I think I’m making these tonight.

2) I thought my friends were hippies for trying to make me try a neti pot, but when I got this ugly sinus thing last week I broke down and bought one. I don’t know if it’s helping the sinus thing now, but I haven’t developed an infection and my sore throat is gone. I definitely see how daily or weekly use would aid in prevention or help stave off less desirable cold symptoms.

I convinced Ethan and Chef to give it a try after they roundly laughed at me, and after flushing E’s sinuses we got a three-inch long, jet black blood clot out of Ethan’s face. I don’t know how long he’s been storing that thing up there (it didn’t have any gills or primordial fins or anything) but I can tell you it’s been a long, long time since he’s had one of his nosebleeds. I can also tell you it’s really odd to see a large blood clot hanging out of your child’s head.

Nasal irrigation may be my new favorite past time.

3) Ethan is obsessed with Wizard 101, which is fine, I guess. It gives me hope that my issues with him during his teen years are going to be more about WOW than THC. Or worse. Fingers crossed.

4) I fucking hate my new student neighbors. There are city violations committed there on a daily basis, from the expected noise ordinance to leaving fires unattended (!) to pulling down tree branches in their backyard to stoke said unattended fires. Today we discovered a cardboard sign nailed to our tree in the front yard, inviting football fans to park in theirs. We also confirmed today that they’re over the city occupation limit (no more than three unrelated persons living in one household).

The setup of our two properties is so that any noise from the partying that goes on in their backyard is funneled directly into our living room. The bass rattles Ethan’s windows while he’s trying to sleep, and the best part with these yokels is that the weekend starts on Thursday night and doesn’t end until Sunday afternoon. I don’t know about you guys, but I had to study when I was in college.

I am cultivating some excellent fantasies of rightfully telling them off, trashing their yard, or blasting GG Allin over their Tim McGraw, but in the meantime I’m also brewing up some real plans with the other neighbors. The self-described neighborhood historian said that he hasn’t seen this kind of dramatic, continuous partying in the forty years he’s lived here.

Won’t you commiserate on asshole neighbors and neti pots with me?

Turns out people do go to garage sales in November.

The guy behind the counter replied, “Uh, it’s just a cow.”

Chef sighed and began to ask for him to bring up various cuts of beef so that he could examine and reject them. Then he came home with a pound of ground beef.

______________________
* To which Chef says, “Chef turned snob a long time ago.”

While I’m not a sports fan I’ve been watching the major fight between the Big Ten Network and the large cable companies with great interest. I live on campus in a Big Ten university town and work in a related field, not to mention that the corporate rhetoric and use of media in this fight is really engaging. It’s like watching two media conglomerates in a massive, public catfight, almost as exciting as the time Paris Hilton hit Lindsey Lohan in a fancy LA bar. But I digress.

The biggest problem is that the major cable companies don’t want to carry it — at least not as BTN wants. Aiming for market penetration in addition to quickly turing around the millions of dollars they’ve sunk into midwestern campuses, BTN’s business plan dicatates that the network will be carried in a standard analog cable package, what most people think of when they think of cable. Realizing that this means either eating the cost or raising the customer’s monthly cost by as much as $1.10 a month, the cable companies have resisted. Big companies like Comcast and Time-Warner (as well as the satellite company Dish Network) want to carry the BTN in a specialty sports package, putting the cost for digital services and specialty sports programming on diehard fans as opposed to millions of customers that may not be interested or don’t live in the midwest.

BTN has responded by penetrating local media with advertisements encouraging fans to switch to one of its carriers, Direct TV, which is not coincidentally also owned by Rupert Murdoch.

In this case I sympathize with the major cable companies, which is truly uncharacteristic of my beliefs, in that I and many others with low incomes and limited funds are tired of being nickled and dimed to death with rates that seem arbitrary to most but can be crucial to some. And although cable isn’t a true utility, it’s considered a utility to people of low-income, the elderly, and the infirm, people who need to fit entertainment into a tight budget, and people who rely on static rates to keep tight budgets within reason. I figure while most people really don’t care about Podunk U’s lacrosse team and don’t want to spend the additional cash, the diehard fans will find a way to pay for the additional programming, and BTN will have to settle for a business plan that doesn’t turn around its expenses quite as much as they’d like.

