I nominate this one . All the other columns are about one sad couple. That column is about how we're all pretty damn sad.
The one they think is saddest is not that sad! Or rather, their little precis sounds sad, but the author is plenty wry about it.
I might have gone the rest of my life not thinking about Sad Sack. Less polished than Beetle Bailey but preceded it. Read a lot of them as a kid. Post-WW II there certainly were a plethora of goofy military send ups in various media. I must have read the original No Time for Sergeants novel* a dozen times as a kid.
*Later a movie--first Andy Griffiths/Don Knotts pairing--and TV show and the inspiration for Gomer Pyle.
I thought the whole point of Modern Love was for readers to hate on the people being featured, in which case sad Modern Love columns seem counterproductive.
I might have gone the rest of my life not thinking about Sad Sack. Less polished than Beetle Bailey but preceded it. Read a lot of them as a kid. Post-WW II there certainly were a plethora of goofy military send ups in various media.
The world is still not ready for my gritty reimagining of See Here, Private Hargrove!.
The world is still not ready for my gritty remaining of See Here, Private Hargrove!.
I may never be ready for the history of the Giant Private Hargrove of Sumatra.
It's weird to think of Jim Neighbors as a cut-rate Andy Griffin.
In the entire run of Gomer Pyle, USMC his unit never deployed overseas. Given that the series ran through the height of the Vietnam war, one would think their would have been at least a hand wave or two.
Shouldn't 6 be from Opinionated Gezunhiet Dankeshane?
7,8: The show was literally a spin off from The Andy Griffith Show where Pyle had appeared as a character for several seasons. (Or maybe that is well known.)
BTW, I regard this as augmenting the thread, not hijacking it.
10: Right, but IIRC, in "No Time for Sergeants", Andy was the proto-Gomer.
8: In what is in no way a sign of a misspent youth, I recall an episode where Gomer and Sergent Carter are looking for an enemy submarine. I think it was the episode called "Gomer Captures a Submarine". I don't think it was a training exercise, but I can't find a plot synopsis online.
The show was literally a spin off from The Andy Griffith Show where Pyle had appeared as a character for several seasons.
Huh...I watched reruns of both shows growing up, and I never heard of this until now.
Given that the series ran through the height of the Vietnam war, one would think their would have been at least a hand wave or two
It's easy to see looking back that the kind of light-heartedness the show depended on would have been very dissonant with any actual conflict. The whole genre, and similar manifestations like Reader's Digest's Humor in Uniform spoke to the fact that military service and its absurdities were far more universal than combat, which was always an anomalous experience even in wartime.
Nabors was a very popular guy in the heartland because of the show, and sang Back Home in Indiana before the start of the Indy 500 for many years afterward.
Does everyone know that "Sad Sack" is short for what the sergeants called inept recruits, Sad Sack of S**t? Still current in the 70s. "Army Creole," an attempt to make every utterance as profane as possible, struck me as resembling Jabberwocky in that it was clearly English, utterly without content words. Army Creole would use the basic swearwords for all parts of speech, and only context allowed you to know what was meant.
I had to tone down my general contempt for Modern Love after a friend from school contributed her heartbreaking story, but I'll still mock it on a case-by-case basis.
2: Yeah, the same thing happened to a friend of mine, and she was like "Whew! Dodged a bullet."
I think the typical 'modern love' author is a writer looking for extra publicity and trying desparately to milk out a columns worth of quasi-literary details from their love life. There's something so painfully writing-class about the prose. It's kind of striking how bland and boring the typical column is given that romance/sex are universally interesting topics.
spoke to the fact that military service and its absurdities were far more universal than combat, which was always an anomalous experience even in wartime.
This seems right. The passing of the wartime humor comedy (and its replacement with the "all soldiers are hero-warriors" theme) seems to be more or less simultaneous with the change to the volunteer army and the end of an era when a large portion of the population served in the military.*
*I always wonder, did they have WWII bumbling-soldier sitcoms in Germany after the war? Probably not, I guess.
