Swear to god, if you don't trust your kids with a damn credit card or the car, don't give them one.
Also, I wish to suggest that perhaps it is not odd at all that the teenage girl didn't object to daddy monitoring her but the teenage boy objected to being monitored by mommy.
Presumably you mean, for reasons other than what I proposed in the post.
Her heart belongs to him, after all.
Next B will suggest that "daddy's girl" and "momma's boy" have different connotations.
Preposterous.
4: I assume that what I meant was intuitively obvious, but yeah: I meant "ahem, sexism."
Which on second thought might be what you were implying as well.
Ah, I yearn for 1999, when I was free of credit cards and cell phones that my parents could track me on.
Then again, my car was so distinctive that everyone knew where I was anyway so my parents didn't have to worry one bit.
I think what was odd was that they both didn't object.
Its also odd why you would need special technology to monitor your kid's credit card bill instead of just, you know, looking at the bill.
Isn't cell phone tracking, as a rule, illegal? I guess the loophole is that people are tracking phones on their own account?
*A word The Economist spells "unphased".
...and everyone else spells "nonplussed."
12: Don't you mean "The antonym of which everyone else spells 'nonplussed'"? Nonplussed means, roughly, buffaloed. Unfazed means, roughly, not buffaloed.
Good lord, I hate these Trojan horse gifts from parents.
I have mixed feelings about the phone thing. I can't help but remember how much of my late teen years involved drunk driving.
13: And now I know that I've been using that word incorrectly for years. Well, probably not using. Reading.
From Unfogged I have learned that not only does "bemused" not mean "unphased", but "nonplussed" doesn't mean "unphased" either!
Concerned mothers and fathers of the world are invited, nay, encouraged to give me their credit cards for safeguarding. Your children, however, you may keep.
Wait. "Nonplussed" and "unfazed" don't both mean "it didn't bother me"? And who's buffaloing whom and is that dirty?
And thanks to this post, I misspelled "unfazed" as "unphased" for the first time in my life. What we gain on the swings, we lose on the roundabouts.
17: But despite Wolfson's best efforts, you still haven't learned how to spell unfazed.
19: Nonplussed is from the French 'non plus', no more. It means, roughly, that you're out of options, or out of ideas -- standing there with a dumb look on your face. This is a state that could also be described as being fazed. So if you're nonplussed, you're fazed. If you're unfazed, you're not nonplussed.
Why aren't these parents threatening to call the gypsies on their children like normal people? (Or was I the only one whose mom did that?)
unfazed = plussed
nonplussed = fazed
buffaloed != bisoned
I can't help but remember how much of my late teen years involved drunk driving.
Serious question: why?
I ask because my mom's approach to that problem was to say up front that she didn't care if I drank, just please call her if I needed a ride so that I wasn't driving. So, I did. I'm wondering if people who drank and drive a lot as kids did so because their parents objected to drinking, so that the idea was to hide that one had been doing it?
Its also odd why you would need special technology to monitor your kid's credit card bill instead of just, you know, looking at the bill.
Is the premise that the kid is paying the bill his/her self and so may hide it from the parent? Or is it that this special technology has the advantage of letting you know right away, that you child has purchased plane tickets to Kabul.
Googling 'plussed' turns up this amusing story.
26: corrected --
Its also odd why you would need special technology to monitor your kid's credit card bill instead of just, you know, looking at the bill.
Is the premise that the kid is paying the bill his/her self and so may hide it from the parent? Or is it that this special technology has the advantage of letting you know right away that your child has purchased plane tickets to Kabul?
Nearly every time I've encountered the word 'nonplussed', it was being wrongly used: i.e., as a fancier way of saying 'unimpressed'. See also 'bemused', which, nearly every time it appears, it is in the sense of amused skepticism or suppressed hilarity.
25: I grew-up in a very isolated small town not so long after the drinking age was moved to 21. There wasn't much to do, but big families meant that somebody's older brother or cousin was always around. So, you'd just drive out to the country somewhere and drink. It was pretty much undetectable. There were maybe four police/sheriff types in town. (We would drive by cops' houses to see who was working that night.) Patrolling hundreds of miles of rural roads looking for somebody who could become nearly invisible by turning off the road and killing the lights was nearly pointless.
I and probably everybody else got the "just call and I'll get you" talk. However, asking your parents to drive you to the bar to get Joe's brother and then to the gas station for beer and then taking Joe's brother back to the bar and then cruising around for three hours violating the open container law really wasn't an option.
