I find Ace "reading" books pretty often. I wouldn't be surprised if she's reading for real before kindergarten.
Another (depressing) theory is that little kids spend a lot of energy on copying what they see grownups do. When parents are frequently seen reading books, kids are more likely to read for pleasure. I don't know how tablets and laptops fit in to this- I've actually been thinking about that a lot since I've been here. They see you reading all the time, but do they know that's what you're doing?
The other idea I thought of is copying my mom, from when I was little. Quiet Reading was part of the bedtime routine. In bed with a book for 10-15 minutes (I think?) with the lights stll on, then lights-off bedtime for real. While we were too little to read, we still looked at books anyway.
1 is probably true.
2.last has crossed my mind as well. Although my parents never read books when I was growing up - journals and newspapers, mostly.
Hawaii and Pokey both did Ace's "reading" thing, especially narrating a plausible story to a nearby adult.
We are on Harry Potter book six right now. Its taken a long-ass time to get there. Partly because there are some long-ass books in the series, partly because you have to wait for kids to mature a bit before they are ready for the later ones.
No but really: are your kids or friends' kids early readers like (collective) you were?
6: I've been wondering about pacing. How old were your kids when you started and how much did you spread the books out?
We just read the first book to our son and then told him "Dumbledore dies at the end of book 6".
Anyway language acquisition in all modalities is a very poorly understood process. There are too many variables, plus a bunch of different ways to arrive at the same place. (I hate the people who fight about which way is the One Right Way).
Anyway sorry, Science can't help you here.
We have just the one kid, I think we started at age seven. He's ten now. So, that's about a spread of six months per book. On average; I don't think books 1 through 3 were spread out as much.
Anyway anyway.
My nervous system is deteriorating pretty rapidly. It's very weird. Like Flowers for Algernon but in reverse. Also it hurts.
I say this both to fish for sympathy and to announce that pretty soon I'm not going to be able to type.
What's the most frivolous thing we can talk about to balance out the destruction of the human species, both climate-wise over decades and locally over the next few years?
The destruction of the human species...in Westworld?
I say this both to fish for sympathy and to announce that pretty soon I'm not going to be able to type.
That sucks, Messily.
Are there adaptive options you can use? Like, would using the computer through voice control be effective for you, or not?
Future reading propensity is pretty tough to predict when they're young.
I was considered "at risk" as far as learning to read was concerned in the 1st grade. I placed into the advanced reading group at the beginning of 2nd grade because I'd spent the Summer learning from collections of B.C. and The Wizard of ID cartoons.
In other words, what 10 said.
If I may step in on E's behalf: she means within the next 10-60 minutes.
But the sympathy should continue being expressed!
Maybe? I think I also tend to have problems speaking loudly enough, during episodes. Probably if I trained it a bunch the computer would obey my voice, but lying down with my eyes closed also sounds like a fine option.
Oh Messily. Hand squeeze, if you can tolerate telepathic touch.
3. I had that thing too, suggested by a doctor I was taken to see because I wasn't sleeping well. It was a great idea short term, but in due course became a major battlefield as I tried to extend the 15 minutes between bed and lights out so I could get more reading done. So yes, but with reservations.
Oh. Right. The nervous system failure will fix itself in a few days. I'll be able to type again tonight or tomorrow. Is my guess.
Now I can't tell if my sympathy fishing is even coherent. Sorry! It's episodic, but (currently) not progressive.
12/19 So sorry to hear that. Apparently VR s/ware is improving by leaps and bounds, so maybe it'll catch up with your requirements, but there must be a ton of other stuff that gets difficult too.
I tried to extend the 15 minutes
Well, obviously I did too. Plus snuck lights in under the covers. But I don't think Heebie's kids are old enough for that, plus they all share a room so they're used to being forced to do things on schedule.
"Sometimes when we touch, the telepathy is too much."
Power and handsqueezes, Messily! And I thought Westworld was actually pretty fucking awesome.
Ok 17 makes me feel a little bit better about chiming in about reading. I was a very early reader (like 3), I was very stressed when my brother began kindergarten without reading and took it upon myself to teach him (I must have been 10). My kid has been much slower & worked with reading specialist at school, likes books and being read to fine, likes doing math problems on whiteboard more, likes watching videos of other kids playing with playmobil the most. She's in second grade and some switch flipped and she's doing exponentially more reading week by week. Her dad was stressed, I was not, I think he did more than me. Same thing happened to Aegis' kid apparently tho before I met him--next to nothing until seven and a serious reader of pretty advanced stuff now (he's 10).
Our kids are allowed/encouraged to read in bed! They all have flashlights and books in their beds. Pokey and Hawaii fall asleep within 5 minutes, but Ace will stay up for an hour or two. (Not necessarily looking at books. Just a night owl.)
One of the things that happens is that it feels like something is squeezing my fingers, but way too hard. It goes away when I move my hands, but moving hurts. WHAT A DILEMMA.
Is 9 for real? And if so why? And Heebs, what do you think of The Magicians?
In case the fish are insufficiently sympathetic, I'm sorry Messy, that's awful.
