The work at the end of the year is finally starting to abate, but somehow the work-that-is-about-work isn’t, so I’m sorry for what has been and will likely continue to be a little thin effort around here. Have a big meeting on Friday, followed by the workplace holiday lunch, performance reviews and so on, and in between there’s another lunch, plus I have to interview the judge for the Detroit municipal bankruptcy live on stage (and on HDTV), and do a one-hour (!!) phone interview on WOSU (tentatively scheduled, anyway) radio in Columbus on Thursday.
It’s a lot of prep. Even though the live interview is only eight minutes. The questions will be easy. Getting my old-ass face TV-ready should take three-four hours.
Not sure if the WOSU thing is entirely firm, but if so, it’ll be “All Sides with Ann Fisher” at 11 a.m. I’ll keep y’all in the loop. EDIT: Booted in favor of a more authoritative source.
Let me just say, I’m grateful how you guys keep the site percolating along when I take a day off. You barely slow down. I don’t even have to say anything about Donald Trump, because you guys will either say something pithy or find other people who are even pithier while I lumber about attending to things.
Weird to think of being on the radio in Columbus. I feel like I should open with a big shout-out to UAHS Class of ’75 hollaaaaaa.
But it was a pretty good day, all things considered. Talked to some people I haven’t talked with in a while, got a lot done, and did my weekly two hours at a volunteer thing I do, an after-school program. It ended with a fidgety third-grader snuggled up under my arm on a pile of pillows while I read a perfectly awful kids-book version of “Space Jam” to him.
“These are great pictures, and I’m sure you like the movie and the story, but this writing is awful,” I informed him. “Way too many adverbs. But it’s OK, we’re going to read it anyway.” Worst volunteer reader ever. Kids literature isn’t easy, I expect; the best is like a haiku — just enough words, and the right ones. No adverbs. On the way home I recalled the day I learned my one-year-old was figuring it all out. I said the first few lines in some of her favorite books, and she went and fetched them from the pile. Once upon a time there were four little rabbits, and their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter. …In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines. A magic moment.
Because I was buried today, not much bloggge, but some.
Roy on El Douche and his apologists.
Eh, that’s it. Time for bed. Be good, y’all.
Sherri said on December 9, 2015 at 2:02 am
I remember telling my kiddo she had to learn to read herself, because I was tired of the Berenstain Bears. Dr. Seuss and Madeleine and Kevin Henkes (Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse is great) I would read endlessly, but not the Berenstain Bears. And not the Boxcar Children when she was older, either; Charlotte’s Web, yet, but if you want those, learn to read chapter books yourself.
She was reading at a second grade level when she started kindergarten. Guess I owe Stan and Jan Berenstain thanks for that, at least.
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Deborah said on December 9, 2015 at 2:43 am
Little Bird learned to read very early. She loved to be read to, she would sit by my side and listen for hours on end if I had the time to read that much. One time when she was about 3, I noticed she was sitting on the couch with the Sunday funny papers staring at them in a certain way that made me realize she could actually read. I started having her read to me and she could. She still reads vociferously.
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coozledad said on December 9, 2015 at 7:05 am
Roald Dahl’s Boy and Going Solo are a good demonstration of effective simple writing. I never read any of his children’s books, but I can see how his style would work there. One of my teachers used to say that all you had to do with children’s books was to “keep shit happening”.* I guess that’s why they got Roald to work on James Bond screenplays and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It probably didn’t hurt that he and Ian fleming were in the Foreign Service together.
*I never trusted him on this.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on December 9, 2015 at 7:14 am
Tell Ann I said hi! That’s wonderful, and I hope to get to listen to you — I may have a mediation at a school that morning, and will have to listen that evening to the replay, but I have a 50% no-show rate this time of year, so . . .
