That man is SUCH a giver! The most hated man in Hollywood takes five to announce the formation of the Perez Hilton Foundation to save premature babies, and shares it with the world through the wonder of Funny or Die.
Which of the two is it, though?
Sure to be a hit with those who’ve tired of last century’s fad, the Bonsai Kitty. Tasteful, as always, Perez.
The lovely and superfantastic Mindy asks:
I’ve been knocking around the Internet over the past week or so, trying to find information about recycling car seats. I found that the two seats left from my older kids were on the cusp of expiration. I registered for a new one, but was stuck wondering if I had to pitch the old ones into a landfill. I would much rather do something less environmentally destructive with them, if possible.
If the car seat doesn’t have a recycling symbol on it, the best directions I received were to strip them of their straps and padding, then chop them up and throw them in the regular trash. (The more destroyed they are, the better, in order to prevent Dumpster divers from reusing an unsafe seat.) Really? There’s nothing better than that, considering the number of car seats which expire or are involved in crashes every year?
Does anyone at Teeny Manolo know anything to do?
An excellent question, Mindy! It practically boggles the mind to think of how many car seats are out there. They are so big and bulky, it seems like it wouldn’t take all that many of them to pile up to the top of a landfill in no time flat. There has to be something that can be done with them, right?
Well, sort of.
Because all child car seats have an expiration date, like those eggs you just bought, the options are fairly limited. It irritates me to think that something that looks perfectly functional is not, but we have to take the word of the manufacturers that over time, the plastics and materials in the car seats degrade. We have Space Shuttles making multiple trips into outer space and back, but can’t seem to make a car seat that works past six years. OK, a little side rant there. Back to the question at hand.
How can we dispose of our expired car seat and still give ourselves the environmental warm fuzzies?
To find out the answer…
A childhood classic, never to be forgotten:
Let us pause in our busy blogging day to commemorate the truly iconic Richard Knerr, founder of the archetypal toy company Wham-O, maker of those childhood classics the Frisbee and the Hula-Hoop, who died today at the age of 82. The world may never see his like again.
Or get rid of all this damn plastic, neither.
With his boyhood best friend, Arthur “Spud” Melin, Knerr started the company in 1948 in Pasadena. They named the enterprise Wham-O for the sound that their first product, a slingshot, made when it hit its target.
A treasure chest of dozens of toys followed that often bore playful names: Superball, so bouncy it seemed to defy gravity; Slip ‘N Slide and its giggle-inducing cousin the Water Wiggle; and Silly String, which was much harder to get out of hair than advertised.
When a friend told Knerr and Melin about a bamboo ring used for exercise in Australia, they devised their own version without seeing the original.
They ran an early test of the product in 1958 at a Pasadena elementary school and enticed their test subjects by telling them they could keep the hoops if they mastered them.
They seeded the market, giving hoops away in neighborhoods to create a buzz and required Wham-O executives to take hoops with them on planes so people would ask about them.
Wham-O soon was producing 20,000 hoops a day at plants in at least seven countries, while other companies made knockoffs. Within four months, 25 million of the hoops had been sold, according to Wham-O.
In the 1985 book “American Fads,” Richard A. Johnson wrote that “no sensation has ever swept the country like the Hula Hoop.”
Ah, but 1985? That was before Beanie Babies, wasn’t it? All they had back then were bloody Pet Rocks!
Okay, to tell the truth I never mastered the use of either of these damn things, and my dog was the only one in the park chasing an old-skool ball rather than a Frisbee. I am still in therapy dealing with the time I was in a fitness class and my friend laughed at me saying, “If you can have sex you can use a Hula Hoop!”
Which may be true, for all I know.
To be sure, the Hula Hoop is a delightful toy, but can someone explain to me why Amazon is offering them for $162.00? Are they made from mammoth ivory and sprinkled with authentic pixie dust? I’m thinking back to what my friend said and wondering if Hula Hooping is not perhaps a whole lot more fun than I was led to believe? For that you could charge this much…
Behold the redneck jolly jumper. No substitute for the real thing, it is a staple of childcare among those who should not be entrusted with the task of caring for children in the first place.
Such as this guy:
Erie Police say Keith Holbrook was seen duct taping a pair of 3yr. old students to the wall in the “preschool” room at Little Wonders Child Care, and inviting other teachers to watch.
No, anyone who’s ever been in charge of a room full of toddlers for any length of time can perhaps identify with the sentiment (was it Camus who said a thought-murder a day preserved one’s mental health?) but, generally speaking, we refrain from shackling children to the walls, whether with adhesive tape or other means. So, while we revile the actions of the now-fired preschool teacher, we understand the sentiment and can only hope that justice will find a way to give him a better understanding of the inappropriateness of his actions.