It wasn't like you could walk around a night with a 40 in a paper bag. There was no foot traffic or any crowd to hide in. Everybody knew who you were and somebody driving home or something would call your mom. Whenever somebody's folks were gone or being really tolerant, that was an option. However, everybody knew mostly whose car was whose, so it was very hard to keep a small gathering and avoid the police.
And that's why water districts build canals. So teenagers have somewhere to sit on the banks, drink and fool around.
23: Because that threat loses a lot of its salience after age six or so.
10, 26, 28: My guess is that the credit card bill only comes once a month, and this service is being marketed to parents so irresponsible that they don't read the credit card bill closely enough to tell their kids' purchases from their own, and/or wouldn't notice inconsistencies in the record a couple weeks after the fact.
More evidence on my piles labled 'why parents qua parents are bad people' and 'i don't understand the insatiable urge to run other people's lives'
Aha. I didn't drink outside just hanging around a lot myself. Maybe cell phones will make it easier for kids who do to call home, though.
this service is being marketed to parents so irresponsible paranoid that it seems to them like a good idea to constantly monitor their kids in real time.
'i don't understand the insatiable urge to run other people's lives'
It's less an urge than a habit that is very hard to break after years and years spent having to remind people to go to the fucking bathroom.
It wasn't a credit card but a debit card.
So they'd have to read their bank statement rather than the CC bill.
I think you'll find that that is a significant difference.
"I didn't drink outside just hanging around a lot myself."
Because you had standards? Anyway, I learned important lessons like why you should never drink Hamm's, what happens when beer freezes, what happens when you try to unfreeze beer by putting on the dash and running the defrost, and how shocked people from the city are when guys just go piss behind the car.
13: As I explained on Standpipe's blog, in 12 I meant that most people wrongly employ "nonplussed" to mean its opposite, IMO because of its structural similarity to "unfazed." I was employing an equivalence between misspelling and outright malapropism to IMO great comic effect.
We all hate other people's representatives in Congress academic writing workshops where did that come from? The Establishment Whitey quidnunc parenting, but a contrarian might submit that closer (or any) surveillance of minor children and their activities (social, financial, ethyl and other) is what we tend to recommend to parents panicked by the latest South Park-causes-cannibalism-in-the-schools news story.
39: Whoops. Actually, I don't even have a Standpipe's blog.
i don't understand the insatiable urge to run other people's lives
When your kids are still kids, it's sort of your job as a parent, to some degree, to run their lives.
I don't have a Standpipe's blog either.
When your kids are still kids, it's sort of your job as a parent, to some degree, to run their lives.
But only to the degree they need it (empirically decided, natch). Micromanaging teenagers lives is pretty stupid, for example.
On the other hand 35 makes sense. I suspect it is pretty typical for momentum to set in.
see also 'bemused', which, nearly every time it appears, it is in the sense of amused skepticism or suppressed hilarity.
It doesn't???
Micromanaging teenagers thirty-year-olds' lives is pretty stupid, for example. Sigh.
40 gets it exactly right. You're always supposed to micromanage your children, except when you're not.
is what we tend to recommend to parents panicked by the latest South Park-causes-cannibalism-in-the-schools news story.
This makes me sad, if true. But it's believable, given all the paranoid nonsense that seems to be common these days.
My mom tells me that one of her big parenting realizations was that I required much less micromanagement than my older brother had. I'd wager a guess this sort of adjustment (in either direction) is pretty common for parents of multiple kids.
45: well I guess that is what it means now. It used to mean, variously, confused or preoccupied. 'Distracted' is a nice word that connects both of those senses, and is probably the best synonym.
But that kind of purism is for petit-middlebrow language-dorks like William Safire. There probably is a need for a word that occupies the space that bemused does in its "misused" sense, so I guess bemused is as good a word as any even if its provenance isn't entirely legitimate.
A good rule would be, if you are correcting a non-canonical use of a word, you have to supply one that will suit just as well; e.g. if you are tempted to misuse 'nonplussed', you should instead use 'unimpressed'. But I can't think of a single word that does what we want 'bemused' to do ('mildly derisive'?), so 'bemused' can stand.
52: I think you forgot to read the liner notes to 45, as posted on Standpipe's blog.
50: Totally. It boils down to just asking every stranger within earshot whether or not they're comfortable with how your child is behaving, and then adjusting accordingly.
