Getting Old

So, I see over at Patrick's place that the teens have this ringtone they think only they can hear.

In settings where cellphone use is forbidden — in class, for example — it is perfect for signaling the arrival of a text message without being detected by an elder of the species.

"When I heard about it I didn't believe it at first," said Donna Lewis, a technology teacher at the Trinity School in Manhattan. "But one of the kids gave me a copy, and I sent it to a colleague. She played it for her first graders. All of them could hear it, and neither she nor I could."
...................
The cellphone ring tone that she heard was the offshoot of an invention called the Mosquito, developed last year by a Welsh security company to annoy teenagers and gratify adults, not the other way around.

It was marketed as an ultrasonic teenager repellent, an ear-splitting 17-kilohertz buzzer designed to help shopkeepers disperse young people loitering in front of their stores while leaving adults unaffected.

The principle behind it is a biological reality that hearing experts refer to as presbycusis, or aging ear. While Miss Musorofiti is not likely to have it, most adults over 40 or 50 seem to have some symptoms, scientists say.

While most human communication takes place in a frequency range between 200 and 8,000 hertz (a hertz being the scientific unit of frequency equal to one cycle per second), most adults' ability to hear frequencies higher than that begins to deteriorate in early middle age.

But I could hear it, and I used to run sound. Can you?

Friday Babyblogging

Miscellaneous adventures of the rugrats of Liberal Mountain.


Miss Rosie. I've lost probably ten pairs of sunglasses to her.



Yes, this is what SP looks like the vast majority of the time. But he's three months tomorrow: this phase of his life should be starting to ease up soon.



Frolicking on the couch. How much do we love the ponytails?

Griefblogging

NTodd's mom died, suddenly, unexpectedly. He's in the air right now, on his way back from California. I have no words to ease pain I know he's feeling.

My mother, my grandmother, and my sister all died between 1997-2000. None were sudden, all were preceded by long periods of suffering. It took me literally years to "get my sparkle back," as Thers put it.

NTodd has suffered roughly similar losses--all unexpected--within less than a year.

Everything is inadequate now, but this song still chokes me up every time I hear it.

For you, NTodd.



The Offspring, "Gone Away."

You Have to Tell Me These Things, People

Spent the weekend with a regular reader who told me no one got my Elrond joke in the New Pornographers video thread.

Well.

Does this help?



(Insert Ann Coulter joke here.)

God Save the Internet

Go. Listen. Take Action.

http://www.savetheinternet.com/broadband.html

(posting from work, can't do links. But you all know how to cut and paste.)

h/t to Atrios.

Well, This Is Mildly Disappointing

You Are 30% Evil

A bit of evil lurks in your heart, but you hide it well. In some ways, you are the most dangerous kind of evil.

How Evil Are You?

Babyblogging: Tonsil edition

Light posting recently because of the surgery and recovery of the six year old, who shovels ice cream and lays around in turn.



Yestereve, the six year old and his sister enjoy sherbet. She's quite impressed with the array of puddings and ice cream in which the house is suddenly awash.



When he's not playing video games, the patient is content to lay around with the new arrival for periods of time extending into seconds.

Our Marshall MacLuhan Moment

You know that great scene in Annie Hall, when Woody and Diane are behind the guy in the movie line who's spewing complete nonsense about Marshall MacLuhan, so Woody steps out of the screen and brings MacLuhan in to say he's wrong, wrong, wrong?

How many times in your life have you wished for that opportunity?

It's now yours.

I blogged a few weeks ago on the insanity of the NRO's Top Fifty Conservative Rock Songs. Number One, of course, was The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again."

Wingnuts, meet Pete Townshend.

Won't Get Fooled Again has been listed in the UK Independent Newspaper as the number one song with - as I understand it - the political message most often misunderstood - in this case the message is said to be 'conservative', a word that may mean different things in the UK and USA.

