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Thursday, August 26, 2010
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Monday, July 26, 2010
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Wednesday, July 21, 2010
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Wednesday, July 14, 2010
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Tuesday, July 6, 2010
January 2009
Cephalopod!
Sg,
That you are doomed to be sort of a nerd was obvious from that time last year, at the zoo. We were watching the gorillas being fed. You said something like “I see a monkey”, and your mother and I, nearly in unison, replied “gorillas are apes, sweetie.”
Your descent continued this morning when you learned the word “cephalopod”. It began with you telling me that your octopus was a person, and I broke it to you that no, in fact, your octopus was not a person. Soon I was asking questions like “is Daisy a cephalopod?” You would say “no”. When asked who is a cephalopod, you said “octopus!” By the time we got to daycare, you were also admitting, when asked whether there were any others, that the squid (“skid!”) is also a member of the class.
Maybe tomorrow we’ll discuss why, if one is going to be pedantic (which one should probably not be), octopodes makes more sense as the plural form of octopus than does octopi.
For now, behold these members of the class/subclass cephalopoda coleoidea: the fearsome octopus! the mighty squid! and the stalwart and redoubtable Tummi Gummi of the deep, the cuttlefish!
Octopus picture by Flickr user OCVA, used under a CC Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license
A Whole Bunch of Sevens
Sg, this song has become something of an obsession for you. And I can see why — it’s kind of catchy. You’ve started trying to sing along in the way someone sings along when they don’t really know the lyrics (“uh mmm mmm sevens ah um mmm living room”). Below Seven is a song that you discovered you liked today. We listened to it on the way home, and then when you were getting ready for bed you were walking around your room picking things up and singing “pick it up! pick it up!”
(Because YouTube is a medium only slightly more permanent than a sand mandala, and for future reference, the first tune is “Seven” by They Might Be Giants. The second is “Pick It Up, Lay It In The Cut” by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings.)
Intermission
For some reason, this time lapse video of a baby playing with his toys is really hypnotic. He covers a lot of ground.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
Thanks, Atley.
See original: 
Intermission
How to Listen to Your Music Without Learning to Hate It
For reasons that are potentially (but not actually) interesting, this is a real risk for me. The solution:
This flow chart describes a combination of playlists I’ve used to generate the main playlist I have listened to over the past few years.
The goals are to:
(a) keep fresh stuff rotating through;
(b) not listen to so much fresh stuff that I start to feel like I’m listening to someone else’s iPod;
(c) keep old favorites rotating through;
(d) not listen to old favorites so often that I get sick of them;
(e) listen to stuff that I like more often than stuff that I like less; and
(f) listen as little as possible to things I don’t like at all.
The idea came from this blog post, but I’ve made a few modifications.
If you were to waste a portion of your life reading the chart, you’d see that, at the moment, the balance is heavily in favor of new stuff. I think the last time I tweaked the parameters I was in a bit of a rut.
Dang. I just noticed I left off an arrow. I guess it is implied.
If clicking the flow chart above doesn’t send you to a bigger version, try here.
I understand I’m opening myself up to some potential embarrassment, but here are the contents of my “_radio” playlist right now:
How You Wound Up a McCord (a tale of massacre and incest)
For every generation n before your own, there are probably around 2n people whose stories have involved procreatin’ in order to give life to someone indispensable to your existence. Here is but one chain running through that crowd, which happens to be distinguished by being the one that gave you your surname.
James McCord, who is alleged to have been a clan chieftain, had some kids with his wife, whose name is lost to history.* Then he was killed at the battle of Killiecrankie Pass (a name I most definitely did not make up), which was fought July 27, 1689.
His son John McCord high-tailed it to Ireland, and he and Mary MacDougal had some babies.
One of these kiddies, William McCord, came to the colonies in 1720 with his wife (whose name we do not know*) and kids, including William McCord, who was but a wee laddie of four summers. Or something.
William built a fort. After what I can only assume to be a lengthy process during which large fees were paid to marketing professionals for numerous rounds of focus group testing, this fort became known as “Fort McCord”. Then William married Jane Lowry. Too bad there was a terrible massacre at Fort McCord on April 1, 1756. Lucky for you and me, William got off a few kids of his own before being overcome by the natives. (One wonders whether the whole massacre began as a harmless April Fool prank. As a sidenote, a party sent out to rescue those captured during the raid on Fort McCord got itself massacred, too.)
