A sweet profile of Carroll Spinney - Big Bird for almost 40 years and he's now 74 years old!

Quoted: Being Big Bird: After 4 decades in costume, puppeteer Caroll Spinney wouldn't change a feather
...
Spinney got his start on Sesame Street during its first season in 1969, after Muppets founder Jim Henson saw him perform at a puppeteer's convention.
...
Henson chose him as Big Bird after Frank Oz, who helped develop Bert, Grover and Cookie Monster, swore off costume puppets following a stint in commercials as the La Choy Dragon, which was equipped with an in-costume flame-thrower.

All personal property and just silliness issues aside, this is quite an ugly tree -- and how scary that the public health people in Wales think that the problem with being pricked by a hypodermic needle is the prick itself.

Quoted: A 150-year-old monkey puzzle tree is facing the chop after health and safety experts said its needles are a danger. The 50ft-tall tree is to be felled after it's needles were likened to syringes.
...
‘Every effort is made in this day and age to prevent children playing with discarded syringe needles,’ a report stated.
...
‘Every effort must be made to prevent children coming into contact with these potentially, equally sharp needles.’

Here again we are enabling stupid kids to move forward in life and become stupid adults. How about we just make a policy that kids need to work harder and pass? Oh no ... that's just silly.

Quoted: Proposed policy would allow student scores of zero to equal 50.
...
Their argument: Other letter grades — A, B, C and D — are broken down in increments of 10 from 60 to 100, but there is a 59-point spread between D and F, a gap that can often make it mathematically impossible for some failing students to ever catch up.

I agree. The only time that the applied concepts method worked for me was in college when I took Calculus for Biologists and knew the biology well enough that it supplemented the learning of the calculus (which I had problems with in high school). But when I was younger, learning by concrete examples was not helpful.

Quoted: Frustrated math students may have a good excuse -- some of the teaching methods meant to make math more relevant may in fact be making it harder to understand, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

This is really distressing. There is a lot of discussion in the mommy blog community about BPA (Bisphenol A) and it is very easy to search for products that do not contain this chemical. Luckily we did not bottle feed our little guy at all.

Quoted: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A chemical in some plastic food and drink packaging including baby bottles may be tied to early puberty and prostate and breast cancer, the U.S. government said on Tuesday. ...

The National Toxicology Program went further than previous U.S. government statements on possible health risks from BPA.

It said: "There is some concern for neural and behavioral effects in fetuses, infants and children at current human exposures." The findings expressed concern about exposure in these populations, "based on effects in the prostate gland, mammary gland, and an earlier age for puberty in females."

There is a certain little guy in this house that could use his own laptop so that he stops stealing ours!

Quoted: One more of the world's biggest technology companies is clamoring to enter the growing market for pint-sized computers targeted mainly for pint-sized customers. ...

HP's foray comes in the form of a new computer called a "Mini-Note" that weighs less than 3 pounds with a screen that measures 8.9 inches diagonally. The machines start at under $500 for a Linux-based model. Prices go up for Windows Vista models with faster processors.

Scary. This is why I'm raising my kid in Washington.

Quoted: Kids who live in neighborhoods with heavy traffic pollution have lower IQs and score worse on other tests of intelligence and memory than children who breathe cleaner air, a new study shows.

Basically an article that says that preschoolers are wacky and you shouldn't worry ...

Quoted: What's it really take to parent a preschooler? It's pretty simple, once you realize what kids this age can and can't do (and what sets them off and what keeps them happy!). Here are seven qualities that make it much easier to manage all that, and why they're so crucial when you've got an independent-minded, boundary-testing picky eater on your hands.

Interesting that this article is about parents who regret names like Emma and Luke but none that REALLY name their kids with regrettable names ... sounds like their interviews were with a certain social segment.

Quoted: Pauline and Jeffrey Eadie, of Cleveland, had gathered the family together to watch home movies of their two older children as babies. In one movie, Jack, now 5, was looking skeptically at his then-newborn sister, now 3. "In the video, I was saying, 'Jack, go to the baby, go hug her,'" says Pauline. "And then at some point I said, 'Go kiss Emma.'"

Unaware that her name had been changed when she was a newborn, Pauline Eadie's daughter, Caroline, looked at her and asked 'Who's Emma?'"