Category Archives: Interesting

Mommy Lushes?

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Only in America could someone right a book about setting up play dates for their kids and then tipping a few back while the little monsters tear the house down.  According to this article in Reveries that’s just what Christie Mellor has done with her book The Three-Martini Playdate.  Here’s a small taste:

Christie’s book actually is one of a number of titles “over the last
few years that urge parents to ease up” by mixing a little alcohol with
their childrearing. Some say this is a healthy thing, “a small break”
from all the “runs to soccer and ballet classes, fundraisers and
homework projects … the almost sadistically stressful world of modern
parenting.”

and

But Christie Mellor says the alcoholism issue misses the point, that
she really only meant the momtinis as "a metaphor for having more fun
in your life … It’s not just about drinking and cutting loose," she
says. "It’s about giving your children the tools to be self sufficient
… Because if you haven’t changed your general attitude, then you just
end up being a really busy drunk."

Somehow I just can’t picture my grandmothers or mother indulging in this kind of silliness.  I mean my grandmothers were non-drinkers and my mom didn’t start drinking alcohol until she was well into her 30s, but even if they did drink and did decide to have a martini during play date they sure wouldn’t make a big deal about it.  Has this generation been so Oprah-fied that we have to create drinking metaphors to tell us how to give our "children the tools to be self sufficient"?

When I was a kid being self sufficient meant you were banned from the house until it was time to eat either lunch or dinner and then if you didn’t show up on time you were in big trouble.  That’s when we kids took the opportunity to discover the wonders of fighting, which I guess in today’s parlance would be called "dispute resolution", seeing who had the most guts by taking whatever outlandish dare we came up with at that moment, finding out how far we could get from our homes without getting into trouble, finding and hiding the neighbors stash of Playboys that he foolishly put in his curbside trashcan, etc.  Our parents didn’t need metaphors to teach us self sufficiency and I suspect today’s mothers don’t either; they’re just looking for a reason to get lit while managing their kids’ schedules.  Of course micro-managing their kids’ lives is a great tool for teaching self sufficiency.

Quixotry = 365 points

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ScrabbletileWhen I was a kid we played a lot of Scrabble in our family.  In fact one of the defining moments in my adolescence was the first time I beat my Mom and I was pretty sure she wasn’t tanking the game to make me feel better.  So I read with interest this item (found via Lex) about a guy who scored 830 points in one game and his opponent scored 490.  They set three records; highest score by one player, highest combined score and highest score for one word (365 for QUIXOTRY).

I feel for the guy who lost since normally you’re the winner running away if you score almost 500 points, yet he was beat by 340.  To his credit that means that if you removed the 365 point word he actually played his opponent even.  Most mortals would have thrown in their tiles after that one. How bad was that pun?

I Can See This Going Over Well in the Miss America Bathing Suit Competition

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MuslimbikiniDavid Boyd points to an interesting product from an Australian company that produces swimwear and activewear for traditional Muslim women.  I truly love watching entrepreneurialism at work and these guys have found what has to be a truly unique niche.  Of course I truly hope the fashion doesn’t catch on at the Outer Banks.

These things kind of remind me of the uniforms the sports teams at a fundamentalist Baptist high school that my school would play against once a season.  Neither the girls nor the boys were allowed to show their legs so the girls would wear these pants that looked like bloomers and the boys would wear sweat pants.  They looked very uncomfortable so I’m willing to bet they would have welcomed this kind of activewear sans the hoods.

At 17 I Was Swiggin’ Beers & Chasin’ Skirts

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ThreewheelerAll Bob Shotwell did at the age of 17 back in the 30s was build his own three-wheeled car, pictured at left.  He named it "Philbert the Puddle Jumper." At that age I couldn’t tell a hammer from a screwdriver and my skills were limited to those listed in the headline. In defense of myself I must say I honed those skills with great effort and gusto. 

