Category: Misc

Via Instapundit, an interesting article about how TV and movies are evolving in their portrayal of stay-at-home dad’s.

Personally, the doltish-Dad spiel never applied to me and my guess is it didn’t apply to a lot of kids growing up. In addition to running a small business for 30 plus years, my Dad was more than a little competent around the house. He built a deck, managed a pool, grew fruit trees, coached all 3 of his kids through various athletic endeavors including football and track and field, renovated just about every room in our house without blowing things up, helped us with homework and school projects and dished out some discipline along the way. A typical working day for him was 14 hours including office time and then traveling to various job sites to manage the field. Frankly, he didn’t have time to be incompetent.

Mom was the classic stay-at-home variety, and that was what enabled them to make things work. She handled the lion’s share of the house, including dealing with me and my brother and sister. As we kids got older, she took accounting classes and eventually helped Dad with running his business, taking care of the money management side of things.

They worked like that because that’s what was required to make thing work. Someone had to be responsible for providing and someone had to take care of the kids. About 8 years ago, the Wife and I had the same circumstance presented to us. By gender, roles ended up different, but in the end it’s the same result.

And the Wife hasn’t blown anything up yet either.

Looks like Voyager 1 is getting ready to exit, stage left.

Over at Wired Magazine, there’s an interview with the Matthew Hutson, author of the new book The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking. The following excerpt is from the first question:

The construction worker who secretly buried a Red Sox jersey in the new Yankee stadium, in the wet concrete. A year later the Yankees found out and made a big deal out of it. The fans were calling for blood and for it to be removed, and the Yankees didn’t want the stadium to be cursed, so they jack-hammered it out of several feet of concrete and pulled this thing, this shirt out of the ground in front of media.

The fact people were concerned that a shirt bearing the name and number of a Red Sox player could curse a stadium by sitting in the concrete of a floor? To me that is weird, funny and illogical behavior.

But by looking at that kind of thing, you get a chance to explore: What do you mean by cursed? Why do we care so much about symbols? How do we judge cause and effect? It gives you a great window into human cognition.

I had no idea this went on. But sure enough, here’s an article at ESPN about it. Pretty hilarious stuff. I can only assume someone saw the guy do it, otherwise I can’t imagine how they’d have found it. The best part is it was an Ortiz jersey.

Now, here’s something to ponder. Would the jersey really have served as a hex if no one knew it was there? Imagine the mythology that could have developed if the guy had gotten away with it and then leaked it out that the jersey was there. Yankee fans would have blamed every bit of bad luck on it for years, I have no doubt.

Of course, as it worked out, the Yankee’s won the World Series in their first year in their new ballpark. So obviously the spell was broken.

UPDATE: Stupid spelling errors. Fixed title typo.

Well, not the dishwasher so much. The heating element. The new one that replaced the broken one back in February. The new one that broke after less than 5 months of service.

When I called customer service about it, they told me they wouldn’t replace it because it only had a 3 month warranty, which had expired. Plus, another (possibly faulty) element was now $100 more expensive than last time. At the point, it was made more sense to just purchase a new dishwasher. I told the customer service person so and then hung-up.

So there’s an expense we didn’t expect to be shelling out for. We picked out a new one earlier this afternoon. It should be here tomorrow, at which point I’ll give the delivery people the old one and install the new one myself.

In the meantime, we still can’t get the kids to clean dishes.

I read the Old Man’s War trilogy from John Scalzi awhile back, but didn’t try out any of his other books. Over at GeekDad they reviewed his latest book Redshirts which comes out next week.

The thing’s I liked about the OMW series were the fast pacing of the book and the main characters were smart. Based on that review, it sounds like Scalzi has duplicated that formula here.’

I pre-ordered it through B&N today and am looking forward to it’s arrival next week.

Been out camping all weekend and just got back late this afternoon. Aside from getting out this quickie Memorial Day post, I’m too tired to blog about much. Though a weekend recap of some sort is certainly forthcoming.

Hope everyone’s Memorial Day was a great one. Back to the grind tomorrow.

The first private sector attempt at space had a successful launch this morning. It’s an unmanned launch and is scheduled to dock with the Space Station to deliver supplies and take back garbage. It’s currently in orbit around the Earth. Cool stuff.

An essay about feeding the baby, over at Deadspin. It’s a bit profane, but has some real funny parts. The following in particular had me laughing out loud:

So you’ve got your formula, now you have to carefully take one level, unpacked scoop of the shit and add it to two ounces of water. They sell bottle warmers to help you warm up the formula for your kid, but I use warm tap water because I like to live DANGEROUSLY. In a perfect world, I would use pristine filtered water distilled from a distant lake in Finland, then lovingly mix the formula inside a Hamilton Beach blender in order to ensure consistency. But it’s 5 a.m. and there’s a baby in my hands that’s screaming to the point of bleeding out of its f***ing eyes, so that plan goes out the door. The baby will get 2.3 ounces of fluid and a half a jigger of powder, served CHUNKY STYLE.

Hilarious. I chuckled just reading through it.

This, too, is chuckle inducing:

They barf all the time, and yet I still fall for it when I’m rocking with them peacefully and waiting for them to shut their eyes and then WHOA HEY HOLY S**T HE’S BARFING PEOPLE.

So true.

Some architects thought it’d be a great idea to one, make a bathroom at the top of an elevator shaft and two, give that bathroom a glass floor. The result is a 15 story view. DOWN.

