Becks, until you have kids of your own, you couldn't possibly understand how great a threat the internet is to my five-year-old son. He has no identity independent of his Webkinz; he plays no games save for those on pbskids.org. His little muscles have atrophied. He is mute. His eyes are square. He has nine pseuds on Unfogged alone. And then there are the sexual predators. They circle our house like birds of prey.

If you aren't afraid, you should be. Prospectively.

Hey, this is the perfect thread to ask whether I ought to let my 11-year-old follow his 13-year-old cousin into World of Warcraft. Tentative answer: you've got enough obsessions already, kid.

Hey, this is the perfect thread to ask whether I ought to let my 11-year-old follow his 13-year-old cousin into World of Warcraft.

I hear it's a near foolproof way to protect adolescents against sexually transmitted diseases and unintended pregnancy.

My eight year old told me that if she didn't periodically log in to webkins, her little online pet would DIE! Specifically, it would explode. Pretty good business model, if you ask me.

The 13-year-old is pretty much the only kid in history who's gotten more nearly normal as he enters his teens, but yeah, not so much with the girls.

My cousin, who was really into pre-WOW games, got a girl pregnant when he was in high school. Upon hearing people discuss this, my 90+ year old great-grandmother, who had severe Alzheimer's and almost never spoke anymore, piped in with "He left his room long enough to get someone pregnant?"

I hear it's a near foolproof way to protect adolescents against sexually transmitted diseases and unintended pregnancy.

Sounds like a modern variant on 'wait until your daughter is a teen to get her a horse', which I've heard in farm communities.

Webkinz are pretty much crack, aren't they. Sally and Newt are obsessed.

7: I thought that was dogs.

Sounds like a modern variant on 'wait until your daughter is a teen to get her a horse', which I've heard in farm communities.

Please, no links Apo.

Remember that we would never allow anything to hurt your Webkinz pets.

My kids are hooked on those things too.

Club Penguin, also. Plenty of free stuff, but to get the really good stuff one must be a member @ $5 per month

Sounds like a modern variant on 'wait until your daughter is a teen to get her a horse', which I've heard in farm communities

And if you can't afford a horse, there's always one of these

I've said many times that shy guys should get involved with horses. I've known quite a few women with horse fetishes, and they tended to be very nice looking and fun.

And good natured, and happy to clean up shit and do other heavy work.

Boohoomoomooboohoomoomooboohoomoomooboohoomoomoomoomoo

My brother-in-law, who is eleven, is obsessed with Club Penguin and Runescape, which upon observation seems to center on killing cows.

As far as I can tell, Club Penguin involves wandering around a cartoon landscape making perfunctory friendships with animal icons. You can't reveal your real name or any biographical facts about yourself, lest one of the informers report you for inappropriate behavior.

17: Just like Unfogged! (Too easy. Sorry.)

17: Club Penguin: excellent training!

Ari, pwned.

So that was an awkward show to watch at the gym. Thanks PBS for all of the half-naked pictures of underage girls! Everyone thinks I'm a perv now.

At least commenters on Unfogged aren't represented by avatars/icons. "Edge of the West", on the other hand...

So, I click the link the post to see what the show is all about, scroll down to the big gray box in which the show's sponsors are listed, and am confronted with the words "MacArthur Park" in large-ish letters. *shudder*

Thanks PBS for all of the half-naked pictures of underage girls!

So less classy than usual?

2: Hey, this is the perfect thread to ask whether I ought to let my 11-year-old follow his 13-year-old cousin into World of Warcraft heroin use.

Fixed your spelling there.

I thought it was pretty good, as these things go. And definitely enjoyed seeing parents who are bigger hardasses than me.

I liked that they made the point that it's not as simple as predator/victim and that many kids are willing participants in the trouble they get into, just like they take risks and get into trouble elsewhere. I think too often these things paint a dichotomy of big bad predator and helpless innocent "child", meaning teenager. I thought it was good that they clarified that a lot (if not the majority) of the solicitations lumped into the scary statistics about online predators are things like 19 YOs propositioning 17 YOs and not creepy old dudes hitting on 8 YOs.

There's a billboard that I pass on the way to my mom's house that says that 1 out of 5 children is sexually solicited online. That sounds absurdly high to me, but if they're including teenagers it's a bit more plausible (but much more misleading).