One of the contributors to a project I've been working on (regarding, as it happens, technology for people with disabilities) is a man who is completely paralyzed, but uses voice commands to run his organization on the computer. He uses a headset microphone, which is enough to make up for his very quiet voice. The software he uses is called NaturallySpeaking.
I know they are, but the first 10 minutes of it could be structured as such, maybe with only that floor lamp on, and then hugs and kisses after.
MANDATORY QUIET READING.
that reminds me of a friend who in middle school had a rule of not being allowed to read for more than 3 hours a day. Even on weekends! Her mom thought she should go outside or do something. So she came over to my house and we'd both sit around reading.
Does it sometimes have Dragon in front? I think I've heard of it but not used it
Aaargh, sore point. My teens have never been readers for pleasure, in either of their languages. I read to them in English at bedtime every night from before they could even talk and bought them books by the shelfload in both languages, but it never took. The time I spent escaping into books when I was a child and teenager, they spend playing electronic games.
As encouragement and example have been so spectacularly ineffective, by now I've been reduced to bribery (they get paid by the book), blackmail ("No more computer time until you've done some reading!"), and vague threats ("you'll never get a good enough English GCSE grade to get into sixth form college if you don't read more!").
I should probably have restricted all electronic devices far more when they were younger, but wanted them not to stand out too much from their peers - it was already hard enough for them being the only visibly non-full-Japanese kids at school.
Dragon Naturally Speaking, is what I meant.
that reminds me of a friend who in middle school had a rule of not being allowed to read for more than 3 hours a day. Even on weekends!
I had a friend who had to earn fiction books by reading nonfiction books - I think the ratio was 2:1 or something. I was appalled.
Has anyone seen the new HP movie? It looks like it might be interesting, except it's from the exact same team that made all the other, mostly mediocre, HP movies, and also I detest Eddie Redmayne.
Yup, Dragon Naturally Speaking. It does take some training - both for you and for the computer - but it can be quite effective.
The time I spent escaping into books when I was a child and teenager, they spend playing electronic games.
FWIW, I think video games probably will have decent skills pay-off in our futuristic society. If nothing else, they're designed by techie people based on what techie people love doing, so there's sort of a grooming "learn how the brains of people who design these things work" thing going on.
One of the things doctors have been telling us with my dad is that high intelligence helps with recovery from traumatic brain injury which like, they're trying to be encouraging but that's fucked up, it should be kindness or courage or something. UNFAIR!!!
Anyway this would all be a very interesting New Yorker article or whatever but it's my dumb life instead.
Is 9 for real? And if so why?
When I first read 9, I paused for a beat and considered whether this was a responsible thing to do, and then realized it was Mobes.
And Heebs, what do you think of The Magicians?
I'm enjoying it! It's super fun.
Sorry Heebie that's not frivolous! But at least it's self-centered?!
One thing about Dragon Naturally Speaking is that the license is expensive, which can be a barrier. But if you need help with that, I'm sure people here are willing to chip in.
One of the things doctors have been telling us with my dad is that high intelligence helps with recovery from traumatic brain injury which like, they're trying to be encouraging but that's fucked up, it should be kindness or courage or something. UNFAIR!!!
One of my students mentioned that he only had two finals, because he's got an A in his other courses and his professors have rules that exempt A students from exams. I had a similar pang of sympathy for my other Calculus students who are not generally as strong, and have 5 final exams instead of 2. Unfair!
Messily, I'm sorry! I will offer no stupid advice, although maybe you have not tried cutting out gluten yet???? The trick is not just to avoid eating gluten but to avoid thinking or talking about it, or even miming gestures like spreading mayonnaise on bread. This is where most people fuck up: they can't stop evangelizing for gluten-free living, and yet they're not actually miraculously healthy. Once you have simply forgotten that gluten ever existed, I promise you'll start to see real changes.
My 5-year-old is also slow to read compared to me and lourdes (lourdes however was a hyperlexic freak who learned reading and talking roughly simultaneously before age 2). I'm guessing she'll enjoy reading for pleasure once it's pleasurable to do it mechanically. We've read her an entire childhood's worth of books over the last 18 months, so much of the "canon" that she'll have to start over again in second grade or so. And yeah, man but reading has become an "eat your vegetables" thing for kids, endowed with mostly instrumental value. I'm delighted by the screen time hypocrites headlines today and yesterday.
(We did all of Harry Potter before she turned five. She loved it, I think to such a profound degree that she went into sad withdrawal once the series was over and she couldn't live at Hogwarts. It was kind of rough.)
I have trouble with this one, because my baseline is screwy: I was past an ordinary level of kids who read a lot into being a compulsive weirdo. So, my kids learned to read later than I did, and don't read anywhere near as much as I did, but they seem to read a perfectly reasonable amount, insofar as I can tell what that is. Newt more like I did, in terms of consuming any kind of trash, while Sally has a tendency to read less by volume but more culturally significant things.
Oh ffs to the kid in 48.
The other dumb thing about TBI is that you really need to get to specialized intensive TBI rehab but they won't take you unless you're otherwise healthy and have strong family support. We got in because we're #1 supportive family and I am pushy AF but that broke my heart.
39 was me, though probably also heebie's friend. I had a work-to-rule response and mostly read biographies for the non-fiction since grrrr.
