Of dolts and duct tape

Ohhh, have I got one for you today!

I almost posted this over on Blue's Blog because I felt the need, upon reading this, to use (v. bad word) or maybe (oh dear! naughty!), so if one slips out, forgive me.

Check it out. Parents whinge about tape on doors.

"At a heated meeting Monday, Michelle Mata told the Lake Local school board in Millbury that the tactic panicked her son during a recent weekend trip to Chicago.
Sylvia Keeler said she may file charges. Her son, Mark Hummel, said he worried he could be trapped during a fire."

Oh cry me a river, emo boy! Trapped? By one piece of duct tape?

Well, I am of an engineering bent and love science, so I was fascinated and wanted to explore this topic.

Let's take a look at this.

This is the door to the bathroom in my home. It is much lighter that the average hotel room door (a heavier door would be advantageous to opening).



I taped it shut with not one but two bits of regular 3M duct tape like ye get from Lowe's:



Taped thus, the door came open easily.

Well, I don't know details of the hotel door taping and I also wasn't trying to get out from the inside. What I needed was help for this to be as accurate as possible.

How could I simulate a 'panicky' high school student?

Like this:



Yeah. Ohio moms? Yer kids are SO playing you and you need to wake up and start parenting.

For your further entertainment pleasure, here's a hot discussion on the subject.

Here it is over on our own Evil Genius Woman boards. Feel free to join us and tell us what you think!

Oh, by the way. Just a thought. Don't hotel doors open INWARD? That would make the whole thing moot. Even my 14 month old could the bloody damned thing.



The Human Crash Test Dummy: daughter of that woman who duct taped her child into the loo!

UPDATE! -

I just gleaned this from the Topix forum (abt page 133 I think) linked above:

"Okay people, i was one of the students in the room where the conflict arose. A simple strip wasn't all it was. It went from the wall around the handle twice back onto the wall. As simple as it sounds it was more. Yes, i agree everything has been blown out of proportion, but to sit there and riddicule everyone for not being able to open the door is rediculous. I don't for one beleive that this matter should have escaladed into a lawsuit, no. Personally i hope for everything to be closed and done sooner than what it seems to be. " (sic)

Uhm ...

I surely surely hope this is a joke. If this is an actual forum post by a student in this Millbury Ohio high school, then you Ohio Moms need to stop being concerned about duct tape! Not only do your wee delicate babes NEED to be taped in a room they need to be in there doing their English Homework!

Grammar Gripe

Having an altogether crappy week/day (I thought the above design was apropo) so I thought I'd vent randomly about grammar. If you want to see a real pro at work on this subject, be sure you check out Mrs. Chili's blog for Grammar Wednesday.

On with the vent:

When I was young, I always thought that the folks who used incorrect grammar or wrote poorly were the unfortunate dregs of society.

They - the folks who couldn't distinguish 'there', 'their', and 'they're' and thought that 'irregardless' was a word and 'nauseous' meant to feel ill, poor lambs (I thought ), were the uneducated, the offspring of semi-illiterates, perhaps even the mentally challenged.

I was wrong.

Grammar and spelling slashers are all around us. People who own businesses, who are professionals (even teachers!), who went to school (and somehow graduated), use hideously incorrect grammar all the time. Don't even get me started on some of the women on my various infertility/TTC/mommy/baby boards (if you're on any of these, you know the people I mean).

Let's randomly pick popular music of which to make an example. Here's a snippet of lyrics from a song on the Robots soundtrack:

Girl I want it you got it
Your body’s like a narcotic
The thought is auto-erotic*

Uhm, no. The thought of her body is erotic. Autoeroticism is the derivation of pleasure without an outside source. Basically the songwriter used the word because he thought it sounded cooler than erotic. He has no idea what it means, or how stupid it makes him look.

(Another example of this is folks who say: "Blase', blase'," to mean "You are nattering on and on." Clearly, they mean: "Blah, blah," but one of them, at some point, heard the word 'blase'' (which means 'disinterested' or 'apathetic'), had NO idea what it meant but thought it sounded hip, and so transmogrified the two into one statement of how laughable a person can be.)

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Another example from music:

I love the band Nickelback. LOVE them. They rock. I adore the music and the lyrics are great, but there is one song that I physically am unable to listen to. Here are the first two stanzas:

Believe it or not everyone
Have things that they hide
Believe it or not everyone
Keep most things inside

Believe it or not everyone
Believe in something above
Believe it or not everyone
Need to feel loved**

WTF? Does the music industry not have editor type persons? Do they not have people who advise them on what things to NOT do so as to avoid looking like complete fools?

