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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.

If you are not sure how to spell a word, then you had better hedge your bets and spel each werd differently eech time. That way, you are shur to get at least one of them right.

Maybe it’s “flys”?

or maybe it’s “flies”?

Machine Design is a magazine that is sent to about 180,000 engineers. MD has been around for a while, and I’m pretty sure it has some editors on staff.  The magazine that came today had a nice little article about Urban Aeronautics‘ Mule, an aircraft that uses fans instead of wings or rotors.

I noticed the misspelling (or typo?) on the cover right away. I figured either someone turned off the spell checker or maybe that is how the British or French spell it (like “tyre”). Then I turned to the article and saw that “flies” was spelled correctly there. Looks to me like this one slipped past the editors.

Alpha is in the public school system and he is required, by state law, to have his immunizations.

I am writing about this topic today because he does not, by our choice, have all his immunizations. Nor will he have all the shots the state requires. So the school sent us a letter informing us that our child is not in compliance with state law and we needed to sign a waiver if we want him to stay in school.

I don’t know why they say he is required to have his immunizations since we can object to any or all of the shots. They should call them recommended, not required.

• “Required” would be non-negotiable, I would think.
• “Recommended” would be negotiable.

Since they are all negotiable, “recommended” makes sense.

I do have a theory as to why all the school forms say “required”. If the forms called them “recommended”, more parents might realize that all those shots are not needed. And then they might have more parents refusing some of the vaccinations. And then the authority of the government vaccination program might be questioned. And we can’t have that.

I filled out the form, indicating which vaccines we were waiving (whichever ones he didn’t have, that’s what we waived). Of course, the only ones he didn’t have were the ones we didn’t want him to have: polio and hepatitis B.

The interesting part was the claim on the waiver form.

I had read a website (it’s on the internet; therefore it must be true) that said to be careful what you sign on these waiver forms. If you acknowledge, in writing, putting your child at risk, that may be a “confession”. Now that may be a bit of a stretch, going from waiving a vaccine to having the state take your kids.

But why not err on the side of caution? What the website said to do was to modify the form to match your take on things.

I thought “Why not give it a shot? The worst that can happen is they’ll reject the form and send us another letter.” (pun not intended but quite clever if I do say so myself) So I found the part of the form that irked me and fixed it so I actually did agree with it. The part of the form that didn’t sit well with me was in bold on the form:

“By signing this waiver, you acknowledge that you are placing your child and others at risk of serious illness should he or she contract a disease that could have been prevented through proper vaccination.“

We decided against polio and hep. B because of the low risk. The entire Western Hemisphere of the world has been certified polio-free for the last 15 years. Hepatitis B is transmitted by morally-objectionable activities, none of which our kindergartner should even know about, much less be involved in. It’s the same objection many people have about Gardasil. If, later in life, Alpha wants to travel to India or work with blood, then he can get the polio or hep B vaccines. But until then, his risk is very low.

I felt that the form did not recognize that the risk of serious illness could be low and that it wasn’t really putting my child at risk. But the worst part about the form was that it claimed I would be putting other people at risk.

What?

Other people should not be at risk if my child is not vaccinated. They could be at risk for one of two reasons:

1. If vaccinated people are at risk for a disease because someone else wasn’t vaccinated, that means the vaccine is pretty much useless.
2. If the other people are not vaccinated, then it was their choice to be unvaccinated that put them at risk.

Neither case involves my child. I did not want to acknowledge something that did not make sense to me, so I altered the form.

Now it says

“By signing this waiver, you acknowledge that you are placing your child at low risk of serious illness should he or she contract a disease that could have been prevented through proper vaccination.”

I am no longer liable for other people’s illnesses. And I am not agreeing that my choice is risky. There, now I am more comfortable with it. All the school will do is file it away with my child’s permanent record. I think they don’t care what’s on the form as long as they have something to show the state.

What is the difference between vaccinations and immunizations anyway?

As you may have noticed, I changed the background picture of SBS again. Back to the fall shot of leaves in the yard.

Football has resumed, and has brought with it a thousand pleasant memories of the start of school. I will again be updating the Football Happiness Calculator, so check your mood on Mondays throughout the fall and early winter. Or don’t. I’m not keeping track.

But in the interest of summarizing my summer (would that be summerizing?), I give you these pictures.

First up, a day at the beach.

We had a week at one beach and another week (in a different month) at another beach. My kids had swimming lessons at the beginning of summer, and showed remarkable improvement from before the lessons to after. You can tell it was remarkable improvement because I just made a remark about it. So now my kids wander into the water without life jackets sometimes. They spent most of their time in the sand, building moats, castles, and other formations that were easily destroyed by wind, water, or mischievous cousins.

Next, a parade.

Regular readers of this site will note my displeasure of sirens in parades, and what better picture to show that than this? This picture was taken about a month and a half after I wrote about toning down the sirens. And I didn’t tell my kids to do that. They just instinctively know that loud sirens are bad for them. Just like any adult should also know. Or maybe my kids learned it from watching me.

Finally, the quintessential summer day. I’ll have to look up the etymology of quintessential. Mainly, what does “most representative” have to do with necessary fives?

Anyway, I like this picture because it shows what a good summer day should have. Swimsuits, a sprinkler, and freezy pops. This was one of the hottest days of the year and we, just like a million other people, thought we should go to the local water park. Since the water park was filled to capacity and had a waiting list (i.e. line down the sidewalk of people standing around and praying for people inside the water park to leave), we just went to the back yard and let the kids play while we did a lot of nothing. My nothing involved a nap on a hammock.

Okay, I looked up quintessential. And I got nothing. But it did point me to quintessence, which had a lot. It does mean “fifth element”, and is not related to the 1997 Bruce Willis movie (as someone at work once told me, “I’ll save you some time. Don’t go see the movie – the fifth element is love.”). But according to ancient philosophies, the fifth element is not love, it is ether (or aether or æther but no one really uses the æ thing anymore, much less knows how to pronounce it).

The first four classical elements are earth, water, air, and fire – all natural items seen on our planet. Ether was for the rest of the universe. I haven’t figured out how Earth, Wind, and Fire fits in here and why they shun water.