I got my mom a picture frame where other people can upload pictures and she sees them. You can set a time for it to turn off at night and turn on in the morning. You can also use it for video calls, if there's somebody else there to make it so that she doesn't panic that the picture frame is talking.
Can you animate the photos so they leave the frame and go visit each other?
You can buy multiple frames and maybe time things just right.
The word "tchotchke" makes me uncomfortable. My brain won't remember how to pronounce it. It keeps trying to parse it as a tokolosh or a Russian or something.
5: Damn! I had an adorable 3-year old all picked out for you.
6: I guess I'll give her to heebie instead.
5: I don't want to hear any whining about the same old fruit basket I send you every year.
It's full of sentient cabbage patch babies.
Really more of a vegetable basket. Until they start wiggling.
I had to tell people to stop buying me shirts. I was getting too many of them even though I wear one every day.
1. That is called a "phone", nicht wahr? Or possibly a tablet if you want your pics at 10 x 8.
It's a tablet, but one without controls or a touch screen. It's designed to give to someone with dementia or just no technical interest and be controlled remotely.
It's an old fashioned app.
When I hand my students the dinky solar powered four function calculators to use on a test, I think it's funny to call them that, "old-fashioned apps".
I find it weird that you can still buy graphing calculators with screens the same as 1992 ones had.
Like Heebie, I can't really think of a gift I get often enough to be sick of it.
My aunt gives us all home made banana bread every Christmas, but I never liked that in the first place, so it doesn't really count.
Fuck it, tchotchkes for everyone. My parents are getting a puzzle. We got a three-pack of candles for people yet to be determined. Cassandane is getting a medium-nice bracelet I saw one of the very rare times I was out shopping without her. My nephew is getting clothes and hopefully we'll think of some kind of toy for him at some point. I don't like clutter around the house, but I'd rather have Atossa playing with toys than with something on a screen (which is hypocritical of me, but it would be bad parenting to let her watch TV or play games on a mobile device as much as I do), so whatever she asks for that's cheap and age-appropriate, great.
If my parents wanted to declutter, they wouldn't have had a second home built within the past 10 years. I don't think Cassandane's parents have expressed the desire to declutter, and they definitely need to be better about open communication, and I'd rather encourage them to solve that than try to guess what they want.
I say "at some point", but this week really is the deadline. Post office schedules aside, we're going to be busy next week with some not-holiday-related things.
Tchotchkes wouldn't be a problem if people were more willing to throw things away. Forget about regifting things or finding the time when my schedule lines up with the thrift store's hours, I mean actually use the trash can. Does this make me a bad person? Is this a slippery slope to clubbing baby seals for fun? Or is my intuition correct that consumer waste from no-longer-wanted products is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to packaging materials, broken artifacts, obsolescent technology, and so on?
The seal population has totes rebounded. Club away.
17: Every drop in the bucket counts. Aren't there any organizations that will pick up your no-longer-wanted stuff? We get calls regularly from the Kidney Foundation saying that they are coming by our neighborhood for pickups.
Every team some teacher friends get together on New Year's Day to have a Yankee swap of all the unwanted crap items they get from their students as holiday gifts. Many of the same things in the OP- candles, lotions, trinkets.
I believe we had a thread at some point discussing variations on Yankee swap rules, but the main unspoken one is it's either a swap of crap or a swap of nice things. Every few years someone ruins it by tossing in a generally-agreed nice or valuable gift then people hate each other because you actually are pissed when someone steals a $50 gift card and leaves you with a Baby's Third Christmas ornament.
We get calls regularly from the Kidney Foundation saying that they are coming by our neighborhood for pickups.
You'd think the neighbourhood would run out of spare kidneys after a while.
American neighborhoods are replenished by regular inflows of migrants.
I find it weird that you can still buy graphing calculators with screens the same as 1992 ones had.
No, what's weirder is that the students are all required to buy these in high school and learn these intricately byzantine key stroke steps for doing things that the google toolbar will literally do for you using any intuitive keyword you can think of. And then the students develop a real honest-to-god Stockholm syndrome love for these TI-85s and it becomes their security blanket.
