Raising Rockstar

1) Public service message – Jimmy Kimmel demonstrates, on national tv no less, how easy it is for someone with mischief in mind (namely him) to get your password.

My point being how easy it is for someone with mischief in mind to get your kid’s passwords, if you give them too much free run of the tech too early. Those adults had no intention of divulging their passwords and schooling your child in email/social media safety would make them similarly wary, sure. AND this is where I type that BIG FAT “BUT…” someone can get stuff out of them without them even knowing (Rockstar btw scoffs and says he’d be more savvy but more importantly, we have established he is to tell me, the next time someone tries to get stuff out of him, be it password or, “Is it true your Mummy – ” shame on you, you know who you are. And I trust you have more respect for yourself as a parent than to ask your child to do it for you next time – NONE of these are Kennedy kids, btw 🙂 )

(Which is my way of saying how much I appreciate when Rockstar’s school sends big purple-texted reminders that the school accounts are “protected by three full-time IT professionals and a specialist Learning Technology Teacher” (and you give them separate accounts at your own peril). Similarly pleased to notice evidence on the school Virtual Learning Environment message boards that his friends’ public broadcasts were checked over and edited by said professionals 🙂

If you watched Cameron Diaz’ recent movie Sex Tape (because I had a cheap thrill finding a way to type the words “sex tape” in the same linky as something about my child’s school :D), her husband keeps upgrading their iPads and giving away the old ones to friends’ kids and relative strangers alike. Instead of scrubbing the devices completely, he figures sharing his music playlist is harmless. Unfortunately, the gadzillion iPads he’s given away are still synced to his current one, and when they all update automatically in a similar auto-backup that Apple’s iCloud does for real, this is how the sex tape gets out (not to mention their son’s best friend who has one of the iPads blackmails them and uploads the video onto a porn site.)

This is my The Tech’s-Gonna-Get-Ya Harbinger of Doom way of saying even if you are very, very sure you personally and manually killed all the connections, I can think of one loop hole offhand – when you or your kids using your tech see one of those idiot pop-up windows “update software/ settings” which restarts the machine as well and innocently clicks “yes”. And then somewhere in there is the default setting some well-meaning computer engineer out of the Dilbert strip proudly put in place that includes an iCloud backup or update to all your devices and puts your sex tape up there.

So, my point is, watch Sex Tape 😀 (For real though, it’s funny, and more importantly will highlight some of the very real risks that technology poses and increasingly literate and tech savvy kids face.

–

–

2) Serious fluff, but entertaining fluff 🙂 The Jet Set Life Of Karl Lagerfeld’s Favorite Male Model. When he’s not jet-setting, he’s a stay-at-home dad (who works out like crazy 😀  A male supermodel like him btw makes USD 200,000 – USD 500,000.) His son has been walking the high fashion runways with him since he was a toddler.

(pic from telegraph.co.uk)

Brad (Kroenig) got famous posing nude for his benefactor to photograph (tastefully, of course). My two cents re the nude thing is that at that level you are, and I mean no disrespect by this – high fashion can be such an art form – A Clothes Rack Of The Highest Order. A true professional has to be able to wear anything, even if that’s nothing. It must be why America’s Next Top Model (used to watch it pre-rockstars) always had a nude round early on after I suppose they “learned their lesson” winding up with both finalists being uncomfortable with being photographed nude in the first season.

So, my attitude is sure, dabble in “modeling” or other showbiz-y things, but if you aren’t Cindy Crawford (who btw got into Chemical Engineering at Northwestern), and/or are squeamish about any forms of undress, just don’t go there as a viable career option <shrugs>. (Sorry, was that just a Shot Of The Blindingly Obvious…)

–

–

3) Serious Eye Candy. Ninja Cats.

No Kidding.

(Poor dog).

–

–

4) One of those tributes to doing things in a more productive yet still easier way… (Not to mention, how you can Change The World 🙂

At a time even more people in Mexico, Pakistan and India were starving, Norman Borlaug  developed a more disease resistant, higher-yielding wheat. I love the simplicity of the solution: If you have x amount of land that produces y amount of crop, find a way to instead produce z amount of crop on the same x amount of land. How? What are the factors in the equation, given x is a constant? Which factors can you improve?

Wikipedia says Mexico became a net exporter of wheat (think economy, and what happens to the border control problem – instead of policing the borders more heavily, help the other country become more desirable for people to live in, as a way of stopping illegal immigrants seeking a better life on other shores. As in, if they had a better life where they live, they wouldn’t try to move…)

Ergo, Drought Fighters, of craftsmanship.net, no less. If you have x amount of land, can you increase the number of times you can use the same amount of land? Apparently so, by: 1) Composting, composting, composting and 2) growing a whole bunch of stuff side by side.

