Some Blog Site

or “What’s Wrong with a Pint?”

With no further introduction, ladies and gentlemen, I give you this:

An Open Letter to Bottled-Water Companies

The cost of water in a bottle of water is around 5 cents. So the average company might save a quarter of a penny per bottle. For 2007, the top brand was Dasani, at about 22% market share. The US consumes around 40 billion water bottles a year, so Dasani’s share would be at least 8 billion water bottles per year. At a quarter of a penny per bottle, that would be $20 million in savings per year for one company.

What do they have to lose?

In cooperation with LaanyKidsMom, here is my entry for this week.

Where did I find joy this week?
The start of Christmas

One of the signs that I am on Christmas break is that my wife makes a hearty breakfast for us all.

That brought me joy on Christmas Eve morning. Not pictured are the scrambled eggs and the oranges. Yes, there are both blueberry pancakes and chocolate-chip pancakes. No, that wasn’t my plate – that was the serving plate.

What else?

We opened our presents.

I enjoyed the presents that I got, but it was even more fun watching the kids open their presents and seeing their genuine smiles.

What else?

Our church’s Christmas Eve candlelight service

Only the last few carols were sung by candlelight. The first 50 or so minutes of songs and readings were done by normal incandescent light. How can you not like a service full of Christmas carols? Not just Christmas songs, but real carols that are all hymn-y and stuff.

One more

Why Christmas?

God became man and dwelt among us. The joy comes not from knowing what He did or how He did it; the joy comes from knowing why He did it and that He did it for me.

Have a Merry and Joyful Christmas!

Gamma has 4 teeth now, and he has learned how to use them. Maybe it’s 4 and a half.

Here is his pacifier. Or rather, here is a pacifier that used to be his but is now in the trash.

Pop Quiz!

This teeth-shredded pacifier is :

1. Evidence that silicone pacifiers are better than latex pacifiers.
2. Evidence that old pacifiers should be discarded and not handed down to the next child.
3. A very good reason why the weaning process should start when the child gets teeth.
4. All of the above.

Time’s up. Hand in your answer using the comments form, please.

I may or may not have said the following line this week:

“Take that plunger off your brother’s head!”

Thanks a lot, Big Idea Productions.

Next time you need to create a superhero character, please make his accessory thingy something cleaner, more hygienic. Remember that thousands, even millions, of children will be watching that character and some will try to copy him.

Why plungers? Why something that is so unsanitary? And why on his head, of all places?

Why not toothbrushes?
Or foaming-soap dispensers?

Think of how he could clean up crime or scrub out injustice.

I was talking to a co-worker who was born and raised in an Eastern Bloc country – one of the old communist countries next to Russia. He said that he, and everyone else he knows from there who is now in the US, cannot understand why Black Friday is so popular.

“People wake up so early and stand in line just to get a good deal on a gift! Why is that fun?”

He will not do that. He said that for so many years that was daily life. His family had to stand in line and wait just for their needs – bread, milk, eggs, etc. – so now that he is in the US he appreciates the availability of things.

Standing in line for shopping is a bad thing and a sign of bad government / oppression / etc. and he will not do that just to save a few dollars. The country was communist while he was there, and standing in line for goods is not a pleasant memory for him.

I thought that was rather enlightening.

Remember that when you’re doing your Christmas shopping and you are waiting in line voluntarily – there are plenty of people who are waiting in line for their survival. Appreciate your freedom and your prosperity – something for which you can be thankful.

Continuing the thought from yesterday’s post :

I am always amazed that people still believe that what they watch on TV does not affect their behavior. Or rather, I am amazed that they think it can’t affect anyone’s behavior. There are people who think that what people watch is just entertainment and therefore cannot affect how they live.

The saying is that Art imitates life, not life imitates art (with apologies to any blog by that name). And there is the famous quote that if violence on TV causes violence on the streets, then why doesn’t comedy on TV cause comedy on the streets?

To which I respond : comedy on TV does cause comedy on the streets.

Back when Seinfeld was in its heyday, most people would watch it and then whatever phrase was the most popular phrase of the show became the most popular phrase in the country for the next week. There was a lot more comedy on the streets, copying whatever it was that was on TV.

Don’t say that comedy on TV doesn’t cause comedy on the streets.

