Hat tip to that fabulous Canadian worthy, Duckworth Peslar, who notified me today that Taser International is marketing a personal taser with a built in MP3 player — one that doesn’t skip a beat when you taser someone or something.
Amazing.
Also making international news over the weekend: FLOGOS are here! The latest in crazy advertising gimmicks, Flogos look — and float in the air — like clouds, but are literally floating logos made of soap bubbles filled with helium. Re-purposed snow blowers pump the shapes through a computer-shaped stencil to form any 2-D logo one wishes, e.g the Nike swish or the Apple Computer apple.
Great Britain’s Gavin Pretor-Pinney, however, doesn’t like them. The leader of the Cloud Appreciation Society was quoted in the Sunday Herald in a bit of a lather:
I find the concept of someone sending up clouds in the shape of a Coca-Cola logo, or something like that, absolutely abhorrent. If you live in the city you are constantly bombarded by corporate messages. Clouds, with their formlessness, are the last wilderness you have to gaze upon. It would be a sad day if you gaze up and find that you had a company logo in the clouds.”
Upon hearing that there may soon also be multicoloured variations, Pretor-Pinney practically popped:
The colour of clouds when a low sun strikes them is one of the most beautiful colour schemes there is. You don’t need to start introducing multicoloured, tutti-frutti clouds. I say leave our clouds alone. This matters to me, I tell you.”
And finally: my 11-year old, one of the funniest creatures on the planet earth, shook her own head over some political news today.
That [she concluded] is why the government should be run by cats.
I posted yesterday about the Mother-Daughter Book Club my daughter and I have been part of for the past four years. Here are the books we read during the last two of them:
5th Grade
Ruby Holler by Sharon Creech
Worst Enemies/Best Friends (Beacon Street Girls, volume 1) by Annie Bryant
Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson
The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Witches by Roald Dahl
Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell
Princess Academy by Shannon Hale
6th Grade
Catherine Called Birdie by Karen Cushman
The First Horse I See by Sally Keehn
Hatchet Gary Paulsen
Rachel’s Journal: the Story of a Pioneer Girl by Marissa Moss
The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup and a Spool of Thread by Kate Dicamillo
The Doll People by Ann M. M. Martin, Laura Godwin, Brian Selznick, and Ann M. Martin
This is the lesson I hope the daughters in our mother-daughter book club are learning. We’ve just finished our 4th year together, and even though our daughters are growing taller than we are, we hope to continue. We meet about once a month, and the girls take turns hosting and leading the discussion. Moms help out by providing an activity and food.
We’ve visited one author in her home and heard another one lecture about being a writer; we’ve marvelled over a local grandmother’s WWII rationing coupons while trying to bake without sugar; we’ve built tiny “Borrower” houses and been teased by our daughters when the books made us cry.
These are the books we’ve read thus far. You may recognize some old friends, but we discovered some really wonderful new ones, as well.
—– Creative Commons Photo, “Little Red” by Flickr.com’s Aussie Patches, aka Ali J
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3rd Grade
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg
Felicity (American Girls Collection Books) by assorted authors
The Gadget Wars by Betsy Duffey
The Magic Treehouse book #16. Hour of the Olympics by Mary Pope Osborne
Molly (American Girls Collection Books) by assorted authors
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Emmy by Connie Jordan Green
4th Grade
Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson
The other side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
My mother-daughter book club has been trying to decide when we can meet this summer, and the email has been piling up: there’s just way too many summer camps, graduations, and family trips to work around. Consequently, I have just dusted off a snappy tool I once used to organize business meetings, and you should know about it, too.
MeetingWizard.Com is a free, simple-to-use website that helps a group set up a gathering (of any kind!) in just a few easy steps:
1) The organizer fills in a simple online form (adding email addresses, an event description, and all possible meeting times), and MeetingWizard sends out an email linking everyone to a page containing the response form. Note: once you’ve added email addresses to MeetingWizard, you can re-use them forever.
2) All recipients of the email respond by selecting ALL possible dates (note: not just the still-open dates they prefer – nor will MeetingWizard allow them to do that, clever Wiz that it is!)
3) MeetingWizard collates all responses in one place so it’s very easy to see which date or dates work best for everyone.
