Simpsonized Family

The Simpson's Movie website will allow you the joy and honor of making your own Simpsonized avatars, too.

The Internet as an iPod?

This is an interesting article...

Is the Internet Doomed to Self-destruct?

The article points towards the beginning of a trend where computer users...in response to their own stupidity of downloading porn, viruses, scams, spam, etc...may have to trade in their free-roaming CPUs for something called a "tethered appliance," one that does nothing the manufacturer does not want done with it.

Tivo is an example of this, and iPods are a strange combination of free and tethered device. (Someone please ask my spouse what his thoughts on DRM-protected music might be. Be sure to bring along a large cup of coffee for this excursion.)


This is a scary thought...businesses and large firms love the idea of total control, but consumers have this weird idea about freedom. Basic thoughts, such as "I bought the &*(^%! thing, and I'll do what I please with it! The device is now out of your hands."

On the other hand, the control freaks should look a very important fact. The computer industry is over-populated by people with have really big brains and virtually no tolerance for stupidity or being told exactly what to do. The free-wheeling community generally known as "hackers" are the grow-up versions of the kid in your class who took his calculator apart during math to see how it worked, then put it back together and reprogrammed it for fun. They're forever taking bits, pieces, and leftovers, and doing neat things with them...and doing fun stuff like hacking the iPhone, too.

It would seem that the Internet is under a bit of attack...from proprietary, locked-down hardware to Net Neutrality itself. Take a look at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Our erstwhile lives are pretty standard. I tried to kick school up a notch with David, who actually took it rather well. We did a lot of math, which went over especially well since it was heavily augmented by the use of manipulatives. He also thinks he's quite cute...he's supposed to be working on numbers from 13 to 31. So I asked him to pick a number which was greater than 23. (Most kids are going to say 24, 25, or 26. Then you have them physically represent that number using rods of 10 cubes and single cubes to reinforce place value.) So he says, "Twenty---NO! NO! NINETY-NINE!" And he sits looking terribly pleased with himself. "Alright, Smarty," I said, handing him the whole bag of tens rods. "Now use the cubes to represent that number." I left him alone while he made a pile of rods on the table, and then he peered into the empty bag and said, "I can't!"
"Why not?"
"Not enough!"
"Well, what DO you have?"
"Um...ninety."
"OK, so what do you need that you don't have?"
"Nine more ones!"
I also had the dining room table fairly well cleaned off, and I handed him a dry-erase marker and allowed him to write numbers and draw number lines on the glass-covered tabletop. His baby sister nearly had a heart attack when she saw him. "BEBO'S DRAWING ON THE TABLE!!" she shrieked, with eyes the size of dinner plates.

We also covered Phonics, which took well over an hour. He hates Phonics. Sight words are giving him a hard time. He seems to have trouble between "on" and "one," "went" and "want," and the word "does" always comes out "DOZE."

Figured out a great way to do geography. He's got his continents quite well nailed down ("What continent is south of Europe?" or "Which continent would I go to if I wanted to go to the Amazon Rainforest?") Now we're focusing on water features (AND land features...which means making clay models of hills, mountains, valleys, islands, oceans, rivers, streams). So he only has four oceans to memorize, and he's about 70 percent there with the Atlantic and Pacific. So I asked him to get the globe (which is a beach ball), and he threw it at me with much joy and sparkling eyes. I tossed it back. He tossed it to me again. (This is why other six-year-old boys across the nation are being labeled with ADD. They're simply six-year-old boys.) I tossed it to him and shouted, "Quick! Which continent did your hands land on?" He stopped and looked curiously as his right hand, lifted it, broke into a huge smile and said, "South America!"

I gasped. "You SQUASHED SOUTH AMERICA?!?!?"

He squawked and giggled and tossed the globe to me. "Quick, Mom," he says, "Where did your hands land??"

We did this for awhile and then I got out the painter's tape (#1 recommended supply for homeschools everywhere! I can't believe how much I use this stuff.) I ripped off a small piece, stuck it to the globe and told him I'd toss him the ball (the wilder the better) and he'd have to tell me where the tape was stuck...was it on Asia, was it stuck on the North Pole, was it in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, etc.