You can listen live on-line to WOSU at http://radio.wosu.org/#stream/0
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Suzanne said on December 9, 2015 at 7:29 am
Kiddie lit is like adult lit, much of it atrocious. I am trying to read Fates & Furies right now, but got side tracked into another book that I have to read for a book club (storm of the century) but both books are really poorly written & in dire need of editing. Fates & Furies might end up being good plot wise, but I’m not far and already tired of reading about one of the main characters banging every women he meets. I’m about to give up on bestsellers as 90% of them disappoint me, the recent exception being All the Light We Cannot See, which was wonderful. I am beginning to realize I read for the good writing, not the plot so much.
With my kids, I swear that at one point in my life, I had every Dr Seuss book memorized. Every dang one. “No Pat, no! Don’t sit on that!”
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alex said on December 9, 2015 at 7:30 am
I remember Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter! They weren’t in an old house in Paris, though 🙂
As for too many adverbs, one of the most overused adverbs in children’s books (and in other writing, especially amateurish writing) is the word gingerly, which almost nobody uses correctly. I remember first hearing it in children’s books read to me by my parents. Even so, I didn’t really grasp its meaning until I became a copy editor and saw it used extraneously and incorrectly to describe behavior that was anything but gingerly.
I heard it just yesterday in a description of a mob of people fleeing an industrial accident.
I suppose one should take care when criticizing children’s choices of literature and such. I remember being utterly heartbroken one year when my mother told me that “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” the watching of which had been a cherished tradition, was a mediocre piece of shit and suffering through it even once should have been more than enough already. Her purpose in doing so was to commandeer the TV that night. (I was heartbroken. Note that I assiduously avoided the use of crestfallen, another tired staple of children’s books.)
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nancy said on December 9, 2015 at 7:38 am
The one that was driving me nuts in “Space Jam” was “excitedly.” If you throw that exclamation point in, you really don’t need the adverb: “‘It’s Michael Jordan!’ Bugs said excitedly.”
Here’s the miracle, though: After I was done reading to the boy, a girl came up and handed me a book to read to her. She’s been a little prickly with me in the past when we’ve worked on her homework together, but she really enjoyed being read to.
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Connie said on December 9, 2015 at 8:13 am
We have friends with three kids, when kids were small they visited us regularly for weekends and more. We finally had to hide the SPACE JAM video because the boys would play it endlessly. I surprised myself by running into it the other day, tucked away in the fancy tablecloth drawer.
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Julie Robinson said on December 9, 2015 at 8:19 am
Stop! Don’t hop on Pop!
Of my two, reading was hard for one, and needed a lot of extra practice, while the other learned just by being read to. Go figure.
When I volunteered at the school library, I was just happy when I could find a book a kid connected with, so they wanted to read more. The books got better over the years, especially for boys, and they were no longer just about sports. It started a little before Harry Potter, then the floodgates burst as publishers realized there was money in it.
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beb said on December 9, 2015 at 8:24 am
Donald Trump increasingly reminds me of the dead civilization in “Forbidden Planet.” They had this vast thought-powered technology but never thought that their id would be so powerful and wild, so hateful and destructive that it would destroy their entire civilization. Trump is the Republican’s is monster.
Our daughter used to read a lot as a kid. Then she discovered video games and just stopped reading. Period. I used to read her a lot of Dr. Seuss but somewhere along the line switched to Dr. Dolittle and Harry Potter. Dolittle is interesting because it doesn’t write down to its audience. It uses long words and a complex story. The only problem is his use of the N-word.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on December 9, 2015 at 8:32 am
The Krell monster!
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Dorothy said on December 9, 2015 at 8:49 am
I read something somewhere (Parents magazine maybe? Psychology Today?) when my kids were very little about why kids crave or demand repetition in being read the same books frequently. It said something about it being necessary to their brain development and their learning how to learn. I wish I could remember the source but in those days, I read when I had 3 minutes to myself in the bathroom, or in the waiting room at a doctor’s office. That erased any irritation I might have felt about reading some books OVER and OVER again! My daughter was reading well before she started kindergarden (out loud and to her brother and cousins or friends) and her teacher told me some other parents asked them what I did to teach her to read. Mrs. Tschiegg said “Some kids just pick it up naturally – and Laura’s parents read to her a great deal, too.”