I would guess that 5 out of 5 teenagers are sexually solicited by other teenagers at least once, so that sounds like a very low number if it is in fact misleading in that way. Why not just say "Every year at least one teenager dies. Don't let it be yours. Give us money."

They may not be counting solicitations by other teenagers, though. If you restrict it to people slightly over 18 soliciting people slightly under 18 it's pretty plausible.

That would admittedly be a weird way to count, but the whole thing's pretty weird to start with.

You seem the same kind of thing in sex offender registries. Poor saps who were 19 and banged a 15 year old getting their pic online along with Chester The Molester.

seem s/b see

"But yer honor! I was bangin' her, I swear!"

I think too often these things paint a dichotomy of big bad predator and helpless innocent "child", meaning teenager.

He / she was leading you on, Becks? Happens to all of us.

23: What's your problem? Did someone leave your cake out in the rain?

Worst song ever, except for "Seasons in the Sun".

I like "Seasons in the Sun", you awful man!

Ben, did you have joy? Did you have fun?

ben rejoices in the spite the song inspires in him.

Yes, but the stars that I could reach? Starfish on the beach. What a rip.

Well, it is hard to die.

Actually, it can be easy as falling off a log.

Donna Summer sang the crap out of MP. No way is it even in the top 25 bad songs.

BTW, Ben, NEVER admit this to a woman with whom you hope to have sex.

I was probably in the first run of people who had their teenagehoods online, and man, do I have some regrets, mostly about posting to band listservs from my dad's realname email account, which listservs are archived forever online. Makes me wish Dad had a little more Google noise around his name, or that private email listservs from fucking 1995 weren't publically displayed forever now.

Also, there were all these randy dudes in chatrooms asking for phone numbers. At the time, it seemed so awesome!

How come? It was good enough for Black Box Recorder.

Between the parted pages we were pressed, in love's hot, fevered iron like a striped pair of pants.

Or is one not supposed to like them either?

SOTS and MP are not in the same league as this:

Well, I hear you went up to Saratoga And your horse naturally won Then you flew your Lear jet up to Nova Scotia To see the total eclipse of the sun Well, you're where you should be all the time And when you're not, you're with Some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend

Nowhere near as bad, Napi.

The song isn't about you, don't be so touchy.

I have only heard the excerpt here of The Beach Boys cover of "Seasons in the Sun", but it sounds like it might be the definitive version (although little known).

The good part of that song is the chorus, and I can't even remember what the melody is to the lyrics Napi has posted.

52: That site is awesome, JPS. As much fun as the terrible rock sax solo review site.

Er, this one.

Although I disagree with their sandbagging Hall & Oates "Maneater" solo for being too long. Anything that keeps a H&O song from happening in the natural way is a good thing.

Best line from the site linked in 55:

You can't make up for a crappy song with no lyrics by increasing the number of sax solos.

Wise words.

We have discussed rock sax before.

What should come on as a post 58 but Jack Bruce, "Never Tell Your Mother She's Out of Tune", which includes saxophones and is good? Nothing but.

I know, Ben. I just forgot that you did it on the front page. So sorry.

I'm not remonstrating with you, AWB, I'm just being terse.

commenters on Unfogged aren't represented by avatars/icons. "Edge of the West", on the other hand...

No, we fixed that! Always improving. Full-service blog.

Also, on topic, the new version of the Mac OS has wonderfully draconian parental controls built right in. Big Father is watching you surf the 'net, kiddo.

Getting into horses is an amazing way to score hot women with good muscles and nice bodies. My new SO is a horse person from way back, and hanging out with her at her riding lessons and her barn, there's a million unattached or unappreciated women looking for a guy that does more than tolerate their horse hobby.

Getting into horses is an amazing way for rich guys to score hot women with good muscles and nice bodies.

Too Much Joy introduced me to Seasons in the Sun. Although I'd already performed a few songs from Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris in a show I was in in High School.

SITS was a British football hooligans' chant circa 1980:

We had joy, we had fun
We had [insert name of local rival team] on the run
But the fun didn't last
Cos the bastards ran too fast

My eldest 3 have pc's in their bedrooms, and can access the internet unsupervised. Which is apparently the current worst parenting crime EVAR, worse than leaving them home alone or letting them out of the house by themselves (both of which I do too). But so far they haven't been lured away by paedophiles, thank goodness.