EM, I use Dragon and have a lot of advice and would be willing to help if you go that route. The newest versions are amazingly good out of box and can be customized significantly (though not perfectly; they'll always think they know what you want better than you do) from there.
FWIW, I think video games probably will have decent skills pay-off in our futuristic society.
I am hoping this will be true, though apart from learning Russian swear words the chief payoff so far seems to be in trading and betting skills. Tatsu in particular makes a fair amount of Steam currency by trading skins and betting on matches. I'm carefully noncomittal on the surface, while secretly hoping it'll lead to a career in the City so he can keep me in comfort once Google Translate finally puts me out of a job.
Selah doesn't actually read yet at 4 but "reads" for fun and to be like me and likes to take books to bed. I think she pays more attention when I read aloud, too. Hamilton and the Hamiltome pushed Mara over the edge into fluency, though her comprehension is still a little screwy in part because (as I realized this morning) she doesn't always remember the differences between why/when/where, which doesn't serve her well when answering questions in class. Nia still struggles at 10, which terrifies me, but fighting over it and making reading a control struggle seems even worse than seething internally and manipulating wherever I can. She's taken some of Raina Telgemeier's graphic novels to bed with her the last few nights, so I hope something is sinking in, but I'm not sure.
Also to the extent this is about kids and sad things Aegis' (difficult) son is getting pretty brutally shunned at school and school is not that responsive. My instinct is to get a lawyer because it always is, but my other directly opposed instinct is that that sounds aggro and insane and helicoptery, which instinct is better.
What does slammed mean? He's not coping academically or people are being mean to him interpersonally?
I misread -- shunned, not slammed.
The school can't do shit about shunning (as opposed to actual violence &c), and noisy parental involvement would probably just get him more shunned.
Yeah. He's in a school where they put all the hipster brooklyn kids in one class and the Russian brooklyn kids in the other and he's in the Russian one. Anyway. He's big, and it's not violent, but it's very nasty and pervasive.
I'm mostly with Mossy. If there's something concrete that can be done that you think would help, like switching him to a different classroom or something, you can lobby for that. But it sounds unlikely, and other than that I'm not sure what the school can do.
Any idea what's causing it, or just arbitrary?
FWIW, I think video games probably will have decent skills pay-off in our futuristic society.
My son is betting it all on making YouTube videos about video games. I figure there are some good technical skills being developed there, plus he's also learning to navigate the pratfalls of being a very minor internet celebrity.
Oh, that crossed with your 60, and it sounds like you should maybe ask for him to be switched into the hipster class, and think about switching schools for next year because if the classes are divided like that the school is run by idiots.
Shunning was probably an understatement. I think they can actually do a lot--e.g. move him to the other fucking class, time machine and not segregate the classes in the first fucking place but yes the risk is the push fails and it's shittier for him as a result.
Hi Clytie - just a couple of points which might be interesting. My father had a post-op brain bleed which after an emergency re-op left him with damage somewhere between a stroke and TBI. We were really worried about some possible consequences from the area affected including perhaps even inappropriate behaviour etc. but most of that didn't pan out despite what was apparently a lot of damage. There was a gap in his emotional knowledge /connection with intellectual knowledge of his situation which mainly manifested as his forgetting that he could not do xyz but otherwise personality was intact. He was more than half paralysed and had other health issues for 8 months so didn't get much rehab until after that but nevertheless made decent progress eventually including outside the time window they usually tell you to expect. TBH the family were far more optimistic than the medicos and in this case we were right. I do think high intelligence was a big factor in his improvement in that IMO high intelligence involves a high level of brain plasticity which is what you need. He was also bilingual which is supposed to help with dementia and I suspect could help with other brain obstacles also. (We didn't get to see how far improvements might have continued as other health issues returned to the fore.)
It's a terrible shame but true in lots of countries that pushy /knowledgeable / highly involved relatives are the no. 1 requirement for best health outcomes.
I wouldn't worry about making the situation shittier for him by asking for him to be moved to the other class, although I would stop short of hiring a lawyer. But that seems worth full-scale meetings-with-the-principal demanding that s/he do this simple thing to prevent a vulnerable child from being bullied.
I submit that going to school with Russians might be infinitely better life experience than going to school with hipsters.
61 he's sloppy and that's transmuted into dirty/germy in the crucible minds of fourth graders. and there's SOMETHING else going on--gets up and runs around the room at random--but they had him evaluated back when --3 years ago??--and not anything diagnosable. They said they wouldn't switch because too crowded but come the fuck on.
Re-evaluate medically and get some semi-diagnosis we can use to push for an IEP but I think we have to pay for it in that case.
No one would hate to see a reading thread hijacked by politics more than me, but... as an aside on video games I have been thinking a lot about Max Read talking about the death of Gawker: "What I'd missed about G/me/ga/e was that they were gamers -- they had spent years developing a tolerance for highly repetitive tasks. Like, say, contacting major advertisers." It's flippant, and yet... it's true that a) those skills have their uses and b) I don't want enemies like that.
He's in a school where they put all the hipster brooklyn kids in one class and the Russian brooklyn kids in the other
That SOUNDS like it can't be legal?
My sister was a very early reader (like around Clytie's age, I believe), whereas I defiantly announced on my first day of preschool that I definitely could and would not read.