4) The Wiz can automatically choose the first date without conflicts, or you can choose one yourself. MeetingWizard then sends everyone an email announcement of chosen date.
5) MeetingWizard can also be set to automatically send out a reminder a day or so before the actual event.
Written especially for the web, the (very) short-form comedy series, “In the Motherhood,” is just begining its second season. Scripted by Hollywood professionals and with an all star cast featuring Leah Remini (”The King of Queens”), Jenny McCarthy and Chelsea Handler, the hilarious and edgy story ideas for each episode are submitted by real-life mothers from across the country. It’s a terrific concept.
And the episodes are FUNNY.
In the Motherhood hopes to become a major destination site, and so far it seems to be succeeding. I love the boldness of pairing the collaborative nature of the web with the professional production values already used by the television and movie industry. And all of this effort is aimed not at the still-highly-male-IT-industry, but at mothers. Hurray!
Oh sure — it’s still a marketing ploy. Nevertheless, it is also truly entertaining while managing to avoid the condescension and banality that still plagues so many “mommy” websites.
You may already have read “Invisible Mother,” (text below). As best as I can tell it’s been circulating online since at least 2005, via email, message boards, and dozens and dozens of blogs — but it is always credited to a nameless author.
Because she’s invisible. Get it?
I do not like to post things without an artist’s permission, much less without attribution. That’s called “plagiarism,” and is a form of theft.
Nevertheless, the hundreds of postings by hundreds of women all happily conspiring with the invisible author to keep her that way is wonderfully ironic, quite aside from the funny loveliness of the piece itself. (more…)
I’ve had a house full of children, visiting relatives, and one vacationing husband. Consequently, we keep running out of food, clean towels, and unoccupied computers.
Among other things: in the midst of everyone taking showers one morning, our ancient plumbing stopped working (first in one bathroom, and then in the other – a total shut-out!)
Sigh. I really did mean to be more organized this week. But honestly? At this point I don’t even know where my day planner is. I did find my cell phone (in the bathroom) and my car keys (hanging from the car’s passenger-side door.)
My 11-yr-old daughter got braces today, and since I am currently the flexible, unemployed parent, I’m the one who took her to the orthodontist. Before taking her back to school afterwards, I took that cute kid and her new mouth out for lunch to try it out.
We found ourselves doing a mother-daughter “Gilmore Girls” act as we tried to guess at the profession of the women gathered at an adjacent table. “They look like plastic ladies!” my daughter whispered. It’s true… though their bodies came in the normal variety of shapes and sizes, they had strangely-colored helmets of hair, strangely-colored orange skin, and they were even shiny. One began passing around neatly bound notebooks to the others, with “Beauty Consultant Success!” printed on the cover.
What the heck is a “Beauty Consultant?” And please: will no one ever make me be one?!? (more…)
It is a fair question. The reporter sounded like he’s all of twenty years old, and he knows my husband, which tells you two things at once: I must be getting old, and no matter how big a city, this is still a Small Town.
I thought of the paper this guy writes for… one of those thin weeklies (mostly advertisements) that inevitably appears at the end of your driveway on a day when it rains, so that you have to scrape up a sodden mass of multi-colored pulp when you go get the mail, vowing to boycott every single one of the advertisers (though their names are no longer legible) and wishing there were some sort of Law.
There were so many ways to answer his question, too. Possibilities ranged from simply repeating the info on the press release he’d already read to an astonished “Who says I’m qualified?”
I also could have held forth on the benefits of having had a liberal arts education, or else quoted the title of a book by Ann Crittenden: “If you’ve raised kids, you can manage anything.”
In the end, though, I had pity on the fellow, who just needed something short and straightforward, to fit a couple of column inches between the ads for rain gutters and exterminators. And decided it was time to get back to blogging!
[note found in my house today] “Yo, tooth fairiey! Trade ya an old bloody tooth that has jchewed 11 years worth of Food for some cash!”
—- Happy Labor Day to one and all!
5th Grade
Catherine Called Birdie by Karen Cushman
Smart, strong women read books.
3rd Grade
My 11-yr-old daughter got braces today, and since I am currently the flexible, unemployed parent, I’m the one who took her to the orthodontist. Before taking her back to school afterwards, I took that cute kid and her new mouth out for lunch to try it out. 
