Entries Tagged 'Blogging' ↓

Any fan of classic literature has got to be frustrated by the Disney-fication of eventually all children's classics. When we decorated Katherine's nursery we told people that the theme was "classic Pooh" rather than "Disney Pooh". If you didn't realize that, you do not. All of them – not just Cinderella and Snow White, but Sleeping Beauty and Little Mermaid too, all are old public domain stories that Disney has sanitized and merchandised. Some of them are actually better in the original, if you ask me. Read the original Sleeping Beauty some time and then see how dumbed down the Disney version is.

Anyway, this post is not about princesses, it's about the sordid history of Winnie the Pooh and Disney's recent loss in that war. You see, the rights to Pooh are technically owned by the Slesinger family, who purchased them from A.A. Milne back in 1930. In 1961 the family signed a deal with Disney to market Pooh, and receive royalties. However around 1991 it appears that the deal went south, and Disney just stopped making the royalty payments. It's worth noting that Pooh around this time surpassed Mickey Mouse as Disney's biggest money maker. But, hey, they're Disney, they're above the law, right?
Like Scientology or Microsoft they can just throw paperwork and lawyers at the problem until the other party just goes away.

In 2002 some granddaughters of Milne and Shepard appeared out of nowhere and tried to file a copyright claim to the characters which would essentially have erased Slesinger's complaint against Disney (since they would never have had the right to license Pooh in the first place). Disney was not technically a part of that lawsuit, but basically they funded the whole thing. They said that they would pay the granddaughters' costs, as long as, if they won, the granddaughters also signed their rights over to Disney. That's practically Asimov's grandfather paradox, if you think about it. How evil do they have to be to even think of sometihng like that? We can't think of a reason why we shouldn't have to pay this deal we signed…I know! We'll go back in time and fix it so that they never had the rights to do the deal in the first place! Mwahahahah!

Only problem is, as of Thursday, it didn't work. The judge threw it out. Apparently in 1983 one of the surviving Milne's did indeed know about and approve of, on paper, the Slesinger deal. So she couldn't then swoop in and say "No deal."

Want an idea of just how big the Disney marketing juggernaut is? Apparently the Slesinger's are owed somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 billion dollars in royalties. Billion. Have a nice day.

The official cast list has been announced. Since I'd been keeping a running list of the rumors already, I posted the official details over here.

BoingBoing has this story about unboundedly long songs. Not infinite, since you can stop whenever you want, but songs that have no specific end. For instance, X Bottles of Beer on the Wall. You can pick whatever X you want.

I'm surprised that "Old MacDonald Had A Farm" isn't on there. Katherine the other day asked me when that song ends, and I told her it ends when you stop singing. Am I missing something? Does that song have an end that I don't know about?

It's funny how words work when you're 4 years old. You understand that "plus" means addition and "minus" means "take away". But "times" already meant something, it means repeating something some number of times, but when you say something like "three times five", it makes no sense. You wouldn't say to a person "I spun in a circle times three."

So as I teach Katherine her multiplication I've simply switched it to the end of the sentence. Instead of asking her "three times five" I ask her what "five three times" is. This is far more intuitive, she understands that "five three times" means "five and five and five". She can do that math.

I have no idea how to explain division yet. All I've got in my head is that old clip from the Beverly Hillbillies of Jethro talking about his "gazintas". Two gazinta four two times, two gazinta six three times, two gazinta eight four times…. 🙂

(I should set something up so that posts on my other blogs show up here, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Seems spammy – if the audience for blog A wants to hear about B and C then I wouldn't need three different blogs, would I?)

But then there are times when I'd like to think a post is useful to all my audiences. Over on Commute Smarter I've got Five (More) Things To Do With A Laptop And No Net Connection. This comes on the heels of a popular post that went around the blogs last week about what to do with your PC when your net connection is down, and included things like taking it apart to clean out the dust. Well, I have about 20-30 minutes every day on the train with my laptop, so I can't really take the thing apart. But that doesn't mean I haven't found ways to keep myself busy!

The other night we're over the neighbors for dinner and playing the "Do you know how smart my 7yr old is?" game. I don't love that game. "Do you guys know what a homophone is?" the neighbor asks.