I especially loved solution (2) which goes against the convention of row upon row covering all those acres of land with the same crop. Why? Because different crops deplete the land of different minerals in different ways. Because different crops attract different good bugs as well as bad. Different crops are susceptible to different bugs in different ways….

–

–

5) More eye candy, in honor of my very first pet (I don’t count the giant mutts my parents kept since before I was born – one of my earliest memories btw, is of riding on the back of a huge brown rescued animal named Smokey), a giant albino rat who dodged the high school science class dissection table (and whom we bathed with thick leather gloves because he inflicted some really bad bites – yes I also remember getting Tetanus shots)… Rescued Lab Animals Do Wonderland Photoshoot

Kinda like this, but eventually much bigger, fatter, older

–

–

6) Rockstar Skit this week is The Many Faces Of The Miss.

“You would serve milady water in a HEAVY GLASS TUMBLER?!”

“Uncle Sheep wants YOU!” (You…. DIIEE!)

“DON’T LET THE DRUNK SHEEP GET MEEEEEEEEE!”

😀 Good weekend, dears

1) Utopian Academy of Arts is a good name for this one… This struck a personal chord because my mum was a public secondary school English teacher for some 40 years, her entire working life. Despite being courted by the private sector several times, she remained – at times inexplicably – in Malaysian public schools throughout.

My dad studied botany on scholarship – mixing natural or synthetically created minerals and cross-breeding various plant species to achieve desired results in the crops (agriculture is after all one of Malaysia’s top economic contributors), and so we lived in several very different and distant parts of Malaysia. Transferring about, my mum found herself occasionally in some very tough neighborhood schools. Once, she had a stint as the “discipline teacher,” – in a school in a relatively poor area. Think lower secondary (i.e. aged about 13) kids who willingly sold themselves for cash… (For e.g. the market price for a boy’s first time was already several thousand ringgit, “if you knew where to go,” and they usually wanted the money to buy a motor bike. (Public transport was relatively unreliable.) Some kids who badly wanted/needed the bike thought this wasn’t a bad deal, especially the boys, who said they didn’t mind getting the experience AND a bike (they could choose to say no, and they usually preferred single middle aged women who wanted some experience))

It was in this environment that my mum began free English tuition classes for any kids who could stay back in school before going to help their parents mind night market stalls or etc. The classes made her wildly popular.

And then one day she got tired. It’s the only time I remember her tiring of her job. She had driven her “new” second hand car to school for the first time. It had gotten scratched up with a pen knife before lunchtime. Devastated, she stopped the free classes, much to her students’ dismay.

In about a week, her students dragged a boy she’d never seen before in front of her desk. “I’m sorry, Cikgu,” he said in a mixture of chinese dialect and Bahasa. “It looked so new, and I had nothing to do… You never drove it before, how was I supposed to know it was your car…” Her students offered to “Teach him a lesson real good,” if only she would restart her classes, but at the time she couldn’t.

“When I gave those free lessons all those afternoons,” she told me, “I never thought those kids could scratch up a car simply because it looked new and they were bored. It shouldn’t have mattered, whether it was mine. That is completely not the point, when I give free lessons. Neither is offering to beat him up because the car turned out to be mine…” She applied for transfer shortly after.   

That wasn’t the only “tough” school she worked in, before or after her car got carved up. (To be exact, immediately after, she was in a top results-producing public school for some years before accepting an offer to move to a brand new “tough” school where she felt she was needed more. Visiting while on leave, I’ve actually joined her for a school function held in that canteen. All the kids were polite to me, but it took more than an hour for my hearing to recover, when we got home. Idly I think this is one reason in old age her ears aren’t tha-at good :D)         

Held To Account. Heard of the Starfish Story? Thousands of starfish get washed up after a storm, and the next day there’s this little boy flinging them back into the water with all his might, as far as he can throw, one at a time. When asked why he’s doing it – he can’t possibly save them all or even enough to make that much of a difference – he flings another one in and says, “Well it made a difference to that one.”

Principal Burkett has a Masters’ in Education from Harvard

“…You are here because someone in your life wanted you to have a better opportunity. Our goal is to get you ready for high school and get you to college…”

–

–

2) The amazing person who wrote My Lovely Wife In The Psych Ward. Dislike the title, the article is so, so much more. She was Type A. He was more surfer dude.