Of course the song has no party-allied political message at all. It is not precisely a song that decries revolution - it suggests that we will indeed fight in the streets - but that revolution, like all action can have results we cannot predict. Don't expect to see what you expect to see. Expect nothing and you might gain everything.

The song was meant to let politicians and revolutionaries alike know that what lay in the centre of my life was not for sale, and could not be co-opted into any obvious cause.

Shove that up your hole of artistic intention.

(And in case you think Pete's not paying attention to all this, think again. Tom Watson has some terrific reflections on the role of blogs in this circumstance. He and Pete, err, talked about it. {Insert adolescent girlscream here.})

Monday Morning Videoblogging

Because I love this song. (Better or worse than Alicia Bridges' "I Like the Nightlife"? At least it's not Elrond...)



h/t to Eli. *mwah!*

(And yes, that is either Carl Newman or a startling simulation passed out drunk at the table.)

Parenting

We recently had our first real troll here at PowerPop, no doubt because of all the agita. A poster mourned the existence of Prussian Blue, saying it was really too bad that liberals had made such things necessary.

Whatever.

Personally, I blame Prussian Blue on their nutbag Nazi parents. Parenting is an imprecise science at best, but I have to confess that I really don't get parents who think that their child's future is wholly within their control. It's like anorexia or something: trying to exert control over some aspect of your life because there's so much over which you cannot exert control. I am rather more lasseiz-faire about this sort of thing: aside from matters of ethics (we don't steal, we don't hit, we don't sit on the heads of our smaller siblings), I figure my kids know who they are, and as long as they're safe, my job is to help them be that person, even if it's not what I personally might have chosen for them. (I was never a band geek, for example, but I fully support my kid's right to be one.)

As a parent, then, I guess I'm not much like Marie Osmond. Via Majikthise:

Pop star-turned-doll maker MARIE OSMOND has launched a personal crusade to clean up the Internet after learning her two teenage daughters have been posting sexually explicit correspondence on their MySpace.com websites. The PAPER ROSES singer felt compelled to give a statement to US tabloid National Enquirer after the publication uncovered outrageous content on her daughters JESSICA and RACHAEL's blogs. On her site, 18-year-old Jessica, who was adopted by Osmond as an infant, claims she is a bi-sexual who craves sex "as many times as possible," while her 16-year-old sister describes herself as a "slut" and a "whore" in correspondence and opened up about her dreams of having sex with DAVID BOWIE. In her statement, shocked Marie, a devout Mormon, says, "I am saddened by some of the choices that two of our children have made. The insidious potential for harm from adolescent Internet sites like MySpace.com only exacerbates these kinds of problems."

Well, MySpace is pretty chaotic, no doubt, but at 16 and 18 presumably these girls are making their own choices. They may be saying things their mother doesn't like, but that's their right.

It never ceases to amaze people that I don't snoop in my kid's room. At nearly 16, she deserves some privacy, and besides, we talk a lot, about all that stuff you're supposed to talk to your kids about. But then, we're wacky liberals.

By 16, Marie Osmond already had a hit record and a TV show; forgive me for believing that it was likely that she also did things (LA in the 70's? Please.) that her parents might not have approved of. She was engaged at 19, an engagement made and broken off abruptly. (I guess her period came.) But that was before MySpace, of course.

The internets are simultaneously public and private space, and the relationship between the two is not always clear. I don't blame these girls for thinking that their mom was unlikely to find their MySpace pages, or that they could conduct conversations there outside her attention. But then, we've all learned a lot about that these last few weeks.

As the commenters at Majikthise point out, what's concerning about her outrage is that it's not so much about MySpace, but about control of her daughters' sexuality. She's horrified that one is bi and the other a slut, but frankly, the one who claims she's bi is 18, and the other may in fact feel that she has nothing more to bring to a relationship than sexuality. That's sad, not because of any sexual activity she may or may not be engaging in, but because of what it says about her identity. We need to do a better job raising our girls to be strong and confident: shutting down MySpace isn't it.