(Have I told the story of the teacher that Jammies was observing, as part of his teacher training, and they were cramming, the week before standardized testing, and they got to a kind of problem that the teacher hadn't had time to get to, and so she was telling them, "remember! when you see this kind of problem, it's K-5-9-9!! K599!" meaning that's the menu path you take to get to the answer.)
I just read this story about the TI calculator monopoly.
I held on to mine for quite a while but some of the lines on the screen started going bad and it was hard to read once there were more than three or four blacked out stripes.
Do you know why your people were driven from Russia at the edge of the Cossack sabre? That's why.
25: Tsar.
But I'm still retaining hope for a return to democracy.
27 is fascinating. Also
But I only remember using the text features to send messages to friends during class.what the actual fuck?
The only messages we could send on calculators in my day were "BOOBS" and "BOSS hOGG".
I even think 27 is too sympathetic to TI. It almost sounds like if they were priced fairly, it would be a great system because their basic-ness prevents cheating.
It would be so easy to design a good product that just, say, lacks an internet browser and wifi. The entire interface is amazingly dumb. By all means have a single-use product as your calculator, but it should cost $30 and look like it was designed this millenium. And the schools should be well-funded, and we should address poverty as a society, and a pony.
Poverty is neither a society nor a pony.
I am very anti-calculator, because fractions are a legitimately abstract concept that students struggle with, but need to understand deeply to make sense of calculus, and K-12 schools have really undermined students' understanding of fractions by allowing them to convert everything to decimals.
I am not anti-software, as long as you're clear on the math that you're skipping.
34: I am a pony! My mom named me Poverty, because I sucked so much.
-12 schools have really undermined students' understanding of fractions by allowing them to convert everything to decimals.
Wait, what?
As far as I know, schools still teach fractions.
There was some Casio calculator I had in school that everyone loved because it let you do fractions.
How do other countries do it? Do the schools own and provide the calculators? (If that's a nationwide standard, there would be little theft or loss.) Are curricula set up so that they're less needed? I think America has more general academic requirements than most developed countries.
They do. But they only teach them once, thoroughly, around 4-5th grade, and after that it's the hurried-you-should-have-learned-this-but-I-know-you-didn't review. When you're learning via speed-review, no one is taking time to give you time and space to wrestle with why they work the way they do, they're just trying to get you to memorize quick tricks so they can get on with the actual content they're expected to teach.
Teaching them in 4-5th grade is fine, but they should be taught at a deeper level at an older grade. For example, none of the students know why you would multiply by the reciprocal when you're dividing fractions. For that matter, fraction division itself is a fairly abstract concept. What does it mean to divide something by 1/2?
Imagine that all pronouns in the first 2/3 of comment 42 are referring to the word "fractions".
Almost the same as multiplying it by 0.498.
What does it mean to divide something by 1/2?
If a shark eats a swimmer, eating half the swimmer with each bite, how many bites does it take to eat the swimmer?
A fraction taught by a fraction equals zero.
A baby shark might require more bites.
Sharks need to learn to savor their meals.
If a shark eats a swimmer, eating half the swimmer with each bite, how many bites does it take to eat the swimmer?
Basically, yes. This is basically the distance version, using division as the inverse of multiplication. One swimmer times one half is one half-swimmer, so one half-swimmer divided by one half is one swimmer.
Students get stuck if they're used to thinking of division in terms of groups - 20/5 means divide people into meals for 5 sharks, so how many people does each shark get? Under that framework, it's not clear what to make of 20/.5. So a good framework is distance - we know what it means to divide by a mile by 3, to divide a mile by 2, to divide it by 1, so what might it mean to divide it by 1/2?
I would have explained dividing by 1/2 as how many half-dollars/fifty-cent pieces you need to pay a bill, which is a totally normal thing* humans, especially children, routinely do. Price is just another scalar amount like distance, but some special fractional amounts are packaged in convenient manipulable physical tokens.
*Well, maybe it is here, because 50 pence coins are common--and awesome, they have seven non-straight sides!--and prices tend to be in multiples of at least five pence, usually ten pence. Coinage is definitely better here. They exist, but I've yet to see a penny. Brits may not realize how wonderful that is.
