The sand art video has been doing the rounds for a while now, but I offer it up again just in case you haven’t caught it yet. Truly impressive stuff.
Archive for January, 2007 Page 2 of 4
I was driving Amy home after picking her up from nursery.
“Daddy, can we go to the shop for sweets?”
“No sweetheart, I don’t have any money”
“But you have some change though don’t you”
“No, sorry, I don’t have any change either”
“Never mind Daddy, you have a credit card”
The scary thing is it’s only going to get worse.
I was discussing the finer points of the European Economic Community with Evan this evening (what, you don’t have such conversations with your three month old? And you’re expecting them to be able to get into university? Well, it’s your child I suppose). During the course of the discussion I noticed that as he was gurgling at me he was rolling the sides of his tongue up, a feat that I have never been able to perform.
I have been told in the past that this is a hereditary, genetic ability, Kerry is able to do it so Evan must have inherited the talent from her. A little bit of web surfing however has cast some doubt on this theory:
Back in 1952 “Matlock” (scientists, like detectives, go by last name) concluded that identical twins don’t always share the tongue-rolling trait. In 1975 “Martin” demonstrated that identical twins are no more likely to share tongue-rolling than are fraternal twins. In 1983 a Hungarian named Forrai found no genetic basis for tongue-curling — or hand-clasping or arm-folding. And studying the Greeks of Thessaloniki in 1982, Cruz-Gonzalez established that while dry ear wax and attached ear lobes are recessive traits, which means you need the gene from both your parents, the genetic basis for tongue-rolling was less clear.
So, if it’s not genetic, then I might be able to teach myself to do it! I hereby pledge to spend at least three hours a day trying to perfect this elusive skill. Perhaps I should keep a video diary:
On Thursday the United Kingdom was hit by gale force winds of over eighty miles an hour. Yes, I’m sure that is considered a mere breeze in Texas or South Dakota or whatever, but we’re not used to this kind of thing over here.
Trucks and vans were blown over, trees were uprooted, millions of pounds worth of damage was wreaked, and even now there are still homes in the country which still have no power. All of this pales into insignificance however when compared to our TV arial being blown off the roof.
At least we think that’s what happened, we certainly can’t get a vast number of the channels that we used to be able to and our digibox says that we only have a 2% signal strength. Someone needs to get a ladder and climb up and take a look, but I can tell you now that person isn’t going to be me. I’ve seen too many Laurel and Hardy movies to make that mistake; the only thing worse would be to walk around a china shop with a plank balanced on my shoulders.
Our reduced choices in viewing has led to us seeing a few things that we wouldn’t normally choose to watch. It’s been quite educational in a way - the televisual equivalent to a foreign exchange trip. It can’t last however as one of the channels we’ve lost is CBeebies, a vital weapon of last resort in the ongoing struggle to distract Amy from prodding her baby brother with a sharp stick.
My three year old daughter Amy’s favorite color is pink. It’s a good job in some respects; she’d feel very left out if it wasn’t. The mere act of buying clothes for a pre-school girl can sometimes feel like a surreal re-interpretation of the Monty Python spam sketch - you have a choice of pink, pink, or more pink.
I’m burning my bra over at dadbloggers. Pop over and have a look.
An intelligent take on Celebrity Big Brother. I don’t think it’s legal to have a British blog and not mention it at the moment. I just can’t believe that these people aren’t actually thinking about the effect their actions will have on their careers.
One of Amy’s many presents this Christmas was a selection of books by my favorite children’s illustrator, Quentin Blake. These have proven to be a great success, particularly one called Fantastic Daisy Artichoke. At one point in the book Daisy Artichoke tells a joke:
“Why do cows have bells?”
“Because their horns don’t work”
Amy is fascinated by this. She clearly understands that there is something particularly significant about these sentences, but her language and cognitive skills are not yet developed enough to decipher what exactly this is. She came quite close this evening, asking me if Daisy Artichoke was talking about a horn on the cow’s bike.
My current favorite joke is rather culturally specific, but I think the international contingent here will get the general idea:
“My dog has no chin”
“What does he look like?”
“A bit like Gail from Coronation Street”
It’s been quite a while since I had a contest, and this seems like the ideal opportunity - so it’s competition time again here at All that comes with it.
What is your current favorite joke? Is it the one about the three monks who walked into a strip club, or perhaps it involves a monkey, a banana and George Bush tying his shoelaces. Whatever it is, I want to hear it. Just about anything goes, I’m no prude. Stay away from the racism and homophobia though, I don’t have much patience for that kind of crap.
