those guys attracted the crew-cut, law-and-order stereotype when the next wave of techies, the computer hackers, seem to lean the opposite way, toward anarchism of various kinds. (Mostly the silly kind, but that’s another argument.) Here is Rick [...]
Trust
“If we really want our girls to be safe, then we should start right now to TRUST HER and build up her strength and savvy — the very things that will best serve her in protecting herself. Withholding our trust in her undermines her trust in herself, and makes it that much more difficult for [...]
APA blogs
Someone told me about this ultra-hip collection of Asians’ and Asian-Americans’ weblogs. Never mind the unfortunate name, it has some interesting stuff. (Warning: When you open the site a bunch of annoying little advertising windows pop up. If you hate that kind of thing, don’t click on the link.)
Distance II
Cathy responds:
Although l too love Princess Mononoke, I seem to enjoy just the things that you find silly. I think that the supernatural stuff, though maybe too far on the spiritual realm for you, adds a density and poetry to it that grabs the viewer’s imagination. So what if it’s dark, maybe too heavy-handed. For [...]
Distance
Princess Mononoke reminds you at once of how far Japanese animation has come since Speed Racer and how much it’s stayed the same. The motion is still jerky, the dialogue choppy and heavily reliant on exclamation marks, and the good guys’ faces are all drawn exactly alike. They look like what would happen if someone [...]
Salsa
There are a bunch of Peruvians in the Bay Area, maybe 20,000 if you believe some people. I know some of them because when I came here in 92 my brother-in-law Paul hooked me up with a semi-pro salsa band that was mostly Peruvians. I hadn’t been playing my bass outside the house for most [...]
Webhead
This is true: my head is increasingly a part of the Internet. If I could take some weight off, I could call myself a thin client.
Bring it on
I haven’t spent much space on Lillian’s exploits lately, and they have been coming very fast, so I’ll have to just catch up with the latest ones. Her research on the physics of small objects recently yielded the insight that many things move on their own when held up and released, and further, that they [...]
Oh well
Remember that time when those ace U.S.-trained and U.S.-paid Peruvian fighter pilots, flying U.S.-supplied equipment, shot down a civilian airplane handed over to them by U.S. advisors and killed a woman and her 7-month-old baby? It turns out the State Department report is finally out, after much dragging of feet and washing of hands. So [...]
Dinopics
You can picture James Gurney’s publishers, worried that they might not be squeezing all the lucre they could out of his wildly popular Dinotopia franchise, begging Gurney for something even juicier for the third book in the series. “We’ve hit the young adult demo and the older kids, but the real gold is in them [...]