We also made a baking soda/vinegar volcano earlier in the week, but it failed to impress much. And we're trying to grow salt crystals, but the string keeps getting removed from the solution, I have no clue why. I think I should get out the crystal garden and call it good. He also had a class on chemistry at the Science Center last week...they used a vinegar solution to clean off pennies and soaked some sponges in saltwater. They were SUPPOSED to bring the sponges home and set them in a window to dry out so they could look at the crystals form on them, but he decided his sponge was too dry and he rinsed it off in the sink. There was a reason I told you not to do that, buddy.

I took the kids to the park today and had the great luck to stumble onto a hot air balloon being filled and readied for takeoff. It was still lying on the ground, and we came over to get a closer look. It didn't take long for them to get it filled and ready to go. They were obviously taking family members for a ride of some sort, and when they cranked the honkin' flame-thrower in that thing, David and Lauren both clapped their hands over their ears and Lauren shouted, "Fire!" So we go to talk about the physics of the hot air balloon for a bit. We watched it take off and float away for a bit, and then I asked them if they liked the hot air balloon. Lauren shouted "Yes!" but David said, "No."
'If it had been a totally quiet balloon, would you have liked it better?"
"Maybe a little bit."
"Oh. You just don't like them, huh?"
"Well," he conceeded, "If we got to RIDE in it, I'd like it LOTS better."

He and Lauren stomped around the park, pretending to be dinosaurs, sometimes spotting the balloon, pausing now and then to streak up ladders and fling themselves down tunnel slides. We came back and made bead necklaces, and then had dinner. As it started getting dark, we spotted the moon, and this prompted David to go into a spiel: "You guys want to hear some stuff about the moon?" You bet! We were informed that it was a full moon, and that sometimes the earth's shadow covers it and that's why it looks like it changes shape, but it doesn't REALLY change shape, and it never disappears or anything. And that you know where that light comes from? Well, from a little bit of help from the sun. And nobody lives on the moon, but sometimes astronauts DO go there, and it's made of dust and rock, and there's a crescent moon, a full moon and sometimes no moon at all.
"What's it called when there's no moon visible?" I asked him.
"It's in centigrade..." he said, faltering a bit on the word. I was surprised.
"In retrograde, or centigrade?" I asked him.
"The first one!" he replies happily.
"That's a really very grownup word, I'm impressed that you remembered it," I said.
BUT I'm sure he has his wires crossed. Centigrade is temperatures, retrograde is appearing to move backwards in orbit. We'll have to talk about that later on.

Upcoming events:

Magic House later this week
First ever Cub Scout meeting next month
New GRC classes start in October

Catbook and Dogbook

Hilarious!

Most people know about Facebook, but how about Catbook and Dogbook? I love it!

I hereby volunteer to make an entry for a certain little coffee-lapping sheltie I know....

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Reunion Trip

Nearly home. We stopped at a rest area and the kids are at the playground portion of it, swinging and sliding before they have to get back into the car. It's proving to be a difficult drive for them, seeing as the DVD player has ONCE AGAIN konked out. It did the same thing a year ago or so and they had the replace the whole thing. Of course they didn't start a new warranty at that point, so it's a year out of warranty at this stage of the game, and apparently fixing it will be out problem. I'm getting extremely tired of being bent over the table when it comes to purchasing just about anything. Our DVD players fall apart immediately, our iPod has already been replaced once, and I can't tell you how many clock radios I've been through in the past few years. I finally gave up and got a $10 one so that when it died, I wouldn't care. I think it's been the best performer of all.

We had a good time; we got in late (around 10 p.m.) on Friday. Saturday was the family reunion, which involved a good 15 similarly-aged cousins for the kids to run around with (ok, second and third cousins), a huge house in the boondocks, a trampoline, a private lake, a boat, three dogs and a dock. Joy. (It also involved an absolute ton of sunscreen. It's no fun to be fish-belly white.) Very brief highlights: The kids learned how to play "popcorn" on the trampoline, the three dogs like to swim, one dog kept knocking my shoes off the dock and into the lake, the kids got to take a short ride in the back of a truck (with joyous dog running alongside) and David got over his "ick factor" of the lake, and was last seen swimming south.