For the record, I had a subscription to Parents but not Psychology Today. That would have been doctors’ office material.
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nancy said on December 9, 2015 at 8:55 am
“Little Black Sambo” is a story about a very smart black kid, but over the years, “Sambo” became a slur. An African-American author rebranded the story as “Sam and the Tigers,” and we read that a lot. Another potential problem was “Struwwelpeter,” a family classic that explains a lot about the German character — it’s all about the dire fates that befall children who misbehave or even just act like kids, and commit such sins as daydreaming. Anyway, there’s a story in there about three white boys who tease a black one, called “the Black-a-Moor,” and for their punishment, a looming giant called Agrippa dips them into black ink, so they’re blacker than the boy they teased. I always felt weird about that one, and skipped ahead to the one about the girl who plays with matches and burns to death as a result.
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nancy said on December 9, 2015 at 8:59 am
Wikipedia tells me Agrippa is, in the original German, St. Nikolas. Wow. Another side of Santa, there.
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alex said on December 9, 2015 at 9:44 am
No stories about the dangers of self-abuse. I guess it must be more of an American obsession than a German one. The French laughingly call it “chastising the pope.”
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brian stouder said on December 9, 2015 at 9:48 am
Thread win for Alex!
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Deborah said on December 9, 2015 at 9:51 am
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve laughed out loud reading the comments this morning. Good topic.
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coozledad said on December 9, 2015 at 9:56 am
The French laughingly call it “chastising the pope.
Don’t get them started on “Bonifacials”.
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brian stouder said on December 9, 2015 at 10:07 am
btw – I still think one of the (mostly) over-looked examples of Trump’s small-minded misogyny is the way he treated a news reporter covering his last speech. Uncle Google lead me to this –
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/07/thin-skinned-donald-trump-calls-female-reporter-little-katy-third-rate.html
which captures some of the creepiness of it
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Danny said on December 9, 2015 at 10:19 am
I disagree about “excitedly.” Bugs could have been being sarcastic. He is somewhat of a smart ass, ya know.
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brian stouder said on December 9, 2015 at 10:45 am
…but then the wordsmith might have said
““‘It’s Michael Jordan!’ Bugs said acidly.” –
anyway – I’m still recovering from the St Nick revelation (although really, if there was a reality show about a rotund old white guy running a labor compound in the frigid, forsaken, far corner of the planet – a compound populated by little people, where escape is essentially impossible – one might rightly be braced to learn the worst, when the truth comes out about its history!
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Sue said on December 9, 2015 at 10:56 am
Stephen Cosgrove. Oh my F-ing gods, I hated his books.
For myself, since I grew up reading books that were 75 – 150 years older than I, by the time I was 10 I knew the difference between waxing and waning, that consumption was a sad and mysterious fatal illness, and that ‘ejaculate’ means to make a surprised or definite statement.
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Dorothy said on December 9, 2015 at 10:57 am
Sorry your radio gig got ditched. Jeff will be bereft!
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brian stouder said on December 9, 2015 at 10:59 am
Let me definitely state that Sue’s post got me laughing!
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Sue said on December 9, 2015 at 11:00 am
Of course the good thing about Stephen Cosgrove is you can skip pages at a time and your listener won’t know it. Small blessings.
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Charlotte said on December 9, 2015 at 11:00 am
My paternal grandmother read to me endlessly as a very small child, and I picked it up straight off. My mother’s side of the family is filled with dyslexics (she’s not the worst, but not a natural reader) so I was that kid — the one reading to all the other kids. One of my prized possessions, a photo of my Grandmommy reading to me — she died when I was about five. A lovely gentle woman.
