You can't HANDLE the spoof

This is beyond funny. This is hurt your forehead funny.

Tom Cruise auditioning for the role of Edward in Twilight:

Celebrity Auditions: New Moon from Electric Spoofaloo on Take180.com

Thanks to Lainey for this.

Sir Ken Robinson in a TED lecture

For years I watched as the arts programs in my kids' schools were slashed - art class gave way to more science classes, gym class was reduced to one hour a week, and computer science was anointed the new king of them all. Not that I have anything against computers. Heck, my relationship with my laptop falls just short of carnal. (Now there's a sentence you don't want taken out of context.) But I argued that kids in kindergarten didn't need computer skills as much as social skills and that it was more important to nurture and encourage their innate creativity.

My proposal fell on deaf ears so I did what a lot of stay-at-home moms armed with degrees and work experience did at that time - I volunteered for a lunchtime enrichment program. If the school board wasn't going to offer more opportunities for creativity, then volunteers would organize it and offer it to the children outside of school hours. You want to learn the trumpet? Done. You want to take karate lessons? Done. Paint, dance a Highland Fling and sing in a chorus? Done, done, done.

This TED lecture by Sir Ken Robinson articulates everything I was trying to argue back then. All three of my children studied Liberal Arts before they went on to specialize in their various fields of interest (English Literature and Political Science, Finance and Economics, and Fine Arts and Literature as it turns out.) With a grounding in liberal arts, they learned how to think, developed the skills necessary to communicate effectively, and most importantly, they gained a lifelong passion for learning. If you want to run a company, it helps to know a bit about the world at large, don't you think?

Some salient points Robinson makes:

1. Creativity is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.

2. If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.

3. We stigmatize mistakes, and we're educating people out of their creative capacities.

"Picasso said all children are born artists. We don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or rather we get educated out of it."

Everywhere, around the world, is the hierarchy of subjects in any school system.

Mathematics and languages is at the top.
Humanities comes next.
The arts are at the bottom.

He speaks of "a new ecology of the mind" just like the one we apply to the earth. "Our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to re-think the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children."

Thanks to kcdyer and jamesmccann for bringing this to my attention. It's brilliantly funny and uplifting, and its message is clear and true. Put aside 20 minutes and have a listen. It's well worth it, for the Shakespeare bits alone.

Fear of Flying...

...while sitting near a screaming toddler. Who hasn't been there, either as a parent to the child, or as a passenger sitting near one of the little anklebiters? I've been both. It's a toss up which is worse.

I remember one memorable trip to London with my husband. The plane was delayed by several hours, with various excuses made over the loudspeaker by the gate crew - "mechanical difficulties" was the first, "awaiting a part from Toronto" was the second, "wrong part sent" was the third, "awaiting another part" was the fourth...

Sitting nearby in the airport lounge was one particularly virulent, screaming child in a stroller. He repeatedly smeared thick snot caterpillars across his cheeks with his chubby fists as his exasperated mother tried to wrestle him under control. He'd fling himself backwards, his back rigid in indignation until a coughing jag released his spine like a switch, then he'd gag and sputter and gather enough energy to start up again. Please God, do not let him sit anywhere near me, please, please, please, became my mantra that night. This was not fair, I argued. I have been there, done that, chugged the gin to erase the memory. And while I feel sorry for his mother, we left our own kids at home and this was supposed to be a romantic vacation.

Well, it seems God doesn't like to be bothered by such mundane and clearly selfish requests when He has bigger and better things on his mind like famine and floods and pestilence, so he punished me in biblical proportions by not only putting that kid near me when we boarded the plane at midnight (after a seven hour wait in the lounge) but directly behind me. The little hellion further enhanced my torture by punctuating his screams with angry kicks to my chair. We hadn't even left the ground, and there was a whole ocean to cross.

We sat on the tarmac for hours until 4 a.m. when we were asked to leave the airplane due to "more mechanical problems." I would have gladly leapt from the airplane in a swan dive over the runway at that point.

So when faced with an eleven hour flight to Hawaii a while back, I reckoned I needed a backup plan. My sister asked me why I wasn't using Bose noise-cancelling headphones. I'd actually bought a pair for my husband years ago, but had never tried them myself. You gotta get the Bose, she insisted. With the cries of that toddler still ringing in my ears, I splurged and bought myself a pair.

Oh, baby. Oh baby, baby, baby cry your heart out, 'cause mama don't care. When Bose says "noise-cancelling" they ain't kidding. There actually was a screaming baby on board but as soon as I slapped those puppies on my ears, I was literally in my own head space.

If you have a long trip ahead of you, beg, borrow or steal a pair. Seriously. I am not getting any kind of kickback for endorsing Bose products, but I believe.

I believe!

And if you want to read an absolutely hilarious account which triggered my memories, go to "How to Survive a Mid-Air Disaster" by Johanna Stein. She's a self-described "first time parent and long-time neurotic" who says in her bio "I was born in Winnipeg, Canada, to a pair of American hippie intellectuals who have smoked 73 varieties of marijuana combined. As a result I am a dual citizen who is pathologically easygoing." This essay on flying with her child, which also appeared in the New York Times Magazine last weekend, just slayed me.