Giulia was besieged by seriously psychotic tendencies requiring heavy medication. That’s not the story. The marriage is the story. (And, if you really wade through the whole thing like I did – hands up, who came to the part where she delivered their son and thought Uh-oh she is SO going to be at her biggest risk for a relapse? Post partum depression to me is HUGE. And really not acknowledged enough in many Asian societies. For real – yes pregnancy in itself is hormonal, but if you are going to be delivering a baby at some point, watch out for the possible depression that follows.  

Because if like me you are someone who has never even had PMS (and strode about with 25 kg pregnancy weight barely noticing it because you barely had any morning sickness or etc either) you will really not know what hit you. I will always remember the massive difference between my post partum with Rockstar vs the Miss. I technically had far less life stress with Rockstar than the Miss in the months following delivery – but being aware of the possibility of depression and prepared for it made a massive difference to my well-being after. So, be prepared: depression is really no joke. (And in Giulia’s case it appeared to aggravate her psychosis to her worst incarceration in a mental hospital.)

They don’t just look awesome.

The article quotes from R.D. Laing’s 1960 The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness: “The cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact minds of many sane people whose minds are closed.”

Another way of referring to Shakespeare’s Madness Is A Form Of Genius theme from Hamlet.

–

–

3) Break it up with some pictures… Meet Gluta, The Happiest Dog In The World. Stray dog in Thailand who can eat satay neatly off the stick finally gets adopted. 2-3 months later, she becomes severely ill with cancer. Watch the footage in the link; don’t worry, there’s a happy ending 🙂

My name is Gluta

–

–

4) Did Sierra Leone’s Hero Doctor Have To Die?

“…Pooley frequently found corpses sprawled in the toilets, lying in pools of contaminated blood from the IV lines that they had ripped out of their arms during the night. One morning he walked into the ward and saw a naked male adult lying dead on the floor, and a “sweet-looking” naked toddler sitting in his blood. Somehow, the toddler survived….”

“…90% of Ebola patients should theoretically survive if diagnosed promptly and treated aggressively. …90% of Americans who contracted Ebola survived. …50% of Africans who contracted Ebola survived…”

One of my biggest fears, of deadly diseases or complications, is bacterial meningitis. When Rockstar was 2-3 months old we even rushed him to the emergency room; we had had reasons to fear, and thank God it was a false alarm. Aside from events earlier in the evening that led up to the 2am hospital trip with screaming Rockstar, I had once lost a relative inexplicably to bacterial meningitis. It is the inexplicability of it that especially stayed with me – when you know theoretically say, how certain deadly diseases are spread you know theoretically what to do to effectively lower your chances or those of loved ones from catching it. 

But when you have no idea how it happens, you don’t know exactly what to do to prevent it. So you fear everything. 

Then less than a year ago, the CJC room mate I am closest to from Singapore days was randomly tagged on a Facebook post (she would tell me after that she had no idea why the picture suddenly surfaced again, but anyway – it really is something, that I saw it when I did. My Facebook activity is sporadic at best, and I had missed related posts for several years, until this picture. )

It turns out my friend and former room mate lost her first child and only son to bacterial meningitis several years ago in as random an infection/ complication as my relative’s. Her son had been about 6, then – close to Rockstar’s age at the time when I first found out.

No, you don’t understand. This friend of mine – she had a tough childhood. When I say tough, I mean beyond “simply” poverty or a broken home. But the kind of person she was, sitting at the desk couple feet from mine in our dorm room……….. words cannot fully describe the person she was. Is.

There are people for whom everything seems to go their way in life – and who don’t think so (:D) and there are people – beautiful, beautiful people – to whom the most horrible things happen (and they don’t think so either) and it goes to show time and again how there is simply no correlation between the amount of crap you get in life vs how much you’ve already had. 

Several months after her first and only son died, I was actually in Singapore to visit another friend, desperately homesick, having just moved there and had a baby. I wasn’t sure if she was still post-natal-depressed, but whatever – she was miserable. My former room mate, she was the strong one. The one who didn’t need the Hi, How You Doing? call. But I would fervently wish I’d called anyway. Thousands had attended the funeral, she would tell me eventually. She had grieved horribly, terribly. I had no idea that had happened to her those few years ago, until less than a year ago.

But that day as I struggled and struggled to find the “right” thing to say after all that, what she said was, “He must have been so special, to have been called back to the Lord so early.”

And it’s true.

–

–

5) More eye candy… Side by side portraits of children and their parents.

Separated at birth. Sort of.

–

–

6) Miss-skit is a pic, titled Land Ahoy, Mate-y! As the Miss weathers the storm at sea with her trusty elephant backpack and Rockstar’s oft-worn, slightly faded, Paul and Shark yachting jacket (which was, to begin with a huge find in the branded warehouse department)

Whee.