When we got back, Grandma offered to not only watch the kids, but to feed them as well so that we could go out to dinner and movie. We hardly knew what to do with ourselves, but managed to reach back into the recesses of our memories and find a good dinner at Los Bravos (bean dip!) and see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the IMAX. (I think I lost 20 percent of my hearing.) We didn't get back until something obscene like 1:20 a.m.

Sunday we went to church and then went out to a Hibachi restaurant for lunch, which was pretty neat. Lauren LOVED the Japanese theme...not just the food (which she scarfed), but she was dazzled by the hanging lanterns ("Doze COOL!") and the bamboo/paper surrounding one of the booths ("Dat COOL!") Hmmmm...how do you make a little girl's room look both pink AND Japanese? Cherry blossoms? Suggestions from my aficionado friends who would know that stuff? The chef did a bunch of stuff like they do, spinning a raw egg on the grill, tossing it up into the air with a spatula, catching it in his pocket, making a fiery volcano out of onion rings, oil and salt. Dat cool.

After we got home we quasi-packed. The kids went swimming with Grandma and I once again got into a spat with a negligent parent of a little brat. (Why oh why do I run into the idiots, and why do the brats always see a "kick me" sign on my kids?) So Brat has a large inflatable at the kiddie pool, which he is using to clomp over Lauren's head. While not nice, this at least doesn't put her in immediate danger, as it doesn't force her to submerge her head. But he does it repeatedly, and follows her around the pool to get at her, and ignores Grandma's reasonable to efforts to shoo him away. So I get mad (duh) and come over, fully intending to take the kid's inflatable away the next time he does it. He sees me and I essentially tell him to knock it off, and Brat sticks his tongue out at me. Sound familiar? So I pointedly (and loudly) start re-telling the story of Precious (my last bad parental encounter) to Grandma, using the word "asshole" to describe the behavior of the last little boy I dealt with, and how amazing it was to me that I was running into such obnoxious hellions wherever we went. (Translation: Would the parent of this little spawn please step forward and identify yourself?) At this point some woman from the adult pool says something about not cussing in front of her kids, which I fully ignore. What's your dog in this fight, anyway? The Brat decides to run into David headlong with the inflatable now, causing him to half-dunk his head. Now I lean forward and absolutely scream at him in my most threatening voice, "LEAVE HIM ALONE. KEEP LEAVING HIM ALONE." Non-cursing Mom now rises up indignantly out of the big swimming pool, comes over to the kiddie pool, takes Brat's inflatable away, says something to him which obviously identifies herself as Brat's mom, and looks at me to say, "I would appreciate it if you would NOT curse in front of my kids!" What I wanted to say (which the FTC would fine me heavily for, and which I can credit my ex-college-roommate for coming up with) differs vastly from what actually came out of my mouth. "I'd appreciate it if you'd make your kids behave, thank you!" She basically turned on her heel and ignored me, which was fine. I stayed around to see if Brat would continue to act up and he didn't, so I went and took a seat in the shade (did I mention the heat advisories out for the week?). That was basically that. Brat's Mom kept a close eye on me, and I kept an even closer eye on Brat. Why do so many parents have kids like that?

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83 Toys From China Recalled

Goody. 83 more toys coming from China's manufacturing plants have been discovered to be coated with lead paint. Surprise. Some 300.000 of them are in consumer's hands, which they're hoping the get back. This comes from Mattel, and the things are mostly Dora and Sesame Street. The CPSC has the full list:

Recalls on Licensed Character Toys Due To Lead Poisoning Hazard

The other new thing I saw was that now we're apparently blending pharmaceuticals into our food. To quote one of the founders/proponents, "The whole paradigm in our society has been based on prescription
pharmaceuticals,” Mr. Flowerman said. Now, he said, “food can also be
available for enhancing health and wellness." So you've got yogurt to lower cholesterol, cheese cubes to curb your appetite, that sort of thing. Does this strike anyone else as slightly freaky?

Prescription Foods

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