@20: I'm somewhat amused by the fact that the term "passive-aggressive" was first coined to describe the behavior of American soldiers during and after WWII.
20.last: That's why Werner Klemperer's attempt to return to Germany in the 60s never worked.
20.last: Reminds of Mad's Hogan parody, Hochman's Heroes.
Good God. Until looking up the Wikipedia page just now, I had no idea that the guy who played Colonel Klink was the son of Otto Klemperer and a cousin of Victor Klemperer.
My father describes his military service (59-61? Ish? An entirely nonwartime couple of years) as endlessly entertaining once he figured out that the system wasn't set up to object to purportedly honest incompetence.
The guys falling for dogs had me hoping for some hot man-on-dog action but they were all lamely platonic. I have an interest as I went to undergrad with a guy currently doing time for a probation violation related to puppy lovin' and I'm always expecting him to pop up in these things.
I'm probably going to regret asking, but how does one get into legal trouble for that sort of thing? Someone else's dog, or what? It just seems like the sort of anti-social behavior that it'd be really, really unusual to get busted for (as 40% of all teenage girls could tell you).
as 40% of all teenage girls could tell you
What? (Am I being slow? I feel like I am being slow.)
Somewhere, back in the mists of the past, Ogged confidently asserted that 40% of all teenage girls had masturbated the family dog. I can't be the only one who remembers this.
Top 5 Unfogged Memorable Moment.
The other four involved urple's short-lived cooking show.
32: That seems unlikely, but far more likely that what I thought you were saying.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you get to be a FPP.
To be clear, I mean LB's command of TFA, not her canine ministrations.
28: It's illegal in a lot of places and the dude in question sees himself as a political martyr for the cause of zoophilia, so he just won't shut up about his activities. He's got a restraining order forbidding him from owning a dog or being in the same house as one, which he violated. His primary crime was coke smuggling, but he ratted everyone out so got only 5 years and was out on probation and under this restraining order from earlier activities (where he got busted on video - this associated with the farm in Washington where the dude got fucked to death by a horse - they videotaped all manner of things including my almost-classmate doing the deed with a doggy).
I use Ogged's 40% dog masturbating assertion as a personal mental shorthand for an insane, confidently asserted statistic. I've had times where I wanted to put it into a brief, before realizing that maybe not everyone reads this blog.
Ex wife #2 was about 12 when she walked in on the family dog going down on her older sister.
A old neighborhood friend of mine was a K-9 MP in the Army back in the 80s and told me all the dog handlers masturbated their dogs to reward them.
Derp doge indeed.
they videotaped all manner of things including my almost-classmate doing the deed with a doggy
You can't have dogs making real estate transactions.
The one they think is saddest is not that sad!
Not at all, and she's writing a memoir? Fucking druggies often think their lives and experiences with that stuff are so damn interesting and they're so wrong. You mean to tell me that you, a substance abuser, had an unplanned and ill advised pregnancy with another substance abuser and despite all of your travails he continues to be a chronic junkie? Holy shit! By all means, better get that on paper like you were on the quest to destroy the One Ring.
Seriously, what was he doing to the doge?
How much is the doge in the window?
44: OTOH, if you got rid of everything written about ill-considered, self-destructive behavior and the effects thereof, there wouldn't be a whole lot of literature left.
I might have gone the rest of my life not thinking about Sad Sack. Less polished than Beetle Bailey but preceded it. Read a lot of them as a kid.
Oh, right! I forgot about those. Read a bunch of them too.
WT-actual-F re: many of the other sad sacks in this thread.
Given the anecdotes in this thread, I might have underestimated.
20: At some point they actually aired overdubbed Hogan's Heroes in Germany. They gave each German character a distinctive regional accent that supposedly made them funnier.
I'm not sure why, but I find the fact that Klemperer only agreed to do the show if they could promise him that the Germans would never win makes the show seem funnier -- just the idea that every single stupid line out of Col. Klink's mouth was Klemperer's way of saying "Fuck you!" to the Third Reich.
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McMegan being reasonable -- in part because she's not trying to make any grand point, just musing.