Emir, email me if you can -- clytaemnestrastabby at geemale
Another possibility: little kids are not left alone with slack time very much these days. My daughter is alarmingly incapable of entertaining herself; if both parents are busy she will curl up in a ball and stick her fingers in her mouth until roused. She looks pretty despondent, but maybe she's so overstimulated in general that this is good recuperation? I have been tempted lately to give her a tablet of her own, or tablet time, because she seems much more peacefully engaged with screens while solitary than with anything else. Better the slurping fetal ball or the shiny Math Activity App? Uh, advice welcome...
72 is suggestive. I was left alone for what a helicopterer would consider criminal amounts of time, in a house full of books. Which is also a great argument for physical not electronic books. Assuming that the world benefits from people like us.
Which obviously it doesn't. Never mind.
Clytie, I'd move him at your first opportunity, like tomorrow.
I was as thoroughly shunned as is possible and it was awful. I think a lot of it is path dependency, and another setting would erase the history that turned him into the weird one.
Couple more thoughts:
I had zero understanding what happened at administrative levels and I strongly doubt other kids did either. I don't think your interactions with the grown-ups will make things worse at the kid level.
This sounds superficial and shallow and like caving in. But when you move him, I'd pay for a make-over. Money can buy things like better haircuts and clothes that fit and suit him. (Don't have to be expensive or trendy, just clothes to make him feel good instead of clothes that he is using to be invisible.) My parents were academics who didn't care about appearance, and the knowledgeable eye of someone who did care could have saved me a shit-ton of grief. Seriously, a good haircut and a personal dresser, for money, for a while, until he doesn't give off the target vibe.
All the stuff with Little Aeg is compounded by the fact that he's not my kid so I'm not actually IN the meetings and obviously no one but me is capable of advocating for anyone, ever, bit I'm perfect at doing it for everyone, all the time.
I wonder what she's thinking, as an inveterate ball-curler myself. I'd let her be calm unless there seems to be some bad effect.
When staring into the middle distance blankly, as a kid, I was often intersecting and rotating geometric solids in my head, which proved very useful later in life.
75 he's pretty stylish, actually, but positively hulking--wears my converse sometimes. Just DOES things sloppily--papers trail behind him, ketchup on shirt and face, etc.
I think getting the principal in a room and asking to be moved again, using LB's formulation of this is an obvious problem with a simple answer is step one. Grabbing the other children by the ear and whispering that I'll send harpies to tear their guts out is step two.
Heh -- one of the hazards of lawyering. I haven't needed to make trouble on behalf of my kids much at all, but when I've had to, I have been very glad that it wasn't up to Buck. Not that he's generally incompetent, but oral advocacy is a skill.
Little Aeg
Surely you should be calling him Orestes?
"Oral advocacy is a skill" yes for example I started off my last oral argument with "Ok but may it please the court, this is bananas."
Orestes would be my ex's son! Aggy (Agamemnon). Now it's Aegis (Aegisthus). I've thought... a bunch about this possible confusion.
There's no canonical name for little Aegisthus, is there? (of course, if Orestes had all along been secretly fathered by Aegisthus that would have made a great reveal at the end in Colonos)
(of course, if Orestes had all along been secretly fathered by Aegisthus that would have made a great reveal at the end in Colonos)
If only the Greeks had had better theorists of drama they would probably have realized the need for such a payoff.
xelA isn't reading. He's 4 at the end of March. He does dearly love being read to, though, and will do the thing Ace (and other Heeblets) does where he'll 'read' a book to nearby adults. He has a library card and visits the library most weeks to choose books.
He hasn't shown any interest in being actually able to read, though. This is totally not a concern to me.* I didn't really start to learn to read until I started school, and I know very few people who could actually read before school.* I would be concerned though, if he didn't show any interest in actually learning to read, once at school.
I do wonder sometimes if he's ready for longer form books, but he's the kind of kid who'd go crazy at just being dolled out one chapter at a time, and I could foresee tantrums at bed-time if a book was left unfinished.
* After a relatively slow start, he's showing every sign of being really smart. Which can be annoying in the pure-Id like world of the toddler.
** I went from not being able to read, to reading Tolkien in about a year.
72: in my defense I have been wildly overcorrecting for maternal depression. But she's also much more extroverted than we are -- loves spending time with other kids, loves having playdates. She doesn't want an audience -- it's not that sort of thing -- but she generally wants company and savors small, friendly groups. (I realize my bias against extroverts is strong and also complete nonsense. The brilliant ones definitely exist: my closest friend in grad school makes friends at the drop of a hat, wherever she goes, and is also extremely well-read, smart as fuck, and very disciplined: better than I am at most of the things I care about, with tons of extra bandwidth for human interaction. Damn it all.)
77: that's definitely a possibility.
87.1: Oh, lord, the extroverts. Selah keeps getting mad at me that I won't let her go talk to EVERY stranger we meet, because she knows she can do so politely and charmingly and it's her great joy in life, whereas one of my goals is apparently to minimize the number of uninvolved strangers who have to chat with a four-year-old. Nia, at 10, still likes and expects a lot of social input (and I wish/hope reading would change that!) and definitely there are personality elements playing out. Whereas Mara is happiest holed up singing to herself while she draws or writes or reads or whatever, the most like child-me and the least in need of maternal-me for getting through a regular day.