As usual there is a prize, and it’s probably the best one yet. Michael Rosen’s Sad Book is the most moving book I’ve ever read. It is the expression of children’s poet Michael Rosen’s grief over the death of his 18 year old son. The text is powerful enough on it’s own, but add in Quentin Blake’s wonderfully expressive illustrations and you have nothing less than a masterpiece. You have to enter this competition because frankly you just have to have this book. If you don’t win it then you’re just going to have to go out and buy it; children’s books just don’t get any better than this.
Ok, so it’s a bit of a paradox: a book about sadness as a prize for a joke competition. But there can be no yang without yin, no crunchy peanut butter without smooth. So go on, give it your best shot.
Amy recently was given a T-shirt bearing the slogan - “That;s it! I’m off to Grandma’s!”. She approached me with it on, chest puffed out and running her fingers under the words.
“What does this say Daddy?” she asked me.
“Grandma smells of old people” I told her.
Amy checks the map
Yesterday we went to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I must admit I wasn’t particularly impressed. It may well be “Europe’s biggest open air galleryâ€, but it just looks like a load of fields full of lumps of metal to me. I’m sure Henry Moore was a talented man, but I’m afraid he doesn’t float my boat. I’m not really an abstract art type of guy.
It was a pretty reasonable place to walk a dog however, or it would have been if it hadn’t been so muddy and we hadn’t got lost. We ended up walking through a marsh and then a field of carefully planted crops before we eventually found our way back to the beaten path.
Our only consolation was that we weren’t alone in our inability to follow signposts. Throughout our trudge through the wilderness there was a couple in their fifties about a hundred meters in front of us. They, like ourselves, were heading for a distant gate that separated the sculpture park from the farmland that we had inadvertently stumbled into.
We saw them arrive at the gate, stop, fumble with it for a while, and then unsteadily clamber over it, and our hearts sank. It was obviously quite a difficult obstacle - the woman in particular spent a good minute or two precariously wobbling at its summit, her legs straddling the metal bars as her husband tried to guide her down.
I of course was confident in my own abilities to hop over the gate like a limber gazelle, but Kerry has never really been into assault courses. In addition she had Evan in his baby carrier strapped to her chest so the odds were pretty much stacked against us.
As we came nearer we began to plan how we were going to get two adults, a three year old, a baby, and an overexcited dog to the other side in one piece. It was a similar conundrum as that puzzle where you have to get a fox, a hen, and a bag of grain over a river without them eating each other. When we eventually got there I had a quick desperate fiddle with the gate’s catch just in case and, despite all expectations, the gate swung smoothly and effortlessly open.
As we sauntered rather smugly back into the sculpture park the couple in front turned round to look at us, no doubt anticipating a fine display of slapstick gate climbing escapades. I don’t know what went through their heads as we shrugged our shoulders and gave them a cheery wave, but I half expected our tires to be slashed when we got back to the car park.
Hot on the heels of my last attempt to convey some recently gleaned information that caught my interest, I bring you the second in the series which in the months to come will be cited as the reason the readership of this blog dropped to zero.
As I’ve previously mentioned I have a new bird feeder set up directly outside our window, and now we have our new dining table set up there I’ve been able to do a bit of amateurish bird watching. There is a definite pecking order at the bird table. Of particular interest is the dominance that the great tit has over the blue tit.
At first glance these two species appear remarkably similar. Both birds are have a particular perchant for peanuts, both like deciduous trees, and both compete for the same sorts of nesting sites. The great tit is quite a bit more hefty than it’s cousin however, and so is able to see off any blue tit that dares to approach the bird table while it is dining.
Which begs the question how do blue tits survive? If both birds compete for the same food in the same places why hasn’t the great tit driven out the blue tit in much the same was as the American grey squirrel has driven out the European red squirrel? (bloody Americans).
The answer to the question is that the tits aren’t in competition at all. The blue tit forages for it’s food in the outer edges of a tree’s branches, where it’s small size and more acrobatic abilities give it a natural advantage, while the great tit concentrates more on the core of the tree. The great tit’s heft and bulk only provide it with an advantage in the artificial arena of the bird table, in the wild the blue tit has the upper hand.
So there you go, another post which has no interest to anyone other than myself. At least the sheer amount of times I’ve mentioned the word tit should get me a few hits from google.
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