IIRC calculators were recommended but not required, and we had to buy them ourselves. They weren't integrated with the curriculum at all. Most people had Casios something like this. We only ever used a tiny fraction of their capabilities. That may have been a recommended model, but you could use anything.
I still have my high school calculator, a Casio several years older than the one in 54. It's right my my desk drawer. Mostly I use it for log functions when I need to check something quickly. It's a bit annoying because the power is solar and weak enough that you need to point out at the light very directly. Still. It's been functioning for thirty years.
I also still have a 50p coin. They are nice.
I still have a couple of HP calcs around. The graphic one hasn't had batteries in it for a while but I assume still works. The other one lasts for approximately ever on a couple of watch batteries, so I leave it vaguely on my desk for the odd time checking something. Of course my phone can do approximately the same thing, but it so much worse interface I'll dig up the calculator every one in a while.
I would give them to someone in school right now, but nobody knows how to use reverse polish anymore.
Heebie, who teaches math, has the patience of a minor saint to explain what causes trouble for actual ensembles of actual students to the rest of us.
I'd like a better understanding of when Pade approximants are useful for the holidays. Also understanding how to add two of them.
The conflict between gifts as material objects, inevitably deficient and tenuously connected to some actual desire, and gifts as instantiations of an aspect of a relationship, this is what I find unbearable about the holidays. The more fraught the relationship (Hi Mom!) or unhappier the recipient, the greater the gift's importance. Of course, these very gifts are the one whose prospects to actually bring happiness are faintest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVItbezctWk
Moby, what is that picture frame thing you mentioned called?
We too have a gift swap at the office holiday party. No more than $15, and a system of stealing/swapping. The bottles of wine, candy, etc. tend to be the most sought-after.
My relative's boyfriend is newly a federal law clerk and they had a raffle for holiday gift bags at their office party, which seems a little odd to me, but de gustibus, and less of a drain on employees I suppose.
58: Right? Moving to another continent is much easier.
59: ViewClix. If you're considering it, it's been useful. I think it would work much better for cases of minor dementia than Alzheimer's. Sometimes it agitates my mom because she keeps trying to remember who people are. Also, you need WiFi.
41: In the UK it's down to the exam boards (subject to very high level rules from the government), and some subjects may disallow the use of calculators. I've never heard of schools providing them. Here's a sample list of no-nos, which seems to apply for most of the boards:
Calculators must not:
● be designed or adapted to offer any of these
facilities
o language translators
o symbolic algebra manipulation
o symbolic differentiation or integration
o communication with other machines or
the internet
● be borrowed from another student during an
examination for any reason*
● have retrievable information stored in them -
this includes
o databanks
o dictionaries
o mathematical formulas
o text.
Question: does the US term "proctor" sound as strange to Brits as the UK equivalent "invigilator" does to USians? Or is it known as an alternative, or used in another context?
64: Yes. No. (In one filthy colony.)
"Inviligator" sounds like a term for a sex criminal.
"Proctor" sounds like a term for a sex organ.
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Decadent America requires its teachers to pay for overpriced calculators out of pocket, whereas beneficent Party cadres are happy to pay for pork and beer.
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67: It does, but all least not using it non-consensually.
62: thanks.
64: the first thing I heard on arriving in the US for the first time was a looped tannoy announcement saying "please do not give money to solicitors! This airport does not support the activities of solicitors!" And I thought, wow, I knew this was a litigious society but...
Is the use of "tannoy" here deliberate as well?
I was told here would be no math on this post.
I always assumed "tannoy" was a slang word referring to how annoying they are, but just looked it up and apparently it was a company that made loudspeakers before becoming the generic British term.
I teach biology to college students and boy do a lot of them struggle with not just fractions but any ratios or proportions, however expressed. They just don't have a grasp on the concept of a denominator. Perhaps that's because, as Heebie suggests, they didn't have sufficient early opportunities to really wrestle with it, but I don't know about that. Useful thread, because now I know which calculator to not get Grandma, and which will please her (reverse polish).