The 11yo chats on a board dedicated to her favourite book series, and reads (but I don't think posts) on a Sims 2 board too.

I just figure they're not idiots, and as long as they're reasonably aware they'll probably be ok. My visit to UnfoggeDCon may not have been a good example though.

Not Prince Hamlet: 11 seems a little young to me for WoW, speaking here with my WoW junkie hat on - not that the game has anything much that'd be troublesome but that some of the other players can take an unseemly delight in being provocative jerks. It depends on the kid, but I'd want to make sure that the kid had a good outlet for feelings of being picked on by people who can be very good at exploiting vulnerabilities.

Ah, bah. I was online from the time I was 14 and all that ever happened to me is that I left a stupid trail of newsgroup posts about MST3K and met some truly lovely hackers and phreakers (many of home weren't even doing anything particularly illegal, or at least not all the time).

I tuned in during OMG TEH MYSPACE and thought it was really lame but that boy offing himself really got to me. Eight million ways to have a bad adolescence: choose one.

Eight million ways to have a bad adolescence
Step in front of a bus, Gus.
Ok, that's in bad taste, but I'm just abiding by the standards of our online community.

We're being liberal fascist parents and use software called Glu/bble to restrict our 3 year old's access. It's a whitelist system, we have to pre-approve any domain he wants to visit. He just does things like learning letters now (starfall.com), but we don't want him to accidentally wander off the site.

71: yeah a couple typos and you're at assfull.com.

In all (a little) seriousness I've always figured I would use a locked down router and traffic monitoring were I to reproduce. Probably wouldn't stop 'em getting into trouble, but it would assuage my curiosity.

i like the lyrics
some sax, not solo or rock

The thing is, by the time they get to the age where bad things can happen (absent truly freakish accidents), they're smarter than you, especially about this stuff.

or may be trumpet or guitar which is the main
this one for sure
sax

74: I will have a hacker battle with my offspring any day!

Read, are you familiar with Boz Scaggs' Baby's Calling Me Home from the Fillmore album? That's what you are supposed to do with horns.

When it comes to horns in the context of 'rock' music -- rather than jazz, soul or funk -- I always think Dexy's Midnight Runners had it down pat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2oyXHuNl80

the instrument whatever
but didn't you like the songs?
i like the lyrics mostly, and it's the first time for me to see what you mention, may be it's all fictional
so i did not look it up to not get upset
i hate to discover double meanings

I think too often these things paint a dichotomy of big bad predator and helpless innocent "child", meaning teenager.

Didn't catch the program, but this is a good point. Parents seem to get convinced that the thirteen-year-old who meets Slavmastr4teengrrls in a hotel was innocently looking for pictures of daisies and puppies when the predator swooped in. And that's not really accurate. She's still the victim, and he's still the creep, but most of the cases don't seem to involve a lot of deception on the part of the creep.

No, it's real. Boz Scaggs was/is a performer. Before he went totally pop in the mid-70s, he was doing a bluesy kind of thing. His first solo record is certainly a classic.

He was one of the artists that played in the five-night closing of the Fillmore West in 1971. The compilation album only has the one song -- and it's worth downloading, as you can find it all over the place -- but the whole set was recorded, and some few people have copies. Sadly, I'm not one of them. Yet.

Geez, am I doing the explaining to Read thing?

Napi, thank you, i love discovering awesome things!

So I wonder: Does w-lfs-n have access to the Boz Scaggs set from June 30, 1971?

I never had any idea who Boz Scaggs was, thinking vaguely that he was the same person as Ry Cooder because of their similarly hilarious names. It turned out that his song "Lowdown" was one of the songs I had heard tens of thousands of times without ever being told what it was.

81: Geez, am I doing the explaining to Read thing?

Well, I was contemplating a comment along the lines of [Insert patient explanation to read here.] , until you preemptively pwned it.

OT: I link this not because of its subject, but because it is objectively funny.

Ah, bah. I was online from the time I was 14 .....

As I've pointed out before, people should remember that the "I turned out all right" argument carries with it a certain degree of risk.

My visit to UnfoggeDCon may not have been a good example though.

No, no. Your kids told me that it was really good for you. They did ask me who Mutombo was and why you were always whispering something about him to their father.

72: traffic monitoring...Probably wouldn't stop 'em getting into trouble

Did that, and really did avoid lots of trouble. IMX the tricky part (as in most of parenting) is figuring out when to intervene and when to let it slide past.

who is Mutombo and why you were whispering?