On the other hand, this is also an opportunity for lesser-known and lesser-lauded athletes to get major coverage and money for their efforts — and a huge portion of the reported events that will be covered by the BTN are women’s sports, a huge chunk of the athletic populace that has historically been ignored and ridiculed. What better way to get them extra attention and encourage more young women into college sports? Unfortunately the BTN isn’t capitalizing on these kinds of athletic underdogs, instead positing itself as a victim of unfair contracts and legal obligations, leaving out the fact that it’s fourth in line to pick games to carry after ESPN, ESPN2, and network TV. Have a kid on the college swim team? You want the Big Ten Network. Want to catch your favorite team’s basketball game? It’s probably on ESPN.

[Further compounding the situation is the typical consumer argument that cable companies should be offering channel by channel plans, a technology that isn't possible until all services are offered digitally instead of analog. Editorial opinion pieces in newpapers across the region lament that companies aren't providing services that don't exist yet, and customers agree. Someday, someday, but until then content has to be affordable.]

At the time this piece is written, Comcast has ended negotiations with BTN and Time-Warner and Dish Network haven’t been able to reach a distribution agreement. Meanwhile, BTN is flooding the market with a lot of noise implying that the cable companies are being greedy and that Big Cable will lose subscribers to its sister company Direct TV. Never mind that the cable companies have already offered to carry the network in a specialized format.

I don’t have any dog in this fight other than resisting another rise in my monthly cable bill, but I’m sure others have opinions. Any sports fans in the audience?

A university news release announced the study’s findings by stating that, “despite marketing claims, parents who want to give their infants a boost in learning language probably should limit the amount of time they expose their children to DVD’s and videos such as ‘Baby Einstein’ and ‘Brainy Baby.’”

The release also quoted Frederick Zimmerman, the study’s leader and an associate professor of health services, as saying that “the most important fact to come from this study is there is no clear evidence of a benefit coming from baby DVD’s and videos and there is some suggestion of harm.”

The two primary reasons that the researchers cite for the negative influence of the videos on infant development are thus:

1) Because the videos are supposed to promote cognitive and language development, parents whose children have poor language acquisition may be turning to the videos for help instead of turning to professionals.

2) Parents who believe videos can promote the development of language and cognitive skills in baby may be less likely themselves to take a proactive approach with their children’s development.

Children do glean things from watching educational videos, but what they glean is troublesome from a parent’s point of view. Covered nicely in an old Salon article called “The Littlest Shopper,” author and interviewee Susan Gregory Thomas elaborates on the corporate benefits of marketing the Baby Einstein brand and it’s offshoots to our toddlers. In this case she targets Sesame Street:

It’s complicated for an infant or toddler to process television. When they are put in front of the television, the only thing they seem to be getting out of it in a verifiable way is character recognition. That’s why you see babies and toddlers so thrilled when they’re at the supermarket and they recognize Elmo. But still, it wears what the marketing industry calls an “educational patina.”

What is so awful about character recognition?

The problem is that the great social values that Elmo and the characters on “Sesame Street” teach are lost on children under the age of 3. They get solely a flat, one-dimensional character recognition. And the only other times that children are going to encounter the character are when a company is trying to sell the kid something. You don’t see Elmo running around your park. You see Elmo when he’s in diapers, when he’s on juice boxes, when he’s on Band-Aids and when he’s on toothbrushes.

The saddest part of it all is that parents are spending their money on products that are supposed to be educational and developmental in nature, and instead they’re unknowingly spoon-feeding their children more of the corporate model. Sesame Street in particular is another sad case because it promotes learning, tolerance, and social issues as part of its brand, but because of the Republican federal government cut gigantic chunks PBS funding, a good portion of the funding is left to “Viewers Like You” — and corporate giants like Pampers and McDonald’s with their own markets in mind.

President Bush gave a shout-out to Baby Einstein creator Julie Aigner-Clark in his January State of the Union address. He praised her “enterprising spirit” as something for which all Americans should aim, meaning that in America anybody can sell bullshit with the right marketing team.

See also: Marketing Elmo’s World

Little girls today may be encouraged to imitate the trampy looking dolls that fill the toy shelves, but Brooke Shields was a living Bratz doll for much of her formative years, and yet the she had the strength to stand up and walk away when she’d had enough. The little girl who quietly got knocked around by others was gone, and in her place was a forty-year-old woman who wasn’t going to be quiet any more while other people used her to push their own agenda.

The more seats the better.