73: It seems like it should be franglais for "you annoy".
The conflict between gifts as material objects, inevitably deficient and tenuously connected to some actual desire, and gifts as instantiations of an aspect of a relationship, this is what I find unbearable about the holidays. The more fraught the relationship (Hi Mom!) or unhappier the recipient, the greater the gift's importance. Of course, these very gifts are the one whose prospects to actually bring happiness are faintest.
This is the time of year when it's nicest to be Jewish. The emotional weight and complexity of Christmas gift-giving just seems so fraught.
Incense. No more incense. Please. Incense burners are great. No more actual incense sticks. For the love of Krishna.
For what it's worth, Heebie, I tried my damdnest to revisit fractions in a deep way in Algebra Skills, Algebra, and Geometry, exactly b/c it seems so conceptually important for both higher level math and every day life. I don't know that I succeeded in building any greater depth of understanding.
76.2: Did you always feel that way? It seems that Jewish-American parents have felt tremendous pressure to do something to mimic the Christmas gift-giving experience for their children -- whether it's actually celebrating Xmas as a purely retail holiday, or creating a tradition of Chanukah gift-giving.
teofilo!
I came back to say that actually, the isty bitsy miniature insence sticks are a GREAT gift, b/c then I can do all the rituals technically correctly, with three sticks, but then they put themselves out quickly and the air quality is still reasonable. No one ever actually gives you those.
79: I have. I definitely recognize that pressure and when I was a kid we did get Chanukah presents and celebrated Christmas with my dad's family, who also gave us presents. That stuff all feels very focused on children, though, and the part of Christian Christmas-anxiety that feels very foreign to me is the emotional weight around adults giving gifts to each other, which is just not a thing in Jewish circles IME.
The main thing is never buy your spouse a stationary bike that costs more than $400.
that feels very foreign to me is the emotional weight around adults giving gifts to each other, which is just not a thing in Jewish circles IME.
Yeah, I guess that matches my experience as well.
Is it a widespread christian thing, to get worked up over presents to adults? or is it just some families being susceptible to marketing?
Is it a widespread christian thing, to get worked up over presents to adults? or is it just some families being susceptible to marketing?
an opinionated system to manage gift-giving stress for both gifters and giftees.
the difficult gifts to buy are unasked-for-gifts for the very small number of people with whom you are super close - romantic partners, children, grand children. parents and siblings are tricky marginal cases where there can be some variation (i.e., one parent in this category, the other in the category described below - but often splitting them up is fine and if you do it competently, they will both be delighted).
of course the person in each household who gets it absolutely right with an unasked for gift wins the holiday. it is so much fun when this is you, and sucks when it is not you! but some years you will nail it, and one of the joys of the holiday is recalling notable unasked for gifts of years past. be kind to those within your inner circle - send them lists of (including links to, if possible) specific things you would very much like to receive, in an appropriate range of price points. those lists can be valuable clues to and inspiration for banger unasked for gifts! do not ask for a gift card from those who are close enough to you that you are sending them a list of wished-for gifts, that would be rude.
outside this inner circle, stick to sweets (chocolates-marrons glaces-pates de fruits-others as appropriate to your own taste and budget), wine (or the recipients known-without-a-doubt preferred liquor), or flowers. if you go off piste here, the iron clad rule is that these gifts *must all be consumable*. on no account give something the recipient would ever feel they would have to display in their home or demonstrate any use of whatsoever - this is why gift cards do not work (aside from being a crap, rude gift). aside from putting the flowers in a vase, ruthlessly enforce absolutely no expectation of opening-consumption-use at the time of giving. if these gifts are unwanted by the recipient they can be discreetly moved on.
if you are tempted to buy something really crap in the second category, you do not want to give that person a gift. so don't.
you are probably vastly underestimating how much some of the people in your inner circle would enjoy receiving absolutely over-the-top opulent flowers, there are few gifts that give more pleasure.
