We got a much earlier start this morning — left the house a little after 9:30 to meet my aunt Anna and cousins Maija and Max. Anna and Max were dropping Maija at the bus station to go back to Boston. We met them on 54th St. (near the Red Parrot, the first salsa club [...]
Archive for December, 2001
New York II
Mary and Diogenes are just back in New York from Taiwan, where Diogenes picked up a prize in the Taipei print and drawing biennial. Now he is clearing out his studio on Lexington and 103rd for a push to finish new material for a show in San Francisco in the spring. I went with them [...]
Spoiled.com
Today Laura and Lillian each got a birthday present of their own domain name. The names are pointed to this site for the time being. It won’t work right away, but in the next couple of days if you type in www.laurajue.net or www.lillianjue.net you will come right here to this very page. How neat [...]
Play on
From the Children Now site’s new report on kids and computer games:”The video game industry explains that girls are not interested in gaming and that it would not be economically wise for them to invest in producing games for a female market. The truth, however, is that girls do enjoy playing video games. According to [...]
Homework
Let us now praise really, really bad books for children. Has anyone seen anything worse than Robert Munsch’s monumental Love You Forever? Forget about books that don’t quite live up their potential (see below). This one has none to live up to. This unbelievable dog, which regularly shows up on the checkout stand racks at [...]
New York
When in New York do as New Yorkers do. So today we walked down Central Park from Mary and Diogenes’ place in East Harlem, stopping to marvel at the rocks shouldering up out of the ground, the Alice in Wonderland sculpture, the pond where Stuart raced, the promenade of poets, until we reached Wollman rink [...]
Delegate
I’m glad that this guy still reads Newsweek, so the rest of us don’t have to.
Family bed
My sister Karen runs a very nice website about childbirth and parenting. Today she points to some more work by the SIDS researcher James McKenna about how OK it is to have your baby sleep next to you.
Failure
So I took the Geek test, and found, to my horror, that I am only 37% geek. Something I need to work on, for sure.The output:”I probably work in computers, or a history department at a college. I never really fit in with the “normal” crowd. But I have friends, and this is a good [...]
Arabica
I point out this new culture site, even though it is a little off-topic here, for the obvious reasons.
Ambulatory
Lillian started walking (lunging, technically) a week before her first birthday. She has also acquired another skill that may prove just as important, viz., drinking through a straw. She showed it off to Laura and me at the neighborhood cafe this weekend, acting all casual like she’d known the trick all her life but just [...]
Death games
Let me paraphrase Lyndon Johnson and say Alexander Cockburn is wacko, but he’s our wacko. Here he weighs in, perhaps a little more heavily than necessary, on the Potter iconography and current events: “In the death games played by adults, children are always the pawns.” Courtesy of Gail.
Enronism
This delightful spam was passed along by Paul.Capitalism:You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.Enron Venture Capitalism:You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your [...]
OK then
The World at War “On March 2 [1933], Hitler was asked by a [reporter] whether the suspension of liberties was permanent. He answered in the negative, saying that full rights would be restored as soon as the … danger was over.”
Shame II
Stephy Says: Aw, Ted, it’s an accident of birth. It could have happened to anybody. (and did, to many others.You all survived and got out.) It might have been a port wine stain in the shape of the crucifixion across your forehead. (Or butt!) Your true friends don’t hold it against you. Though you had [...]
The long run
And speaking of geekery: Amen. “I have never ever met a technical person (including me) whom I would trust to know what is really the right thing to do in the long run.” — Linus Torvalds last weekend.
If you are interested in software design and stuff like that, you might find this exchange pretty interesting. [...]
Optimism kills
Lemony Snicket is flying off the shelves. Now here’s something I can get behind. Says the Post: “Child psychiatrists say that these books, and other works that deal with kids’ deepest and often unspoken fears – of separation, abandonment, loneliness and death – can be therapeutic, far more so than tales that are relentlessly optimistic. [...]
Shame
I’ve never been ashamed of my conservative religious upbringing. I just figured it was something that happens to some people, like rainy weather or a toothache. Today, driving to work and listening to John Ashcroft testifying at the Senate hearings, I realized what it must be like for those people who do feel ashamed. I [...]
Trust no one
Here’s more evidence that Librarians Are Corrupting Kids. Watch out, Daniel Pinkwater. Cardinal Ashcroft will be after you soon. (Pointed out by the very observant and connected Craig Jensen.)
Wall of sound
Everyone has some terrible thing their parents did to them that they can never forgive. Mine is Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. My dad had an old Ford LTD wagon in 1976, which came with a couple of 8-track tapes containing Herb’s greatest hits. We made liberal use of the infinite-replay feature of 8-track [...]