Anyway late-reading kids are the best; precociousness is a path only to angst because there is no such thing as a precocious adult.
there is no such thing as a precocious adult.
There's always dementia praecox.
My 4-year-old knows a lot of written words and has at the very least memorized many of his books and will correct me if I read anything wrong. But he is curiously unwilling to try to do it himself when we ask ("no, daddy, you read it.") So I think he's very close to reading but maybe not quite there and doesn't want to admit it.
Oh, as far as non-Trump things, I guess I could say that I started blogging again (as did a few other old-school adoption bloggers) and you're unlikely to see anything you haven't already, but if you're into that kind of thing it's there with biscuits on.
and I wish/hope reading would change that!
Right: oddly enough, "if you learn to read by yourself then we can spend less time with you" doesn't seem to be a super enticing pitch.
89 is the truth. Turns out you can have several precocious midlife crises, however.
I have repeatedly told the story of slowing down Sally's reading by being pushy about it (leading to her spending a weird period of almost a year where she was writing things in sentences but convincingly denying being able to read things she hadn't written. It passed.) She may have been weird (she was totally weird), but I think it's easy to trigger pushback. I wasn't that pushy with her.
94 is pretty cute. I always knew intellectually you couldn't really make kids do things, but like, you really can't!!! It's so weird! And then you are the one saying "I am going to turn this car around if you guys don't cut it out," sunrise, sunset.
re: 87.1
A friend of mine from university was super-smart. Same academic discipline as me, totally ferocious in argument. But, massively friendly and outgoing, brilliant raconteur, seemed to know literally everyone in Oxford, and the actual life and soul of any party. I'm not actually that shy, but I always felt a total wallflower by comparison. He was a textbook contradiction to the (surprisingly widespread assumption) that only nerdy shut-ins are smart.
He gave up academia for law, and I expect will be a QC and eventually a supreme court judge or something. He's already arguing in front of the supreme court.
96: Yeah, I figured that one out early on. Or, there are things you can make a kid do and things you can't, and distinguishing clearly between them saves you an incredible amount of grief.
By being maximally slack about everything, I've ended up with kids who've turned out pretty well in a slightly raised-by-wolves kind of way. I attribute this to dumb, random luck. And they give me a hard time about my slackness level, and point out that all of their friends' parents demonstrate parental concern by yelling at their kids more, and I clearly don't really care about them.
98 yes. I am definitely on the low intervention/unbothered by defiance end of things--personal space more of an issue than developmental anything. I wish we had a yard where I could send them so that they could not do the things I can't make them do somewhere I can't see.
Yup, we had "go to your room" as an explicit 'this is not a punishment, I am just done with interacting with you for the moment.' A yard would have been better.
You definitely can't make finger-sucking stop! Which is too bad because it is gross and annoying beyond REASON.
100 yeah I take a lot of baths in the dark. They get that I am super stressed/sad right now so we have a working agreement that "Mama/Clytie is seriously like *this* close to crying, so you just have to be good whenever I tell you to until Christmas and then we can revisit" which works pretty well. But like, I still have to tell them, they can't just intuit that they should, e.g., leave their old pants in the middle of the living room floor. UNFAIR!!!
um sorry "should NOT" do that with their old pants, obvs.
A speech therapist told my parents to TIE MY HANDS BEHIND MY BACK AT NIGHT to stop thumb sucking. They didn't because that was insane in the 80s too.
This is a safe space for both truth and lies.
105 I guess I must have eventually! (Yes, I did, but I moved onto idly sucking on the ends of my hair, which I also stopped, then I moved onto caring what boys thought about me, WOULD TRADE BACK.) Anyway I have a funny voice so who knows, maybe the speech therapist was right, probably I just doomed my whole head all up somehow.
The Calabat (3.5) isn't reading yet, but he can recognize his name and the names of his classmates. He has an immense vocabulary, too. He likes to type the alphabet out on the computer, and he knows that the words on the page have something to do with the stories he's being told, but it hasn't quite clicked yet.
Last night we put Atossa to bed with a book so she could read herself to sleep, and she's only 17 months old. We think this is a good sign.
Only the first sentence of that is true, and only narrowly. Last night for some reason she really didn't want to go to sleep. The usual routine is a bath and I read her a couple books and then bed, but that didn't work. The book was attempt #2, and that placated her for a few minutes - it was interesting watching through the baby monitor as she tried to read or just played with the book - but she didn't go to sleep then either. Attempt #3, I read her two or three more books and this time she finally went to sleep.
She definitely does like being read to. She'll run around the house carrying a book to us and ask us to read it to her. These days it's usually Curious George. Yay imperialism!
Was just taken by a froend who was meeting other friends to a non-strip strip club in Dubai. Weird.
non-strip strip club
They come out already nude?
Everybody comes out wearing nothing but some gunk and an umbilical cord.
Clothing is removed to reveal more clothing underneath?
The clothes come off in polka-dots.
The trick is to wear the umbilical cord as a belt, not a tie.