In one sense I'm totally aware that gift anxiety between adults is stupid. In another sense, I'm bad enough as it is as keeping in touch with people, holding up my end of relationships, etc. Christmas gifts feel like doing the bare minimum. If someone gets me something expensive and nice and useful and thoughtful for Christmas and I got them something worth half as much, or nothing, I'd be a real dick.
Blame our capitalist society or my personal pathologies for conflating price tag with all the rest, but how else should I measure the value? Thought put into it? That's a recipe for getting people Amazon gift cards if I just commit to beating myself up for it sufficiently afterwards.
Is it a widespread christian thing, to get worked up over presents to adults? or is it just some families being susceptible to marketing?
I actually have no idea. In my experience it seems pretty common but not universal. (My dad's family, for instance, doesn't seem to get particularly worked up about Christmas gifts, though they do give them and get plenty worked up about other stuff.)
I'm getting everyone I know a wooden plaque reading " Home is where you hang your hat.". There will be no hook or peg on the plaque, but there may be a duck.
Wait. "Home is where you hang you're hat." And the duck is wearing a dress and a frilly apron.
susceptible to marketing
Marketing brought us shoulder pads, Hersheys, and osmotically conveyed understanding of this year's blue check gauge. What's the alternative?
Possibly my perception comes from my ex's family, and to some extent from my maternal grandmother. Fraught gift exchange between adults in a world of surplus is kind of messed up, agreed; but it seems like a common facet of fraught relationships (so most relationships) to me. The alternative I see is to bail on people who don't share my obviously correct outlooks, which would leave me talking to my cat and I guess to occasional non-christians (cultural sense of the adjective rather than life-of-faith sense).
Fraught gift exchange between adults in a world of surplus is kind of messed up, agreed; but it seems like a common facet of fraught relationships (so most relationships) to me.
For sure, and I don't mean to suggest that there's necessarily anything wrong with participating in this kind of gift exchange or experiencing anxiety about it. Cultural expectations just are what they are, as are fraught relationships. It's just an instance where not being part of that particular culture or subject to its expectations is a bit of a relief.
27: I went to a fancy private school in the early 99's. We were not expected to buy them. At my girls day school we bought our books, but at boarding school see borrowed them. When I took calculus in 1993, they let us use calculators. I think it would have been better if they had not. They would have picked easier angles /numbers like sin 30 degrees instead of some whatever they did that required a calculator.
My high school didn't even offer calculus.
I'm pretty sure I ended up giving away my graphing calculator to one of you guys a few years ago.
My family tends to do the weird thing of Person A asking Person B what to get for Person C, then Person B surreptitiously asking Person C and relating the answer to Person as if it's their own idea. Then everyone acts surprised, but still gets what they want. There are worse systems.
I want the system where Mike Bloomberg isn't on the TV all the time.
I've enjoyed getting gift cards before. They make a nice thank you gift. A friend came and stayed and left me a gift card to The Strand. I bought myself a graphic novel, a copy of a YA novel I enjoyed in childhood, and a magnet with an enthusiastic heart sweating drops of blood and banging on a drum with the caption "the beat goes on." I like tchotchkes, evidently. Actually, speaking of magnets, I'm still sad that I lost one a friend got me with a little monster saying "I like big words." But I have one that a coworker got me to thank me for my help with a German language rainbow-colored circumplex system for representing emotions. Of course, it helped that she worked with me and so understood my interests, but that one was pretty right on in terms of a little tchotchke I'd love. Basically, a fridge can always use another magnet.
96: everything goes through my mother-in-law which does not work great, because she isn't the best communicator or good at understanding what other people like. So, I asked about Hudson's Bay blankets and if she knew where I might get a wool blanket of comparable quality, since they are so expensive. And anyway, I don't care for the pattern, though I felt sort of that I should since it's quintessentially Canadian.
So, I'm pretty sure that she suggested something to Tim's brother and s-I-l, because I got a cheapo acrylic Hudson's Bay blanket. Sort of the worst of both worlds. And then they were insulted when Tim had it draped over the back seat of his car to protect it.
Now, I am very specific. But mostly we buy gifts for their kids and the family unit and small little things for each of them and they buy us somethin* since we are childless - usually a joint gift. This year I gave the two things to M-I-L and said that if they were both too expensive (though less than what we spent on their kids) cash toward one would be appreciated. Which i feel kind of bad about but it's more useful to me than something I dislike.
