Scary picture

Okay, it's not that scary. Unless you hate hot pink. It's only scary because I remember changing her nappy not that long ago. And because she was such a bald baby, and I just finished paying for a haircut on hair that reaches down to her how-can-I-put-this-but-remember-we-were-just-discussing-nappies area?
Think there is a dimensional whoopsie in action here!

The Facebook button we need

Conspiracy of Silence

On October 6th 2010, Kate Harding had this to say (in the wake of the tragic suicide of Taylor Clementi) :
"Seriously, half the problem here is the astonishing number of adults willing to come to the defense of the kids who are tormenting their peers, day in and day out.....Can we stop making excuses for the bullies and start standing up for the kids they torment? ....  I simply can’t understand why so many adults are so eager to dismiss bullying as a childhood inevitability of no real consequence, something on a par with skinned knees, maybe a broken wrist at worst. Something that heals quickly and turns into a distant memory or even a funny story. I can only assume those people were once bullies themselves — perhaps they still are — and are thus loath to acknowledge how much serious, long-lasting damage they might have done."
(original article can be found here : http://kateharding.info/2010/10/06/)
Bullying takes so many forms, and the outcome is never good.
An 11-year old boy has died in a pool of his own blood. He was shot by his 12-year old cousin during an argument about taking a knife out hunting. Triston Papuni will not be growing up any more; he will not be standing up to any more bullies. That, you see, is what killed him. Triston called his 12-year old cousin 'an arsehole' and the cousin poked him with a hunting rifle several times before grabbing two bullets and loading the gun, asking "Are you going to get cheeky now I'm sticking bullets in it?" Triston turned his back. So his cousin shot him in the shoulder, and the bullet destroyed his windpipe.
Here is a list of the things that sicken me about this story.

• This 12-year old killer was a bully who had been reprimanded at three of his previous schools for picking on his classmates. At 12, he had attended at least three schools, where his bullying behaviour was..reprimanded.That obviously put the fear of God into him.
• Two boys get into an argument, and one of them picks up his fathers' hunting rifle WHICH IS JUST LYING AROUND and loads it with live ammunition WHICH IS ALSO JUST LYING AROUND and shoots another child in the back to prove how superior he is. You can see the source of the problem right here. What kind of arsehole teaches a 12-year old how to load and use a hunting rifle and then leaves it AND THE AMMUNITION lying around? The kind of arsehole that calls bullying harmless; that kind of arsehole.
• We know Triston's name. His killer, however, has permanent name suppression. This has been granted to allow him the opportunity to 'eventually reintegrate into society'. He is getting a choice. He has permanently deprived Triston of any choices whatsoever.

No sentence would assuage a family's grief at losing a child. This killer (I'm not calling him a bully any more) gets 20 months in a juvenile detention centre; his father gets 2 years for attempting to cover up the shooting by telling his son to lie to the police and make it look like an accident.It doesn't start to cover the damage done.
Here's the thing that really made my heart ache. These kids are part of a close community. The family of the victim had this to say :
"It has been a torment to us that those sentenced today have remained in the community since the death of Triston. It has seemed to many that their being in the community meant that there were no charges to be answered."
Too many adults willing to take part in the conspiracy of silence that prevents bullying behaviour from being treated like the social evil that it is. Right THERE is what killed Triston Papuni.

Musing about bullies

Two years ago, Beloved Son had to make a speech about social evil, and he chose bullying. I worked with him on the speech and reminded him that the first thing a bully does is the same as the first thing a predator does - cut one out from the herd and hunt it.
Beloved Daughter knows this one only too well. A young girl at school is being treated this way and Beloved Daughter has chosen to make sure it isn't possible for the predators to cut her out of the herd - by  siding with her, by teaming with her in the games where the stated objective is to get her out, by leaving a table full of petty girls to go and sit alone at another table so this girl has somewhere to go.
Girls do this sort of thing so much better than boys. Bullying, I mean.
And so Beloved Son has had cause to discover in this last week. Deliberately, publicly and pointedly excluded from a party by a girl with the face of an angel and the disposition of a Rottweiler, he was so crushed he asked to stay back from school the next day because he couldn't face people, and I let him.
I daresay it's not the last curve ball life will throw at him.

Prodigal

Great Barrier Island. Has mobile phone reception in one or two spots. One shop. Place of great natural beauty. Getting there by ferry takes a good four hours. And that's where my Beloved Son was for a week.
It's good to have him home. He had a blast; they went sea-kayaking and did two overnight stays, there was rock-climbing, sailing - he got sunburn on his hands. The food was apparently not wonderful. I made apple crumble for pudding. Dad, Beloved Daughter and I each had a slice with cream and he inhaled the rest.