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And just for contrast; this is quoted verbatim from a list that I'm on:

I am looking a particular van. I am not sure wha the make and model but I know UPS uses them. Their meduim size. I am considering one for my business

(A person replies to her, then:)

That's probably the one I talking about! Thanks for the heads up.... do they sell them used? If so what's in your opinion a reasonable price to pay rather new or used? I want a nice clean decent one to carry my inventory in for my business.

(He replies again. She responds:)

Yeap that's the one LOL!I already check the net GEEZ guess I'll have to wait until I the lottery for one of those LOL!

What is her business, I wonder? (Aside from making me wince.)

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Here's another gem; again, verbatim:

I have went thru my Dresser and Closet (spring cleaning) and have a bag FULL of Ladies Plus Size Clothes ( size range 24 thru 28)..There are Pants...Skirts...Dresses (lounge type)and Shirts...All are in Good Shape and can be Wore to Work

Of course, this speech pattern ('have went through' and 'can be wore') is typical of Standard Southern White Trash (this one is primo whisky tango, from Pelion, the butthole of the universe.). But what's up with the ellipses? Are commas too ... common? Or perhaps unfathomable? Why be arsed to learn punctuation when you can simply choose one that you fancy and use it for every application? While we're At It ... someone Explain to Me ... the random Capitalization ...

Where does this one work? Who hires these people? Are they raising children to speak and write like this? Is there an unusually high suicide rate for language arts teachers in Lexington?

I just purchased this button for my Evil Genius Husband to wear to school (I also comes in t-shirt form). What do you think?

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(Obligatory link litter:)

More tees for teachers here, shirts, mugs, buttons and stickers for those of us living in the Southeast (no I don't have a shirt that says "Pelion, butthole of the universe", but I should), and check out our NEW maternity cut t-shirts!

PS: for those of you still awaiting you free goodies that i promised ... what was it, last year? *sigh* I have finally gotten them all wrapped and posted! Yay!

I am also getting really addicted to giving stuff away, so look for another round of freebies to my peeps here soon.

PPS: post already edited for ... a grammar error! *rolls eyes* There are probably ten more.

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*copyright Fatboy Slim, lyrics from Wonderful Night, from the Robots soundtrack.
**copyright Nickelback, lyrics from Believe it or Not, from the album The Long Road.

Related Tags: grammar, bad grammar, language, english, teachers, t-shirts, tees, shirts, tshirts, buttons, stickers, kraken, pirates

Exo-nesting?

I am SO nesting. Yes. 20 days or so before I deliver, I start nesting. Go figure.

Here's the bizarre part though; I'm nesting outside the house.

I finished the taxes and, the instant I found out how much we were getting back, I became obsessed with the fence.

Yeah. The fence. Around the farm.

So I started collecting estimates at the stock sale and (after some negotiating and wrangling) I got a really good price and went for it. The blokes came out Wednesday, finished up yesterday and it looks GOOD:

This is a sample from the front of the property. Before (above) and after:

So, I've got two more weeks until my son will be here, my house is in it's general, alarming, call-the-CDC state of disarray, my hospital bag's about half-packed, the pack-n-play is still in it's carrying case, but, by gum, the goats won't be getting out anytime soon! w00t!

(This is the new goat pen fence. Behind is our 'barn'; a teensy little shed that was built by the city folks who lived here before us. Adding onto that is my next project.)

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Weird baby item of the day. These things - to me - are so creepy that they're cool (I'd use them in a NICU just to see the looks on people's faces), but I still think that the idea is bogus. I mean, any item will retain your scent for the baby and the fact that they look like hands is lost on a newborn. Now if they were made out of some synthetic cyber-skin and heated ... and maybe anamatronic ...

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And moving abruptly to English and its various misuses, abuses, and evolutionary jumps:

The conundrum of the 'word' email and how it was spelt was brought up on one of my forums. Good question. My vote is "e-mail" although I (obviously) use "email". What do you think? Several people (including an English teacher on this board) offered "E-Mail" or "E-mail" neither of which I agree with. The phrase was "electronic mail" and so should not be capitalized unless it begins a sentence.

Someone linked this article discussing the subject. What do you think, grammarphiles?

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Seen on one of my mommy forums (on a school paper written by her husband):

"I went through it and edited it for him, he had a hard time with language class, and I was appauled that he hadn't put anything in it about me besides the fact that I found the coarse that he's taking now in college, or about the child that him and I are about to have.
I don't feel I'm overreacting.. we've been together almost have of a decade."

