Chandra Clarke

Award-winning entrepreneur. Author. Professional Optimist.

Childhood Defined

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Image credit: Pixabay

It’s tough being a parent in the 21st century. Not because there aren’t any places to go for advice on important issues – just the opposite, in fact. There must be hundreds of childrearing books out there, a couple dozen parenting magazines, and umpteen web sites.

Naturally, they all give conflicting advice; worse, some of them give advice without explaining it. For example, one source says it’s bad to give your child raw carrots under the age of three, with no reason given. You’re left to wonder if A) It’s because they could be a choking hazard, and if so, why only carrots and not, say, raw broccoli? B) Whether mature carrots — those three years or older — would be acceptable or C) Carrots are verboten simply because too many parents of the previous generation were driven mad by their youngster posing with a carrot all day and repeatedly saying “Ehhhhhhh, what’s up doc?”

Anyway, after spending many hours navigating the parenting media (okay so really it was only five minutes; I’m a parent and that’s all I had to spare) I’ve come up with a list of terms that might help you find your way too. Good luck!

DVD: For the modern parent with kids to entertain, a unit of time. Example: “Hi Joan, I’d love to talk but I’ve only got half a DVD left to finish the laundry.”

Debris field: The area around your child that contains half chewed biscuits, dumped bottles, water, toys, socks, juice etc. The size of the debris field grows exponentially every month, until it eventually takes in your entire house and backyard. And possibly the neighbour yards as well.

Bib: Theoretically, something your child wears to protect clothing. Realistically, it’s a spot to print cute phrases like “Daddy’s Number One Fan.” Given that children smear food into their hair, their ears, along the table, and on you, the small area of protection afforded by the bib is laughable, really.

Toys: Expensive items that parents are encouraged to buy in great quantities to educate their children. Children do learn from toys; indeed, when a parent steps on one, they learn all sorts of new words.

Soother: Also known as a dummy or a pacifier, it is designed to be something that babies suck on for comfort. Unfortunately this design also makes for a sleek, aerodynamic profile which allows even the youngest arm to throw it up to 10 feet away. The amount of dirt that clings to it is inversely proportional to the proximity of a sink for washing it.

Sleeper: A type of clothing that very young children are supposed to sleep in. Children don’t actually sleep, however, until they’re old enough to fit into regular pajamas.

Crawl: A form of motion that your baby will try to do hundreds of times without success. Anxious parents who want to encourage their baby’s development should simply look away for five seconds. Baby will suddenly be able to crawl at speeds approaching 50 kph.

Emergency Trip: At least once per year, all children are required to look ill enough to require an emergency trip to the doctor or hospital, at which time they miraculously recover about two minutes before being seen by medical staff. This is nature’s way of stimulating the onset of grey hair. See also: 2 a.m., weekends.

First word: A child’s first word will not be what you’ve tried to get him/her to say for a week. It will be something that you didn’t realize you were saying like: frackingcomputer! or stupididiotneighbour!

Kitchen sink: The one item you will not have to pack to take your young children across the street.

Childproof: A mythical state of being. To date, nothing has been conclusively proven to be childproof. However, many such items that claim to be are very adult proof.

Pthththtb: The rude raspberry noise that is one of the first sounds a baby learns how to make. This says more about the human condition than I ever could.

All the Food That’s Fit to Print

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Maurizio Pesce from Milan, Italia [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

A few years ago, a Chicago chef has took us one step closer to a Star Trek reality. Homaru Cantu modified an ink-jet printer to print … food.

Well not quite food yet, but with ink cartridges loaded with fruit and vegetable mixtures, and a paper tray loaded with soybean and potato starch ‘paper,’ he’s getting there. He’s able to print out edible pictures that can be fried, frozen or baked; restaurant patrons can even tear up their menus and add them to the soup.

It’s not quite the replicator you see on the Enterprise, but it won’t be long now before I can stand near a spot on the wall and say “Earl Grey, hot” and have it materialize out of thin air. Or fat air, for that matter.

Cantu didn’t say how he modified his printer, as there were patents pending, and I can see why. After all there are a lot of potential applications.

For instance, a lot of new-built kitchens come with Internet connected computers. Busy Moms and Dads may soon be able to print dinner faster than they can microwave it. Indeed, forget downloading music: that is soooo 20th century. Download fillet mignon instead.