Here’s a sweet piece of local Livingston lore — Jeff Bridges prized photo of the moment he met his wife Susan at Chico Hot Springs (she’s turning him down for a date): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeff-bridges-met-wife-photo_5661ef65e4b072e9d1c61223?section=good+news&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000023
Death of Doug Tompkins is a real shame. I’ve known a bunch of people who go way back with him, and from everything I’ve heard, he was a stand-up guy, and a true environmentalist. Cold water will kill you just about faster than anything.
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Sue said on December 9, 2015 at 11:12 am
‘Space Jam’, circa 1895: “‘It’s Michael Jordan!’ Bugs ejaculated excitedly.”
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adrianne said on December 9, 2015 at 11:15 am
I share the disdain here for the Berenstain Bears. Only antidote is to read them sarcastically to your kids!
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brian stouder said on December 9, 2015 at 11:17 am
Charlotte – a great photo, indeed; I’ll have to share that link with Pam.
Semi non-sequitur: they had Dolly Parton on The Voice last night, and she sang her evocative ‘Coat of many colors’ song, which always gets Pam; and she plugged a movie soon to come out, around her old sad song about Appalachian poverty (which gets Pam, every time!)
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Judybusy said on December 9, 2015 at 11:32 am
Charlotte, that truly is very sweet!
The most common refrain I heard as a child was “Get your nose out of that book and come empty the dishwasher/set the table/weed the garden!”
I was in a rage today listening to Ted Cruz being interviewed about climate change on NPR this morning. He actually said the temperature of the world is not rising. “There’s different ways to interpret [data from NASA satellites.]” He also steadfastly refused to answer Steve Inskeep’s question if he accepted the science of evolution. He just ignored the question and kept blathering about how he cares about the single mom who’s a waitress and doesn’t want government interfereing with her life. Oh, except he voted agains a minimum wage increase. Of course.
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Deborah said on December 9, 2015 at 11:40 am
Charlotte, that was a touching story. His wife is gorgeous, I googled her and in every single image she looks spectacular.
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brian stouder said on December 9, 2015 at 12:18 pm
and speaking of word usage, I contend that the headline “Fisticuffs fly at Indiana town board meeting” can only be true if the town board was called to order on an airplane that is aloft
http://wane.com/2015/12/08/fisticuffs-fly-at-indiana-town-board-meeting/
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Sherri said on December 9, 2015 at 12:42 pm
My daughter and I were on a plane when she was about 4 and she was reading a book. A gentleman sitting in the row with us commented on it and mentioned that he was a reading specialist, who taught teachers how to teach reading. He said it takes about 10,000 lap hours to create a reader – not to teach a kid to read, but to create a kid who reads. I don’t know about that stat (it sounds suspiciously like the 10,000 hours of practice number), but my daughter is a reader. I don’t know if lap hours mattered more than seeing reading modeled as something you do for entertainment and knowledge.
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MarkH said on December 9, 2015 at 1:04 pm
There’s a “more authoritative source”? What exactly were you going to talk about, Nancy? If it was something Detroit, that’s quite a diss.
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basset said on December 9, 2015 at 1:11 pm
I heard the same Cruz interview and couldn’t finish it, had to go to Sirius.
Meanwhile, this for the dog people of the group:
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/3w0zwa/english_mastiff_competing_in_a_dog_agility_contest/?
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coozledad said on December 9, 2015 at 1:13 pm
Fred Hiatt being willfully stupid again, or just up to his usual bootlicking?
http://wonkette.com/596811/washington-post-demands-racist-gop-hatemongers-tsk-tsk-racist-donald-trump
The GOP IS Trump. None of their current candidates are demonstrably different. Hiatt’s just attempting a dullard’s headfake while he tries to pinch another Bush off in the nation’s shorts.
