Weakened in Paradise
I always believed my best bet for employment was the service sector, but it hasn’t worked out the way I expected. I’ll never give up intelligence-gathering, covert surveillance, and stalking as hobbies, of course, but ever since Big Government became more deeply involved in those fields I’m finding it much more difficult to make a living pursuing the observational arts.
overheard
A man to his 13 or 14 year-old son, “I know, it’s going to look even more gay, but that’s what your mother wants.”
Meet the Duggars
An Arkansan woman is pregnant with her 18th child.
All the children — whose names start with the letter J — are home-schooled.
Read on for the full list of names.
blah, blah, blog
Alex Tabarrok, of Marginal Revolution, took his 6-year old to a party attended by other prominent economics bloggers. When they got home, his wife asked the 6-year old how the party was.
“It was like this,” he answered, “Blah, blah, blog. My blog, blah, blah, blah. Blog, blah, blog.”
from a new park in our neighborhood
These tips apply to more than just healthy swimming.
The Talk
Jon was fourteen or so when his dad walked in unexpectedly to find him rolling and tumbling in bed with a girlfriend. The household being a secular-humanist-North Shore-Chicago kind of a place, there wasn’t a scene, just some embarrassed and irritable fumbling followed by a general, eh, withdrawal.
Not long after, Jon’s dad took him aside for The (Long-Deferred) Talk. Here it is.
“Son, sex is one of the best things in this world.
“Get as much of it as you can.
“Don’t be stupid. Don’t be a jerk. Try not to hurt anyone. But get as much of it as you can.”
Big Tent Books, It’s for Kids!
My Beautiful Mommy, a book to explain plastic surgery to children, will be available this Mother’s Day.
My Beautiful Mommy is aimed at kids ages four to seven and features a plastic surgeon named Dr. Michael (a musclebound superhero type) and a girl whose mother gets a tummy tuck, a nose job and breast implants. Before her surgery the mom explains that she is getting a smaller tummy: “You see, as I got older, my body stretched and I couldn’t fit into my clothes anymore. Dr. Michael is going to help fix that and make me feel better.” Mom comes home looking like a slightly bruised Barbie doll with demure bandages on her nose and around her waist.
infographics
Charles Joseph Minard may get all the accolades for his graphic of Napolean’s march to Moscow, but for me, the above chart is the most beautiful ever created.
Motherly Advice
“You shouldn’t do the Twist when you’re wearing stretch pants. It doesn’t look nice.”
I was, oh, maybe seven years old.
Edith Maybin
(via conscientious)
President Bush Murdered on Hamas Puppet Show
A children’s puppet show in which a Palestinian boy stabs George W Bush to death has been broadcast on a Hamas-owned television station in the Gaza Strip.
The boy declares “I place my trust in Allah. I need to kill you”, before stabbing the US president in the chest, in the programme on the al-Aqsa station.
For Aaron
A Boy Named Sue
The effects of cross-gender names on men, from Marginal Revolution:
“Researchers have studied men with cross-gender names like Leslie,” Dr. Evans explained. “They haven’t found anything negative — no psychological or social problems — or any correlations with either masculinity or effeminacy. But they have found one major positive factor: a better sense of self-control. It’s not that you fight more, but that you learn how to let stuff roll off your back.”
Now that’s a party
When Robert and Julia Anscomb arrived home the next day they found their dog Bailey unconscious. He had overdosed on ecstasy tablets. Their dining room floor was covered in four inches of beer, their lap-tops, iPods and jewelery had been stolen and they found handcuffs and underwear in their eight-year-old daughter’s bedroom.
Quality Time
Son: You never let me do anything.
Dad: There are a lot of reasons why you shouldn’t do that.
Son: It’s no big deal.
Dad: You make everything sound so easy.
Son: You make everything sound so complicated.
Son and Dad: We both suck at this.
Hey Jude
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgrrQwLdME8[/youtube]
via iacas
A Valuable Tutorial
“Really, to an adolescent, arguing is the opposite of lying.”
Forty-six percent of the mothers rated their arguments as being destructive to their relationships with their teens. Being challenged was stressful, chaotic, and (in their perception) disrespectful. The more frequently they fought, and the more intense the fights were, the more the mother rated the fighting as harmful. But only 23 percent of the adolescents felt that their arguments were destructive. Far more believed that fighting strengthened their relationship with their mothers. “Their perception of the fighting was really sophisticated, far more than we anticipated for teenagers,” notes Holmes. “They saw fighting as a way to see their parents in a new way, as a result of hearing their mother’s point of view be articulated.”
This Morning- a play in one act.
Characters
Mike the dad
Kathy the mom
Andrew the moody, argumentative, angst-ridden, impulsive, reckless, rebellious teenaged passive-aggressive time-swallowing morning bathroom hog known for his odd sleeping patterns, awkward growth spurts and slobbish behavior who, with any luck, will be moving out in a couple of years
Setting
Chez Smith– two bedrooms, one bath, approximately 1,000 sq ft of plain vanilla American living space
Time
7:00 AM.
Finding your birth mother…at work
For years, Steve Flaig, a delivery-truck driver at a Lowe’s store here, had searched for his birth mother.
He found her working the cash register at the front of the store.
Little Miracles
Where’s this idea that childbirth is a miracle came from. Ha, I missed that fu**ing meeting, okay? “It’s a miracle, childbirth is a miracle.” No it’s not. No more than a miracle than eating food and a turd coming out of your ass. It’s a chemical reaction, that’s all it fu**ing is. If, you wanna know what a miracle is: raisin’ a kid that doesn’t talk in a movie theatre. Okay, there, there, there is a goddam miracle. It’s not a miracle if every nine months any yin yang in the world can drop a litter of these mewling cabbages on our planet. And just in case you haven’t seen the single mom statistics lately, the miracle is spreading like wild-fire. “Hallelujah!” Trailer parks and council flats all over the world just filling up with little miracles. Thunk, thunk, thunk, like frogs laying eggs.
Elaine and Haley
Elaine,
After you tried to take the heat off yourself by telling your entire family that your husband and I were “way more drunk” than you, you decided to create a diversion by suggesting that you and I do a choreographed dance for your entire family. You were too far gone to realize that nothing says “look at me, I am super wasted” like performing a choreographed dance to a room full of sober Jewish family members.
Link, in which Elaine responds. This is too good to make up. Not always quite as acerbic as that, but always funny and very heartwarming.
Lynne Spears’ Parenting Book Delayed
Not surprising at all that Britney Spears’s 16-year-old sister is pregnant. Depressing, yes, given that this is likely to garner more media attention than the entire U.S. presidential race, but surprising, no. What is surprising is that their mother had a deal for a parenting book, and only now has it been cancelled.
Leavin’ Las Vegas
It’s a new day for Céline Dion as she wrapped up her titanic five-year engagement at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on Saturday night.
Since opening in March 2003, Dion’s show, A New Day…, grossed more than $400 million US and was seen by nearly three million fans. One fan had reportedly seen the show more than 100 times.
Tickets for the final show were for sale on eBay for as much as $1,899 US.
–snip–
“Most of us have left our families behind to give ourselves every night,” she [Celine Dion] said. “I can assure you it was worth it.”
The Simon Bar Sinister Plan
My friends’ daughter plans to have an evil genius for a brother:
- Simon Bar Sinister
- Make Simon Bar Sinister
- Help Simon Bar Sinister
- Have him as a kid
- Love Simon Bar Sinister
- Take Simon Bar Sinister to science class