The patrons have to donate their clothes to the dancers.
non-strip strip
You mean the kind like in anti-tank mine belts where the dancers wear nursing bras?
I'm chatty and outgoing, but also hate people, in my current life spend most of my down time sitting on the sofa reading the internet, and am additionally not particularly noteworthily smart. Data points to nowhere!
Glad to see OSTC/LC is still around.
They kept their clothes on and danced sexy on stage. There was an MC too. So very Dubai and not Dubai at the same time. So strange.
121.1: Putin thinks I can be an undersecretary in Health and Human Services and/or Defense.
120: Right, it's almost as if introversion, extroversion, and intelligence are so poorly defined as to make the whole thing a pile of garbage. I don't know where I internalized the Introvert Triumphalism, although I guess it's everywhere. Ironically I think my chatty, mildly abrasive maternal personality drives my daughter bats and she prefers mellower, sweeter company.
re: 110
xelA can recognise his name, and most of his classmates. They have everyone's named on lego blocks at hte nursery, and when they arrive in the morning they are supposed to take their block out of the box and stick it to the 'grass', and they take it off again at the end of the day. It's very definitely shape recognition, though. He recognises a few individual letters, and always gets 'A', and he points out 'M' and 'S' on things, and knows what they are. But other letters it's pure random luck whether he gets them right or not.
By contrast, he counts well, and already does simple arithmetic. Not prompted by us, but he'll add things, or say how many things there are, etc.
Ditto on the hilariously huge vocab. Also strangely mature speech (alternated with really really not mature speech).
He has a girlfriend at nursery, which is hilarious. They really genuinely seem to have something between them. They sit with their arms around each other, or stroking each others hair.
He told me in the car the other night:
'Me and Antonia have a connection.'
127.last is the most adorable thing I've read in ages. Your kid is cuter than a baby otter*, ttaM!
*The metric standard measure of cuteness
Ugh, the girlfriend-boyfriend thing. I'm pretty sure Selah has kissed every boy in her class, though she bossily insists she won't marry them unless she can have a girlfriend too. Luckily she's got enough moms that no single one of us has to take responsibility for her inclinations.
Ugh not to take away from how cute ttaM's story is. Just goodness!!
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You know, if you were a prawn, seeing one of your fellows being killed, cooked and eaten by a human being would be just about the most Cannibal Holocaust level of fucked up.
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"Mongo only prawn in game of life."
Oh hey I just hate-watched all 17 Harry Potter movies in like four days.
That is way too much screen time.
56/75: 75 is right and is good advice, and I'd submit that if you're having a terrible time at school and you have an out, TAKE IT before the weird kid role gets crammed down on you by society.
In general, "if you have an out, take it" is pretty good advice. Also, if the problem is other people's shitty behaviour, taking pills will not fix them because the problem is real and not in your head. Out of the general American toolbox of either medication or litigation, litigation is probably better here but surely you can go and yell at the headmaster without needing an attorney?
Also, addressing the wider thread urbi et orbi, you do know the notion of "screens" as a category, including TV, video games, the web, probably Kindles but that's books so it has to be good even though it raster scans and has a keyframe interval right tout confondu, was invented by Susan Greenfield right before being completely discredited for giving big media interviews on research she hadn't actually done yet?
re: 135.last
I used to see Greenfield around Oxford now and again, and she is visibly annoying in person, too. I wonder sometimes if that judgement is reflective of some underlying misogyny* on my part, but she trails around with a flutter of assistants and toadies literally trailing after her and every once of her self-presentation is 'fuck you, less important people'.
Around the time of the Royal Institution fuckups, lawsuits, etc.
* but maybe not, because the male equivalents I come across -- loud-suited opinionated braying dickwads -- are equally or more irritating.
131: one of a very few experiences shared by prawns and at least one former president of the United States.
137: Teddy Roosevelt? That's my nomination for "President most likely to have escaped from cannibals at some point."
Also most likely to have been a cannibal. Except Jackson, maybe.
139: George HW Bush, actually. He managed to avoid it himself, but several other pilots shot down at the same time as him were eaten alive by Japanese troops.
141: I thought I knew about most of the Japanese WWII atrocities, but this one was new to me. From the International Journal of Naval History
Lieutenant General Joshio Tachibana, Imperial Japanese Army, and 11 other Japanese military personnel were tried for the beheadings of two American airmen in August, 1944, on Chichi Jima in the Bonin Islands. [5]They were beheaded on Tachibana's orders. One of the executed airmen, a U.S. Navy radioman third class, was dissected and his "flesh and viscera" eaten by Japanese military personnel.
The Japanese Wikipedia for the "Chichijima Incident" quotes GHQ/SCAP records as saying that parts of 5 airmen were eaten. It records that when Tachibana first tasted grilled human liver, he declared it delicious and demanded a second helping.
The "eaten alive" part (cutting strips of flesh off prisoners to cook and eat while they were still alive) seems to be a later sensationalization, though, at least in this particular case.
OT: If anyone goes to see Scorsese's version of Silence later this month, can you report back on whether it's any good or not? I love that book so much I don't think I could bear to see it badly done.
(Prompted by 142, because Endo's second-best novel after Silence, The Sea And Poison, is about the vivisection of a captured American airman, and what it does to the consciences of the doctors who participate.)