96: everything goes through my mother-in-law which does not work great, because she isn't the best communicator or good at understanding what other people like. So, I asked about Hudson's Bay blankets and if she knew where I might get a wool blanket of comparable quality, since they are so expensive. And anyway, I don't care for the pattern, though I felt sort of that I should since it's quintessentially Canadian.
So, I'm pretty sure that she suggested something to Tim's brother and s-I-l, because I got a cheapo acrylic Hudson's Bay blanket. Sort of the worst of both worlds. And then they were insulted when Tim had it draped over the back seat of his car to protect it.
Now, I am very specific. But mostly we buy gifts for their kids and the family unit and small little things for each of them and they buy us somethin* since we are childless - usually a joint gift. This year I gave the two things to M-I-L and said that if they were both too expensive (though less than what we spent on their kids) cash toward one would be appreciated. Which i feel kind of bad about but it's more useful to me than something I dislike.
I thought Hudson's Bay sold beaver pelts. Which apparently are super warm.
They bought the beaver pelts with wool blankets.
I thought they bought them with muskets and liquor.
All of these things, I'm saying, sound like more exciting gifts than a blanket.
A new, big Hudson Bay blanket costs more than a gun. We have one. It's too heavy for me to sleep under unless I was sleeping out of doors in Canada.
106: which is why I asked about more affordable alternatives and mentioned that I dislike the pattern anyway. The next year I asked my m-I-l for a blanket, because it was made in Canada and they did not ship to father US.
https://www.macauslandswoollenmills.com/pricing.html
The lap blanket was $60 Canadian which is not bad at all.
106: which is why I asked about more affordable alternatives and mentioned that I dislike the pattern anyway. The next year I asked my m-I-l for a blanket, because it was made in Canada and they did not ship to father US.
https://www.macauslandswoollenmills.com/pricing.html
The lap blanket was $60 Canadian which is not bad at all.
Happiness is a warm gun in a blanket.
This year we asked for an all clad skillet or a Metal French press. I don't think this is unreasonable since we spent around $160/USD on them and their kids.
If you're sleeping outdoors in Canada you can leave the liquor outside the blanket, where it will both stay cold and not be stolen. And should a visiting American attempt to do so, your well-insulated gun will be in good working order.
Canada is cold enough that liquor can freeze.
If it's that cold I'm thinking you need the beaver pelt.
This year we asked for an all clad skillet or a Metal French press.
Few things are less metal than a French press.
108. What is a lap blanket exactly? Does it just cover the lap? Lap and legs? Hmph. Insufficient. The whole point is to cover all parts of your body except the head (and one hand, for pressing controls) while you binge-watch British (or Scandinavian) detective series on Netflix.
ps: I am now deeply confused. If I look for "lap blankets" on the google, I get a mix of "baby blanket" and "throw blanket." (Except on Etsy where I see actual lap blankets. Thanks, entrepreneurial craftspeople of America!)
113. Canada is cold enough that liquor can freeze.
Can't you just eat it like ice cream then? I remember doing that in not-precisely-Canada (that is, Cambridge, MA). (Not precisely liquor, but rather beer.)
Been there. Beer stored in a car trunk in winter.
The water freezes first, so what's left is kind of liquor.
I bet that tastes even better than the American beer it started out as.
115: The coffee is at no point filtered at microscopic scale, so you're keeping more carcinogens in. It's (barely more) dangerous coffee. Doesn't that count as metal?
One would think with so many Germans in the Midwest the beer would be good but apparently the Atlantic just washes something away.
Prohibition killed the market for quality product. It only came back in the 90s. Then people went nuts with the hops so now everything is an IPA or a weak a Pilsner.
America was worse for beer than Hitler was?
Yes. But Zima is our gift to the world. Or maybe White Claw.
I have heard of neither of those things and I'm just going to keep on in blissful ignorance.