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51.2 -- It is kind of awesome, in a "stick this up your ass, Nazis" kind of way.
20 -- No, it wasn't simultaneous. Friends myage spoke of fighting the hash war of 1978 in Germany. It was Grenada that started it, and Kuwait that really cemented it.
Actually, I knew a vet of the Hash War back in 79/80. He lived in this neat group house about halfway up Big Mountain, with a great view, a large pond, and a zip line over the pond. Great place to take a date on a summer evening. One time a stoned guest answered the phone "World Headquarters" and the name stuck. Someone made a big carved wooden sign and so they put it out at the road, much to the confusion of tourists.
I moved away, and then Jim Nabors bought the place, tore down the house, and built something big. Sold in 2000. Gollllllleee.
Friends myage spoke of fighting the hash war of 1978 in Germany.
Come to think, a friend dated a guy who was older, but not all that much older, who'd been in the US Army in Germany, so probably no earlier than the early-mid 80s, and described it as pretty drugaddled then. Participating in artillery exercises after doing heroin, and that kind of thing.
I remember the Great 40% of Girls Masturbate Their Dogs Debate clearly, if not fondly. Maybe fondly.
I don't think it's been linked yet, (or I missed it).
I honestly don't understand the skepticism. If you were to have asked me, for some reason, what percentage of teenaged girls play with their dog's penis at least once, I would have guessed something like 40%. Kids get curious. (Note: I've never had a pet.)
It was the referent for my stupid and tasteless rejoinder* to ogged's tasteless Helen Keller joke the other day.
*Did they own a dog when she was a teenager?
Huh. In my memory of it, ogged was asserting that 40% of dog-owning teenaged girls had played with their dog's penis. If that was supposed to be 40% of all teenaged girls, that seems much less supportable. I think that would be over 80% of dog-owning girls.
Oh, good, he clarified that point in 226 of that thread.
20: Theyre not a sitcom, but Hans Hellmut Kirst's Gunner Asch novels - satirical stories about life in the wartime German army - were filmed in the 1950s
This would be the thread to note that The Atlantic decided to put up an article about how giving a woman a happy ending is now some sort of spiritual movement. Possibly my favorite passage.
The conference was at least half full of men, young and old. During the training session, a young man named Eli, a One Taste coach from Brooklyn, told us what he takes from the experience. One man asked him: Why bother? What does a man get from sitting there stroking a woman and not receiving hands-on pleasure in return? "As a stroker I am learning to feel," Eli said, "to put my finger on this incredibly sensational spot on a living breathing organism, to come into contact with so much life in one particular place." He also spoke about his white middle class male privilege and how he had to really check it at the door. "For me this is one thing that is not going according to my ride."
59: I thought you were making a more common joke.
Man, the author in 64's website is something else. A teaser of "Epilepsy and Exorcisms".
But the clinical neurological speak of genetic mutation and basal ganglia misfiring did not satisfy me. I grew curious beyond the scientific. What was I looking for? At the time I had no idea...Years later, I learned: to understand my body in the context of the Jewish people, in the context of my ancestors, of my history and of my connection to Torah...It was at Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in Boulder, Colo., that I began to uncover my story...For the two years I spent in Boulder, I worked with an acupuncturist to begin to use my seizures as a guide toward deeper, spiritual knowledge.
The picture that accompanies "Erotic Healer Rabbi" is also all kinds of awesome.
a happy ending
This usage is new to me; I realize it's facetious but I can't say I like it.
I'm remembering that in Trilling's review of the Kinsey Report he mentions the popular understanding that the man is obliged, and that Kinsey's challenge of that was unpleasant. A very good essay.
Theyre not a sitcom, but Hans Hellmut Kirst's Gunner Asch novels
I read them when I was actually in the army. And his Night of the Generals was made into a movie with Peter O'Toole as General Tanz.
Have we not already talked about OM here? There was a longer Gawker article.
OT: So, a couple of months ago someone linked an online application to be a Jeopardy contestant, and I just got a callback for an in-person audition. I should probably study or something.