The Sea And Poison, is about the vivisection of a captured American airman, and what it does to the consciences of the doctors who participate.
And people say I'm difficult to shop for...
What's the most frivolous thing we can talk about to balance out the destruction of the human species, both climate-wise over decades and locally over the next few years?
Asked and answered!
From cannibalism and banzai suicide charges to nuclear weapons, the Pacific War was some brutal, brutal shit.
Am I to take it that this Endo character has made a career of getting people to read about horrific shit that actually happened?
147: In those two books, yes, though they're both inspired by events rather than direct novelizations. Other books are more oblique - Wonderful Fool is based very loosely on the character of a real missionary priest, for example,* but the events are entirely imaginary. Scandal is a Jeckyll-and-Hyde story exploring the dark unconscious of an elderly famous novelist, and I'd love to know how much of that was based on his own experience.
*The original priest on whom the character was based went on to open a bar in one of Tokyo's main entertainment districts, because he reckoned that the only way he could have honest conversations with Japanese men about what they really felt and believed was when they were completely drunk. It was still going into the early 90s, at least, when I was taken there.
Re 135, I mean, why choose between medication and litigation? I don't! But yes, to clarify, any medical evaluation would be for the purpose of getting a diagnosis which schools are legally required to accommodate rather than Fixing the Kid. (I think the kid needs better tools than he has, but medication isn't anything like an obvious solution here, and if he gets presumable ADHD diagnosis, trend here is away from medicating anyway, and toward cognitive and family therapy. Whether Aegis and his ex have time/money/inclination for that is another matter but there are, I am sure, things we can do at home.)
It's not ideal because then the kid has a possibly unhelpful label, but it's leverage with the school/city, which can drag its feet otherwise (and in the case of the school, has been). Lawyer would be less to sue than to be a dispassionate presence like, "this family knows its rights." Sit-down serious talk (as opposed to previous emailing) is the right thing, I am just consumed frustration anticipating that Aegis will agree to bullshit half-measures and has the wrong ideas about the seriousness of the issue and the nature of Little Aeg's role in it because Aegis is a Tough Guy which is great when you need a bookshelf built but maybe not here.
This is also maybe sort of not something I need to take on right now? It's just a kid I care about and there is SUCH an obvious fix, idk.
Both Silence by Masahiro Shinoda, and Sea and Poison by Kei Kumai are considered good enough movies to not need remakes. I don't know how well Shinoda is known, Double Suicide is famous, but Kei Kumai is relatively unknown, has interpreted several Endo works, directed another story of cannabalism, Shiny Moss, and may be known for Sandaken No 8 about comfort women, with a tremendous late performance by Kinuyo Tanaka
Kumai made a career of edge and iconoclasm. He has fanatical fans.
I mean the even most-er obvious fix is individualized learning WITHOUT a disability diagnosis, which some public schools (like my own kid's) manage quite ably, but failing that.
there's SOMETHING else going on--gets up and runs around the room at random-
My kid does this. It makes a huge difference if there is a teacher who accepts that he needs to do this and takes steps to ensure that it is not disruptive to other students, vs. a teacher who just yells at him for it.
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I was making myself coffee. The math secretary says, "I hate reading math! I can't do this!" So I chat her up and discover that the chair of the department has asked her to read/edit the math senior seminar papers. This is an absurd abdication of his duties. I advised her to take it much less seriously - "you can highlight a whole section and say 'above my head'." - but she is too thorough a person and so she just feels caught in a bind. She's trying to look up some of the math terminology, but basically she can't make sense of the papers.
I'm furious at our chair. I told the secretary that I wouldn't take any action without checking first with her, because she is new to the job and does not want to make waves.
Is there anything I can do?
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Is there anything I can do?
I take it you've already ruled out "punch Chair in the face" as an option?
Can you say to him you noticed she was doing it and that's not appropriate without telling him she said anything about it?
Alternately, I am like clearly aching to terrify some male humans right now, I'll totally call him and make him cry.
I would have to rewatch the Shinoda Silence to see how I feel about the fact of the Scorcese. Shinoda is a very great director, but pretty "Japanese" making movies without concessions to Western audiences. My feeling is that his Silence is at least as much a Japanese story as a story about Catholic missionaries.
Is this comparable to the butchering of Ghost in the Shell or the atrocity of Tom Cruise in Last Samurai? Another example of cultural imperialism and expropriation? Barbaric Japanese persecuting Christians?
Probably. But it is Scorcese, who will add enough nuance and subtlety, I hope, to make these contexts and subtexts interesting. Not that I will watch it.
I remember a line for the Shinoda, a noble wife is talking to I think a young Franciscan, who were competing with the Jesuits. Part of what was going on involved internal politics with Catholicism creating counter hegemonies in Kyushu...never mind.
"No matter how much tea you drink, gaijin, your eyes will still be round."
Xavier's Legacies is a recent non-fiction book about Christianity in Japan.
154: That's crazy. How incompetent is Chair generally?
'"I am," I said,
to no one there.
And no one heard at all not
even the chair.'
Is this comparable to the butchering of Ghost in the Shell or the atrocity of Tom Cruise in Last Samurai? Another example of cultural imperialism and expropriation?
