me rite gud

Happy Pi day y’all!

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I could go on, but I'm really more a fan of e.

Brilliant.  What else is there to say but brilliant?

In fact the rest of the Billboard Liberation’s modified billboards are pretty funny too.

Taken at a Detroit book depository by a person exploring abandoned buildings. (I hadn’t gotten around to posting it yet but the are many more pictures of abandoned places all over the world at Abandoned but Not Forgotten.

… we had to walk backwards uphill in snow to school and back.
Unlike those young whippersnappers who entered college this year. From
the Beloit College 2011 mindset list, in the lifetime of the students graduating in 2011 (born in 1989):

• have never rolled down a car window
• Fox has always been a major network
• MTV has never featured music videos
• Dilbert has always been ridiculing cubicle culture
• High definition television (not to mention DVDs) has always been available
• Russia has always had a multi-party political system

The kids really haven’t been watching much TV lately.   Yet tonight we managed to waste almost an hour on YouTube  watching stuff get blended. My favorite was the glowsticks.  Eamon was not happy about the transformers getting blended.

Speaking of letting kids do dangerous things… It got me thinking about another interesting article I remembered reading over the summer. Using the powers of the Internets (which has replaced my ability to remember anything) I was able to dig it up again.  So here it is,  an article by David Derbyshire in the Daily Mail:  “How Children Lost the Right to Roam in Four Generations.“

Comparing my kids childhood to my own, it seems crazy how much I was allowed to roam around my old neighborhood. I remember summer days where I wouldn’t see my parents during daylight hours. We had crazy good fun playing in the woods (and crap pond), miles from home. Or atleast it seems like miles. Definitely well out of eye or earshot of my mother. I can’t imagine letting the kids run wild in Los Angeles. Okay, so its not the same as rural upstate New York. But still.

I’ve also been getting super paranoid about losing the kids in public. I find myself asking the kids, “if you got lost here what would you do?” Eden’s answers are pretty solid and I think she would do a fantastic job on her own. Eamon scares me. Not only do I have no idea what he would do if he got lost, he doesn’t seem too worried about not knowing where we are or even where he is. I’ve even contemplated giving them cellphones. Yikes.

Eden is learning her multiplication tables which involves daily speed quizes where they have to get 25 problems correct in one minute before they can move on to the next set. We’ve been practicing alot at home and I finally got tired of making up sample quizes by hand. So here is my quick and dirty quiz maker.

While I was at it, I did one for Eamon who is working on addition.

Found this one on boing boing. While the title of his talk is semi sensationalist, Gever Tulley actually has some good ideas. Thinking about my childhood, I had tons of time to tinker. All of the items on his list were things I got a chance to experience as a kid. Sure I almost burned down the house and rendered our only telephone unusable for a couple days. But I learned to safely handle fire and keep very good track of the screws when taking things apart. In retrospect, the freedom to tinker was one of the best things my parents could have done for me. While I think we let our kids explore things on their own, its really time I start setting them up to do some of the things I did as a kid. Unfortunately I don’t think his book is available yet but I am looking forward to it. While the Dangerous Book for Boys (and Girls) is interesting, its also very tame. Hurrah for having fun playing with fire, knives, cars and big appliances.

okay, so spending 1.4 million on a car is obscene, but it sure is purty. i saw a lamborghini on laurel canyon while coming home from work yesterday. my heart did a little jump.  when i was a kid i really wanted to fly ridiculously fast in fighter jets.  unfortunately there was the itty bitty detail that they were fighter jets.

Eamon was sitting alone at the dinner table.  He had been told that he was not to get out of his chair until he had eaten the designated pile of food.  I might also have mentioned something to the effect of him being scrawny.  And that unless he started eating more, a tough guy could come up, flick him on the forehead and Eamon would fall over. While he pushed food around his plate,  the rest of us cleaned up the house.  I was washing the dishes when I heard him say something about batman.  I shut off the water and mumble a huh?

Eamon:  Um,  I don’t really like Batman

Another mumbled huh?

Eamon: He can’t really fly or anything

Me:  Uh,  true….

E: He can’t even shoot lasers out of his eyes.

Me: So who do you like

E: Well,  Superman is all muscley and he can fly.

Me: Yeah I guess compared to superman, batman is kinda boring.

Eamon returns to pushing food around his plate, thinking deep thoughts about super hero supremacy.