the good old days

Falling in the “I wish I made this up” category…

image from the Stanford School of Medicine

One day Five-Year-Old Daughter declared she’d been in a knife fight. She told a long, long story about how when her day camp took a field trip to the “Bounce House” (a place with lots of those huge inflatable slides and bouncy castles and such), one of the counselors took them in a back room and gave them all knives with plastic handles and told them they had to be in a knife fight. She picked a knife with flowers on the handle. It was about fifteen minutes before she admitted it was all made up…

If you like the silliness we produce here — well-edited, and plenty of things vetoed — you might enjoy the silliness that otherwise ends up on the cutting room floor, such as Daughter’s apparent fascination with hand-to-hand combat. Buzz is starting another blog to chronicle some of it.

When I was driving to pick up our daughter from camp today, I was literally moved to tears by what I heard on the radio. But it wasn’t a tale of human tragedy; it was a remembrance of what happened forty years ago today at Statio Tranquillitatis.

I was moved by both the profundity of the occasion and by disappointment with what has happened to the space program since 1969. When I was a child in the early 1980s, enthusiasm about the space program was still abundant. Charles Bolden, now the head of NASA, reported that when he visited schools in the 1980s, every child wanted to be an astronaut. Now only a two or three kids in a class are interested. What was supposed to be the greatest adventure in human history has fallen out of the public consciousness.

When I picked her up, I reminded my daughter of the anniversary, and we started discussing the missions to the moon and prospective missions to Mars. She wanted to know why it would take so long to get to Mars and why the astronauts would need to remain on Mars for a year and a half before starting for home. So we got to discussing the motions of the planets and Kepler’s Laws. When I got home, I found this and showed it to her.

This is Cosmos; this is what I learned astronomy from as a child. My daughter is now the same age I was when I first watched it, and she was enthralled. Thankfully, the whole series is available for online viewing via Netflix, so she can see it just as I did.

I had a dentist appointment yesterday morning. It was my second this week. I’ve had eight fillings drilled out and replaced, with “composite” instead of “amalgam” fillings. According to our very personable dentist, this should last me for the next fifteen years, provided I keep brushing and don’t coat my teeth in treacle.

In an apparent attempt to prolong the misery of getting orally assaulted — I can still feel the damn drill! — here’s a sickeningly sweet little film teaching small children how to keep their teeth healthy. Told By A Tooth from 1939.

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No wonder my grandfather had dentures for as long as I knew him. (Actually, that’s probably because he was a careless alcoholic.)

The dental advice in this film sounds quite reasonable, and the child narrator is a pleasant change from the serious adults who usually provide voiceovers for educational films.

And now I’m going to go take more ibuprofen and huddle miserably in my room…

Another educational film featuring a young Dick York — 1949’s Rest and Health teaches you the critical relationship between getting enough sleep and being a star member of the track team.

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Of course, George is strongly motivated to get more sleep — since last week he invited Sue to a party but then fell asleep. She was peeved, but gives him another chance once he starts getting enough rest.

(We also learn that bowling is good exercise… which isn’t entirely unreasonable, as long as you’re the type who jumps around and does a victory dance whenever you hit the pins.)

Is frankfurter casing really that much of an issue [insert Mohel joke here], or is it more like when kids “need” to have the crusts cut off a peanut butter sandwich?

image from Retrospace

If your family is more tolerant, then you can go for really upscale hot dog choices — Oscar Mayer wieners with a sack-o-sauce! The wiener the world awaited!

image from clotho98’s Flickr

I’m a sucker for stop-motion animation, particularly when it’s very well done. I’m also a sucker for Super Mario (which is a strange unfulfilled wish from the days when I desperately wanted a Nintendo (all my friends had one!!!), but my parents wouldn’t get one). And Legos are just pure awesome, of course.

So a combination of all three… well!

And he’s got lots of other short Lego animations as well… a good way to spend a morning.

At supper last night, our daughter took a big bite and then exclaimed, “Mama Mia! That’s a spicy pizza!”

Well, let’s see…

1. adequate health insurance
2. a sane extended family
3. clean, sustainable lifestyle and environment
4. full scholarship to their university of choice

Well, I guess if you can’t have my list, hot porridge is better than nothing.

brought online by Millie Motts

In 1947, the US Chamber of Commerce released a film called Education is Good Business. Gov. Mark Sanford was born in 1967, meaning he probably got stuck watching anti-drug and anti-sex mental hygiene films rather than this one. Maybe he should try taking a look at this, though…

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• Graduates of economically supported schools earn their way more profitably in the community.
• Better schools pay for themselves through larger incomes to more productive people, whose families in turn buy a greater volume of goods and services.
• Educationally, the community gets what it pays for.
• [Russia's education budget] is approximately four times greater than that of the United States. (OK, that’s more of a Scary Communist statistic than a useful fact.)

The alternative to funding your own citizens’ education is hoping that educated adults from other states will decide to move to your backwater community of ignorants and thereby raise the standard. Also, you have to hope the few educated adults you do manage to raise don’t get fed up with the community and leave for better opportunities elsewhere. (Neither of these trends have ever been noticed.)