Building anything, much less a car, was way beyond my ability and quite honestly of zero interest to me. That means that I now hold people who do build things, especially at the age of 17, in special reverence.  The car is featured in a Popular Mechanics article by Jay Leno, who refurbished the car after Shotwell gave it to him, and he points out that in this day and age there are very few 17 year olds who can build anything, so I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad about my own lack of DIY creds. He also wistfully points out that in the 30s you could show up at the DMV and register a self-built three wheeled car.  Try doing that today.

Baboons Gone Wild…er

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In another sign that we’ve been messing with mother nature a bit too much roving bands of baboons in South Africa are encroaching on the homes of people who have encroached upon their habitat.  According to this piece at National Geographic (found via Boing Boing):

Conflicts between baboons and humans in the suburbs of prosperous Cape
Town have gotten so bad that monitoring teams have been deployed to keep
the animals away (South Africa map).
The large monkeys invade people’s homes in the coastal Table Mountain
region, sometimes confronting people who try to scare the baboons off.

Joan Laing is co-chair of the rival Welcome Glen Baboon-Free Neighbourhood Action Group. She says the animals are a menace…

"They break windows to get into houses," Laing said. "They even know
how to open doors. And once inside, they make a mess. They empty the
fridge, ruin furniture, and defecate all over."

And they’re not afraid of people, she says.

"I have had them in my house several times, even while I was
there. They simply brushed past me. I had to get out of the way," Laing
said. "Even my husband got threatened by a baboon."

Just makes you want to say "Holy crap!" doesn’t it?  And I don’t doubt for a minute that the beasts poop everywhere once they’re inside.  Celeste and I were in Belize a few years back and while on a jungle tour one of the guides warned this guy in another group that he was getting too close to the monkeys.  The guy ignored the guide and within seconds had a steaming piece of poop in his hair after a monkey flung it at him.  They look cute on video but they’re pretty nasty creatures up close.

In Good Company

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A couple of years ago I was playing in a buddy’s poker tournament and he asked me and another guy named JB to help collect money and dole out chips.  My buddy had a system that he used to make sure he’d gotten all the money from every player, but JB and I quickly screwed it up and before you knew it we were short a bunch of money.  So we had 30+ guys who all claimed to have payed in their $100 and we were about $500 short.  I was so upset I’d been part of the screw up that I was ready to puke.  Eventually my buddy asked JB why he had bills in the pocket of his shirt and JB realized he’d put some bills in there when his hands got full and then forgotten about it.  Thankfully most of us had played together long enough to know it was an honest mistake but JB still turned red as an apple in his embarassment.

Well, it looks like JB and I are in good company in terms of screwing up the whole money/chip thing.  According to this story in Freakonomics the guys at the World Series of Poker ended up with $2 million in extra chips at the end of the tournament.  Normally you’d think that someone had to be cheating but it ends up that the extra chips were due to some of the WSOP employees being a little math challenged.  I can only imagine how embarassed the WSOP folks are about this.

Watch What You Say

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Here’s a piece of news for all you trolls and haters out there; watch what you write/say or you could be on the wrong end of a very expensive lawsuit.  A woman in Florida recently won an $11.3 million defamation suit  and a lawyer in Georgia won a libel suit against a former client who’d started a blog and written some nasty things about him.  According to the article about the Georgia lawyer bloggers have been considered bulletproof because they weren’t worth suing, i.e. they didn’t have deep pockets like media companies.  Apparently that’s changing:

Legal analysts say the lawsuits are challenging a mind-set that has
long surrounded blogging: that most bloggers essentially are
"judgment-proof" because they — unlike traditional media such as
newspapers, magazines and television outlets — often are ordinary
citizens who don’t have a lot of money. Recent lawsuits by Banks and
others who say they have had their reputations harmed or their privacy
violated have been aimed not just at cash awards but also at silencing
their critics.

Later in the article the founder of the Media Bloggers Association recommends that bloggers bone up on libel law because eventually someone’s going to get sued and lose their home. 

