Jade and Jason

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing - Photo Books

Happy Cat

Zork may have problems, but he's happy.

jade

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing - Photo Books

jade

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing - Photo Books

JASON AND JADE

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing - Photo Books

Some time at home

Nemo's walk

Ella can't wait 'till Halloween!

NY

Bad day for shrimping, good day on the boat

Kids at Stennis Space Center

This is really a kid cool place. Plenty to do, see,
and try. And pretty good place to eat too.

Drug Dealers

What the heck is the deal with this country and drugs?

Okay, I understand the life prolonging, pain reducing, warm fuzzy, “let’s do our best to increase the quality of life”, use of drugs. There are justifiable reasons for drugs. I even understand the need for drugs in self induced situations…so you didn’t take care of yourself and now you have some health issue that requires medication…whether it’s because you envisioned yourself as an Olympic runner and ripped the ligaments out of your joints or you envisioned Twinkies becoming your existential god and lost your religion to diabetes. Drugs are used to control something that went wrong…even if what went wrong is that you didn’t use your head. But what the heck is the deal with Ritalin?

We have spent millions trying to control drug abuse. We are subjected to commercials that warn parents of their responsibility to “discuss” drugs with their little ones. We’ve even gone as far as to declare a war on freakin’ smokers because they are producing toxins that compete with the damage we are doing to our lungs with our factories and car emissions…and we all know that’s wrong…and smells way worse than cheap aftershave (not). So, if we are so anti drug, keep your lungs clean, and feel good about yourself so you can extend your life and be who you are, how comes every time a kid doesn’t act like the precocious kid on the latest popular sit com, we start asking his parents if they have considered Ritalin? What’s that?

I don’t understand. Half of the people I know have their kids on a drug; “he was to hyperactive in school”, “he just doesn’t have an attention span”, “he was failing, and we had to do something to help him”, “his behavior is spontaneous. He doesn’t think before he acts”.

Let me start out with explaining why kids aren’t called adults…it is primarily because they are kids. Kids, although often mistaken for small versions of adults, are not adults. They are larva. They are evolving. They are given to adults, driven around by adults, fed by adults, dressed by adults, and their schedules are dictated by adults because they require constant supervision and direction. That isn’t because we are superior and they are subject to our whims, it is because they are larva and, as larva will, they are discovering, paying attention to the multitude of stimuli in our loud aggressive little first world haven, and responding to their immediate needs. I guess if you want to call that “hyperactive”, or “lacking attention span”, or “spontaneous”, you can…but that would pretty much be the definition of childhood, wouldn’t it. As a matter of fact, although I am not a huge fan of kids, I would argue that the kids that seem to have missed that whole dorky stage of irresponsible, annoying behavior are the ones that scare me. They have no imagination. They don’t believe in any magic. It’s scary. Stop bragging. The children of the corn had the same qualities and they scare me too. These kids aren’t cute; they are lacking any of the spontaneous behaviors that occur during developmental stages…why are we picking on the normal larva?

Unfortunately, all the specialists that claim to be repulsed by any aggressive assault to the sanctity of childhood, act as if medicating children to get rid of that pesky inconvenient behavior without having to express any dissatisfaction with little Johnny is better than teaching little Johnny that, in the real world, little Johnny is going to grow into a big, strong man that needs to know that the cops will whip his butt if he tries to throw a tantrum when his drug deal doesn’t go down right. I guess you have to lose your baby fat before an ass whooping is more practical than drugs.

So, if you want to “help” your child because he is failing, the first step to recovery is recognizing that his teacher may be a lunatic…he is just a kid…he’s supposed to be a lunatic. Teachers that want to teach kids and think that kids learn from sitting quietly at a desk and acting like the kid on TV are not only dumb, they are dangerous. What’s worse is they will make you dangerous because, after flashing their college education in your face (a true feat in a country where every Tom, Dick, and Harry has a degree), they convince you that your child’s behavior is “abnormal”. Your child is in danger of…of…oh, of being a child. He should be asking for a cell phone by now! Do you really think all those 12 year old girls dressed like hookers started acting precocious when they were 11? Kids that are as screwed up as our don’t get there over night…this is years of conditioning and practice, and, let me point out that it is not the result of us listening to the experts…the inverse relationship between good old fashion whippings and crime are coincidence.