70: Hooray!
66: I am going to read this in hopes that one particular family member -- the same one who once cornered my ex-wife the art critic and asked her for her thoughts on erotic photography -- does not show up in it.
I will now celebrate not finding him in the article with another link to Clarence Carter's "Strokin'".
5:
I was once forced to sit through about 10 minutes of a... call it a movie called "Shaving Ryan's Privates". From a critic's perspective, I'll say the title was inspired.
Not exactly on-point.
60:
My dad traveled to NYC for an audition in the mid-60s, didn't get on.
All my life people have asked me if I would try out for it. I always say no.
Here's a pretty good rant about a very similar scenario, the "Ted Rall hates black people" imbroglio of December 2013. Features many examples of representative tweets from those who live to express knee-jerk outrage.
Apparently, cheap Canadian whiskey has as much alcohol as good whiskey.
70: Congratulations! You'd be a great Jeopardian. (And I'm slightly bummed now since I also took the online test.)
Fun in Laredoo:
"Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin.
"Six dance-hall maidens to bear up my pall.
"Throw bunches of roses all over my coffin.
"Roses to deaden the clods as they fall."
I mean, it says right on the bottle how much alcohol is in it.
We have a bunch of veteranos here, right? I forget who. Besides me*.
*Not a Ph.D.
Me too. And Gabardine Bathyscaphe, maybe?
I'm not actually expecting to do particularly well even if I do get on -- playing along from home I'm fairly mediocre. But it sounds like a moderately entertaining thing to do.
Thinking of top 5 Unfogged moments, doesn't the Oscar Pistorius arrest mean that we retroactively win that argument with B on whether Pistorius should be in the Olympics? It's now clear that B is objectively pro-murder.
94 -- God, that Wikipedia page is amazing. The guy who played the French stock character LeBeau was actually in Buchenwald and has a concentration camp tattoo. Everyone who played a German was Jewish and had a relative killed in the camps. I now want to rewatch Hogan's Heroes with all this in mind.
Nothing too much in it that has not been discussed, but this Klemperer interview with Pat Sajak shows his equanimity and perspective on thie thing in a good light. (Even when Sajak the Ass wrong foots the whole thing by initially saying it was set in a concentration camp.)
88: Women get callbacks much more quickly. It doesn't mean you're out of the running. And yay, LB!
94: "he series fails to fully reflect the life, the rather harsh life, of POWs in a German POW camp during World War II....The producers may have wanted to (quite inaccurately) portray most Germans as disloyal...and those in authority and uniform as bumbling fools.....There is no evidence that the Germans used prisoner-of-war camps to protect secret weapons or important persons from Allied aerial bombings let alone keep them within close proximity to the prisoners within the same compound....The tunnels are unrealistically tall and spacious....The series depicts the prisoners communicating by radio with submerged submarines.... Swastikas on the camp flagpole and in a picture in Klink's office are incorrectly shown as left facing....Historically correct German rank designations, such as Hauptfeldwebel (Senior Master Sergeant), Leutnant (lieutenant), Hauptmann (captain), Oberst (Colonel) and others were almost always given American armed forces equivalents in the series"
88: Yay, hope! Yay, LB!
91: Judging from that intro, I would have guessed that that happened circa 1992, but Alex doesn't have a mustache so it can't be...more than 13 years old, wow. Still, Jeopardy's set really doesn't age well.
So many threads run through Hogan's Heroes it's hard to know where to begin. Everything about it is bizarre as only the 60s could be.
I kind of want to merge the Hogan's Heroes and Colbert's racist joke threads. You know what was some really offensive humor?
Hogan's Heroes was filmed about 20 years after WWII's end. Does that mean an Abu Ghraib comedy is coming in another 10 years?
I've learned quite a bit about Otto Klemperer lately: his interpretations of Mahler symphonies are important to me just now and I've listened to 2 already this morning on my ipod.
