Rules for eating and such rendered in the style of the Old Testament. I first read this 10+ years ago and it still makes me almost die from laughing so hard. Anyone with small children will understand. My favorite line is, “Leave the cat alone. For what has the cat done that you should so afflict it with tape?”
So… I guess you heard that the Giants won the World Series? It was an amazing series and I’m thankful that I got to watch/listen to all or part of 6 of the 7 games. (I watched all of Games 1-3, saw a portion of Game 4 in addition to my mom checking the score on her smartphone during dinner on Saturday, listened to Game 5 on my long drive home on Sunday, and got to watch/listen to over half of Game 7 last night.) I’m impressed that Madison Bumgarner pitched in Game 1, Game 5, and then 5 innings of Game 7 last night. (So is Jason Motte, my favorite closer with the St. Louis Cardinals. Real classy, Jason. It’s why I follow you.)
To the Royals fans who read: you guys have a kick-@$$ team and you made my boys work for that World Series victory. I wouldn’t doubt that y’all give the MLB a run for their money next year because Game 7 could have gone either way. And seriously… your team had the Kansas City Symphony play the national anthem one night and had one of your opera stars sing it the next night — y’all are classy. 🙂
Yet another baseball Quick Take. One interesting trend this season has been “Hunter Pence signs”. It was a weird trolling thing started by some Mets fans this past summer and it went viral. At all of the away games, fans of the home team bring the signs. There s a Twitter collection of them here.
There’s even a rap video based on the signs:
One of the few times I miss having a TV and cable. I’m kind of bummed that I likely won’t be able to watch Election Night stuff from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Apparently, it’s going to be fun.
The difference between the media in the USA and the media in Canada. Can we just say that the Canadian media won on this one?
(And for all the people who are going to tell me that I hate my country and should move to Canada, we did try in 2009.)
This one goes out to all the moronic conspiracy theorists claiming that vaccines cause autism. Actually, there are more than 100 genes that contribute. That many genes are a bit much to be turned on by the body’s response to a vaccine.
And for the morons who are citing a bad reading of a Canadian study linking the MMR vaccine to febrile seizures, you might want to read the part of the study which mentions the seizures occur most often in kids who had been selectively vaccinated or on delayed schedules. There’s also the fact that some kids get these seizures around ages 2.5 to 4 years old and said seizure is the first sign that the kid has a fever. I should know… Daniel is/was one of them and we made 3 trips to the ER for them in the year after his third birthday. (One of those trips was actually the night before his third birthday.) It’s terrifying to watch your kid seize like that, but it sure beats watching your kids on a ventilator because your delusion and paranoia over pseudoscience landed them in the hospital with a completely preventable disease.
Wow… a somewhat balanced look at Common Core. I don’t love everything Simcha Fisher has to say but her piece on Common Core was very balanced. I hear a lot of complaining about the math portion, but the way they’re doing math actually makes a great deal of sense to me. There was a teacher who taught my elementary school class how to do mental math, how math works, and how numbers relate to each other. This means that I have a better than average grasp of the metric system and scientific notation, both of which make infinitely more sense than the English/imperial system used in the United States.
As for literature, Simcha mentioned that they tend to err on the side of non-fiction which is fine with me. I always read things that interested me and my parents didn’t have to introduce me to good literature because I generally found it on my own.
Here’s something for Halloween. I found this piece on the history of witchcraft to be pretty interesting. (Then again, my college degree dealt with this sort of thing, especially in the history and anthropology classes I took.) She’s not endorsing the practice of Wicca or anything (and she mentions that Wicca is a 20th century invention) and she makes some interesting points about cultures in which witchcraft is still an excuse for stuff going wrong. It’s definitely worth a read.
For more Quick Takes, visit Jen at ConversionDiary.Com.