One of William’s kids was James McCord, whose wife Katy may or may not have been briefly carried away by the Native Americans after the Ft. McCord incident. In any event, she lost her last name* and gave birth to James, Jr.
James, Jr. married a woman named Sarah Boal (another last name destined to become mulch for our family tree*). Can we go split-screen here?
James and Sarah have a son, John McCord. He married Nancy Crook. (She was probably glad to change her name to McCord.* See, in the olden days, your last name was what you did for a living, so Joe Smith was probably a blacksmith and Eddie Baker probably made bread. Vladimir Putin. Heh.
John and Nancy had a son, Robert McCord.
James and Sarah have a daughter, Elizabeth McCord. She didn’t stay a McCord, though,* because she married Joseph Adair. Adair is a nice name, isn’t it? And don’t you feel that the right column should be roughly as long as the left? I know I do.
Elizabeth and Joseph had a daughter, and they named her Jane Adair.
And Robert McCord married Jane Adair. That’s incest!
(A note about marrying your cousin. Robert and Jane were born near the beginning of the 19th century, and can be forgiven for their incestuous union because language hadn’t been invented yet, so there was no way to say “hey, don’t do that; that’s incest.” But today we have a strong social taboo against marrying anyone more closely related to you than a second cousin. Some say that it makes your children retarded. Others say that you yourself must be retarded to violate a bedrock taboo. So it’s a chicken-and-egg kind of thing. But just so you understand: Robert marrying Jane would be like you marrying AT’s nephew Sam, which would be disturbing and would probably kill your mother and I. Unless you are reading this after having married your cousin Sam, in which case your mother and I love you very much and we want to support you but we’re just trying to understand and maybe you can visit again next christmas.)
Robert’s and Jane’s son was named James McCord, and he married Mary Cornelia Walker. Their son was named Guyte (or maybe “Guyton”) P. McCord (not “Walker”*), and now we’re getting down to the folks I heard discussed at interminable family holiday gatherings.
Still with me? Guyte McCord married Jean Patterson (who built the little red house in the NC mountains), and they begat James E. McCord, one of my grandfathers. (He isn’t the James McCord who famously broke into the Watergate, though our James is a bit of a John Birch Society type. If you don’t understand this parenthetical, and if you think of American politics as the kind of civil discourse described in 7th grade civics, please do not investigate the Watergate or the JBS. You are better off in your ignorance.)
Jim (as he is known) married Marquita Lance. “That’s an interesting name, ‘Marquita’”, you may be thinking. And you’d be right — it is interesting! Her father, Mark Walter Lance, was so geared up to have a boy and name him Mark, that when my grandmother was born he just went ahead and named her Marquita.* True story.
Marquita punted the name back over the gender fence when she and Jim named my father Mark Lance McCord. He married Dawn Harmon (who snuck her last name into my brother’s middle name* *), and they begat Junior (me). I married AT, and together we made sure you were begatted.
And that’s how the lion got his spots.
* The patriarchy. Pffft. What are you going to do?
* * Take that, patriarchy! Pow!
The Almost Comically Horrible Weekend Is Underway!
It’s obvious that the story of this weekend begins on Friday morning. But a point isn’t a pattern (except to the schizophrenics), and I didn’t see — couldn’t have seen — where things were headed until about 7:15 Friday night, when you and I were on the way home from day care.
I was really tired, not only from the day’s travails, but from a few really busy weeks at work, the last couple of which happened to coincide with a couple of busy weeks for AT at work. For almost two weeks, AT and I daily answered the question of who would stay at work until midnight, and who would work from home after putting you to bed.
And I was tired from changing the tire in Atlanta’s un(s/r)easonably cold weather at the end of a long day. It was very cold. Like the actual low yesterday was -12°C. I didn’t have gloves, so my work with the heat-leeching metal tools was punctuated by pacing, hands in my pockets, until I could feel my fingers again.
And you were tired. I could tell as soon as I walked into the daycare. I’m not sure whether it was that I was too tired to be a good parent or you were too tired to be a good kid, but the ride home started to shape up to be pretty rough. You were asking for things that didn’t exist, or asking for things using only really vague pronouns. I wanted to hand you what you wanted, but couldn’t figure out what that might be. I eventually opted to put on some music.
