First, by popular request, here’s a link to TheLittleGuy’s Amazon wishlist. Suggestions of things we should add to it are welcome. Now, on to clearing out some more of these open tabs in my browser.
- 6 Food Mistakes Parents Make. So far, TLG shows no sign of having food issues. That is to say, he’s doubled his birth weight at just three months and shows only the slightest signs of slowing down. He doesn’t seem to care whether I eat broccoli or garlic or curry or whatever. And he will drink breastmilk warm or cool. He is a man on a mission! His father and I are both omnivores and not particularly picky, although for years as an adolescent I refused to put tomato sauce on my spaghetti (I’m over that now.) Nevertheless, I fear having a picky eater, not least because I will seriously lack patience for dealing with it. On the other hand, he’s packing on enough reserves from breastmilk now that he’ll probably be able to afford to turn up his nose at a few meals down the road. Ha!
- Another parenting tip – Wil Wheaton writes about playing games with kids – Rules 17a and 17b seem like they’ll be useful:
Rule 17a is a house rule we invoke when we’re learning a new game. It basically states that, at any time, a player can say, “You know, I just realized that I did this stupid thing that I wouldn’t have done if I had a little more experience in the game. I’d like a do-over.” If the majority of the players agree (and we always do) then we just back up a little bit, and play on. It reduces the risk of doing something bone-headed that you can’t ever recover from, and it keeps the game fun.
[...] Rule 17b:
Depending on your kid, the game, and some X factor that I leave to you as a parent, you could give your child up to three “roll again” markers, like poker chips or glass beads or whatever, that she can use at any time to re-roll a particularly bad dice roll. They can use it whenever they want to, but once the marker it used, it’s gone for the rest of the game, so your child will have to choose very carefully about when she’s going to use it. This would be especially great with a couple of smaller kids, because the parent isn’t put in the position of awarding do overs and giving the appearance of favoritism [...] - I thought the point made in this article – that Sarah Palin is Future Shock personified – is spot on. The entire m.o. of the Republican party in my lifetime is to appeal to people’s worst natures, fomenting fear of the other, fear of change, fear of the future, and rewarding reactionary wingnuts in thrall to a cynical theocratic and authoritarian impulse. Surely, surely Palin can be the nadir of this wave of this brand of politics and after this nutty election is over we can start to move on from it. Anyway, the pullquotes:
What I do remember sticking with me was the notion of accelerating change, an idea which did then and still does make the hairs at the back of my neck tingle. I also quite clearly remember Toffler’s most succinct definition of the syndrome which gave the book its name, a definition which didn’t even necessarily refer to anything technological: to suffer from future shock was simply to be paralyzed by “too much change experienced in too short a period of time.”
For a long, long time thereafter, I’d sit in idle moments and wonder just when future shock was going to happen. In my childish conception, it was something that would happen all at once, be precipitated by some obvious event – the proverbial straw – and stand out just as vividly and obviously as an outbreak of the flu when it did roll across the land. It took me years to understand the words as pointing toward something more poetic and metaphoric than clinically diagnostic. It’s a thought I’ve had occasion to dig up and reconsider this last week. Because this is what I’ve come to understand: Here we are. This is it.
[...] The gloss of down-home authenticity – the mooseburgers, “snow machines,” and other rustic tat that figure so centrally in her instant legend. The young-Earther retreat from science and all its methods. The palpable resentment of coastal elites (even as this time around it doesn’t seem that term is shorthand, as it so often is, for “Jews”). The instinctual, immediate recourse, upon achieving even the most local and limited sort of power, to the heavy-handed suppression of free inquiry. The things that endear this onetime nowhere-burg mayor to Americans are, as clearly as can possibly be, indicators that a whole lot of people think tomorrow came too soon.
What you get when you swallow too much change too quickly isn’t a mass outbreak of twitching, hebephrenic breakdown, nor some neo-Amish wave of technological renunciation. You wanna know what it looks like? A hockey mom and former beauty queen with an upswept ‘do and a pregnant daughter in high school. Sarah Palin is future shock personified.
- Catherine Jamieson has opened the Utata Gallery and Art Center. This looks amazing. I wish I lived closer (it’s in Vancouver.) I also wish I had time to do some proper photography. Alas.
- Bit overtaken by events, but I appreciated Obama’s response to the Republican faux outrage about his ‘lipstick on a pig’ remark:
This whole thing about lipstick. Nobody actually believes that these folks are offended. Everybody knows it’s cynical. Everybody knows it’s insincere.
I would like to see more of him calling out the usual Republican phony bs for what it is.
More tabs tomorrow, perhaps.
