A dear friend is in a play next weekend. I'm not ready to leave Hokey Pokey with a baby-sitter. If it were a movie, I'd just plan on taking him to the lobby if he gets fussy. But with a play, it seems like you risk disturbing the actors.

We could hire two baby-sitters - one to stay home with Hawaiian Punch, and one to sit in the lobby with Hokey Pokey. But if anyone has a cheaper solution or sense of existing etiquette, I'd love to hear it.

(Obviously I could ask the dear friend. But it's less of an imposition for you guys to say if the answer is clearly "Keep him out!")

A rather shocking number of my peers are abuzz about this zodiac nonsense. Do we need to have another thread mocking beliefs in stupid shit?

Because I'll post one. Hell, I just did.

It's enough to make you wonder if Kevin Drum's editor reads Unfogged:

in an email conversation with my editor she suggested that one point worth making is that in America today, "someone making $100K has a lot more in common with someone making $30K than someone making $100 million."

In response to this assertion, Drum conducts a little thought experiment:

Suppose that you lead a comfortable middle-class life. Let's say that you're in your 30s, married, two children, and you make $100,000 per year. I offer you a fair coin flip with the following possible outcomes:

Heads: You will be stripped of most of your assets and will earn $30,000 per year for the rest of your life. That's all you get, and neither friends nor family can top it up for you. Tails: You will earn $1 million per year for the rest of your life. Would you take me up on my offer to flip the coin?

Almost no one would take the offer, so he concludes the editor is wrong.

But this is ridiculous. Whether the editor is right or wrong, the thought experiment is deeply flawed: Even if I were earning $30K a year, I wouldn't flip that coin. Who the hell wants to risk being locked into $30K/year for the rest of their life?

By a long stretch I'm no expert on internal Chinese politics or China-US relations, but this story caught my attention:

The People's Liberation Army undertook the first test flight of the J-20 aircraft prototype at an airfield in western China, signaling the military's opposition to Gates's trip and to U.S. efforts to improve military connections between the countries.

The flight occurred just a week before Hu is to travel to Washington for a summit with President Obama. It was a clear statement that although Hu might want Gates in China to burnish his legacy as a steward of solid ties with Washington before he steps down next year, the military has a different view.

Making matters worse for Hu, when Gates queried him about the 15-minute flight, it appeared to him that the PLA had kept word of the test from China's president and all other Chinese civilians at the meeting.

The tone of the article seems a bit alarmist, but I don't know squat about the civilian-military relations in China. Still, it seemed worth tossing up for discussion.

We're all clear on the idea that in Western culture, masculine things are okay for both men and women, but feminine things are only okay for women, so you quickly get two groups: people and women.

Okay. You know the Like a G6 song? (Great, isn't it?) I noticed on New Year's that the woman who sings in it (DEV) is not the star of the video. Some random hot chick is. (Sober girls around me, they be acting like they're drunk, they be acting they're dru-u-unk).

So DEV is the clubbing girl in the white jacket, and I have no idea who the main character girl is. DEV is a person - she's not front and center, she's not showcased for her hot bod - and the main character is a random hubba-hubba woman. It's all very strange, except it's not.

(Anyway, in real life most of us don't split real people-with-vaginas-who-we-know into these two categories - except for young women, when thinking about themselves. Probably not many women on Unfogged did this. But I think many young women out there believe they can't wear both hats at the same time.)

Or maybe I just wanted an excuse to link the video.

I don't see why Palin's use of the phrase "blood libel" is itself so egregious. Using inflammatory language which creates a climate of violence is exactly what she's being accused of, isn't it?

I couldn't bring myself to watch more than 30 seconds of the video, so maybe in context it's worse.

I awoke in a location lacking in the way of a proper coffee-making device. I say "proper" here, because I was undeterred and immediately set about taking inventory of potentially useful items in the pursuit of coffee preparation. Forthwith, I discovered coffee beans, a coffee grinder, coffee filters, a funnel, a kettle, and two large coffee mugs.

With the kettle filled with water and heating on the stove, I ground the beans and placed two coffee filters in the funnel, positioned over the first of the two mugs. The near-boiling water trickled from the kettle through the awaiting grounds, making its way down into the mug. The first brew was complete.