If I ever have kids, we're going to have to figure out a way to deal with the whole online thing given the inevitable "but you met Daddy online, and that turned out alright!"

Ned (et al.), try Boz' first album -- the last three cuts on side 2 anyway. First a Jimmie Rodgers song, then the one that gets all the attention -- Loan Me a Dime (with Duane Allman, which explains the attention) -- and finally the one I like best, as of right now, Sweet Release.

90 -- Read, that's one you have to get from the archives.

The part I worry about is the ethics of having a secret blog, and blogging about your children. The conflict is that I feel strongly that I should be honest to my future kids that I'm writing about them online, and yet then they go blabbing all over the place to Mom and the Universe, kids being kids. Yet I don't want to out myself as having a blog to, say, my parents. Even though they are lovely people.

87: per the rest of the comment, I was sort of kidding. You could make a case that it's not a great idea for a 14 year old to be befriending felons online, even if they did turn out to mostly be really swell felons.

I think the biggest question with kids is how to keep open communication about what they're doing online. Mine is young enough that this is no problem yet, so I don't have anything useful to say; it's a concern. Lockdowns and detailed monitoring seem wrong, since the kid will hear distrust and arbitrary restriction for no definite reason.

How do you send a message to your future kids? Surely science fiction has answered this question.

Is it true that your mother had a eyebrow piercing?

Eh, obviously, I dont worry too much about sharing stuff about my kids online. Maybe I should more, but I dont.

And how do we protect our children from stumbling into terrible, terrible music on the internet?

many kids are willing participants in the trouble they get into

While I think this is true, in the non-victim-blaming, an interesting mess is when kids post (non-pornographic) pictures of themselves on teh MySpace, or whatever, and creepy pervs repost them on slavering image boards. (M. LeBlanc posted something about this recently, didn't she? It's creepy when it happens to adults, and it's creepier when it happens to kids.)

Also, "Maneater" and "You're So Vain" are not even in the same league as "MacArthur Park."

I did, kinda.

re: 99

Years and years ago [mid 90s] I worked for an ISP. One of my occasional jobs was vetting customer's websites, and that was one of the things I came across quite often. Legal photographs taken out of context and represented in a semi-salacious way. It was pretty fucking distasteful.

That said, I clicked through to one of my younger relatives homepages recently, to find a link to cheesecakey semi-nude photos of someone in his social circle. I can't help feeling there's something a little unhealthy about that given what I know about how those photos get 'repurposed' online [although there was nothing illegal about the photos themselves].

My blog is there for my kids to read - the older two have it bookmarked, and can post on it if they like. It's not all sweetness and light, but I do my really nasty moaning about them to internet friends elsewhere, which isn't public, which I figure is the same as moaning about them IRL to my friends.

So heebs, you just end up with two blogs - one for mommy-blogging for the grandparents' benefit, and a secret one for yourself - maybe you'll end up passwording it or something so the kids don't find it.

103: That's probably the ideal solution.

103.2: Or else you run the risk of getting something like the two comments I have received from my kids:

Hi dad, you're embarrassing me again. It's not as bad as that one time in third grade open house when we were waiting to enter Mr. Z's room, and you stood there chanting, "Heliopolis versus centurions! Heliopolis versus centurions!" It's cutting it pretty close, though.

so much for your brilliant blog dad, why did you give it up? now who's going to save the world through whining about it using big words??

Fortunately, I could assure her that the latter enterprise is not at risk.

Someone dear to us has four blogs.

The thing is, by the time they get to the age where bad things can happen (absent truly freakish accidents), they're smarter than you, especially about this stuff.

Generally true. OTOH, I can't wait to see what happens when the kids of my peers start making it into their teenage years, seeing as how it's our job to know about this stuff.

re: 107

Actually, I don't think the kids of your peers will know shit. It seems like technology moves in generations.

My dad could fix a TV or a piece of electrical equipment, my grandfather all kinds of engines and things. I could fix neither, but neither of them knows shit about computers. Either software or hardware.

We are the internet and PC generation. I suspect the one that is following on from us will know some other technology really well but will treat computers largely like unfathomable black boxes [in much the same way that my peers treat TVs or VCRs]. They are consumer goods these days for most people. Not something to be hacked around with.

No response to 83 yet. I suppose I ought to send an email.