And there are multiple examples of people being injured or worse by trying something they saw in a movie. How many of those does it take before someone will admit that maybe what you put into your soul via your eyes can affect how you live or what you do?

If what we see and hear on a regular basis does not affect us, then why do advertisers pay so much for commercials or product placements? If there is a study that shows people are immune to such influences, then a consultant could save companies a lot of money by eliminating their TV/film advertising budgets.

This fact of life is more easily seen by parents. My kids recently watched Kung Fu Panda. For the rest of the day after the movie, did they behave as they behaved before the movie? Not even close. They were jumping, kicking, and swinging things in their efforts (conscious or sub-conscious) to emulate what they had seen on screen. In this case, that lasted all of one day and they were back to normal the next day.

But what if their eyes are fed a steady diet of violence? How will they behave? What would happen to the average level of violence in their thoughts? in their actions?

What if their eyes and ears are fed whatever is on TV? How will they treat their parents after several years of watching sitcoms? How will they treat women when they are older?

Certainly, there are many people who can watch things and not be affected. And there are plenty of people who will do bad things without having been influenced to do so by a TV show or movie.

After all, sin is not new.

But why promote it?

I want to watch football and I want my children to be able to watch football with me. I have come to realize that although football is safe for young eyes to watch, the commercials are not.

I‘ll let the kids watch the first bit of Saturday night football or Sunday night football before they go to bed. As soon as the station switches from the game to commercials, I grab the remote and have it ready to switch channels in case something bad comes on. They already don’t like going to bed. I don’t want some movie preview to scare them right before bedtime.

Movie previews are the worst when it comes to scary stuff. When it comes to anything else inappropriate, the TV station’s shows are the worst offenders. They have previews for whatever dramas or sitcoms they want to promote for the coming week, and the previews are meant to catch your attention. That means they don’t always show things that are what I want to see or what I want my kids to see.

I figured that went with the territory of the prime-time games.

I figured that the afternoon game would be safe to leave on commercial while I stepped away for a minute.

Alas, it was not. I forgot that it was Halloween. Somehow that made it okay to show disturbing images to young children during daylight hours… I came back to find my 4-year-old watching a TV screen that was showing people at a local (to whatever game it was) Halloween party. The costumes were very elaborate and professional looking, but also very grotesque and scary.

Now, whenever I leave the room during a football game or any other show, I turn the TV to the nothing-but-local-weather-not-even-commercials channel, one of the secondary digital channels here. I just can’t trust the TV stations’ judgment when it comes to content. Or maybe it’s really the advertising company that I can’t trust, but the end effect is the same – not watching commercials.

I got to thinking – why not rate the commercials? And then require a warning at the beginning of each commercial so that the viewer would have a chance to avoid it? They do that with normal TV programs already. The catch is that commercials are so short that the offensive material often starts very quickly, so the warning would need to last long enough. I thought that the worse the content was, the longer the warning would need to be.

• G would not need any warning
• PG would need a 1-second warning
• PG-13 would need a 2-second warning
• R would need a 3-second warning

While that’s a start, it’s insufficient. What if I’m changing channels and stumble into the middle of a commercial? The warning at the beginning wouldn’t help me then. Scratch that plan…

What about limiting a commercial’s rating to the program’s rating? A commercial’s rating should not be able to any worse (where G is good and R is bad) than the rating of the program during which it airs. What’s the point of rating a show as appropriate for children when at least 8 of the 30 minutes (that’s at least 26%) of the show is unchecked advertisements?

That would require a change to the broadcasting system, because not only are commercials not currently rated but sports and news shows are also not rated. My suggestion would be to make sports default to PG and news default to PG-13. If a network knows ahead of time that a sports show requires something other than PG (wresting, Superbowl halftime show, etc.), then it could set the actual rating of the show to the right level.

Once the rating of commercials is in place, then you could either trust the show will be safe (i.e. the rating will be what you expect throughout that whole block of time) or you could setup the V-Chip and know that offending or graphic or frightening commercials would not make it onto your TV screen. The V-Chip doesn’t work if something is not rated, so today’s V-Chip program ignores news and sports and commercials. Those gaps need to be closed somehow.

This blog post might not do much, or even affect the FCC or even my local TV station, but at least I feel better now. I just want my kids’ eyes and minds safe until they can discern what is good.

And I still want them safe after that too.