The Original Un-TGIF

So far into the week I don’t know if this is late or early…

1) After all the Toddler Shaming Debate stuff ignited by a dad posting his daughter’s pic with a sign stuck to her PJs declaring she had pooped in the shower and he had had to clean it up? Here’s *sshole Cats Being Shamed For Their Crimes. Because they won’t grow up to have Facebook or Instagram or even Wifi. That we know of.

Never getting a cat.

Before the Cat People scream at me – half dead rodents are fine, I actually have relatively high rodent threshold from hamster breeding days (they occasionally eat their young and don’t always finish – and my first encounter with that was when I was about 8 or 9 – I wanted to be a vet, because I thought I could take the blood. But I couldn’t take seething maggots or the horrible tales of mistreatment. I mention, because I happened to meet two tweens/teens separately who wanted to be vets. I don’t think loving animals alone is enough – your bad day at work is going to be an animal dying whom you couldn’t save, or cases of terrible mistreatment that make you lose faith in human beings (like that is hard to do :D) You can volunteer, you can donate, and it allows you to walk away for awhile and take a breather. If it’s your career path that may not as easily be the case…)

Anyway. I draw the line at having wild, half-dead rodents in bed. (Yes, I’m still on the thing I was talking about from 20 minutes ago.) You don’t know where it’s been or what it’s been eating.

See?

But I don’t understand why the note above has a sad face.

She probably sneezed at grandma a lot in life too 🙂

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2) Fake Self Help Books Left In Bookstores. How is How To Avoid Being Abducted By Aliens not here???

Somebody PLEASE tell me there really is a Gary The Skateboarding Duck series out there?

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3) 6 Inventors Who Regretted Their Inventions. Yes there are bombs but also Nespresso-style coffee pods 🙂 and I especially liked the one about the “//” in “http://” – because while we can mostly ignore it nowadays and simply go straight on to the actual name of the site without thinking about “//”, apparently a lot of work went into us being able to ignore it and simply go straight on to………… Just something I remembered from once talking to a programmer who described one of the greatest causes of conflict between non-programming people and programming people working together as the non-programmers failing to understand that one “simple” (really, simple-looking) function would involve a helluva lot of coding (ditto one simple typo).

Dis is a coffee pod.

Dis is a bomb 😀

Back to the bombs. How much of a moral debate is it, that you “need” a terrible weapon in your store room at least as “insurance” in case someone else whom you might not like gets one? An upper primary school kid once explained NATO to me as follows: “What I can tell is, all the countries who have (a bomb/nuclear weapon) form this club to keep anyone else from getting one.” 

Sounds like playground politics, doesn’t it? It occurred to me never to underestimate what kids learn through play and social interaction on the playground. It’s a very, very hard lesson to reproduce solely through book learning and tuitions……

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4) In honour of Rockstar’s recent learning unit (hugely coincidental, came out a day-ish after I asked, “How do you explain colour to a blind person?” (ans: by communicating in the language of the other senses): Blind Painter Uses Touch And Texture To Create Incredibly Colourful Paintings.

“The first art shows that I did I never told anyone that I was blind”

He says it’s because he didn’t want knowing he was blind to affect how a person viewed his art. I disagree, I think he should totally have told people he was blind. (One “hack” I liked to use in literature essays was to study the writer/poet’s background more extensively, because their life would totally colour their work. You were a lot less likely to be “wrong” (well, totally “off”) in your essays if you noted when the artist did the work and had a rough memory of what his own life was like at the time. Bon Jovi had the right of it, when he crooned “Like the poets need the pain….” Take T.S Eliot and The Wastelands and compare that to what he wrote after he became a Christian.)

Anyway, the artist says he mixes paint in braille-labelled tubes to a set formula, but what really struck me was how much more “light” this blind artist paints into his scenes. He is classified as “functionally blind” which means he can only differentiate light and darkness, and if you look at his artwork you can see the light “magnified” as though it’s literally calling out like a beacon to him in all his works…

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5) Rockstar Skit this week is The Antithesis To Girlie.

I recently set up a Hair Clip And Necklace corner for the Miss with a few Japan Home hooks, mainly to keep her from climbing up said side of my dresser/ chest of drawers. (Yes. I. Know. At least two nice storage boxes have gone R.I.P. from her standing on them. She gets more familiar and she is going to start dive-bombing the dog, whose basket is just below.)

Eyebrow-raising?

So I am mildly surprised Rockstar is playing with her hair, until…………

N-ot so much.

Rockstar: Look, Mum – Hairclip Monsterrrrr!!!

Miss: <delightedly shakes head vigorously as clips fly everywhere>

Y-eah. Sounds about right.