The 12 million pizza advertising flyers you got in the mail today? Wouldn’t they be a lot more appealing if they actually tasted of pizza? And wouldn’t those annoying magazine insert cards that fall into your lap be more tolerable if they were potato chip flavoured?

The world’s spies might enjoy their work a little more, if the mission instructions they’re always having to eat were a bit more palatable. I’m sure James Bond would enjoy martini-flavoured notes from Her Majesty’s secret service. Heck, I’d enjoy a martini-flavoured note from Her Majesty’s secret service, and I wouldn’t care if it were shaken, stirred, or folded into a paper airplane.

Given that newspaper ink tends to spread over everything within a five foot radius of the paper, breakfast and the morning newspaper could be combined — the newspaper could become breakfast. “Honey, are you going to eat that sports section?”

Eating your words might not be so humbling. Dogs will actually eat your kid’s homework. Licking stamps might not have to be nauseating anymore.

On the other hand, there may be some drawbacks with printable food. Those pizza flyers I mentioned earlier will make the postal worker’s lives exceptionally difficult — dogs love pizza too.

Busy moms will have to make sure their husbands and kids don’t eat the stuff set aside for the bake sale or the big Feldman presentation she printed off for work.

The printers will be dirt cheap but it will probably turn out that the refill cartridges will be $500 each. Plus you’ll start getting junk email advertising ‘Prescription drugs, Rolex watches AND FoodJet ink CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP!’

If you got an ‘Out of Potato’ error you wouldn’t know whether to call a sous chef or tech support. A paper jam would set off the smoke detector. You might find your printer secretly hooking up to the Internet in the wee hours of the morning to surf illicit food sites. There would be pop-up windows asking, “Do you want fries with that fax?”

Inevitably there will be a food printer virus which causes your printer to spit out dozens of cheesecake printouts. Hang on, that won’t be a problem…

But there might be one that plays mind games with you — printing a picture of a milkshake that actually tastes like a pork chop for example. And you can bet that some industry chief will decide it’s a good idea to a launch lawsuit against the 10-year-old in Moose Jaw who downloaded an illegal copy of a McBurger.

The biggest problem, however, will be the fact that it’s based on … printer technology. You’ll be desperate for a quick fix of ice cream paper and it will flash “PC LOAD LETTER” at you for hours. You’ll be late for work because you spent 20 minutes trying to get your muffin print out unstuck from the rollers. Or your important dinner guests will arrive to find you pounding your keyboard in frustration, screaming, “What do you MEAN you can’t find the printer? It’s RIGHT THERE!”

Of course it could be worse.

We could be basing our first attempts at Star Trek transporter beams … on printer technology.

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What would you print out with a food printer? Answer in the comments below.

BreakN ^up iz hard 2 do

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Image credit: Canva

One of the better paradoxes of human history is that sometimes the best way to see how things have changed is to study something that has stayed the same.

For example, since the dawn of time, men and women have formed, and then broken relationships. Most people dread a break-up, whether they’re the “dumper” or the “dumpee.” This is because it used to require a painful, face-to-face meeting. Consider ancient China:

LI MING: Over? What do you mean it’s over? I thought I was your little plum?
CHEN: Sorry babe, your lotus just doesn’t blossom for me any more.

Or the settlement period of the Australian outback:

NICK: You’re dumping me? What’s got you so aggro?
SHEILA: You’re seeing another Shelia. So nick off.

Or even here in Canada, in the 1980s:

BOB: No doot eh? We’re through eh?
CINDY: Yes. Your six pack has been replaced by a Molson muscle. So take off eh?

These days, couples try to make it easier by sending break-up notes via text messages on their mobile phones. Social commentators are lamenting this trend, saying that it allows people to be more rude, anonymous and less sympathetic — because they can break up at a distance, using 155 characters or less.

However, pundits shouldn’t worry too much. It’s not as easy to break up by cell phone text message as you might think.

First of all, both parties need to have a cell phone for this to work, and you both have to be using the same messaging app. There’s no point in WhatsApping if your soon-to-be-ex is Snapchatting.* And of course, the apps, and OS need to be up-to-date, otherwise, our dump message could be lost in space. Indeed, there are documented cases of relationships continuing for weeks after a break up because one of partners hadn’t upgraded their phone.

Even if this is the case, one of the reasons for the break up is probably that you spent too much time staring at your phone, yakking to other people instead. So neither of you will notice the split.