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coozledad said on December 9, 2015 at 1:16 pm
Eagle demonstrates feeding on carrion.
http://gawker.com/opportunistic-predator-and-living-symbol-of-america-att-1747102232
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Heather said on December 9, 2015 at 1:22 pm
Can you imagine Trump with Angela Merkel? He’d start some international incident talking about her looks, and I suspect he would never respect (insofar as he can respect any woman) someone who is so unapologetically “unfuckable.”
I remember my mom taking us to the library a lot, and she got us to learn in to read in part by taping note cards with the names of things on those things–“bed,” “chair,” etc. My little nephews seem to be way more into Star Wars and Legos than reading, but they’re getting books from their no-fun auntie this year for Christmas anyway. I’m thinking “Farmer Boy” by Laura Ingalls Wilder for the older one. I loved the Little House books when I was a kid and this one is about the early life of Laura’s future husband, Almanzo Wilder, so hopefully more relatable than the other LH books (although I would love a world in which more boys discover that books about girls are great). For the younger one, I’m thinking “Free to Be You and Me,” to start pushing my liberal agenda on the new generation.
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Suzanne said on December 9, 2015 at 1:29 pm
I heard Cruz this morning, too. Unbelievable & creepy. All the climate change scientists are in the pocket of the governments who just want to control the masses and gain power. When asked if he, too, wanted power, he changed the subject.
This is the danger of the dominionist Christianity espoused by Cruz. We don’t really have to pay attention to facts because the only fact that matters is that God wants America to control the world, and that can only be achieved by fundamentalist Christians following what they believe God tells them. God won’t allow the environment to be ruined as long as the right people (people like Cruz) are in charge.
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Jolene said on December 9, 2015 at 1:41 pm
Time for end-of-the-year “best of” lists. Here is Hank’s list of 10 best TV shows of 2015, with links to movies and music at the end of the article.
And here’s the best of TV according to the NYT.
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Brandon said on December 9, 2015 at 2:01 pm
I share the disdain here for the Berenstain Bears. Only antidote is to read them sarcastically to your kids!
I don’t. I realize some find them preachy, but I like the illustration and the characters. I was also a kid when the Bears were on TV constantly.
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nancy said on December 9, 2015 at 2:27 pm
Nice of you to say so, Mark, but in this case, I offered them a seasoned radio pro who actually covered the bankruptcy trial on a near-daily basis. She’ll do better than me.
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coozledad said on December 9, 2015 at 2:28 pm
Someone needs to catch the first boat back to Sicily.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/scalia-race-affirmative-action
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brian stouder said on December 9, 2015 at 2:46 pm
Well, I may have to turn in my Lincoln fan-club card, for not realizing that December 6th was an important 150th anniversary.
Our most recent president from Illinois marked the occasion today, and I caught it on the news; the 150th anniversary of the adoption of the 13th Amendment of the Constitution, abolishing slavery in the United States
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Kirk said on December 9, 2015 at 2:55 pm
I remember those rabbits, and we were read a lot of Dr. Seuss and Curious George, among others. The one book I remember Mom reading to us most, often at my request, must have been of WW II vintage. It was about some anthropomorphic critter — another rabbit, I believe — who was so selfish that he had nine combs, eighth toothbrushes, etc., etc. It had a definite anti-hoarding theme.
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MichaelG said on December 9, 2015 at 3:04 pm
What I remember from Dr. Doolittle is something about “the great, gray, green greasy Limpopo River”.
I need good writing in books I read. I can’t tell you how many books I’ve taken out of the library, read three or five pages and put down.
Cooz, of course all those people loving them some Trump (and Cruz) have been there all the time. They didn’t just materialize out of thin air. They’ve been sitting there waiting for someone to say the things they want to hear. Trump is . . . I don’t know what. Cruz is stark raving mad.
