Category: Daft Musings

It is an understatement to say that Kelly loves books. “Book” and her own declensions of the word book: abook, bookoo, were her first words, and until we trained her not to do so, Kelly used to wake me and Peter up by pounding one of us with a book and insisting we read it…

I keep my weight under control for a variety of reasons, not least of which is I don’t want to buy “fat clothes.” I’m not obsessive about it. I have an ideal weight, at which I think I fit most of my clothes well, but I allow myself to fluctuate from it by about 5…

In the New York Times. You knew it was gonna happen someday. And I don’t think he’ll have to go to jail, since he’s already been found innocent. Via Mental Floss.

In the past few years, Comic-Con has become too much for me to deal with. Each year, it’s gotten bigger and flashier, and since San Diego built a sports stadium downtown, almost impossibly crowded. I’m nostalgic now for the days when a few weeks before the Comic-Con, I could book at the Clarion, a modest…

As they’ll tell you themselves, Europeans are better at foreign policy, cuisine, and fashion than troglodytic Americans. In order to help you, my readers, towards the path of becoming as suave and sophisticated as our betters on The Continent, I present to you a selection of European music videos to further your understanding of their…

Shiaw-Ling likes to use Leet, a curious way of writing which requires you to replace Latin alphabetical characters with the non-alphabetical characters whenever possible. A typical example sentence looks like this: 7|-|3 [,]|_|1(|< |3|20//|| |=0>< ]|_|//|?5 0/3|2 7|-|3 |_42`/ [)09. To my complete embarrassment, I could never figure out what she wrote. I can’t tell…

But if I only alude to the Montessori Method’s failings, even in passing, I discover that nothing will get a Montessori parent shrieking faster and louder than evidence that their expensive private school may be shortchanging their child’s educational potential. It really is like a cult against which nothing negative may ever be said.

The weekend before last, I opened up my RAZR phone and discovered the screen was broken. I was devastated, especially since we don’t have a landline at home we can rely on. I could still use the phone to make and receive calls, but I couldn’t do anything that required a screen, like using my…

A few seasons ago, Peter and I enjoyed the TV show Joan of Arcadia. In it, an apathetic 16-year-old girl suddenly has God talking to her in the form of random people she encounters. When she follows their cryptic instructions, she indirectly became a force of positive change in the world. It also had an…

I have only seen 9 films in the theatre this entire year, and at least half have been children’s movies. And the rest (except 1) have been low-budget indie films. I was briefly disturbed by the thought that within my meagre lot of movie going, the actors I’ve seen most often on the big screen…