I had fairly well tuned you out when I realized that you were repeating “I want another one; I want another CD, daddy.” I was relieved — hitting “next” on my blackberry was well within my abilities. And lo, I was downright pleased when the song that came on was a favorite. For me, it is one of those that freezes the moment you first hear it in time, so that every time you hear it a little bit of the initial wonder remains.* Here’s that song:
You stopped kicking your feet when the song began, and your glazed stare out the window briefly focused. You were quiet for about a minute, and I was pretty sure you were having the same reaction I’d had. Then you said: “I don’t like this one. I want another one.”
See, that’s the moment I should have been able to plot out the course of the rest of the weekend. First the tire, then the solid blow to my pleasant delusion that you and I are two manifestations of the same spirit. The trajectory is obvious. Or it would have been if I hadn’t been so tired, so disconsolate.
I was so tired and crabby that I didn’t notice the third datapoint when it was staring me in the face. When AT came home and declared it “cold in here”, I told her she was crazy. She directed me to the thermostat, which told me two things: (1) the indicated actual temperature was about 8°C below the set temperature; and (2) the heating system, which was set to “auto” (and which therefore should have been doing its best to replace the missing heat) had simply given up. I suddenly felt how very cold it was in the house. By morning the house was more than 15°C cooler than when we’d left for work 24 hours earlier.
So you went to spend the night with grandma and granddaddy. AT and I stayed at home, because I had to be north of town to get a new tire at 7:30am, and AT had to be at work at 10:00am. A hitherto unused electric blanket saved the evening. But when I had to get out of bed in the morning, I suddenly felt a great sympathy for the people who stepped out of their warm Boeing into the Hudson River on Thursday.
After grandaddy brought you back home, you stayed with Haley for a few hours while we were at our respective offices. AT called me as evening approached to let me know she was leaving the office, and could give me a ride if I wanted one. A few minutes later she called to tell me that someone had broken into the car.
A window was smashed, and we think that the only thing taken was a purse that has been doubling as a light-duty diaper bag. I imagine that the thief was probably disappointed. I’d bet that the purse is in a garbage can not two blocks from the parking lot. (Although Donnie pointed out the possibility that the culprit was someone whose baby really needed a new diaper, in which case they probably got exactly what they wanted and needed.)
So that’s the weekend so far. It’s Saturday night now, and Monday is technically part of the weekend this go ‘round. So who knows what other joys await.
There are bright spots too, by the way. You seemed to enjoy the song after “Greenman” very much, and I can’t complain if you’re a Critters Buggin’ fan (even if Raimondi isn’t the most interesting song).
* And how I was all like “this sounds like XTC, except for how it’s completely awesome”.
Bullies Worse than Predators On Social Networks
About half of minors who report receiving sexual solicitations online say the advances come from other minors, the report says.
Where sexual interactions do occur between adults and minors online, they rarely progress to physical encounters offline and, when they do, they usually involve post-pubescent minors between the ages of 14 and 17, who are aware before the encounter that the person they are planning to meet is an adult.
The researchers found that the minors who are most at risk of encountering inappropriate content and encounters online often engage in risky behaviors or come from environments that make them more susceptible to risks, such as environments where there is little adult supervision or where there is drug abuse or physical and mental abuse.
“Those who are most at risk often engage in risky behaviors and have difficulties in other parts of their lives. The psychosocial makeup of and family dynamics surrounding particular minors are better predictors of risk than the use of specific media or technologies,” the report says.
The report also says that although cyberbullying is a greater problem than predators, there is no evidence that bullying has increased because of social networking sites and that bullying still occurs more often offline than online, although social networking sites have created another avenue for expressing it.
The report, titled "Enhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies," was commissioned by the National Association of Attorneys General, which is trying to determine the best way to combat cyberthreats against minors. It was produced by a task force headed by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and is based on reviews of existing research in the area, of which the task force says there's a paucity, as well as an examination of existing tools that offer online safety features.
The task force included more than two-dozen representatives from policy groups (Center for Democracy and Technology and the Institute for Policy Innovation) child safety groups (WiredSafey.org, ConnectSafely.org) as well as technology companies (MySpace, Google and Yahoo).