48, 50: I didn't intend to imply that it is easy, but to say that the surveillance methods described in the post are arguably examples of what we tell people to do when they ask society to forbid children to do things.
every stranger within earshot whether or not they're comfortable with how your child is behaving,
This one's easy, B, just remember that children are meant to be seen but not heard.
55: Issues with the folks still? It really is amazing how quickly you can switch from seeing things as a kid to seeing things as a parent.
40: What do you mean "we", paleface?
I think the swipple recommendation is to talk to your kid more, make sure you are available when they need you and make sure they know that they can be open and honest with you if they want to. Monitoring the location of the kids' cell phones and reviewing their purchases after the fact probably do just the opposite.
25: I ask because my mom's approach to that problem was to say up front that she didn't care if I drank, just please call her if I needed a ride so that I wasn't driving. So, I did.
It would be somewhat difficult to call your mom at work and ask her for a ride back to chemistry class, especially when the other guys have a car.
max
['Also, you'd have to explain the source of the beer.']
Don't forget to frequently clear the "maximum speed" record your GPS is keeping for you and also remember to put your cellphone in a Faraday shield purse when visiting places you shouldn't.
Biohazard, those sound like good ideas.
[How to make an] RFID Secure Wallet.
I think the swipple recommendation is to talk to your kid more, make sure you are available when they need you and make sure they know that they can be open and honest with you if they want to.
When you put it that way, no wonder people go for the Stasi option.
You remember the Sally Field movie: Not witout my daugter.
Just for posterity:
The daugter in the former spot was completely unfazed* when her notional opposite-sexed progenitor called her up to grill her about
This should be marked on some calendar somewhere.
when they ask society to forbid children to do things. take into account that children are part of the viewing/listening public, I think you mean.
69: No danger of children joining the reading public, except for Twilight.
A word The Economist spells "unphased"
Argh.
72: Twilight, and Harry Potter, and anything that can be derided as juvenile pulp trash... people have been complaining about kids not reading enough, or reading the wrong stuff, since before the existence of television.
39: I was employing an equivalence between misspelling and outright malapropism to IMO great comic effect.
In other words, you wrote it for a purpose.
I sort of get the 'inertia' concept, but it seems broader. like today i was helping fix something in a rented apartment and the adult was telling the kid to pick up their toys. if you temporarily confiscated toys left out outside a play area, wouldn't the kid start picking them up? I guess i assume kids are at least as smart as a dog of similar age. but parents seem more interested in telling than in setting up ability to learn from consequences and thus engender personal responsibilty (oddly, i can't use those words anymore without thinking of dark satanic millianism). i mean, i remember i had to budget out and buy my own clothes, shoes, socks, etc at a pretty young age, and i thought it was wierd how my friends would either get new things or not depending on begging their parents for them individually.
and i thought the southpark-induced thing was a 'before you micromanage everyone's kid with some awesome new law, start with your own' strategic retreat thing if you can't calm them down and suggest communication. not a freestanding good idea.
70: Hey, you're talking to a woman who lets her kid view/read/listen to/say all sorts of shit that most people would freak out about. Nonetheless, there are limits to what they can handle.
parents seem more interested in telling than in setting up ability to learn from consequences and thus engender personal responsibilty
Can I ignore this?
74: people have been complaining about kids not reading enough, or reading the wrong stuff, since before the existence of television
No way! For that long, even?
78: It's tough, but luckily I'm going out in a bit.
75: Am noticing that we seem to be having a few days here where the pitchers and catchers have been a bit out of sync on this sort of thing. Probably due to both people's tone being slightly out of whack and incautious reading. No biggie of course, just an observation. Dog days of summer? Back-to-schoolitis? Low-level annoyance that public political discourse in the US is that of a terminally-fucked idiocracy?
No way! For that long, even?
You wouldn't believe how long there's been sexual intercourse.
The terrible thing is, whether or not something has been deployed to great comic effect is in part a function of the reactions to that thing, and therefore not something the opinion of the deployer can dispose over.
My life got easier when I decided that I was the only person who had to find my jokes funny.
I can usually rely on my father to like my jokes, or at least to appreciate them.
And who's buffaloing whom and is that dirty?
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Of course.
82: You wouldn't believe how long there's been sexual intercourse.
There's even evidence from ancient cave paintings!
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo down by the seashore.
The author of that wikipedia article seems not to know the difference between the terms "subject" and "indirect object".
As I recall, Wyatt Earp both hunted buffalo as a private citizen and "buffaloed" two-legged varmints in his capacity as public servant. In unrelated news, it would be pretty cool if the gunfighter moustache came back into vogue.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A BUFFALO BUFFALO.