121. The beer I had that froze was Lowenbrau. Not real Lowenbrau but the fake version made in Texas (IIRC). Defense: I was young and stupid when this happened. (Now I am old and stupid, but I haven't frozen any beer lately.)
One night, we were driving around drinking partially frozen beers while having the dashboard covered in other beer we were trying to warm when we passed a police car.
And the officer was like "I'm gonna let this slide just this one time but don't let me catch you drinking warm beer no more".
The driver was breaking at least four laws. The police never caught us.
When I was young and more foolish I found myself in a low dive in the Gambia, smoking local weed and drinking beer from the freezer. Trying to drink beer from the freezer. Wondering how I had got so stoned I couldn't seem to get any beer out of the bottle ... working out, after several centuries, that there was beer in the bottle but most of it was a solid chunk of ice, which wouldn't fit through the neck. Playing for another few years a game with myself where I tipped the bottle from side to side until the ice was melting and then sipping at the melt beer.
If only I had had Maureen Dowd to keep me company.
You should have jogged across the country and back. Worked up a thirst and come back to a melted but still-cold beer.
134: There's a notable feature of the geography there that makes that difficult to do. I imagine doubly so when stoned.
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So apparently there's a movie out by Clint Eastwood about Richard Jewell, they guy who saved a bunch of people at the 1996 Olympics by discovering a pipe bomb and got his name dragged through the mud for his trouble.
Is it unreasonable of me to read most of the reviews I've read so far as "journalists dislike a movie that fails to flatter journalists"?
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122: Hamms was awful, but I have fond childhood memories of the commercials for some reason.
136: I haven't read reviews, but the big thing twitterers are noticing is that it incorporates a woman journalist trading sex for information, and this is a portrayal of a real person who died in 2001 and where there's no evidence anything like that happened. Seems pretty avoidably churlish, plus it's a tired trope aside from the personal aspect. No idea how prominent a part of the the actual movie it is.
From this Vanity Fair article on Jewell's experience, it does seem like the media needs a kicking for its treatment of him. Amusingly, even the VF article carries over that women-journalists-all-sleep-with-sources trope by reporting Scruggs's being described as a "police groupie".
135. Maybe dope works as a crocodile repellent, though.
The French press I want is vacuum insulated and made out of stainless steel, not glass.
142: Who can say? Neither Dave nor crocodiles are here, man.
Speaking of crocodiles, I'm morbidly fascinated by this story, and am kind of disappointed that it's pretty much agreed to be untrue.
This may be unfair of me, but after watching Clint Eastwood court an empty chair for Romney, I'm going to start with a side-eye towards anything bearing his name. It's like he was nutty for Trump before that was even possible, and so I can't see how he might have improved since then.
143: wait, does that mean you are supposed to leave the coffee grounds sitting in the water indefinitely (insulated) ?
I think if you've already plunged it, while the water will still be in some minimal contact with the grounds, the grounds should be fairly compressed and I don't think that much will seep out of them. Then the press just doubles as a carafe.
On the topic of gifts,
1. books for a third grade boy? He is proving to be a pretty voracious reader, but things like Percy Jackson are probably still a bit too hard for him. Difficulty-wise, he's at the Choose Your Own Adventure/Encyclopedia Brown/Tales of A Fourth Grade Nothing level. He's a bit gendered but not too gendered in what he prefers.
2. books for a 5th grader who loves the Hunger Games more than anything in the world?
3. books for a 1st grader who is very clever at following complicated jokes and sophisticated ideas, but needs early reader difficulty? Graphic novels are good, Frog & Toad were great.
(3rd grader also loves graphic novels but devours them so damn quick that they barely last.)
149: The Flashman novels for all of them. Think of it as an experiment.
149.3: Does this 1st grader have all the Calvin & Hobbes collections?
We do! That's a good idea. (This is Hawaii, Pokey, and Ace bwiw.)
The Guardians of Childhood series might work for the younger kids. There's also a fractured-version of fairy tales that I can't remember the name of. Also, if people like cats, there's about 400 books for kids in that range in a series called "Warriors". They are just horrible, but kids like them.
149:
DK books for 1. Volcanoes, dinosaurs, mummies, rockets, insects-- blend of text and pictures, they're nice.