And if you want a pair of Bose QuietComfort 15 headphones (le sigh) and you live in Canada, go here and check them out. I know they're expensive, but I'd rather have a pair of those than a big sparkly ring. Honest. (Unless I can use that ring to carve out a hole for an escape route next time I find myself sitting in front of a toddler in full meltdown mode.)

The Fun Theory

un. A theory about fun!
inally, something I can believe in.



What happens when an ordinary staircase is replaced with musical steps? Will more people use the stairs instead of the escalator? And what if a regular garbage can is turned into the world's deepest can? Will it encourage people to throw away more trash if it's fun?





Thanks to the Laughing Squid for this. It made me think about how much fun I have in my life. Not enough, I concluded. Must rectify immediately.

And thanks to kcdyer for the link to the Daily Drop Cap by Jessica Hisch, who created the fancy schmancy capital letters you see here.

ust when you think you've seen it all....

an you believe how beautiful these are?

m in danger of becoming obsessed.

It's Complicated. And I Can't Wait.

This is worse than having to wait until Christmas morning to open gifts.

Another 45 days until this movie opens. Le sigh. Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, people! Together. In a Nancy Meyers film!

I love Nancy Meyers. She creates dialogue and believable, quirky, charming characters like no one else. Have you seen SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE with Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson? I watched it again the other night even though it's exquisitely painful due to my deep, unrequited love for Erica Barry's kitchen. (It's more like kitchen lust. Actually to be honest I could run away with that whole house and have ten thousand of its babies, and please don't tell me it's just a movie set and it doesn't exist because I need my fantasies and these days, most of them involve that kitchen.)

Nancy writes about real women, women like me or at least, the kind of woman I'd like to be, one who writes successful plays and lives in a luscious house situated right on the ocean, beautifully decorated of course, with off-white furniture and tasteful art and no dust or pet hair anywhere and probably no rotting fruit in her fridge... but I digress. I adore Nancy Meyers and Meryl the Streep, and from the looks of this trailer, this movie is not going to disappoint.

I just have to make it until Christmas. While the family is cleaning up the last bits of turkey and gravy, this old broad is planning on hoofing it down to the Cineplex.

Stephen Fry and Sunny Days

A blog about letters of note. Or as the tagline says "correspondence deserving of a wider audience" and I agree wholeheartedly.

Let's start with Stephen Fry, shall we? Because I love him. Because I saw him in London at the premiere of V for Vendetta which was not intentional, but a happy coincidence as I passed through Leicester Square on my way to a play and there he was, towering above the crowd, being as gracious as only he can be.

A woman wrote to him saying she was desperate and depressed and felt she had no one to turn to. He wrote back, and said in part:

I've found that it's of some help to think of one's moods and feelings about the world as being similar to weather:

Here are some obvious things about the weather:

It's real.
You can't change it by wishing it away.
If it's dark and rainy it really is dark and rainy and you can't alter it.
It might be dark and rainy for two weeks in a row.

BUT

It will be sunny one day.
It isn't under one's control as to when the sun comes out, but come out it will.
One day.

It really is the same with one's moods, I think. The wrong approach is to believe that they are illusions. They are real.

If you wish to read this letter in its entirety and other wonderful correspondence, go to LETTERS OF NOTE and look around.

(My favourite letters include two replies to artist Haymes when he sent out a questionnaire to over 500 artists and people of distinction to ask them to describe the sky. One is by Isaac Asimov and the other by Jerry Kosinski. Beverage alert. Don't say you weren't warned. Read them HERE.)

Have a great weekend!

Multiple Exposure with the Nikon D200

I went on a mini-field trip yesterday with a friend, and discovered a function in my Nikon D200 that was hitherto unknown to me. (Hands up how many of you use "hitherto" on a regular basis?)

Okay, technically this function wasn't unknown to me as I knew it was in there, I'd just never used it before and never purposefully went looking for it. (Listen? Can you hear it? The chorus of "read the #$%^ing manual!" from the camera club guys. Can't hear it? Me neither.) So I went spelunking into the depths of my camera menu and found this little jewel.

It's called Multiple Exposure, and with Freeman as my guide and mentor, I gave it a whirl. The camera automatically divides the exposure after you enter how many multiple exposures you want - choose 10 for example, and it will give 1/10th the amount of light you need for each shot so that the finished shot will be accurate and balanced. How cool is that?

What do you think? I like the sort of expressionistic, watercolour quality to the photos. Or maybe I'm just full of hooey.

I tried different objects with varying degrees of detail - a brass jar with silver embossed figures, a firepit surrounded by leaves, a painted votive candle holder, a hummingbird feeder...


It was an interesting experiment and I learned a certain degree of control is necessary for each exposure, but it was fun to try something different. My method was to take the first shot dead centre, then move a few shots to the right, go back to the middle and then take the remaining shots to the right. Others may move deliberately from left to right, but I wanted control over where the image was centred in the shot. I have no idea if there's a right or wrong way to do this, so I just dove in.

And for the traditionalists in the crowd, some corn husks. Plain, old, one-exposured corn husks.

Oh oh. I just discovered the Image Overlay function...it even gives a preview in camera. Whoo hoo, I heart my Nikon!