The scene in "German California" in the 40s is amazing, with all those intellectual expats, mostly Jewish trying to make some sort of living from the entertainment business. The children, like Klemperer's son Werner were able to make a life there but the expats themselves drifted away. Many were unable to settle anywhere after that and lived very restless lives.
"German California"
Anaheim?
105 -- There's an amazing anecdote from The Rest Is Noise in which Schoenberg confronts Mahler's widow in the late 1940s in the middle of the Brentwood Country Mart, which is pretty incredible if you've been to the Brentwood Country Mart. The Schoenberg family is still in Brentwood; I think the kid or grand-kid teaches at UCLA.
70: Congrats, LB! I made it to the auditions a few years ago, but I was rejected for my terrible personality. Also, maybe because I'm slow on the clicker. The brain damage probably didn't help either.
God, and in googling this I learned for the first time just now that I guy I knew as "Judge Schoenberg" is Arnold's son.
re: 104
Filmed in the Middle East somewhere? Maybe.
The US, of course, were the Nazis in this instance.
re: 107
Yeah, and Korngold, and the like, too. It was modernist heaven.
Adorno apparently really hated Southern California. There's something surreal about the idea of him living across the street from Bertolt Brecht in Pacific Palisades while laboring away at a dialectical critique of 12 tone music.
On the other hand, the whole "bland SoCal suburban neighborhood full of German philosophers" thing sounds like an ideal setup for a wacky sitcom.
The part where Schoenberg is all annoyed that the tour-of-the-stars-homes people would mention Shirley Temple across the street but not him is fantastic.
LB would be the second person from here on there, right?
I used to enjoy Hogan's Heroes, then I found out that their portrayal of the Tiger tank was completely inaccurate. Once again, Hollyweird insults good, fighting machines.
While 115 is in the form of a question, I don't think the judges are going to credit it.
118: Smooth life Jeopardy hack. If you forget the question word, just end your answer with "eh?" or a rising tone.
Also, has anyone noted that there was a hearing in 2012 to determine ownership of the movie rights
Shit, HTML fail.
...for Hogan's Heroes? Just savor that fact for a minute.
end your answer with "eh?"
Are you implying that Trebek is in the tank for fellow Canadians?
It's worth a try. That's real money on the line; play dirty if you have to.
I'm astounded by how much Trebek looks like Joseph Gordon-Levitt in this picture from his CBC days.
Congrats, LB. I tried out once, and didn't make it. Too many bad categories for me on the screening test they used that time (50 questions at the $800/$1000 level).
confronts Mahler's widow
The astonishing Alma, subject of one of Tom Lehrer's most famous songs.
What happens on Jeopardy if you use the wrong question-word? E.g., "Author of the Gettysburg Address," "Where is Abraham Lincoln?" I mean, it is a question, and it contains the correct answer.
105ff: Schoenberg used to play tennis regularly with George Gershwin. I read that he also played with Groucho Marx, but can't find a citation. In looking for one, though, I came across this fascinating little piece about tennis-playing composers.
When he wasn't busy coming up with a system for ordering notes in music, the Austrian composer could be found surrounded by scribbles and sketches for countless inventions. One of which was a notation system for tennis. As an accomplished tennis player, Schoenberg wanted to be able to record the moves of his tennis games so, in between rounds of four-sided chess, another of his inventions, he devised his own tennis shorthand, capable of recording everything from 'player rushes to the net' to 'foot fault'.
"Where is Abraham Lincoln?"
Grant's Tomb.
126: The "who are three people who have never been in my kitchen?" precedent may be somewhat applicable.
Trebek: "Obviously that is not what we were going for when we wrote up that clue." Of course, that concerned the material part of the response so you have an argument. Try it at the try out and report back. Or better yet liveblog it.
This FAQ on show mechanics reads like it is the transcript of a reddit Ask Me Anything session (of course we have those here with direct experience). From it:
The judges table has about 10 people sitting at it, including the producers, writers, researchers and a lawyer.
and
Most of the conversation is between the judges, if the contestant does have some type of grievance, they are able to explain their side, but that usually doesn't come up.
So if you got on the show, you might be able to work it out lawyer-a-lawyer.
