Seriously though - I love my wife and love the amazing person she is and how she’s stuck with me through all my shenanigans. She’s also an awesome mother to Damien, sweet jr high pastor, great nap taker, sharer of big olaf sundaes, a great friend to others, a guitar hero rock chick, a great world travel partner, a beautiful karaoke singer, an awesome sister, a slow reader and most importantly (and my favorite picture of her), a protector of wildlife habitats.

Happy 22nd (+ or - 10) birthday love!

“Why does Forest Grove’s website kinda suck now? What is this annoying “I bought my website at monstertemplates.com” flash menu doing on here?”

I offer no further comment because of something someone told me about saying nice things and if you can’t then you shouldn’t have a blog. But you can leave a comment if you’d like.

It’s interesting to see how different personalities are shown while playing the games. Though it would be good for folks not familiar with the sound effects to know what game the kids are actually playing (you can find it out by going to the photographer’s website and clicking through the photos of the project) because I’d guess that it would have a pretty big effect on the kind of reactions you’re getting. If I’m beating Carlos in a game of soccer I’m going to be reacting completely different than if I’m playing a game like Fable 2.

Before those of you who don’t get video games start feeling too high and mighty, I’d think about how you look when you’re taking in whatever form of entertainment you enjoy (i.e. watching tv, watching a movie, listening to music… even reading a book?).

(The games listed on the photo section of the site are: Grand Theft Auto IV, Call of Duty 4, Tekken, & Star Wars Battlefront)

Reviewing Chinese Democracy is not like reviewing music. It’s more like reviewing a unicorn. Should I primarily be blown away that it exists at all? Am I supposed to compare it to conventional horses? To a rhinoceros? Does its pre-existing mythology impact its actual value, or must it be examined inside a cultural vacuum, as if this creature is no more (or less) special than the remainder of the animal kingdom? I’ve been thinking about this record for 15 years; during that span, I’ve thought about this record more than I’ve thought about China, and maybe as much as I’ve thought about the principles of democracy.

I don’t personally have high hopes for this album - but there’s a small voice inside my head (I think it’s the 1994 version of me in fact) keeps saying “that it’s gonna be good, Axl’s a musical genius. Remember how many times you sang/played along to November Rain??”

I think it’s safe to say that the future has arrived. Our flying cars should be arriving sometime next year. And it’s no coincidence that the trailer for the new Star Trek movie was released at the same time.

Direct link to video

We’ve been adding content almost daily (it will probably slow to 3 times a week eventually) so there’s lots of stuff to check out if you’re new to the whole Mac world. There’s scintillating posts on such topics as:

• Switching to Mac 101
• Which MacBook should I buy?
• CTRL-ALT-DELETE for the Mac
• Email Attachments Quickly

So this is fair warning to anyone contacting me for Mac support - your question may end up on a website for all to see. (We’ll ask your permission first of course) So think carefully before you email me wondering how to turn on your Mac.

Visit us at www.aboutthismac.com.

Like that.

I’m honestly not sure.

Hit this link for more great band shots from the 70’s.

Via boingboing.net

A third development that pushed people into overparenting, Marano and others believe, is the “brain plasticity” research published in the nineteen-nineties. This research said that, while the infant brain is, in part, the product of genes, that endowment is just the clay; after birth, it is “sculpted” by the child’s experience, the amount of stimulation he receives, above all in the first three years of life. That finding prompted many programs aimed at stimulating babies whose mothers, for whatever reason (often poverty), seemed likely to neglect them. Social workers drove off to homes deemed at risk, to play with the new baby. But upper-middle-class parents—and marketers interested in them—also read about the brain-plasticity findings, and figured that, if some stimulation is good, more is better. (Hence Baby Einstein.) Later research has provided no support for this. The conclusion, in general, is that the average baby’s environment provides all the stimuli he or she needs.

Marano thinks that the infant-stimulation craze was a scandal. She accepts the idea of brain plasticity, but she believes that the sculpting goes on for many years past infancy and that its primary arena should be self-stimulation, as the child ventures out into the world. While Mother was driving the kid nuts with the eight-hundredth iteration of “This Little Piggy,” she should have been letting him play on his own. Marano assembles her own arsenal of neurological research, guaranteed to scare the pants off any hovering parent. As children explore their environment by themselves—making decisions, taking chances, coping with any attendant anxiety or frustration—their neurological equipment becomes increasingly sophisticated, Marano says. “Dendrites sprout. Synapses form.” If, on the other hand, children are protected from such trial-and-error learning, their nervous systems “literally shrink.”

It is crazy how accurate this is with what I saw while working at the University as well as working with youth at our church. So many parents are sheltering and protecting their kids from failure that when their kids actually do try and fail at something it leads to a huge meltdown and inevitably the parents turn their blame to the youth pastor, salesperson, etc. instead of looking at what they have done in raising an insecure 17 year old who’s go the emotional stability of a 8 year old.

In 2007, officials revealed that five per cent of applicants to Oxford and Cambridge had embellished their application forms with material taken off the Web. Explaining why they wanted to study chemistry, two hundred and thirty-four applicants cited word for word the same example, ‘burning a hole in my pajamas at age eight,’ as a formative experience.”

I could just keep quoting this but obviously you need to just go ready it if you’re interested by this point. Here’s one last one that I know more than a few teachers will identify with:

“My mother never read to me, and my father took me to no ballgames,” Epstein writes. They took no photographs, avowed no love, of him. This, he says, was the general approach to child-rearing in the nineteen-forties and fifties, when he grew up, and children benefitted: they developed into regular people, “going about the world’s business.” As for the steamy devotion shown by later generations of parents, what it has produced are snotty little brats filled with “anger at such abstract enemies as The System,” and intellectual lightweights, certain (because their parents told them so) that their every thought is of great consequence. Epstein says that, when he was teaching, he was often tempted to write on his students’ papers: “D-. Too much love in the home.”

As the writer mentions in the closing of the article, the over-parenting issue is one that’s easy to sensationalize because it’s something easy to see and pick on. There are a ton of teen-agers volunteering and willing to help out with their community - not all of them are sitting at home waiting for mommy and daddy to bring them their sippy cups.