Harry Potter and the Thoughtful Mother

So, HP and the DH.
It was an illuminating experience; pun intended. Mainly 'cause I attended it in company of a large chunk of the school my kids go to, ungrammatically, meaning I wasn't quite prepared for the proportions of the cheer that went up when Harry Got His Kit Off. Well, most of it. No cruelty to horses was involved, though I did feel very sorry for the camera crew. You can imagine my perplexion some moments later when Ron's face swam (ha! - I see what I did there!) into view and the cheers were twice as loud. He was fully clothed at the time. It may be a New Zealand thing; but the female populace is very much Team Ron. I will not go into the noises that ensued when Harry and Hermione went all Ring-Galadriel-fanfic on us.
Things I Might Not Have Heard From A More Mature Audience.
"Voldemort is Michael Jackson. Unnaturally pale, no nose, displays an unhealthy interest in teenage boys. "
"OMG, is that actually how they actually dance in actual England?"
Sob. SOB, SOB, SOB, SOB (Dobby died. Sorry if that's a spoiler)
"That'd be a WICKED tattoo, I'm getting it Monday" (torn between agreeing and alerting police since subject is definitely no older than14).
Effects are WICKED (I quote). I would certainly agree, especially on the snake front. Apparently our shrieks were heard in the next cinema; admittedly we do have on our side the Shriek Queen. According to my Beloved Son, her spider scream  (school camp)  travelled two mountains. In winter.
I will say an awed word for the animation on the retelling of the Three Brothers, from the Tales of Beadle the Bard.  If you had wandered into the cinema in the middle of that sequence you would not have known where you were. They were surreal, beautiful, terrifying and succint.
What occupies my mind now is the level of giggling that went with the ten-inch wand line.
Movie good, though.

Cricked necks and vegetables

From todays’ paper :

"Police have issued a warning for people to keep an eye on their massage therapists' hands after the conduct of a Palmerston North masseur gave them cause for concern."

Can't help but think that following this advice could well lead to a boom market for therapists following an epidemic of cricked necks.

                                                                          

Quote of the week from a developer who shall remain nameless, upon discussion of a uni student who has been doing testing for us and concerning whether he will remain in testing or move to development.

“Because he’s really too clever to stay in testing, you know”

Somebody remember to water me.

                                                                       

The Girly Spoon

Because the money we could spend on fireworks would amount to a display that would have trouble stunning the cat, we have made a family tradition of spending Fireworks Night having supper out in Orewa, followed by a lazing (well, in my case) in the hot pools at Waiwera. We have recently shared round the family flu virus; exams are next week (in Beloved Daughter's case) and the week after (in Beloved Son's case) so swimming is Out Out OUT! Also, the pet restaurant, Sahara, has gone out of business. So, we went to Mayumi, for Japanese supper instead.
Mayumi is tiny and beautiful, like the oyster-shell carvings my parents kept on the mantelpiece. Their food is just as detailed.
But they're catering, tongue-in-cheek, for their Western audience, and my lot caved in and ordered deep-fried ice-cream.
Mayumi has a stunning selection of chopsticks - including baby chopsticks, which are rather like a cross between a plastic icing bag and sock-knitting-needles - and they are all elegant and gorgeous. However, they clearly lack for spoons (and no restaurant owner in the world wants to see the state of his floor after feeding people ice-cream with chopsticks)  and so every spoon in the place was being pressed into service. Dad got a tablespoon, which didn't bother him. Up until Beloved Daughter raised her first spoonful to her mouth, Son and Heir wasn't thinking about it, after that it was...
WHY DID I GET THE GIRLY SPOON?

You're not in the Hundred Acre Wood anymore, Pooh

We have a family passion for Trivial Pursuit; so when we saw the new updated edition on sale for $20 less than we'd seen it before, there was a mad undignified scramble for it - I won - and we read the rules on the way home. Much has changed, much has not. The categories are still there and still the same (although for some reason literature has changed from  brown to purple?) , but there's only one box of questions, and an envelope that has four card-sized gaps. As one card is used for question-and-answer, another is slid into the envelope. When the cards are in the envelope, all you can see is the Topic at the top. So if you land on a Question square, you have to answer the Question corresponding to the colour category, but you can choose the Topic - though there's no clue other than the topic name. This is not as helpful as it sounds. For example, Topic Oz has nothing to do with Australia, and much to do the The Wizard Of.
Thus, I found myself on Purple (art and literature) and selected Topic Elephants.. My 15-year-old Son and Heir enquired gravely whether I knew the name of the deity that is the principal object of worship in the Hindu pantheon. I opened my mouth to say "Ganesh" as he turned the card over, stared at it incredulously, and then fell over laughing. It took us a while to understand why; but it seemed he had glanced at the Pink (entertainment) answer by accident; and that answer was Heffalump.