Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy
Scott Lynch tells us about a variant on the Sony Aibo robotic dog. It’s from Honda and it’s called Writerbo.
Strangely, he didn’t include where to buy such a thing. Guess I’ll just have to do it myself.
(Via Tamboblog, who doesn’t have any entry links that I could find!)
It’s been a busy week.
Last Friday I baked 48 cupcakes for Simon’s birthday party. (Why? Because it seemed like a good idea at the time.) 24 chocolate, 24 vanilla. Then early Saturday morning I made vanilla and chocolate buttercream frosting, dividing between the cupcakes such that we had vanilla-vanilla, vanilla-chocolate, chocolate-vanilla, and chocolate-chocolate. Something for everyone.
I was already exhausted, and I hadn’t even gotten to the party yet.
The birthday party was quite a success, despite my fears that everything would go wrong, from no one showing up to parents saying, “Cupcakes???” We had it at a nearby park. 15 of Simon’s closest friends showed up to eat chicken nuggets, play on the playground, do crafts, and eat cupcakes. The craft was painting and putting stickers on wooden picture frames, and the kids really got into it. (Michael’s Art Supply is a wonderful place to get stuff for a kids’ party.) The kids got horribly dirty, which they utterly loved. I had a box of baby wipes so parents could make an attempt at cleaning up their kids.
When I put Simon’s birthday cupcake in front of him, several kids leaned forward and blew out the candle. He didn’t care—moved him that much closer to eating the cupcake.
(I tried to make a joke for the parents: “Don’t worry! The cupcakes are low carb!” Instead of a laugh, I got, “They are?” Waaah.)
Then Darin’s parents arrived for a visit, which is always great—the kids love Grandpa and Grandma.
Then we all got sick.
The kids had been sick for a couple of days. Sophia had a one-day cold and fever, and then Simon got it much worse, with fever on and off for a couple of days. The excitement and strain of Simon’s birthday party may have weakened his immune system, although he’s always gotten colds a lot more easily than Sophia has.
Then Darin got sick enough to stay home from work—trust me, that’s sick—and I woke up one morning going, Ennnnnnhhhhhhhh.
Not that that has stopped us: kids need to do stuff, and when grandparents are in town we need to do extra stuff. So there was the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, which is the kids’ newest favorite spot:
(No, I don’t know why whenever I tell them to sit together for a photo, Sophia decides they must hug. I guess next time I try to take their picture somewhere, I will have to enforce separate seats.)
And we went to the park in town that has a fountain for playing in:
(This is them post-frolic. They were wet and exhausted and very happy.)
The grandparents’ visit is almost over, the kids have only a residual cough, and I think I’m getting better too. Darin even went to work today.
Roger Ebert let some time lapse between his TV review of the new Adam Sandler movie, The Longest Yard, and the written review. In between, he went to Cannes and saw all manner of films. And now that he has to write a review of completely disposable Hollywood programming, he regrets his earlier televised version:
Three weeks ago I saw “The Longest Yard,” and before I left for the Cannes Film Festival, I did an advance taping of an episode of “Ebert & Roeper” on which I gave a muted thumbs-up to Richard Roeper’s scornful thumbs-down. I kinda liked it, in its goofy way. There was a dogged ridiculousness to the film that amused me, especially in the way Adam Sandler was cast as a star quarterback. Once you accept Sandler as a quarterback, you’ve opened up the backfield to the entire membership of the Screen Actors’ Guild.
Now three weeks have passed and I have seen 25 films at Cannes, most of them attempts at greatness, and I sit here staring at the computer screen and realizing with dread that the time has come for me to write a review justifying that vertical thumb, which is already on video and will go out to millions of TV viewers seeking guidance in their moviegoing.
I do not say that I was wrong about the film. I said what I sincerely believed at the time. I believed it as one might believe in a good cup of coffee; welcome while you are drinking it, even completely absorbing, but not much discussed three weeks later. Indeed after my immersion in the films of Cannes, I can hardly bring myself to return to “The Longest Yard” at all, since it represents such a limited idea of what a movie can be and what movies are for.
Read the whole thing. Talk about your mea culpas.