And this may be bullshit, but a good story if it isn;t:
One time, the two top winning (dollars won) contestants ever on Jeopardy!, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter (won the most total money ever on Jeopardy) stopped by to view a taping. During the break Alex decided to chit chat with them and asked them what they have been doing with the money they won, Jennings, a devout mormon, mentioned that he was helping out in the community, donating, buying bibles and such.. Then Trebek asked Rutter. His response: "Hookers and blow Alex, hookers and blow".
Alma in her sixties walked out of occupied Europe over the Pyrenees, with the help of Varian Fry and Albert Hirschmann.
If you met some of those German Californians, you'd be 1 degree of separation, if you have my tastes and interests, from anyone you'd ever wanted to know or see.
132 last -- yes, I just realized that (through meeting Schoenberg's son at least once, without knowing of the connection to the composer) I'm in a two-steps removed touched-the-hand-that-touched-the-hand-that-touched-the-hand situation from an insane amount of late 19th/early 20th Century European culture. For whatever that's worth, which is basically zero, but fun.
Schoenberg's kid also had an connection to the OJ Simpson trial, just for maximum culture clash surrealism.
So in a butterfly-causes-hurricane kind of way, either serialism or the Nazis caused the deaths of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. Ultimately, I blame the Jews.
If you do get on the show, LB, or even just for the tryout, I'd definitely suggest Googling "arthur chu jeopardy strategy" for some thoughts on Arthur's recent run (he finished with the third-highest ever total). As he was quick to admit, none of the elements of his strategy were completely original, but he put them together in a particularly nice way, while attracting a bunch of Twitter hate (and love).
See, e.g., the defense Ken Jennings made of Arthur's strategy at Slate, or the interview Ken did with Arthur.
It's too bad that John Emerson isn't around for this thread -- Germans in mid-century Hollywood is one of his favorite topics.
Also LB, if you're not already familiar with it, the J! Archive is a treasure trove of information about the questions asked on the show. There are certain topics that come up frequently, so it's probably a good place to study.
We're pulling for you, LB! But you must work the Mineshaft into all of your on-air interviews.
137: Ooh, that does look useful.
and 138: "My hobbies? I enjoy picking low hanging fruit."
I'm sure Alex would love to sex Mutombo.
Prisoner of Trebekistan is a must-read.
100: July 2007. Granted, my wardrobe was a little out of date. But very few men go with a light suit.
132: And the manuscript score of Bruckner's third.
Salka Viertel's autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers, is a wonderful read that I highly recommend to both of you, idp and halford.
Responding to all the subthreads:
I was with my god kids yesterday, which meant that I got to hear the five-year-old say, "Look! Einstein (the yellow lab) is showing his penis!"*
Now I really want to watch Hogan's Heroes. Should I?
A college debate friend of mine did really well on Jeopardy. His husband was recently hired to work at Google, and is now living in San Francisco and probably riding the infamous bus.
In re: Central Europeans in California, I love reading the parts of Czeslaw Milosz's memoirs that are set at Berkeley. He was quite unimpressed with U.S. university student leftists during the 60s. (I think this was around the time he and Neruda got into a big spat because communism, but he told me that Neruda later personally apologized to him.)
*Might as well put this here. Said godson has a serious speech delay, or whatever it's called--he is fairly chatty, but almost impossible to understand. There's a long, convoluted story as to why he isn't currently seeing a speech therapist, and he will start seeing one soon, but the whole situation is driving me batty. I feel super-guilty that I don't want to spend much one-on-one time with him because I can't understand what he's trying to tell me, and we both end up sad and frustrated. I suppose I just wanted to whine here in a space that his parents wouldn't see, but I'd also appreciate any suggestions. He does use ASL occasionally, but only for words that I can basically understand in spoken context anyway. FTR, his three-year-old sister is also hard to understand, but more in a typical toddler fashion, and I think she'll grow out of it. The 1.5 year old twins don't have any clear words at all, but they chatter together all the time. The oldest's issues seem to stem largely from his never-ending ear wax-based trouble hearing, and also possibly from the fact that he and two of his other siblings have NF1, which can manifest in any number of ways.