So, to sum things up, ‘cause I’m just trying to make sense of things here, the childhood specialists, who are trying to guide parents into creating active, creative, stimulating environments for their children, bring these children into a classroom at about five years of age, park them at a desk, clap their hands to get their attention and demand that the child hold their attention on a single figure for instruction. The teacher may create classroom “activity” that involves, well, maybe moving across the room to sit down and pay close attention to a story, or reaching across a table for a crayon. Then these “specialists” complain because these classroom trained kids come home a sit on a couch, focus on a box, and move across the room to, say, fiddle with an action figure or stretch across a coffee table for the remote, and you are somehow responsible for correcting the eight hours a day of brainwashing your kid receives in thinking this is good behavior and he should be medicated if he thinks your full of crap. If you don’t correct it fast, by the time Johnny is eight, he will be a little fat, and it will all be because you are a bad parent and Johnny is lazy.

Of course, credit where credit is due. Schools build gym into their curriculum. It is only natural that adults teach kids how to get in shape because kids were never in shape before adults took on this responsibility. Getting in shape is not something that happens in their generous 15 minutes of recess that will be wasted gossiping, fighting, or standing around. Getting in shape has to be made as boring as possible. First, the smallest, weakest kid has to be made to feel bad about himself (which you will be expected to correct in one of those “drug free” talks) by being chosen last for the team…because your child’s teacher wants to give young people the opportunity to exercise “authority”. This was important to the plot of “Lord of the Flies” too. The children in that story developed much like the street gangs we admire today…so it must work. Then your child will be instructed to run, or play kickball, or do jumping jacks, because calisthenics are always a viable alternative to doing something fun. And just so we can drive this home with your kid, we are going to grade little Johnny on these incredibly boring activities. He isn’t disinterested because this type of control takes the fun out of fun; he is disinterested because there is something wrong with him. As a matter of fact, if he can’t run as well as the other kids, he may have to do an extra lap…just like math teachers are allowed to tell the football player in high school that he is a dim wad and will be required to do an extra chapter of math…oh, wait, that won’t happen, my mistake. But, in gym, the subject matter is actually the punishment too. It all works out in the end. Anyway, little Johnny will be made to understand that he is a loser and all the happy little brainwashed kids are winners. That way, when they do studies on good mental attitude and sports, they can justify another gym class when all the winners feel good about themselves. All the suicidal kids weren’t any good at kickball…they were good at math.

I bet running was invented by an adult…I bet kids would have never tried it if they weren’t being graded on it.

It just seems to me like the solution to all of this is pretty simple. Firstly, if you want kids to grow up thinking, stop making them use your brain…let them be hyperactive, distracted, and even a little annoying. They annoy me and I accept it, why can’t the experts. Secondly, if they need to be calmed down, how about, again, we try getting them to use their brain instead of a nice 5 o’clock cocktail. The worse thing a kid should fear is a smack on the bum, from where I stand. When I was a kid, cops were protectors; they weren’t people that terrified you every time you didn’t use your head…which was almost everyday. Doctors made you feel better; they didn’t conspire to put you into a comma because no one could stand having you around. Thirdly, get some experts on child behavior instead of “desired child behavior”. Forthly, don’t take a teaching job if you are too lazy to keep up with the educational needs of the kids you are teaching. Instead of boring them to death with your marginal talent for teaching the worlds most boring subject, consider this…I am old and your subject is STILL boring…no one likes it but you! That’s not abnormal, you are abnormal. So if you want us to be interested, shake it up a little…we have limited life spans and you are wasting our time. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself why so many of the parents that grew up learning the same boring stuff you are teaching don’t remember enough of it to help their kid with their homework. The most likely answer is that the information wasn’t retained because it was deemed worthless to their overall life experience. The average American remembers more of General Hospital’s plot line during the Luke and Laura era than they do your subject matter…no matter how many “thank a teacher” bumper stickers sell this year.

Only some teachers are great…most of them needed a job and weren’t med-school material.

As far as the schools go, before you start criticizing these kids, take a look at yourself. I guarantee you that the percentage of wide load teachers you are employing equals or exceeds the number of kids in the same boat, per capita, of course. And while you are complaining about these kids being hyperactive, reactive, or whatever other psycho babble you are obsessed with this week, you might want to consider that the kid with the 10 pounds of hair spray on in the front row with the cell phone in her designer purse might just have some issues that will shock you when she is 12…even if she is the easy road for you now. And the kid eating a bug might just turn out to be the guy that shows you the most compassion when he’s running your nursing home.