Somebody needs a little time-out. Say, eighteen to twenty-four months?
Truly hath it been said that the days between Christmas and New Year’s are the sweetest of the calendar, and for one reason only: presents!
You get to play with the kids’s presents.
Or is that just me? No. No, loyal reader, it is not. And how do I know this? I know this because our faithful friends across the Pond have informed me that Hunky Prince William is having the very devil of a time getting his WII out of the hands of his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Or, as we may now call her, the QuWIIn.
From People.co.uk:
William’s girlfriend Kate Middleton bought him the £200 gift for Christmas – but he now has to share it with his grandma.
A Palace source told The People: “When she saw William playing a game after lunch at Sandringham she thought the Nintendo looked tremendous fun and begged to join in.
“She played a simple ten-pin bowling game and by all accounts was a natural.
“It was hilarious. William was in fits of laughter. He was enormously impressed at having such a cool gran.
Indeed, she’s not the only one who’d like to get her hands on William’s WII.
One has a limited tolerance, one does, for spoiled Hollywood stars who insist on collecting their own United Nations of Benetton and then changing the children’s names, particularly when the child is old enough to come when she’s called.
One has, however, no tolerance whatsoever for fools who adopt children, then send them back after seven years, once the parents have their own biological children. What is this, re-gifting?
He’s a professional diplomat? This doesn’t sound very diplomatic to me! He should go to back to school for a social work degree. From the Guardian:
A Dutch couple living in Hong Kong yesterday found themselves at the centre of an international controversy after they gave up their daughter for adoption seven years after they adopted her themselves.
Raymond Poeteray, 55, who has worked as a Dutch diplomat for more than 20 years, and his wife, Meta, adopted Jade, an ethnic Korean girl, when she was four months old…
A spokesman for the South Korean consulate in Hong Kong said the couple had found it difficult to raise the little girl because of “culture shock”.
“[The Poeterays] now have their own children,” the spokesman said. “They decided it was difficult to raise [Jade] because of cultural shock. They said she’s not willing to eat their food. That’s one of the reasons. It’s a strange reason. She was raised from a very early age. It’s a very uncommon case. It’s a difficult situation for us to understand.”
Why, yes, it would be. Given that she’s been with the couple since she was four months old, it’s difficult to understand why she or they or, indeed, anyone at all would be undergoing culture shock at this late date. As for fussy eaters, if they think it’s a problem confined to Korean adoptees, they’ve got a rude awakening ahead, no?
Typical!
In a bid to take over where the Post Office leaves off (North Pole, postal code H0H 0H0) Microsoft this year introduced a Santa Claus MSN bot to chat with people via instant messenger, for kids who, presumably, have better things to do than wait in line at the mall to talk to Santa.
Then they killed Santa.
From The Register:
Here’s the whopper that Microsoft spokesman Adam Sohn told AP: “It’s not like if you say, ‘Hello Santa’, he’s going to throw inappropriate stuff at you.”
Erm, yes it is, Adam. It’s pretty much exactly like that. When we innocently asked him to eat something, Santa said: “It’s fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else.”
The slapdash job Microsoft did on the supposedly festive chat agent was revealed when Reg reader Iain’s nieces offered Santa some pizza. According to Microsoft the girls were “pushing this thing to make it do things it wasn’t supposed to do”.
Yep, Santabot was taken out behind the sled and shot faster than you can say “Old Yeller.”
Well, you can leave him cookies and milk if you insist, but it’s clear to astute readers what Santa really wants this year!
Maybe he could settle for a Mac??
I’m not a big fan of logos or writing on my clothing. I think I am paying enough already without giving them some free advertising on my body. And really, since I try to avoid the paparazzi these days, nobody sees it anyway.
But finally, some writing on clothing that I can get behind.
From the Los Angeles Times comes the story of a man with a vision. A man who thought, why not expose children to words and their definitions while they are at PE? Which is perfect, because as we all know, there’s nowhere to hide during PE.
At a middle school in which most children are disadvantaged when it comes to exposure to vocabulary words often found in standardized testing, 26 year old UCLA undergrad Michael Bailey thought he could help. Using the principal of “cognitive metaphor theory” which is just a way of saying that our minds try to place unfamiliar things with things that are familiar, he decided PE shirts would be the way to go.
So far, it seems to be working at improving the student’s language skills, and every little bit helps.
Now just think how smart we would all be if everyone walked around with words and their definitions on our backs!
I’ve got dibs on “superfantastic.”
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