(/braindump)
I've a profoundly deaf close family member, so different from your (intermittently?) hard of hearing godchild J Robot, but I do think early and intensive is extremely important for language acquisition and speech in general. As a god parent perhaps you could risk a bit of pushing?
This reminds me of the episode of Hogan's Heros where they smuggled Ike into the camp for a cochlear implant.
Does anyone else find the recurring waves of "ohmygod *amazing* video if deaf person HEARING FOR THE FIRST TIME!!!! you will cry!" videos to be unwatchably horrible and the entire phenomenon sickmaking or is that just me?
Videos are generally unwatchably horrible.
Some videos have people injuring themselves. Those are watchably horrible.
"of" once again, wretched phone.
J, Robot, I know we've talked about this a little in the past and I'd be glad to talk again. At not quite 20 months, Selah says at least 50 words that people who know her can recognize (so I don't always know what she's saying if it's the names of kids in daycare, but her teacher recognizes those, and presumably ditto the dog's name here, etc.) whereas Mara had maybe a dozen at her third birthday and still struggles with her speech. She makes the sounds fine and can be understood, but her grammar is still idiosyncratic and she will make sort of poetic descriptions to cover for all the words she doesn't know. We probably need to get her back in speech therapy but I've made other things a priority for her because her speech is improving, just not as fast as we'd hoped. So I do understand not doing it, sort of, but this situation sounds quite different.
I've been gently nagging his mom for the past two years, and I do think the therapy will start soonish, at least.
A great speech therapist is a great thing, and there are a lot of them! It sounds like other concerns have kept the family somewhat isolated and the mom may not recognize that her kids are outside the normal range. A professional will, and will stay on top of it.
Communicative frustrations aside for the moment*, keep in mind that clear speech != language. Generally, "early" is more important for (accessible) input and much less important for (understandable) output.
*I realize that communicative frustration is what you are complaining about. So, not trying to change the subject. Just adding a side note.
J, Robot, my suggestion to limit frustration is to spend time with him doing stuff where you don't need to talk much. Take him to a movie, go play catch, ride bikes, stuff like that. Playing board games and eating meals will probably be more frustrating simply because there's more opportunity to chat. I always think of five as the age of the neverending story, where kids just talk your ear off, so it's probably particularly frustrating now in a way it won't be once that stage passes. (Sorry, Thorn, I know your kids are around this age. It's just one of my personal least favorites. They don't stop talking, and they're smart enough to notice when their audience zones out.)
Reading historical inaccuracies section of the Wikipedia page for "Hogan's Heros" makes me want to add a similar section to the page for "Top Secret".
Thanks, all. I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm not fabulous with this age group, either. I will cuddle ALL THE BABIES!!!!!!! but don't do as well with the 4-7 range, especially if we can't communicate very effectively. I'd like, for example, to take him to movies, but the main thing stopping me is that I wouldn't be able to understand what he was saying during the car ride. Well, that, and the fact that I haven't figured out how to handle the car seat issue.
Re: Messily's comment, the issue here does seem to be speech rather than language, so I hope the delayed intervention doesn't turn out to be too problematic. The twins, meanwhile, are on their own time table for virtually everything, so it's easier for me not to worry about them.
Honestly, given my level of (mostly unwarranted) anxiety about the kidlets in my life, I can only imagine how miserable I'd be as a parent.
No, no, the beauty of it is that you're too exhausted to be miserable! Especially when ydnew has no idea how right she about how Nia talks from the moment she wakes up until her head hits the pillow at night, which is exhausting too.
J, Robot, I really recommend using the PRIDE strategies from Parent-Child Interaction Therapy when playing with a young child who struggles with something that gets in the way of connecting otherwise. This seems like a fairly good rundown, although it's aimed at clinicians rather than parents. Having a few minutes of special playtime helps a lot of things.
My fever is finally gone. I'm still without an appetite and even thinking of beer makes me queasy.