“Hey, my name is Jim, where did I go wrong
My life’s a bargain basement, all the good sh*t’s gone…..

1) These people got really sick, doctors scoffed, and then some of them found happiness in the Town Without Wi-fi.

“…In Green Bank, you can’t make a call on your cell phone, and you can’t text on it, either. Wireless internet is outlawed, as is Bluetooth.

….It turned out there was a whole community of people out there who called themselves “electrosensitives” and said they were suffering due to the electromagnetic frequencies that radiate wirelessly from cell phones, wi-fi networks, radio waves, and virtually every other modern technology that the rest of society now thinks of as indispensable……

Whatever happens…….. Monique is pretty convinced that her version of the science will prevail and that future generations will see the folly of iPhones and laptops just like past ones did asbestos and cigarettes.“

–

–

2) “Orphanage Tourism is big business…” Why You Should Avoid Orphanage Visits In Cambodia.

“…The number of orphanages in Cambodia has almost doubled in recent years, despite the fact that the number of orphans has declined. It’s shocking to realise that the laws of supply and demand apply to the business of orphanages, where children are the commodities and well-meaning foreigners are the customers…”

–

–

…..Oh, Tuesday just might go my way
It can’t get worse than yesterday
Thursdays, Fridays ain’t been kind
But somehow I’ll survive….

Hey man I’m alive I’m takin’ each day and night at a time
Yeah I’m down, but I know I’ll get by……

3) Autistic Boy Discovers His Gift After Removal From State Run System.

One of the reasons I appear to link more articles on this is because I have Malaysian friends whose kids or nephews range from borderline to quite severely autistic and where they live in Malaysia, end up being home schooled, because of the lack of provision for such special needs.

Another reason is because Rockstar has a friend he occasionally play dated with from Kindy days (so it’s been 3, 4 years of sometime meet ups now) who is mildly autistic. You may pick at my flawed comparison, but I’m going to stand by this point anyway, that this friend of his, however he sometimes loses it or etc, has to date (touch wood 🙂 never lost it with Rockstar, and has treated him better than a few “normal” kids.

(YES I’m aware this is a flawed comparison, the catch being Maybe Because He Can’t (mistreat Rockstar), but I have enjoyed the little luxury of not having to explain to Rockstar that his other friends were “kidding” when they told him he was too little to be in a particular group, that Science Club was definitely cancelled and he should just go home, or that you really didn’t have to work that hard on your times tables because they haven’t yet (and actually they have). In other words, Everything’s A Package of goods and bads. Your “package” has goods as well as bads just as other “packages” do, I continue to opine that society causes us to value some “goods” (like academic achievement) over others (like being a team player rather than excessively competitive) and aside from a thing about perspective, is also a thing about looking specifically at the hand you are dealt.

Galations 6:4 used to be on my dealing room desk: “Make a careful exploration of who you are and the work you have been given, and then sink yourself into that. Don’t be impressed with yourself. Don’t compare yourself with others. Each of you must take responsibility for doing the creative best you can with your own life.”)

Anyway re article I linked above – it says State therapy specialists claimed Jacob Barnett would never tie his shoes, read or function normally. He’s currently studying condensed matter physics at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis, having entered college at the age of 11. My two cents are:

a) It must be quite near impossible to truly understand or predict all the capabilities of the human brain (qualified also by the acknowledgement of some statistic or other that might show how few wildly successful cases like Jacob’s there are), and

b) If you were a teacher in a State-run establishment and paid the same salary to handle – I don’t know, 40? kids regardless of how “easy” or “difficult” they were, well, you are only human (sure, your life gets better with more “easy” than “difficult” kids) and probably overworked (how to watch all 40 of them especially when some are swinging from the chandeliers or something?).

–

–

I’m gonna pick up all the pieces and what’s left of my pride
I’m feelin’ like a Monday, but someday I’ll be Saturday night….

4) Yet another public service message: Coffee Drinks You Don’t Know About, But Should.  You’re welcome. (Bows).

This one’s desert.

–

–

5) Another public service message (for myself, really :D): 9 Healthy Food Swaps. Also strangely in honor of Rockstar’s current school reader which is – no I’m not kidding – about Maple Syrup. And, know what else? He really liked it (the reader!) so I now find myself promising to hunt some down for him.

Freak Boy.

–

–

6) Rockstar skit is What To Do On A Saturday Night, in honor of their very first fleece blankets that Rockstar’s friend has given these two.

Obviously, this is a Rockstars Stamp Of Wild Approval 🙂

Good Weekend, Dears