The roles that a mother plays in the lives of her children are so integral that to refer to her using language that suggests an occasional, casual participant in the child’s rearing would be, at best, dismissive, and, at worst, offensive. So why isn’t the same true for fathers? Our lexicon for describing what fathers actually do is limited at best: “mothering” is the standard description of what we need when we want to be comforted; “fathering” is a word, just not one I’ve ever heard anyone actually use.
I had a handleless cup of hot, stale tea, poured and reheated from a pail stored in the restaurant’s walkin refrigerator, and one elegantly folded fortune cookie—a short paper nerve baked in an ear. I would tug the paper slip from the stiff clutches of the cookie and save it as a bookmark. All my books had fortunes protruding like tiny tails from their pages: You are the crispy noodle in the salad of life. You are the master of your own destiny.
Childcare: new short fiction by Lorrie Moore in the New Yorker.
The President of Brazil + Firefox = Awesome!
The Hold Steady - Constructive Summer (via 893TheCurrent)
Yo Gabba Gabba! - “Pick It Up!”
The after intro animation segment in Yo Gabba Gabba is consistently amazing.
Greasemonkey script that disables the insanely annoying “mouse wheel = map zoom” feature on Google Maps, which I accidentally trigger All. The. Time. It’s pretty easy to tweak the settings in…
Consumerist - Sausage Package Illustrates What Happens When You’re A Jerk To The Copywriter (via beltzner, via IRC)
Thanks, kev, these made my day and it’s only 10am.
Rain gutter cable management system - the ater shot (via mr.edwards2). Once we move I’ll probably look into doing something like this.
What an incredibly sad story.
(Not only did Pixar do a beautiful thing here, they also refused to turn it into a callous marketing/PR ploy and declined to comment on the story or discuss it with reporters.)
There have been at least a few of these in the past (the “sample an image for the most common colours) but none as nicely put together as this one.