On the upside, Mobes, you do belong in the Sadsacks thread!
Plus, I learned not to put the armpit thermometer in my mouth.
More accurately, I learned that our thermometer is an armpit thermometer.
165, 166: well it could have been worse.
OT: I think I'd like to try out minecraft. Should I or will it be like civ when I was in college?
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I'm looking to sublet a one-bedroom apartment in Austin for the summer (June through August). Main criteria are location-based: less than a 45 minute bus ride to Montopolis, in an interesting area to walk around in. Any advice?
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Cut down a tree, build a pickaxe, and tunnel into the side of a big hill or mountain until you get coal.
I guess maybe that was intended, actually.
|| Celebrity deaths don't usually get to me, but I'm finding Matthiessen a sad loss. |>
174: It is, but he had a good long ride and left a great legacy. Plus, maybe now I'll be inspired to finish In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.
|| I don't know which of you fuckers to blame most, but Christ, that game. I managed to resist until last weekend (when I had a deadline, of course), and it's crack. I finally got 2048 today, and when I was at the symphony tonight, I swear to God, I couldn't stop imagining pushing the pairs of violins together to make violas, and the violas to make cellos, and the entire string section packed away into the corner of the stage in the form of a single, orange-yellow superbass.|>
I couldn't stop imagining pushing the pairs of violins together to make violas, and the violas to make cellos, and the entire string section packed away into the corner of the stage in the form of a single, orange-yellow superbass.
Someone start programming this, quick! It's much less ridiculous than the Cumberbatch/otters version.
Some videos have people injuring themselves. Those are watchably horrible.
You know you liked that Anderson Silva kick vid. Here's a relatively mild kind of deadlift fail.(not a bicep tear, I promise)
169: I'm not the best person to ask anymore, but I don't want your comment to get lost in the ages. Email me (my address is under my pseud) and I'll connect you with M/tch, Sir Kraab, and Criminally Bulgar.
175: That's beautiful and hilarious. You've caught a mutation of Tetris Syndrome. I haven't had it with 2048, but ten years back when I was playing a lot of (yes, it's a ridiculous name, and yes it has the most interesting video game economy this side of Eve) YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates, I would see any grid--especially floor tiles--as a collection of pentominoes.
If only we could use this for good somehow.
The Cumberbatch/otter one is easier than doge one once you realize that each Cumberbatch is paired with an equivalent otter.
181.last: On my browser, I can only see the top two rows and part of the third, so I have to play without knowing what's going on at the bottom row and I've gotten my highest scores ever that way. I'm not sure what that means about my usual gameplay.
The last row (or column) is used mostly for fixing mistakes or late game chaining. It's a safety net. (There are some small tricks you can do if you pay attention to it, e.g. moving everything to the side before moving up if you notice that a low-value piece is going to move up to a location that you could move a high-value piece left into, but worrying about that is an optimization.) Not having to worry about it is a useful simplification most of the time.
There is no question that I would have finished my PhD dissertation a full 3 months earlier than I did, if not for the Tetris. Speaking of, cool.
If only we could use this for good somehow.
Something like freerice.com?
You all could have raised thousands of dollars, or thousands of grains of rice, or something, in the last couple of weeks.
This seems to be the appropriate thread to mention that after uncountably many hours I finally won the goddamn doge game.
My wife's office computer was this week upgraded from XP to W7, which means the version of Tetris we've carried forward since floppy days finally doesn't work anywhere. The old diskette was called Best of Entertainment.
How do you play a simple, portable version of Tetris these days?
Which Windows 7? In Pro I think there's an option to run programs that run on XP, although I don't know if that's being kept with XP going unsupported now.
183: It's extra challenging because if you can only see the top flop of hair, a lot of the Cumberbatch photos look alike.
188:
Thanks, that's the crux of it. My wife's upgrade at work is to what's called Enterprise, which will run in XP mode with a download from MS. I sent her the wiki. At home, where we have 7 but not a business version, we'll need 3rd party emulation, such as from S/n.