Although the national attorneys general association commissioned the report, there’s been some breaking of the ranks among its members. South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster has complained in a letter (.pdf) that the report’s findings are “as disturbing as they are wrong,” and “create a troubling false sense of security on the issue of child internet safety.”
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal had a similar reaction, saying that the “harsh reality defies the statistical academic research underlying the report.”
See also:
See original: Bullies Worse than Predators On Social Networks
Girl talk, boy talk: A study in stamps
Sociological Images posts on these two stamp sets, and well…just check them out for yourself.
Lorë P, who alerted SI to the product, breaks it down:
One of the first things that struck me was that both of these is that they have stamps that mention dad — “daddy’s girl” and “like father like son” but only the female one mentions mom (I guess it would be considered too emasculating to have “mommy’s boy?”)
Another interesting part of these stamps is that the “Girl talk” emphasizes the sweetness of girls - their giggles, their silliness, their angelic qualities (not to mention princess..). On the other hand, the male version has more objects - trucks, rockets, robots and “strong” traits - being brave and embracing adventure (and what does “all boy” mean anyway?).
It’s the so-called little things, folks. This shit is everywhere. Not to mention, I’ve been staring at this thing like a 90s era Magic Eye poster and I’m pretty sure I see a 3-D image of “daddy’s girls” flipping the bird.
The stamps are made by Sassafras Lass.
See original: Girl talk, boy talk: A study in stamps
Winsor McCay's Adventures in Hearstland
Sg, Ian gave you a collection of Winsor McCay’s 1905-1914 “Little Nemo” comics for christmas. It’s in a big red book printed under Taschen’s Evergreen imprint, which I can’t seem to find a website for. Anyway, we’re going to start reading it soon. As a matter of fact, I’m reading it now. I’m about 100 pages in, which amounts to about two years worth of a weekly strip. I’m enjoying it. I have more nuanced views on the subject, and that’s where this blog post was headed. But then….
Well, OK: actual war didn’t happen. But I did run across this collection of Winsor McCay’s later political cartoons at the inimitable Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog.
It was a bit of a shock. And I was stress out. And I was not only stressed out, but also taken aback. And gobsmacked to boot. Here I’d been engrossed in McCay’s saga of whimsy and fantasy, and (without any warning, thank you universe) I run smack into cartoons like the one above. It’s not just the dreary subject matter that set my teeth on edge, for I’m usually up for adding a measure of darkness to something good to see whether it makes it better.
What astounded me about the McCay political cartoons was the ham-handed way in which the reader was bludgeoned by artless symbolism. E.g. (x2):
Also, the lack of imagination would be striking if these were presented as cartoons by, say, random political cartoonist X. Coming from Winsor McCay — Little Nemo! — it is positively stunning. I’ll leave skimming the political cartoons as an exercise for the reader, but if I had seen even one more gigantic Uncle Sam protecting huddled masses, I probably would have cried.
The introduction to the Nemo book says this of McCay’s move from the New York Herald to William Randolph Hearst’s New York American:
With Hearst, McCay was in for an experience that was not particularly wonderful, and one that he may have wished on numerous occasions was only a dream — a dream in which he was bound by a golden paycheck to an oligarch’s whim. … Apparently McCay drew only so many Wonderful Dreams pages, probably being stopped by Hearst at a reasonable wrap-up point some time in 1913, the publisher then undertaking to turn McCay’s talents entirely to political cartoons. It was a murderous decision.
I took this with a grain of salt when I first read it — the Nemo book introduction is unsourced and a little hyperbolic (“murderous”?). But I give it a bit more credit after seeing the political cartoons. They are not the work of a genius at play in the fields of creativity. They aren’t even the work of someone who seems to care very much about his work.
And, in fact, there’s reason to believe that McCay wasn’t the one making decisions about the content of the cartoons. McCay’s political cartoons reflect Hearst’s pre-WWI isolationism, for example. But McCay himself later put together an animated retelling of the sinking of the Lusitania intended to make the viewer mad enough to go support war with Germany.
In conclusion, I do not like the political cartoons. They are not good.
And now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I’ll happily return to reading Nemo and will try to forget I ever saw the political cartoons.