My recommendation?  When you’re writing about someone think of it has having a conversation about one of your neighbors or co-workers.  It’s perfectly fine to have an opinion about the person and you can tell anyone you want what that opinion is, but you can’t make accusatory statements about that person unless you’re ready to back it up with proof.  For example it’s perfectly legal to say "I think Joe is an amoral jerk" but it’s a completely different thing to say "Joe’s a pervert who diddles little boys."  Statement number one is an opinion, statement number two is an accusation.  The worst that can happen with statement number one is everyone you say it to might think you’re a jerk or Joe might challenge you to a fight, but with the second statement you could end up in court.

For the record I love everyone…we’re all God’s children…blah, blah, blah…don’t sue me.

And You Thought Going Blind Was the Worst Possible Outcome

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I can remember hearing all the crazy things people used to say to disuade boys from pleasuring themselves.  You know, spanking their proverbial monkey.  Hairy palms and blindness were the most oft-warned side effects of this ubiquitous practice.  Well, since we don’t have an epidemic of men with fuzzy hands, wearing dark sunglasses and using a tap cane we can safely assume that these warnings were fabricated by grossed out moms and priests who wanted to keep all the fun to themselves.

Interestingly, though, Iran’s supreme leader Sayyid Ali Khameini has weighed in on the subject of self diddling (found via Boing Boing).  According to his blog men should not exercise their wrists during Ramadan.  He has a Q&A section where he addresses the issue:


Q: "If somebody masturbates during the
month of Ramadan but without any discharge, is his fasting invalidated?"

Iranian Supreme Leader: "If he do not intend masturbation and
discharging semen and nothing is discharged, his fasting is correct
even though he has done a ḥarām (forbidden) act. But, if he intends
masturbation or he knows that he usually discharges semen by this
process and semen really comes out, it is a ḥaram intentional breaking
fasting."

Here’s the interesting thing to me; by saying that it’s not good during Ramadan it seems to me he’s saying that it’s okay during the rest of the year.  Combine that with the whole "virgins waiting for you once you blow yourself and a few hundred innocents up" thing and you’ve got quite the recruiting video for young radicals.

Unexpected Benefits of Being a Wetmouth

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I have a few physical attributes that I find truly annoying.  First, I seem to be replacing all the hair I’m losing from my head with hair on the rest of my body, particularly my back.  I’ve seen guys with worse back hair (much worse) but I’m not happy that I’m starting to resemble Bigfoot.  Second is my amazing propensity to sweat.  It can be 50 degrees outside and if I walk more than a couple of blocks I’m in a full-on, shirt-drenching sweat.  It truly makes the summer miserable sometimes.  Third is my mouths ability to produce spit.  It usually doesn’t bother me that much, but when I go to the dentist it’s a royal pain in the ass.  If they don’t have that sucker thing in there just right I can drown in a matter of seconds while the hygienist is blissfully scraping away.

Well, I think I need to embrace my spit glands.  I just read this little item at Freakonomics:

As much as I generally dread the dentist’s chair, I always wind up
learning something. Yesterday was no exception. I was asking Dr. Reiss
about the causes of tooth decay—genetics vs. diet, etc. etc.—when he
began explaining why toothpaste is such a bogus product. Any claims
that toothpaste makes about preventing decay, whitening teeth, etc.,
are totally falacious, Dr. Reiss told me, because the F.D.A. can’t and
won’t allow the ingredients necessary to perform those chores in an
over-the-counter product that children can easily get hold of. (That’s
why he recommends an antibacterial product like GlyOxide, a fairly
foul-tasting but apparently effective means of killing the bacteria
that cause decay.)

The other thing I learned yesterday was
far more interesting, with far greater implications. He told me that
tooth decay in general, even among wealthy patients, is getting worse
and worse, particularly for people in middle age and above. The reason?
An increased reliance on medications for heart disease, high
cholesterol, depression, etc. Many of these medications, Dr. Reiss
explained, produces drymouth, which is caused by a constricted salivary
flow; because saliva kills bacteria in the mouth, a lack of it means
increased bacteria, which leads to increased tooth decay. Given the
choice of taking these medicines versus having some tooth decay, I’m
sure most people would still choose the medicines—but I am guessing
that most people haven’t thought about the link between the two.

So my spit is my friend!  Maybe I’ll discover equally encouraging news about my sweaty ape tendencies, but somehow I doubt it.