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Sherri said on December 9, 2015 at 3:18 pm
It’s easy to note the science illiteracy on the right when it comes to climate change, and on the left when it comes to vaccines. But science illiteracy is so widespread across our society that even as E. coli outbreaks caused Chipotle to close all their stores in Washington for a time and Costco and Starbucks to recall products, not a word was mentioned anywhere about food irradiation. Much like GMOs, despite plenty of evidence of safety, food irradiation has been tossed aside as harmful, even though it could protect us from these outbreaks of E. coli and salmonella from meat and fresh produce that regularly occur. I’ve been wondering if anything will ever bring food irradiation back into the discussion, but it seems unlikely.
It won’t help against norovirus, though, and Chipotle seems to have been doubly unlucky to have been hit with a norovirus outbreak in Boston soon after their E. coli problem out here.
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alex said on December 9, 2015 at 4:07 pm
Sherri, I think the big objection to irradiation is that companies will zap stuff that’s gone south, which may kill the stench and the rot, but it’s still garbage. Imagine, though, having guacamole that stays forever green.
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Sherri said on December 9, 2015 at 4:15 pm
Alex, you can already have that, thanks to chemical additives. Certainly there are trade-offs, but E. coli is a pretty nasty bug.
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Sherri said on December 9, 2015 at 4:18 pm
Scalia wants to make sure we know Trump isn’t the only prominent racist. Trump is only running for power; Scalia actually has power.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/scalia-race-affirmative-action
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Jeff Borden said on December 9, 2015 at 4:26 pm
I keep hoping and praying that Scalia and Thomas eat themselves into the grave. God, they are monstrous. They cannot be gone too soon.
I’m in total agreement that Donald J. Trump is the ultimate result of Republican racist politics dating all the way back to Tricky Dicky’s “southern strategy.” His schtick really is dangerous. A Muslim shopkeeper in NYC was beaten inside his store. A cab driver was shot at Pittsburgh. And a group of peaceful Muslims who had said their prayers in a California park were approached by a screaming Christian who threw her cup of hot coffee at them.
My work for the German newspaper –which will sadly end when 2015 does– illustrates there is plenty of racism at work in Europe, too. Just look at the results of Marine LePen’s hideous far-right party in regional elections, which won something like 30 percent of the vote. Is there anywhere on our little blue marble where someone can live without being subjected to this stupidity?
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Judybusy said on December 9, 2015 at 4:53 pm
Wow, Sherri, that’s despicable. Thanks to you, I’ve been gorging on the Amicus podcast, and so have a better appreciation of what the issues are, and what cases are before the court this year.
When Trump made those remarks, my immediate thought was about the safety of our Muslim populace. But just like the attack on Planned Parenthood, those remarks will not have led to those actions.
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Colleen said on December 9, 2015 at 5:13 pm
I was an early reader. I remember reading “The Early Bird” to my kindergarten class because I was the only one who could read. Loved Nancy Drew and tore through those. Now it’s mostly non-fiction, when I can come up with the attention span to actually read.
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Connie said on December 9, 2015 at 5:36 pm
I can still sing the Berenstein Bear song from those videos. Mama, Papa, sister, brother, we appreciate each other!
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Sherri said on December 9, 2015 at 5:46 pm
One of those Muslim sports stars that Trump seems to have forgotten exists in this country responds: http://time.com/4143003/kareem-abdul-jabbar-donald-trump-isis/
If I had to vote for an outsider with no experience or qualifications as President, I’d much rather vote for Kareem Abdul Jabber than Trump. But I’m not afraid of scary black men, or Muslims.
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ROGirl said on December 9, 2015 at 5:55 pm
The GOP is afraid that Trump will become a 3rd party candidate. His supporters will follow him, which guarantees a Republican loss.
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David C. said on December 9, 2015 at 5:56 pm
I never read well in school. I thought it was just because our reading books were stupid. Turns out I’m dyslexic, and the books were stupid. We didn’t have a library in our township, so I couldn’t pick out books that interested me enough to struggle through until maybe jr. high school. Our favorite book when we were pre-k was Dr. Goat. As I remember it, it had a great rhythm. My mom can still recite it from memory. Good thing too, I hear it now fetches $200-300 for a even a bad copy.
