Church: Prologue, "This Is a Song" @4:20 PM
On a Sunday last fall, I was working downstairs with the space heater on and the office doors closed when the phone rang. The caller ID read DAN KOIS, which meant that it was my wife, upstairs, calling our home phone from my cell phone. As is often the case on weekends, we were trading carefully-negotiated Work Periods. I was writing while she looked after the children; later, I would take the kids while she worked. Later still, we would maybe eat dinner together and then put the kids in the bath.
I answered the phone. In the background I could hear crying. Alia said, "You have to come upstairs right now." READ MORE 93
Underparenting: Words! @12:05 PM
"Fuck!" the kid said, from the back seat of the car. They pick these things up from everywhere, the two-and-a-half-year-old children do. The child is like a runaway threshing machine rattling across the landscape of language, ingesting and scattering everything in its path: grain, chaff, string beans, feed buckets, chopped-up bits of mailboxes. How much of what your child says is understandable? the developmental survey form asks. You mean articulate? Or comprehensible? "The greens are taking care of the eights," he says. Or: "Welcome to Metro." Or: "I want a toaster in my ear." READ MORE 20
The Prank Review, with Juli Weiner: An Introduction @12:31 PM
From time to time, Juli Weiner will review pranks and their aftermaths. We begin, as all good things should, with an introduction.
My sophomore year of college, winter break was thirty-one days long. The first part of the break I went on a trip, but from the end of December to the end-of-the-middle of January, I had exactly zero plans, goals or tasks for my time in suburban Philadelphia. While I was on vacation, my friends Dan and Asa returned from their own schools. By the time I got back, they had both already received citations for public urination. They too were very bored. We realized though that their arrests would probably have made the police blotter in the local paper, the Ambler Gazette. Eventually, we found a copy of the paper in my parents' recycling bin. Our scheme was to cut out the blurb, sneak into our high school, and tack it on the bulletin board reserved for clippings of alums and students in the news. The point being, our graduating class had been, to date, extravagantly undistinguished. The only students and alums ever "in the news" were the ones who sent in their wedding announcements. Which, come to think of it, would be a much funnier thing to have in the paper or on the bulletin board than a citation for public urination. READ MORE 16
Underparenting with Tom Scocca: Stroller-Bullying on the Red Line @11:58 AM
It was a mistake to get on the Metro train with the kid riding on my shoulders. I should have taken him down and buckled him into the stroller out on the platform, even if it meant missing the train. But I had taken the wrong branch on the decision-making tree, and there I was, standing up in a packed train car at evening rush hour, with one hand on the kid's ankle to hold him in place, and another hand on the overhead handrail, which meant there was no hand remaining to put on the stroller handle as the train jerked into motion and the clumsily half-set foot brake came off, sending the stroller wobbling away from us, bumping through the crowd. Sorry, excuse me, sorry! READ MORE 10
The "Family Bed" @4:56 PM
The beeping came on as the backdrop to a predawn dream—beep-beep-beep—and then, mhmm, is that the alarm clock?—beep-beep-beep—but too faint, unless we'd dropped our alarm clock under the bed and then dropped a comforter over it—beep-beep-beep—so it was maybe the bus, outside, idling, somehow generating a high-frequency overtone to the rumbling—beep-beep-beep-beep—or was it hrmm just the pulse in my ears—tinnitus, the blood surge—beep-beep-beep—hmrff NO, it was definitely, somewhere, an ALARM CLOCK, but— READ MORE 14
YouTube and Children: A Deadly, Awful, Horrifying Combination @2:05 PM
"In a child's hands, YouTube is like a long hallway, with doors leading to ever stranger and more inexplicable places. You click on a Wiggles video, you find a link to a homemade video of an animated dinosaur lighting his own farts, which leads you to a link to a crude drawing of a volcanic ass, which leads you to news footage of Mount St. Helen's blowing up, which leads you to a clip of Helen Keller in 'The Miracle Worker' dubbed in Korean. It's like Six Degrees Of Fuckedupness." 3
That '70s Show Called "60 Minutes" @2:50 PM
"We had planned to do half a dozen headshops in the area, to see how many out of six would sell to the young people. But after three visits, the kids had made purchases in each store. So we decided to save a little money on bongs." From the CBS archives: a 1970 "60 Minutes" segment investigating marijuana use among high-schoolers in Moorestown, NJ. Some highlights: a visit to the Jolly Joint paraphernalia emporium, and a cute-as-a-button, braces-wearing blonde 17-year-old boasting about the 84 she scored on an English test she took under the influence ("You study high, you take a test high, you get high grades!"). Also Harry Reasoner pronouncing the word "bongs." 0
Harvard Grads "Relieved" There Are No Wall Street Jobs @5:24 PM
"At Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, undergraduates are relieved that they no longer have to fight the temptation of high-paying Wall Street jobs, President Drew Faust said." Oh are they! The fuck you say! [via] 17