If we are going to medicate someone, why can’t we medicate the ones that have some kind of chemical imbalance…that would most likely be the people who wanted to work with kids but can’t seem to figure out why they act so much like kids. Why are we medicating the people who are just trying to figure out why they have to sit at a table all day until someone comes in and takes them out to run because they sit around all day and that makes them lazy. It seems pretty clear to me that medication shouldn’t correct something that isn’t wrong. America’s kids are a mess and I, for one, can’t imagine what parents today must have to put up with trying to raise them in a maze of pseudo intellectual reflection of what childhood should be. Unfortunately, I think the only people in this country who are more messed up than our kids, right now, are the educated folks telling parents how to raise them. Kids aren’t a theory, they are human beings, and dumb people with dumb theories that haven’t been tested shouldn’t have started correcting our societies “misguided” child rearing techniques without having to produce some hard evidence first.

What can I say? I’m a product of my marginal education. Congratulations on another solid investment of tax dollars.

Musical Paradox

The music industry has been long overdue a wake up call. The more they whine about profit margins and take to attacking their fan base, the more it becomes obvious that they have taken what must be defined as a basic human need or an addictive human device and severely mismanaged it.

So, Ive been asking myself for years now, "Why can an average American citizen who purchases a gun and leaves it on the seat of their car be held accountable when a child snatches it and uses it for no good, but the music industry has been victimized when they lose control of what they claim is still their property and it ends up on the Internet where young children can, with little effort, commit what they claim to be a federal offense?" Are they the only group in America who can claim ownership of something without the inherent responsibilities that accompany such a claim?

The music company says that people "purchase" music, but they don't actually "own" it. Of course, the magic of copy write babble can be construed to mean just that and, without doubt, as long as the American population never asks themselves how they can "purchase" a CONSUMABLE (not that I would question the permanence of the impact, but, rather, the sanctity of file integrity, subject to the average users occasional crash) and then be subject to a renters contract, I suppose they will continue to use this to their advantage. What next, will food stores demand that you can only use potato bread for peanut butter unless you pay extra to use cheese?

So, here's my question...are we renting, buying, borrowing, or negotiating use of songs...because, as it stands, I think we buy it when it's time to pay, rent when we discover that we can only burn it to disk three times and the first disk was dropped as it was pulled out of the burner, borrow when we purchase a whole song at a whole price and then have to purchase it again because our i-pod songs don't play on another music source, and negotiate when our downloaded license is corrupted, the Internet is jacked up and we can't download the new license for two days until we figure out how to fix it...not a great deal. In the meantime, we can run down to the CD store and buy the disk if we are anxious to pay 14 to 20 bucks for one song because the music industry is forcing full packages of mixes down our throats that allow them to force us to pay for their crappy bomb music in order to buy one song that we want to hear. That's a pretty good deal for them, but the consumer is getting hustled.

There was a big sign in an Military hospital I visited once that said, "The file, the paper, and the print in your records are government property, however, the content belongs to you. Therefore, if you would like a copy, we will make you one, but the original folder will be retained."

I'm thinking, if that is how this works, is the music industry exempt from all law? So, lets get this straight. We "buy" a product...unless we are being scammed, we assume that "buy" implies, like, "buy". Our computer, that we purchased, creates a series of coding sequences that create "replication" of the song, and we may then purchase a CD and our computer, that we bought and own, can manipulate the surface of that CD to create the final product we are after. So, if the medical records thing is consistent with federal law, wouldn't that make the file, the drive, and the configuration OUR property and the contents their property? If so, when some kid takes an image from another kid, all they owe the music industry is a copy...and, according to the hospital sign, that is only upon request.

On the other hand, if the music industry wants to retain full ownership of something they claim is for sale, shouldn't they be held accountable for losing control of their property, entering our homes via the internet, and contributing to the delinquency of minors everywhere? If they think their profit margin is hurting now, maybe they need to experience full accountability and be ban from "selling" anything that they can't seem to make a fair deal on without creating a playground of "crime" for our young...after all, our young are a major marketing target for them...perhaps how they are dealing with our kids needs to be examined.