Greatest pairing of book and reader ever: Go the F**k to Sleep, read by Samuel L. Jackson.

A Mountain I'm Willing to Die On: "If our goal is to be tolerant of people who are different than we are, Chase, then we really are aiming quite low. Traffic jams are to be tolerated. People are to be celebrated."

If you haven’t already seen the full PDF being e-mailed around, Go the Fuck to Sleep is awesome. Will definitely be picking up a copy, and will shelve it next to All My Friends Are Dead.

This is going to come in very handy: 101 10-minute recipes from The Minimalist.

Poignant, how you can watch maturity (and loss of exuberance) develop before your eyes: Natalie Time Lapse (birth to 10 years old in 1 minute 25 seconds).

Wow, Hollywood had brainwashed me too. I had no idea that drowning doesn’t look like drowning:

The Instinctive Drowning Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D., is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents) – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening (source: CDC).

Definitely click through. Fascinating, and the stuff of parental nightmares. (via kottke)

When my daughters start dating, and we talk about it, I may lead with this, what boyfriends and girlfriends search for on Google. That’s it in a nutshell, right there. Sigh.

I printed out The Science of Success for bedside reading, but until I get to it the thing that grabbed my eye from Jason Kottke’s excerpt was this:

With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail — but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.

Shit, no pressure! I hope I have dandelion kids.

Jon Ronson’s fantastic parenting story starts like so:

My eight-year-old son, Joel, comes into my office to ask if there’s a worse swearword than fuck. “No,” I say.

There’s a silence. “You’re lying,” he says.

“There’s none worse than fuck,” I say.

Joel narrows his eyes. “I know you’re lying,” he says. He leaves the room.

(via tmn)

Andre Agassi on hating tennis. He had to face the dragon (a souped up ball machine modified by his father that would shoot at 110 mph) at seven (!) years old:

My father has deliberately made the dragon fearsome. He’s given it an extra-long neck of aluminum tubing, and a narrow aluminum head, which recoils like a whip every time the dragon fires. He’s also set the dragon on a base several feet high and moved it flush against the net, so the dragon towers above me. I’m small for my age, but when standing before the dragon, I look tiny. Feel tiny. Helpless.

My father wants the dragon to tower over me not simply to command my attention and respect. He wants balls that shoot from the dragon’s mouth to land at my feet as if dropped from an airplane. The trajectory makes the balls nearly impossible to return in a conventional way: I need to hit every ball on the rise, or else it will bounce over my head. But even that’s not enough for my father. Hit earlier, he yells. Hit earlier.

My father yells everything twice, sometimes three times, sometimes 10. Harder, he says, harder. But what’s the use? No matter how hard I hit a ball, no matter how early, another ball comes back. Every ball I send across the net joins the thousands that already cover the court. Not hundreds. Thousands. They roll toward me in perpetual waves. I have no room to turn, to step, to pivot. I can’t move without stepping on a ball—yet I can’t step on a ball, because my father won’t bear it. Step on one of my father’s tennis balls and he’ll howl as if you stepped on his eyeball.

Holy crap.

The Big Picture has a nice collection of Easter shots. I really like the eggs in the first two pictures. While we’re on the subject of Easter, Amelia had a stroke of genius this year, suggesting we do the egg hunt in the dark, kids armed with flashlights. It’s at least twice as much fun as a daytime hunt, and even eggs in plain sight can take awhile to find. Give it try next year.

Two links ripped from Lone Gunman’s review of his first year: Lies I’ve Told My 3 Year Old Recently and Conversations My Parents Must Have Had While Planning to Raise a Child.

I’ve tried to ignore Pixar’s gender problem because their movies are so damn good, but this post makes that pretty much impossible. It’s not about any one movie, but about the body of work as a whole. Consider Finding Nemo:

Father/son bonding film featuring a male clownfish (Marlin) and his son (Nemo). I’m all for movies about fathers and sons and, in fact, this is my favorite of all Pixar movies. Still, Nemo doesn’t put female characters front and center, and it probably shouldn’t, considering the subject matter. If it were only one male-dominated movie in a well-balanced oeuvre, I wouldn’t have a problem. Female characters: Nemo’s dead mom (Coral), Dory, Peach, Deb, Darla.

Ally score: 2/10. Points for having an important female character. Not too many, though, since she is squarely in the selfless helper/moral center role. Should I give points for making 2 of the 8 fish in Nemo’s tank female? Should I just be happy that any are female and not quibble on the 25% issue? Also, the elementary school teacher fish is male. Maybe because he’s a science teacher.

I’m still going to see Up in theaters, and will take my daughters, dammit.

“Great, now I have guilt!”

(via kottke)

Announcing the first-ever victory by a parent in the face of the neverending “why?”: A Dialogue With Sarah, Aged 3: In Which it is Shown That if Your Dad is a Chemistry Professor, Asking “Why” Can be Dangerous.

I love how long it takes before he gets to “that’s complicated.”

Focusing on MySpace in the Lori Drew case is to take your eye off the ball:

Let’s be clear. Megan Meier’s suicide is a tragedy. The fact that it was precipitated by bullying is horrific. And the fact that an adult was involved is downright heinous. But by centering the conversation around MySpace, people lose track of the core problems here.

Interesting insights on bullying, parenting, technology and their intersections (and conflations).

Must everything be so complicated? Even milk? I don't really care so much for myself; at 35 my lifetime diet has probably so loaded with plastics, teflon, hormones, antibiotics, and pesticides that I'm doomed. Or maybe I'm waterproof, bulletproof, disease-proof, and feared by mosquitoes everywhere (or at least boll weevils). Regardless, I try to protect my daughters from that stuff, as I have a crackpot theory that girls are hitting puberty earlier because of all the hormones in the food.