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  • I Wish I Was in New Orleans

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    New Orleans is my essence, my soul, my muse,
    and I can only dream that one day she will recapture her glory.

    -Harry Connick Jr

    I love New Orleans. I love the blatant debauchery of Mardi Gras, the soulful beauty throughout the year. I love the sultry heat. I love that the voices of everyone there seem to sing. I love the food, the music, the tourists and the natives.

    I do not love the pictures of me that have been taken there. At least at Mardi Gras. Yes, I was 18 and 19 at the time…. still, I think I’ll spare you. This was the only one I deemed not too humiliating. That’s me at center, Jeff at my right. Don’t ask me how he got all those beads.

    This picture was taken at Andrew Jaeger’s House of Seafood on Royal St, a restaurant I’ve visited every time I’ve been in New Orleans; if it still stands and you ever find yourself in that area you must try it.

    Do you like how three of us shared the same jar of Manic Panic to dye our hair for the occasion? That’s classy.

    Today, I wish I was in New Orleans; instead, I am getting ready to take all three kids for three consecutive dentist appointments. Fun!

    Happy Mardi Gras, everyone. Laissez les bon temps roulez.

  • REVIEW: Snapshot Adventures: Secret of Bird Island

    Recently the good people over at Large Animal Games sent our family a PC game to try out, called Snapshot Adventures: Secret of Bird Island. This game was created in collaboration with Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, the same organization which hosts the “citizen scientist” projects Celebrate Urban Birds and the Great Backyard Bird Count.

    The basic plot of the game, as penned by Jacob (who is 11): The player’s grandpa has been lost, and for some reason his friends don’t know where he is. To find him, has to go from state to state to find clues. This is where photography comes in. Each one of his friends has a magazine or blog or something like that. They challenge you to take pictures of certain birds. They reward you with praise, a clue, or an item to help you with your photographs.

    I was fairly impressed by the whole photography aspect of the game. There are tutorials on what constitutes a good shot- bird facing the camera, wings outstretched, level of zoom, and so forth. When you wind up with multiple shots of birds, the game asks you to select your best shot. Maverick (8 years old), ever a perfectionist, was very careful to always try to achieve “magazine cover” shots; even Cassidy (4 years old) quickly recognized the basic rules of photo composition.

    By asking the player to take pictures of specific birds (pictured at the corner of the screen for the non-reader), the kids learned how to narrow down characteristics to identify a bird. Cassidy would carefully scrutinize the picture-  the bird pictures are fairly realistic, by the way-  and decide that bird she needed to find had a red chest (robin). Then when she saw a red-winged blackbird or a woodpecker, she knew to ignore it, it didn’t have the marks that she was looking for.

    What made this game really fun for all three of my kids- and that’s a fairly serious age range, 4 through 11- was the capability to create and name your own birds, write their descriptions and release them into the “wild”. My hooligans, of course, named their birds things like “Dad Stinks” and “Moonchomp” (Moonchomp eats only moons and suns) and this amusement alone will keep them going back to the game, even though they’ve beaten it.

    Importantly, this invented bird section is completely separate from the main part of the game; there’s no “Death Star” birds hobnobbing with cardinals and hummingbirds.

    From a mom perspective, I’d like to point out that the accompanying music was nice and soothing, with bird calls in the background, and I didn’t want to throw anything after listening to it for an hour. It would have been nice if there was an option to have text read aloud- Cass can’t read yet, and Maverick is sometimes a slow reader; but this didn’t seem to diminish anybody’s enjoyment.

    Is this game a substitute for going outside with the kids and doing your own birdwatching? No, of course not. But it did teach the kids some bird species and calls they didn’t know yet, and prompted them to voluntarily take the camera out to “capture” some birds (as opposed to me dragging them out with me). Birding has been legitimized and is somewhat cool again around here. For a kid just developing an interest in birds, I’d say this game would be ideal.

    Sure, I’d rather they spent all their time reading and painting and playing outside. On a rainy Sunday, though, all they want to do is play video games. I figure time spent playing Snapshot Adventures: Secret of Bird Island together, as a team, is time they’re not playing Sly Cooper: Band of Thieves (the most annoying game in the world). And really, that’s good enough for me.

  • Everything I Do is Wrong (Weekend Reading)

    Derive happiness in oneself from a good day’s work,
    from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.

    -Henry Matisse

    Some calm, misty mornings around here, these last few days.

    Meanwhile, I feel like I’m a speeded-up black and white silent film, a Buster Keaton maybe; a comedy of errors. I keep messing up the simplest things. I am fatally behind on emails, projects, life. Everything I do is wrong.

    Ever feel that way?

    Anyway, some weekend reading for you. Enjoy!

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    Is the recession hurting our health? Let’s see, Spam sales are up, McDonald’s, Dominos, KFC, all up. Gym memberships down by 20%. What’s wrong with this picture? What’s the real cost?

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    I have one real vice, one siren call that makes me put on shoes and brush my hair and go to the store…and it is Pepsi. I know, it’s sad, and I’m working on it, I swear. It looks like Pepsi is switching out the (mercury-tainted) high fructose corn syrup and replacing it with real, actual sugar. Does that make it any better?

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    The average age for a first cell phone in the UK is 8 years old. Ha, don’t tell my kids… I told them they could get cell phones when they were old enough to get a job to pay for them.

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    People are out of their minds. I’m sure you heard about the lady whose chimpanzee ripped her friend’s face off (I was unlucky enough to be subjected to the 911 call on the news) and was shot dead.

    You may or may not know that the chimp’s mother also was gunned down.

    Now the Huffington Post reports that there are about 7,000 pet freaking tigers in America. I repeat. People are out of their minds.

    Jeff pointed out that probably lots of pet chimpanzees have their lives end in violence. Because they are not meant to be pets, not meant to be kept in captivity, not meant to be mated and bred, not meant to be forced to live among a different species. Primates have families and societies and cultures and they probably just… snap at some point. I mean, wouldn’t you?

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    OK, back to the economy. I really liked this article from Jim Randel which advises that “young people should not invest in stocks, real estate or even savings beyond a reasonable safety cushion. They should invest in themselves.” Love to hear your thoughts about this.

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    Ugh, ugh, ugh, yuck, yuck, yuck. Just when I thought my daughter might be growing past the Dora the Explorer stage, Nickelodeon and Mattel forge an evil partnership and create tweenage Dora and friends.

    This groundbreaking initiative, featuring fashion dolls and accessories, is a completely new brand extension that empowers girls to influence and change the lives of Dora and her new friends. It’s innovative, diverse, wholesome, bi-lingual and entertaining.

    It’s sickening, that’s what it is.

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    Here’s another one I wrote for Eco Child’s Play: Remembering When Scholastic Meant Good Books. This has had the most pageviews of all my articles, meaning that many more people in the world know what a booknerd I am and always have been.

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    I know I spend a lot of time here reminding people to donate to their local food banks, but the need doesn’t go away when the holidays end. Food banks were hit hard recently by the whole peanut butter recall and were forced to throw away thousands of pounds of food containing tainted peanut products.

    Remember, a dollar can pay for several meals because food banks buy in tremendous bulk. Every dollar counts.

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    Finally, because I couldn’t resist:
    Drunk Pantsless Man Steals Elderly Lady’s Diapers.

    Yep.

    That’s all, folks.

    Wokka wokka wokka.