Words fail.

(via Ann Althouse)

From Wired Science comes news of a study that shows that living in rural areas boosts immunity to allergies. Or, in other words, kids are less likely to develop allergies if they are exposed to a lot of biodiversity, er, plants and stuff.

I guess the idea is another demonstration of a counter-conventional wisdom. In this case, the conventional wisdom is to isolate kids from all that nasty pollen and dirt and Nature so they won’t develop allergies. If they aren’t exposed, they won’t get it! The only problem is I’m not so sure this is conventional wisdom.

We’ve seen a pretty steady stream of studies demonstrating that exposing kids to environmental stresses like dirt and pollen actually boost the immune system, ultimately making the child healthier, not less so. Seems to me this is just another example of that trend.

In case you haven’t been on the internet at all today, Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of *Where The Wild Things Are” has died. He was 83.

Until today, I had no idea who wrote the book, let alone illustrated it. Judging by the number of blurbs about his passing that I’ve seen during my own surfing today, he’d certainly attained to a fair amount of fandom. Looking at his Wikipedia entry, I see that’s the only book of his I know. Or at least recognize. He seems to have been a more prolific illustrator than writer, and managed to stir up some controversy with the illustrations in one of his books.

Aside from that, I skimmed through an interview with him and he struck me as pretty curmudgeonly. Perhaps he was having a bad day, although the article’s author indicated Sendak’s behavior was pretty typical for him.

The wild rumpus will continue without him.

After seeing this, you want one.

The ad is unintentionally hilarious. They show off the device and explain that the laser is the real deal. They show two Jedi wannabes duking it out with a couple of “lasersabres” (at least, it looks like it), and then quickly go into an explanation about how dangerous the lasers are and that no one should use them as a sword or for dueling and blah, blah, blah.

Still, it’s very cool. If we could slice the Thanksgiving turkey with it, it would be hard to turn down.

The dog started barking upstairs and that typically means a cat in our driveway. Doesn’t matter if it’s our cat or someone else’s cat, as far as the dog is concerned it’s trespassing. An offense punishable by barking the interloper to death.

This happens just about every evening and as I said, it’s usually a cat. So when she started doing it last night, I asked the lass to get her (the dog) to knock it off. The lass, curiosity clearly getting the better of her, decided to check out what the dog was fussing about.

She comes up to me, eyes wide and with a little concern in her voice, “Dad, it’s not a cat.” Right then, I’m thinking “We need a bigger boat…”

She continues “It’s about this big…” and she holds her hand about a foot apart. My next thought is “Well, scratch the bigger boat.” The size means it could be just about anything. She’s smart enough to know what a cat looks like, so I need another detail to have any hope of coming to a conclusion.

She finishes “… and it’s grey and has a pink tail.”

Ahh, well, round these here parts there’s really only 1 thing it could be. I hopped up off the couch and went to the window and sure enough, the possum was waddling across our driveway. By this point, the dog had come downstairs, clearly hoping we would unleash her upon the poor creature. Our younger male dog had picked up on her agitation and was similarly inclined. I imagine his thoughts were along the lines “Got no idea what’s going on, but I’m IN.”

As soon as I stepped outside, it scooted into the brush. The tree it went to is dead and it was only a foot or so off the ground when the lass and I tracked it down. It barely moved even after I went inside to get the camera. The lass was impressed by it’s lack of movement and kept asking why it didn’t move much. I tried to explain that’s it’s defense mechanism, to sit there and be still, hopinig we’d leave it alone.

Aside from taking the pictures, we obliged.

Kids who eat at home eat better

In reviewing 68 studies on the association between family mealtimes and children’s health, the researchers found clear patterns: Children who frequently eat at home with their families eat more fruit, vegetables, fiber, and calcium- and vitamin-rich foods. The more a child’s family eats out, the greater the amount of less nutritious food and drinks, such as soft drinks, he or she consumes. In addition, children from families who have frequent at-home meals together have a lower body mass index than those from families that eat out frequently.

I read the above paragraph to the Wife and her reply was “And they needed to perform a study to tell us that?” Just so.

Also from that linked article:

More than 40 percent of a typical American family’s budget is spent on eating out…

Now that surprised me, as it appears to me they are saying the entire family budget, not just the food or grocery budget. I know we’re way below that, meaning there must be families way above. I’m curious as to the methodology they used to come up with that number, as it seems really high.

I’ve actually seen this hyped at a couple of places, and this is just the most recent. That said, portraying Darth Vader as a father with a petulant 4-year Luke nipping at his heels seems like one of those ideas that’s so obvious it’s hard to believe it took this long to come to fruition.

The book will be released on May 4th. If the teasers are any indication, it’s hard to imagine it being anything other than a huge hit.

So earlier today, my brother (I think) suggests I try Words with Friends. I download it on my Nook, set it up and invite him to play a game. Shortly thereafter, word gets around the family and the next thing I know, I’ve got a game going with my Dad and Sister as well.

So the Wife takes an interest this evening, installs it on her iPad and invites me to play a game. So I spread word to everyone else, and now we’ve all got at least 4 games going simultaneously. I don’t know who else my Brother, Dad and Sister are playing with at the moment, but based on the way I’ve been beaten so far, I’d wouldn’t be surprised if the list was long.

Just what I needed, something else to kill time with.