2. Glukhovsky metro 2033 books maybe.
145: Brazilian water jaguars eat caymans, also fish. Giant water hunting cats what's to dislike?
Captain Underpants was very well received in our house when people were at the right age. I have no idea what age that was, except that it was well before forty.
153: Guardians of childhood looks good!
I should say that these are books for the kids to read to themselves after bedtime, not for us to all read together. Not that that matters much. Just that any single book doesn't need to appeal to multiple kids.
148: there isn't a much contact, yes but I find coffee gets more bitter as it sits in a french press. ymmv I guess.
dorling kindersley, https://www.dk.com/us/
Here's a link to Glukhovsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2033
China Mieville's one stab at YA, Un Lun Dun, might work for your 5th grader. I liked it.
Oh, he also did Railsea. That might be for a slightly older reader, not sure.
He is proving to be a pretty voracious reader, but things like Percy Jackson are probably still a bit too hard for him
I'd give Percy Jackson a whirl, if you think it'd appeal. A third-grader who's enjoying reading a lot will stretch themselves.
Also, what about the Gregor the Overlander series? They're by Suzanne Collins who wrote Hunger Games, but are for younger kids. Newt loved them -- I don't think I read them or if I did I don't remember.
149: Has the first grader read "The 13-Story Treehouse?" I'd say it's a bit harder than Frog and Toad, but not by much. It's also a series (26, 39, etc.) The Calabat liked it a lot. Any of Willems (Pigeon, Elephant and Piggie) were also big hits here.
Harry Potter for the third grader? The Calabat has also enjoyed the Tiffany Aching Pratchett books.
Graphic novel series my strong-reading second-grader has devoured: All the Captain Underpants, as mentioned, and others by that author; Amulet; Zita the Spacegirl; HiLo. At least that I remember.
I got Gregor the Overlander from the library to see if he would like it, and read it myself first; I felt like it needed slightly more emotional maturity than he had, what with starting out with the loss of a parent and making that a major animating plot point. Also, it kept describing the POV character's emotions... oddly. It's been a while, but it grated in a way that I sort of wondered if it was a YA technique to explain how people ought to feel.
I picked Cog off the employee-choice shelf at the local bookstore and he enjoyed that, though.
For Hawaii, Tamora Pierce novels. She has series set in two worlds--the series with "Circle" in the titles is probably best for that age, but either is fine. Best to read in the order published.
For Pokey, what about the Great Brain books? I'm getting them for a friend's kid this year.
149: For Hawaii, Alanna The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce kicks off a quartet (and even more books in other series in the world if she stays interested). Girl has to become a knight against expectation.
2nding Cala. I think the Tiffany Aching books would interest both HPs.
eilis dillon's the island of horses, completely wonderful, also a book of hers about foxes - lots of her books are so great.
167: That's some timing! I didn't discover Pierce's books until grad school, and have since reread all of them multiple times. I think Hawaii might identify with characters in the Circle of Magic/Emelan books (especially Sandra, protagonist of the first book) more than the Alanna/Tortall series right now, but the books in both worlds are wonderful.
I also agree with 168.
Yay!! Thanks, all, I just dropped a lot of money on books you've rec'ced here!
I just figured out the fairy tales books I couldn't remember the name of. The first one is "The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom." They are for third grade or so, if I remember correctly. Which I may not.
My approach is generally to throw Roald Dahl and Diana Wynne Jones books at them until they get old enough to be grumpy - both authors are prolific enough that you won't run out
How old does a child have to be before it gets grumpy when things are thrown at it?
147 and 148:
https://www.espro.com/Catalog/French-Press
It has a separate chamber to stop the extraction. I also want the metal one because I am a klutz who will break glass.
The "Who Was" books -- short biographies -- were great for us in that old-enough-to-read-solo, too-young-for-real-books period. There are tons of them, with enough range to cover just about any set of interests. Also the Magic Treehouse series.
For the 5th graded, Ender's Game seems like a natural follow-up to Hunger Games, and was a big hit here. Probably works better for (most) boys than (most) girls.