I honestly try to remember. She didn't say homonym, which I know. She said homophone. I take a guess that it's a word that has multiple meanings depending on the pronunciation (like read as in REED, versus read as in RED). "Nope," says the 7yr old, "It's two words that are spelled different, but sound the same. Like meet and meat."

"Then what's a homonym?" I ask.

He thinks about this and says, "They're the same thing."

I shake my head at that. That can't be right. So as casually as possible I pull out the cell phone, open up a web browser and go googling for it.

Sure enough, kid's right. Homophone and homonym mean the same thing. When the hell did THAT happen?

By the way, the word I was thinking of was "heteronym."

Update: You know, it's actually more complicated than this. Maven's Word of the Day tells me that homonym is the superclass to which both homophone and homograph belong. Specifically, a homonym is supposed to be spelled and pronounced the same (such as "grizzly bear" and "bear witness"). A homophone is what the neighbor said – sound the same, spelled differently. Interestingly a homograph is the thing I was thinking of, spelled the same but pronounced differently, like "I object to that large object."

Apparently a heteronym is a particular type of homonym where the word has to have an entirely different meaning. So I'm guessing that this means "I will read the book" and "I have read the book" would be a homograph but not a heteronym. "Look for minute details for the next minute" would be a heteronym. I think.

I'd like to blame it on Lukas, but we all knew that it was going to be a spectacular failure, didn't we?

Read more…

Guys: are you worried about a little thinning on top?

You may want to consider having another cup of coffee.
German researchers said caffeine not only blocks the chemical known to damage hair follicles, but it can also stimulate growth.

But, don't get too excited just yet.
The study also found that you'd need about 60 cups of java a day to start seeing the effects.

Instead, the researchers are hoping to create a caffeine solution that can be applied to the scalp.

So apparently the solution is to actually take a shower in coffee?

I'd like to see the mouse that got shot up with the equivalent of 60 cups of coffee a day. Run that frickin maze in 0.3 seconds I'll bet.

What's the name for that thing where you lose your ipod headphones (earbuds, actually), so you go out and buy a new pair (because you walk across town twice every day with them and you need something) for $20, but they're horrible, so you spend a week suffering with them (you can't return things that you stick in your ears, you ever try?) until finally you break down and buy another pair…

…and it's at this point that you think I'm gonna say "You find the original pair you thought you lost", right? Well, yeah. I did, right there in the garage.

BUT THEN I FOUND ANOTHER G$%^&*(D%^&N PAIR that I'd never seen before, sitting right in the junk drawer in the kitchen. That's like, irony squared or something. Alanis Morrisette's got me all confused about what that word's really supposed to mean.

So I now have:

• One ipod
• 2 sets of earbuds that were already in my possession
• 2 sets of earbuds that I've just purchased for $20/per.

If I get one more pair I'm thinking about implementing a day of the week sort of thing. I wonder if I can convince Kerry that now I need to buy more iPods?

When Katherine was just learning how to speak, she used to say that the Indian sitting on the Land-o-Lakes margarine was Jesus.

Well she's 4 1/2 now and quite articulate. Last night over dinner she showed me the margarine and said, "Daddy, that's an Indian on there."

"That's right," I told her, "And you know what? When you were little, you used to say that was Jesus."

Pause. "Yes Daddy, I know," she told me. "I said that because she wears her hair long like that, and that's how Jesus wears it."

So, there you go. If your child says something that you don't understand while they're still learning to talk, make a note of it and ask her a few years later when she can explain it better. "Remember when you said innoo da tikkamix? What did you mean by that?"

Actually "innoo da tikkamix" is an Elizabeth quote. This appears to be the battle cry of something called a Wonderpet, from what Katherine tells me. My best guess is they're saying "into the thick of it" or something like that, but I can't seem to google anything to confirm that. On the contrary, the catchphrases of the characters are clearly listed on wikipedia and they're not even close.

Either way, Elizabeth thinks that "innoo da tikkamix" is hysterical and will run around the house saying it. Anybody know what it really means?

I'm reminded of the old Steven Wright bit: "I kept a diary when I was a baby. Day one, still tired from the trip. Day two, everyone talks to me like I'm an idiot." and, more relevant, "Whenever I'm the room with a baby I like to write down every noise they make, so when they grow up I can say, What did you mean by that?"