The Many Faces Of The Weekend

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.

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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…)

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3) Serious Eye Candy. Ninja Cats.

No Kidding.

(Poor dog).

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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….

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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

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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