Ending a relationship by text message also means the dumped party has to translate twice: once to figure out what the short form message is saying, and again to figure out what the nice, gentle “reason” for the break up really means. For example:

itz not U it’s me = Really, it’s you. I can’t stand you anymore.
I luv U lIk a brother/sister = Please don’t try to kiss me again. Ick.
d timiN iz off = I just met someone else who is way cuter than you.
Im jst not redE 4 a relatinonshi rght nw = I can’t believe I took you home from the bar last night.

There is also the question of timing. When is it safe to send a text message breaking up with your partner? If your ex-to-be drives an SUV, the answer is never. This is because he/she will inevitably be driving while answering his/her mobile phone and will end up running over several smaller cars upon receiving the bad news.

If your partner uses the subway a lot, you’ll have to time your message to arrive when they are above ground. Otherwise, they could lose the signal and not realize they’ve been dumped. (See relationships continuing for weeks after, above.) If they have credit or money problems, any time is safe. If their mobile phone account is cut off and they don’t receive your goodbye message, they’re not going to be able to call you back to start an argument about it either.

And finally, the social commentators don’t realize that picture phones may actually make break ups faster and less acrimonious, allowing people to get on with their lives. For instance, if you catch your partner with another man/another woman, all you need to do is snap a photo and send it to them. They know they’re busted, you can hit the delete button and move on.

After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. Or 2000 wrds f U uz txt msgN shrt form.

 

*Names and trademarks owned by their respective companies, etc.

If You Go Out In The Woods Today…

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Image credit: Pixabay

Two back to back reports have me worried:

Washington state campground officials find a bear passed out in the common area and discover that it had guzzled three dozen cans of beer. Police in New Brunswick find that a bear had raided a stash of stolen beer and slurped down six cans.

Yes dear readers, this is, I believe, the start of a Disturbing Trend. There are now at least two known incidents of bruin beer burglary, and I suspect there are many others that have gone unreported — because few people have the beer guts to say their suds have been swiped by bears.

No one knows why bears are suddenly boozing it up, but I have several theories. (C’mon, you knew I would.)

1. Beer drinking does not involve sticking your sensitive nose into a bee hive and getting stung 300 times.

2. Beer is easy to come by. All you need to do is show up at the nearest camp site, and wait until everyone stops shouting “B-b-b-ear! Argh!” and runs away.

3. Bears can easily perform those drunk/macho stunts like crushing beer cans against a forehead. Possibly yours, if you don’t get away from the camp site fast enough.

4. Fresh caught salmon tastes really good cooked in beer.

5. Bears have heard all the latest studies that suggest the occasional pint is good for you.

6. Who’s going to tell them they’re getting a beer belly?

7. The A&W Root Beer Bear has been swigging the soda for years, so it was only a matter of time before they switched to the hard stuff.

Go ahead and laugh, but I suspect that beery bears are going to be a serious problem in the future. For instance, how many cubs can we expect to come from broken caves because mommy bear got fed up with daddy bear coming home in a drunken rage every night? (Although I admit this begs the question as to how she’d know a drunken rage from an ordinary bear fit).

And what about teen bears? There’s not a great deal to do in the woods on the weekends, apart from scaring the tourists. I can just see it now — bear benders. A whole weekend of drinking and terrorizing camp site after camp site; and when that got old, they’d start in on each other. You know — bear baiting followed by bear knuckle fighting. And heaven help us if they find a hunting camp full of guns — it would give a whole new meaning to the right to bear arms.

Even if campground authorities managed to keep the trouble down to a bear minimum, the trend may still affect popular culture. The story about Goldilocks might have to be rewritten to have Papa Bear say, “Who’s been into my six-pack?” (Or in the British version, Mama Bear would have to complain about the beer being too cold.)

Possibly the scariest issue associated with this trend can be summed up in three words: bear beer breath. Or even worse: bear beer barf.

Of course it won’t just be restricted to bears. Other animals will start getting into the act sooner or later. Squirrels will discover that a half walnut shell filled with mulled wine is just the ticket for getting through a long, cold winter. Birds will be arrested by the flock for flying under the influence (Although come to think of it, birds crash into my living room window fairly frequently, so perhaps they’re already into the sauce, as it were.)

Mice will have wine and cheese parties. Snakes will start talking funny, even ssslurring their words. And rabbits — can you imagine if they started getting drunk and taking home a different bunny every evening?! There’d be rabbits everywhere!

Yes folks, if you go out in the woods today, just like the song says…

… you’re sure of a big surprise.

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