I re-positioned the grounds-bearing funnel over the second mug and slowly poured the results of stage one back through the contraption (with all the expected spillage, a phenomenon I believe to be attributable to viscosity, but I'm not a scientist).

And voilà! The verdict? A not unsuccessful attempt to make a coffee beverage of sorts. (Now if only I'd thought to get some milk.)

For your new pair of jeans.

This pair has never been washed and was worn consistently for around six years before having to be put to bed in the archive due to the smell that it gives off once it gets slightly warm.

Size: 32" W x 32" L

* Please be aware that this product is second hand and has been worn. Although it's been treated with love it may show signs of wear and tear - we hope you understand that this isn't a fault, it adds to the individual story of each piece.

Yes, please do be aware.

Anyone else have atrocious problems with clogged ears when they have a cold? Right now my right ear is so clogged that I'm a bit dizzy, (because the left ear is clear). It hurts. I have days when I go around looking like I'm trying to unhinge my jaw because as soon as my ears pop they start to fill up again, and so I'm perpetually trying to pop my ears and I don't realize how ridiculous I look until I catch my reflection in a mirrow or window. (Fortunately this is maybe one bad cold every two years or so. It hasn't developed into an ear infection since college.)

One time I was riding in a car with a friend, trying to pop one ear, and it popped slightly in a pinprick way - I heard a high-pitched squeal. My friend exclaimed "Was that your ear?!" She had heard it, too. I have no idea what exactly happened, but it happens to me, and she could hear it happen.

I'm not the most superstitious person, but this year July has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays. This happens once every 823 years. This is called money bags. So: copy this to your status and money will arrive within 4 days, based on Chinese Feng Shui. The one who does not copy will be without money. Don't let that person be YOU or ME!

I would throw an epic shit-fit if this happened to me:

Heathrow had been snowed in for days, with many flights cancelled and people sleeping at the gates waiting on standby for any flight home. On his flight there was a couple with a very young baby, less than 1 year old, who had purchased three First Class seats including one for the baby.

The stewardess asked them if they'd be willing to hold their kid on their lap and accept a refund so that an extra person could take a flight home. The couple declined, saying that they'd purchased the seat for their kid and he was going to keep it. The couple declined a refund with a £400 voucher, then a refund and a free round trip anywhere except Australia, then a refund and a free round trip anywhere including Australia.

This went on for about 20 minutes. Then the pilot came out, and not to sweeten the deal with ice cream. He said "This is my plane, and I get to decide who flies. All three of you are not coming on this plane." The couple suddenly became extremely receptive to the idea of accepting the free ticket but the pilot said no, you've missed your chance. Please enjoy a few more days in London, and accept the thanks of three Heathrow standby passengers who will be flying home in your place.

I might have accepted one of the bribes or negotiated for something else that suited. But that's not the point. If none of the bribes dealt with the factors I was juggling and they threw us off, I would be absolutely livid.

m.unfogged.com now points, for HTTP 1.1–using browsers, to the longer-to-type http://www.unfogged.com/mobile.html.

Conversation overheard between two women at soccer today:
First woman: How old are you?
Second woman: 45. Why?
First woman: Shoot. We're trying to get a team together to play in an over-50s women's tournament.

The whole concept of a role model is kind of cheesy, but seeing someone actually embody something you'd love to do is pretty neat.

Two perennial complaints about college classes are: 1) classes are getting easier, and 2) there is rampant grade inflation. Evidence for the first usually comes in the form of griping that students are much less prepared than they used to be, and back in the day, get offa my lawn, etc. The second is well-documented, and I've only seen it treated as an indicator of bad things: too much emphasis on student evaluations, universities inadvertently creating incentives to give good grades, since unhappy students mean less business, etc.

Now let's go over in pedagogy land, or at least math pedagogy land. Here, there is widespread agreement that it is better to have most of your students understand fewer topics, than to have most of your students not understand many topics.

Clearly, if I teach three topics well, then my class will have more As than a class where they teach five topics poorly. So it's possible that those two original complaints arise from professors attempting to do a better job teaching. Perhaps those two trends only really reveal problems with the older way of doing things.