Archive for December, 2006
What (white) American accent do you have?
What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The Inland North
You may think you speak “Standard English straight out of the dictionary” but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like “Are you from Wisconsin?” or “Are you from Chicago?” Chances are you call carbonated drinks “pop.”
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The [...]
Goong Goong teaches characters
We threw a party for Lilly’s birthday a week after her actual birthday. All the aunts and uncles and cousins came over. The best present was a tablet on which you paint in water and it shows up like black ink, but disappears when the water dries. Her grandfather showed her how to hold the [...]
Burning questions
I met the software architect for this cool Web 2.0 company at a staff party for one of the schools Mary works at. I’m thinking this could be a very useful tool for settling some of the burning questions that keep me awake nights, such as:
State capitalism, or deformed worker’s state?
State capitalism
Deformed worker’s state
Make Free [...]
Kinderbanjo
Well that was interesting. I was just at Lilly’s kindergarten class for a song-and-snack to mark her birthday. When I walked into the classroom, an African-American boy named Durrell took one look at my gig bag and said, “That’s a five-string.” A five-string what, I asked him. “I don’t know. A five-string.”
After the songs and [...]
Fan Fiction
Laura has been uploading her own fiction to the Artemis Fowl fan site at fangathering.com. Take a look. There’s more on the way. She writes it out longhand and then types it in, editing as she goes. I like the level of detail that goes into her scene descriptions, and her dialogue can be kind [...]
Finger puppets
Lilly calls him “my uncle Peter.” He has certainly become accomplished at the uncle-ly arts, chief among them that of making mere dads look kind of stodgy and lame by comparison. Right, thanks for the clothes, dad. Now uncle Peter, he gave me this cool set of knitted finger puppets that will encourage my creativity [...]
And finally…
On the way back to Guatemala City from San Marcos, we stopped at the spectacular Lago Atitlan for lunch and a bit of scenery-viewing. From there we took the old road to Antigua, the one that was replaced by the Pan-American highway in the 1960s. It was slower, but more rewarding, the way those things [...]
Water
More imagery from Guatemala. This is a fabulous little cascade that you pretty much have to hack your own trail to, in a back corner of a coffee plantation. It’s always suprising to find a place like this without so much as a snack stand to exploit it.