Putting aside the facts that she is, indeed, overreacting to her husband not including her in some English assignment for school; that hubby needs to be editing his own paper (that's kinda the point of taking a writing class); is anyone else alarmed that a person who displays this shocking a lack of language skillz is editing this paper for someone else's college class?

Die, die, DIE!

I have enough disgruntlement (it's a word!) over clueless twinkies on baby boards who write things like: "we had a peak at the baby in their", and "my hip's feel so lose", but I get particularly exasperated when I spot Grammar Idiocy in print. I mean, isn't that why people pay a person called The Editor? Helloooo!

So, I'm reading one of my comic books (Ultimate Fantastic Four currently written by Mike Carey) and Reed Richards (arguably the cleverest bloke in the Marvel Universe - which makes it 10 times worse) refers to a cube-shaped object as ... wait for it ... "A Dice."

Kill me now*.

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In related news - but more pleasant - I had a teary-eyed moment of intense motherly pride the other day.

I was kidding my oldest (aged five-years-in-less-than-two-weeks), Boy, about being so skinny. I was jokingly comparing him to his sister the Human Crash Test Dummy who, despite her appetite, remains downright scrawny. He laughed and said:

"I'm not scrawny! None of us is scrawny!"

None of us IS scrawny.

I know grown people, folks who have graduated from university, who cannot get subject-verb agreement down pat. But my five-year-old can do it. Really, I almost wept with pride.

Of course it's not because he's a genius or anything (although the boy is pretty bloody clever. He can read and write easily and knows a startling amount about dinosaurs), it's that he has two parents who strive to speak impeccable English (not counting his mother's random *koff* epithet).

I don't think people grasp sometimes how much they influence their children by example.

Folks carefully read a book a night to their toddlers, for instance, thinking that this is all one needs to produce readers. It's not enough. Children have to see a love of books. They have to see Mum and Dad reading books, the house needs to be filled with books.

So many people think that school will teach their children to speak and write properly - again - it's not enough. Language development begins in babyhood. Along with most other things.

You can't wait. You can't think: "Well, I'll begin teaching proper grammar/ table manners/ politeness / how to share/ how to write thank-you notes/ fill-in-the-blank when she gets older."

The same idea holds for discipline, IMHO. You can't think: "He's way too young to discipline now" or "Aww, let him stand up in the shopping trolley, he's too small to fall out" or "Well, she's two. Two year olds often throw themselves on the ground in the parking lot and scream and thrash about because they don't want to be buckled in their carseats."

I suppose you've heard about the overzealous Ms. Sally the-government-knows-what's-best-for-your-children-better-than-you-do Lieber and her anti-spanking legislation proposal? John Rosemond (whom I generally adore) wrote a good piece on it.

Aside from the obviously unacceptable notion that the government should be allowed to intrude any further into my life, and the hysterical/ liberal view that popping a child on the hand or the bum is child abuse, there's a practical problem:

The whole thing is bass-ackwards in my opinion. You consistently discipline from the get-go (including reasonable spanking if that's your thing) , by the time a child reaches age four - an age where you can explain things and reason with a child - then you shouldn't have to spank very often afterward.

The whole don't-touch-until-age-four thing seems like an accident waiting to happen. Wouldn't an out of control child who has had nothing but gentle rebukes; brief time-outs; and deep, meaningful talkings-to be more likely to be abused by an exasperated parent exploding and really beating him?

Of course, the real point of all of this is that yet another person is attempting to tell us mothers that we cannot be trusted to use our own judgement. If it isn't other mothers doing mommy drive-bys or Republicans telling us we have no rights to make decisions about our own bodies, it's the Democrats defining spanking for us because, bless out little hearts, we are too stupid to do this tough job of motherhood without guidance.

Leave us the heck alone! Trust us and we will be more apt to trust ourselves and do a good job of raising future generations. Perhaps that's why some folks let things like education and discipline slide - they have been berated by others (all the stupid childcare books by the 'experts' spring to mind) into thinking that they are not doing a good enough job.

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PS: Just a note to everyone awaiting goodies. I'm getting to it! I made an error and waited until after the first so they cut my cheque (which removes all the mad money from my store account) so I have to wait until I accumulate more. Sorry for the delay!

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*Yeah, I know. You're all saying: "well, it's just a comic book!" NO! No excuse. My children will be reading these one day. Those guys are writers and should be held to the same exacting standards as any writer! Now if we could just get newspapers on board. Worst. Grammar. Evar!

Edited to add: in all fairness I had to come back and point out that I was mistaken about who said 'dice'. It was johnny Storm, not Reed. Not that this excuses it.