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David C. said on December 9, 2015 at 6:26 pm
Watch out Sue, there’s another one off her meds and on the loose.
http://www.fdlreporter.com/story/news/education/2015/12/08/school-review-controversial-muppets-book/76989824/
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Deborah said on December 9, 2015 at 6:42 pm
Ok this is weird, Little Bird and I were doing some last minute shopping in the Plaza area and there in the middle of the street was a Mac Book Air Pro, looking a little beat up but it still works. Of course it’s password protected, we just want to find ou who it belongs to so we can return it. It’s a very new model, the person who lost it must be beside themselves, I would be. How can we find out who owns it?
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alex said on December 9, 2015 at 6:58 pm
I doubt it matters whether Trump stays or goes. It will be the difference between a crushing defeat versus one that’s the most humiliating ever. Remember, this is a country that just elected Barack Obama twice. Denigrating minorities and women and denying science has very limited appeal, and may work well in off-year elections in gerrymandered red states, but it’s pure poison when it’s the only thing you have going for you in a national election.
Much as I find the political ruckus right now distasteful, I’m relishing the fact that “normal” Republicans are being forced to reckon with the crazies they’ve been abiding. It’s the best turd-in-the-punch bowl scene ever.
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Charlotte said on December 9, 2015 at 7:20 pm
David C — I come from a family of dyslexics. My mother’s older sister managed to get herself an MA in Education in the early 1960s, but she hired people to read to her. My younger brother couldn’t read or write fluently until after his first year at Sterling College in Vermont — a tiny hippie school where there was a 4:1 student/teacher ratio, and where they also did a lot of practical things like managing woodlots with draft horses. I distinctly remember the first letter he sent me that sounded like himself — I think I cried. Even so, he wound up flunking out of the University of Kentucky because he just could not pick up anything in a big lecture format. Among our generation — of the 7 biological cousins, 3 of them had major dyslexia issues (and 2 others just hated school). Always made me mad that my mother considered me “smarter” than my brother, when it was just that I got a biological advantage when it came to school.
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Jolene said on December 9, 2015 at 7:47 pm
Deborah, perhaps the police have someone on staff who knows how to circumvent the password. Or maybe someone at an Apple store.
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Deborah said on December 9, 2015 at 7:57 pm
That’s exactly what we did Jolene, we handed it off to the police. We feel better.
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Jill said on December 9, 2015 at 8:34 pm
Basset, I took a St. Bernard through advanced obstacle work. Some of the big guys are surprisingly agile.
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MichaelG said on December 9, 2015 at 9:18 pm
That big dog is a hoot. He looks like he’s thinking “OK, I’ll do this for you and your stupid little exhibition, but there better be a big steak in it for me at the end”. He has the long suffering look down pat.
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Deggjr said on December 9, 2015 at 9:30 pm
I used to read the Berenstain Bears to our son, but reversed ‘said Mama Bear’ and ‘said Papa Bear’ so that Papa was the wise one. You see son, that’s why these books are funny, they’re written like Papa is an idiot and everyone knows that’s not true. As young as he was, that would make him laugh and laugh. Great times, great times.
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Sue said on December 9, 2015 at 10:22 pm
David C., you beat me to it. I was just about to post that.
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Brandon said on December 9, 2015 at 11:39 pm
Connie, Lee Ann Womack did a nice theme song for the early-2000s Berenstain revival.
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beb said on December 10, 2015 at 7:45 am
It’s hard to listen to any Republican candidate and not want to take an axe handle to them. What’s so hard to believe in evolution, or climate change. What does the GOP have to offer to a waitress? What are they offering to her? To take away her Earned Income Tax credit, to make it more expensive to buy health insurance. To lower a minimum wage that’s always 1/3 of non-tipped workers (as if tips to waitresses really make up for a decent $12/hr wage…)
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