Man, don't get me started on "Ran" and "Throne of Blood".
159: Yeah, part of the story is about how contempt for and silencing of the Other and minorities cross all kinds of cultures and subcultures.
But the movie also recognizes how particularism can be a valid resistance to aggressive universalist cultural aggression. Looking at what happened to China, were the Japanese right? But in the year of the WWC, we'll skip that.
But then Oda and Toyotomi were also imposing a totalizing ideology to unify Japan.
Complicated. Scorcese can't handle it, I just decided, even though he ain't that Catholic.
158: He is competent but very unwilling to do tasks he dislikes. He and I generally get along, but on those occasions that we disagree, he is horrible - goes 0 to 60 in seconds, bullies, misremembers facts so that they favor him, etc. It's a mess.
So I could talk to him in a chummy water-cooler way about this, but if he weren't cajole-able, then I'd want witnesses and possibly senior administration before I tackled the topic.
Which I'm sure the secretary would be horrified by.
One of the problems with the situation is that it's hard to see how to approach it with him without calling her dumb. I mean, it is flatly unreasonable to expect someone who doesn't have the relevant mathematical skills to edit math papers (what does edit mean? Some final proofreading step?) because that shit is just printer's pie unless you understand it. But saying "Of course she can't do that" sounds like putting her down.
Damn, Ume got me started.
Martyrs? Remember we are talking about the ideological shock troops for the fucking Dutch and Portuguese Empires circa 1600. The Jesuits especially were a vanguard, a specifically geopolitical project.
Reminded of Black Robe about the young "idealist" Jesuit who finally reaches the remote Canadian village and sees that it is dying of the smallpox Euros brought with them.
Not the good guys.
164: She would not take offense. She's overwhelmed by the task and is already taking it as evidence of her low intelligence. In truth, she could do it as well as anyone from the writing center - she's smart, she can look at it roughly for clarity - but she's finding it super stressful and it's not the skillset she was hired for.
You should tell him that's the dumbest fucking idea you've ever heard.
Tell him to ask the hunky janitor that a wiz at math to do it.
Can you create an alternate task that is in her job description? Then cheerfully say "she's not going to be able to get to your papers before January, since they aren't in her job description, but making these name tags for me is and she's doing that first thank you bye!"
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Someone finally got him that ladder.
Yeah, 2016 is basically saying that the world is done with the whole America experiment, isn't it? Time to bleach the flasks and move on.
153: Yelling is better than making it a three-day-suspension offense, though. Grrrrrrr.
Kid D (who is now 14) and I started one of those reading challenges at the beginning of the year, with 12 categories to tick off. I've read about 70 books (lost count a few weeks ago) and she has read 7. She does have lots of half-read books on a shelf and has listened to probably another twenty or more, but still. I'm starting to wonder if she's dyslexic or something. Didn't read until she was 9, and that was only because I insisted she learn, and she still had to actively learn rather than having picked it up by then. Couldn't learn using phonics, only look-say. Is still a really slow reader, uses a bookmark or similar to read line by line, and it's clearly still a slog.
Of course, I'd be delighted if Kid C (16) had voluntarily read 7 fiction books this year! He reads the occasional maths book, and whatever he has to read for school, but he doesn't do stories, never has done. He learnt to read mainly from computer games (famously asked age 4 how one exits from a room).
And Kid B (18) doesn't read huge amounts either - I put I think 8 books on her kindle app for her when she and C went to France this summer, and she read one in the whole three and a half weeks! C also not a reader. Kid A does read - I think university is getting in the way of that atm, but I think it did for me too.
I've been too depressed to read very much for years now. I suspect this is a self-reinforcing thing.
I should probably try to limit comments here given how ubiquitous my pseud has been lately, and how inured I've gotten to the extremely public nature of this forum.
I just binge-watched the first two seasons of Catastrophe. Frivolous! But also sort of hilariously funny. Rob Delaney plus Sharon Horgan equals absurd, comical, etc: they will make you laugh.
Yeah, it's great. I'm still working my way through season one, as I missed it when it first aired, but I'm loving it.
Horgan is also great in Todd Margaret.
Ste/ven C/hu just gave an interesting talk at IF's institute last week. I thought he did a nice job of both emphasizing how serious things are, and where we are as far as developing the technologies we'll need to, well, maintain civilization.
I've been too depressed to read very much for years now. I suspect this is a self-reinforcing thing.
For me, giving up on the PhD made reading anything remotely connected to my PhD topic or neighboring areas unbearably depressing. What made this a real problem was that "topic + neighboring areas" encompassed basically everything that interested me--which is part of why I never wrote the damn thing.
That's finally started to wear off, thankfully. And between German-language practice, learning something about Portugal, and, I dunno, the possibilities for social democracy in the 21st century, I've got plenty to read now.
Oh, oops, wrong thread for the CC link.
I've found audio books helpful in dealing with depressive non-reading. They overwhelm the inner monologue that distracts me from focusing on the text. Might be worth a try, lurid.
The important thing to do in graduate school is stay long enough to exhaust your funding, but not so long that your desire to learn is killed permanently.
190: you should put that in the climate change thread, where I should have put the link in the first place!