You're only saying that because you're being buffaloed from below.
THIS WOULD WORK A LOT BETTER IF "BISON" WERE AN ENGLISH VERB. AND THE NAME OF A TOWN.
87: Beat you to it. Although the way I learned the meaning of that was different from what the Wikipedia page said. The way I learned it had no mention of the city. Since "buffalo" can be both a singular noun and the plural of that noun, you can compose a potentially infinitely long sentence with nothing but that word. Bison (that) trample over (other) bison are themselves trampled over by bison that are themselves... Although I guess the plural vs. singular distinction isn't essential either.
Gorilla gorilla gorilla Gorilla gorill gorilla buffalo buffalo Gorilla gorilla gorilla.
"My life got easier when I decided that I was the only person who had to find my jokes funny."
Damn, could we be related?
I'm not closely related to anyone in Kentucky.
(Guessing that the numbers in your email address are a zip code).
I can usually rely on my father to like my jokes, or at least to appreciate them.
My mom is convinced I'm hysterical. I'm fairly sure the rest of the world does not think I'm even mildly funny.
It's not entirely clear that 40221 exists as a ZIP code, looking at Louisville ZIP code maps.
I'm not closely related to anyone who was born on April 2nd, 1921.
62: I've been more concerned with the GPS ever since I spotted a 93mph max speed reading when I hadn't been anywhere near that speed.
Near as I can tell, a GPS can get confused during U-Turns or when it's just locking on to its satellites. I don't want to try to explain that to a cop or the other guy's lawyers.
Apparently the Palm Pre has been phoning home with GPS location information since it came out. I don't care about Palm knowing exactly where I've been within a few feet but I do care that Palm didn't happen to mention that little feature.
My mom is convinced I'm hysterical.
I did not initially read this in the way it was intended.
(Guessing that the numbers in your email address are a zip code).
Could be an Albany zip backwards.
According to the USPS web site, 40221 is a Louisville zip code used only for PO Boxes.
I am not related to anyone who lives in P.O. Boxes.
Another problem with GPS (while we're hating on it) is that it's only as good as the data it has available. Which for some areas is significantly outdated or otherwise inaccurate.
111: Well, that's not a limitation of GPS per se, but a limitation of the map data.
Ah, PO boxes! That explains why I didn't see it on a map. Those PO boxes are at the post office facility next to the airport, apparently.
112: True enough, but it becomes a problem with using GPS in practice.
let's all figure out where entity lives and then go to his house!
115: let's all figure out where entity lives and then go to his house!
Actually, I expect if you promise to send money or give him blowjobs he'll just post his address for you.
max
['Actually, I'm pretty he'll just give it to you anyways. Cookies work.']
My parents were very much of the "you can tell us anything... and you will" school. I was repeatedly told that if Something Happened I could call and get help at any time, no problem, but when I did go out with friends I was grilled about where, with whom and why I had gone and what was done while there. They wanted to be cool but they were terrified I was out imbibing and/or fucking guys. This did not make for an environment in which I was terribly open with them about my activities, innocent or otherwise, because they were so incredibly aggressive with their questioning.
Turned out that made for great practice for when I was going out imbibing and/or fucking guys, so I've got mixed feelings.
My experiences tracked pretty well with Robust's (well, not the guy-fucking) except that (1) nobody really drove anywhere and (2) I largely spent my vulnerable teenage years playing role-playing games in basements, so not only was there nothing to report to the griller, the worry itself was absurd. I guess there was a remote possibility I could get all high on Doritos but even then there really wasn't much trouble to be had.
My experiences tracked pretty well with Robust's (well, not the guy-fucking)
Man, is that ever a familiar refrain, only usually delivered with more nervousness.
imbibing and/or fucking guys
How many guys did you imbibe?
119: they were nervous about not fucking guys? That seems a little backwards.
Just remind the first guy you don't fuck to be gentle and things should be fine, is what I say.
I was up way too early to deal with this, thank you.
OT, I really liked District 9.
(Guessing that the numbers in your email address are a zip code).
Les Miserables became much easier to follow once I left this heuristic by the wayside.
I largely spent my vulnerable teenage years playing role-playing games in basements, so not only was there nothing to report to the griller, the worry itself was absurd. I guess there was a remote possibility I could get all high on Doritos but even then there really wasn't much trouble to be had.
They were probably worried about your alignment.
