The View From The Hill

Circuit City: Destroy All Copies Of Mad Mag w "Sucker City"

2008-08-05T01:06:00.001-04:00

Circuit City headquarters has ordered their stores to "destroy all copies" of the latest issue of Mad Magazine. The retailer apparently isn't amused by the 4-page spoof of "Sucker City." Hit the link for Mad's 1-page preview and headquarters' response.

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The devil riders of Darfur

2008-07-24T14:56:00.001-04:00

A doctor in the lawless region of Sudan, witnessed the atrocities of the Janjaweed; and then became a victim of the militia’s terrible revenge

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Time for the Truth About Black Crime Rates

2008-05-28T00:55:00.001-04:00

The lessons of the Sean Bell case

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Get Firefox's Best Features in Internet Explorer

2008-04-30T03:00:00.001-04:00

Whether a stubborn IE-only web site or full-on IT lockdown keeps you from using Firefox, things aren't as bleak as they seem: You can cram many of Firefox's best features into the proprietary beast that is IE. Find out how to add bookmark syncing, integrated spell-checking, session management, keyword bookmarks, ad blocking, and oh-so-much more

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CompUSA Refuses To Accept Cash

2008-01-21T07:21:00.001-05:00

So I guess that's why they're going out of business! Bunch of numb nuts! Oy!

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For Male Virgins: Basic Things No One Told Me About Sex

2008-01-21T07:19:00.001-05:00

Granted, I lost my virginity a long time ago, but this article does remind us guys that real-life sex doesn't exactly go like it does in the world of porn.

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Harlan Ellison -- Pay the Writer

2007-11-19T15:35:00.001-05:00

Here's Harlan Ellison talking about writers being compensated for work. He's talking specifically about Warner Bros. and their production of the Babylon 5 DVD, but it seems appropriate for the current WGA strike.*** Language Warning***For those who may not know it, Harlan Ellison is usually synonymous with NSFW.

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Audio blog post, transcription...

2007-10-01T23:18:00.001-04:00

Audio blog post, transcription unavailable
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Audio blog post, transcription...

2007-09-27T21:31:00.001-04:00

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On the [...] speech...

2007-09-24T22:16:00.001-04:00

On the [...] speech at Columbia was a rather pathetic. The Columbian president maybe most tensed and intimidating [...] speaker ever. It was down right hostile if you can believe that from a liberal.
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Today, we spent doing...

2007-09-24T22:13:00.001-04:00

Today, we spent doing laundry and messing around on the computer. I have setup some other journals to use for creative purposes later on. I will explain more about it in detail in the future dural post.
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Top 25 Sci-Fi Projects from the Last 25 Years

2007-09-22T22:58:00.001-04:00

Good news: Battlestar Galactica gets second. Bad news: Babylon 5 gets completely snubbed! Galaxy Quest over Babylon 5? Puh-frakking-leeze!

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This is a test on Saturday...

2007-09-22T07:55:00.001-04:00

This is a test on Saturday September 22nd. This is only a test.
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New Nuclear Powered Spaceship Design will Shorten Mars Trip to Six Months

2007-09-21T16:41:00.001-04:00

U.S. company introduced an innovative propulsion system that could significantly shorten round trips from Earth to Mars (from two years to only six months) and enable spaceships to reach Jupiter after one year of traveling. The system, which may dramatically affect interplanetary space travel is called the Miniature Magnetic Orion and is...

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City Pages - Safe Child Syndrome

2007-06-26T09:32:00.001-04:00

by Beth HawkinsMarch 16, 2005At the park the other day, I happened to glance up just as a dad and daughter walked past clutching walkie-talkies. Not the toy kind, but grownup walkie-talkies so neatly engineered that the child's fit cozily in her palm. The girl, who appeared to be about six, was dressed in a red twin set with oversized cat's-head buttons and her blond hair was drawn into a red scrunchy. Her dad wore a pinched expression and a suede baseball cap.It looked more like an assault on K2 than on the Playland-style climber that had just swallowed my own son. The father passed right by the benches flanking the climber and squeezed in behind his girl. As I watched him try to keep up with her, hunched and wheezing in his navigation of the Lilliputian maze, I realized the walkie-talkies weren't part of a game of hide-and-seek: The man was determined to stay both physically and electronically tethered to his daughter.I can't count the number of winter afternoons I've spent right here at the base of Adventure Peak, the four-story star attraction of this fully enclosed Edina city park. To a kid who's been cooped up on a winter weekend, this is Candyland: slides, moonwalks, wobbling bridges, and a hollow 30-foot fiberglass oak tree. The facility, as Edina's website promises, comprises "more than 40 events to keep kids challenged and entertained for hours." Despite what you'd think, that doesn't mean downtime for parents, and it doesn't mean a chance for the kids to run wild. In my experience, the only remarkable thing about the dad clambering toward the giant slide was his high-tech Plan B for keeping tabs on his princess. Never mind the benches, the chance to read a magazine or to finish a coffee before it gets cold; these days, a good parent clambers through the giant Habitrail, feigning delight the whole way.It's not enough that adults are watching from the ground, or even that there are some adults up in there. It matters not that every inch of Adventure Peak is "padded, netted, and enclosed." No, my generation believes good supervision means being right there with your own child every minute, even though our parents would have happily plopped down for a good gossip.There were plenty of other grownups up in Adventure Peak that day. I watched a svelte brunette slip out of her Josef Seibels, set down a book on creativity in Waldorf education, and follow a boy of about four up to a chamber sporting several colorful vinyl punching bags. There, she urged the boy to spin the orbs and examine them instead of punching them.A few cubicles to the left, a father in an oversized sweater directed the play of two boys who looked to be six or seven. He wanted them to climb down the fake tree; they ignored him in favor of a spiraling tube slide. "You're going down the yellow slide?" he asked rhetorically, scrambling to the slide's egress. "Okay." Later I see him peering up into the tree trying to get the boys to wave to him.Behold the most controlling, anxiety-ridden, over-involved generation of parents ever. After the walkie-talkie episode, I took an informal poll of parents I know. At what age or stage of development can Mom or Dad go ahead and sit down, reasonably assured their little darlings will survive a solo whirl on the jungle gym? Instead of a hard-and-fast answer, what I got was the sense that we hover for numerous and complicated reasons. We fear school buses, babysitters, and sometimes even Grandma and Grandpa, who may not know any better than to let the baby cry a little on her way to sleep. We're scared adversity will scar our kids or, conversely, that they'll be bored--a condition that, left untreated, might turn them into school shooters.But we also fear their independence. We're up there in the climber because we can't afford to miss a minute of face time, you see. We believe our physical presence is the linchpin to the children's emotional well-being and, although we never say so out loud, we want it that way--because it's central to our well-being. We're scared the kids will grow up to resent the fact that Mommy works, or--the biggest golem on the list--they just plain won't like us. And in an age of high divorce rates and transient communities, kids who don't like us suggest the possibility that we might really end up alone.Much as I've come to hate Adventure Peak, I used to climb, too. It was the other parents I feared. I gave up climbing after a particularly irritating visit to the park over the holidays. Near the end of our sojourn, my younger son, who is nearly three, set his mind on a drink from the vending machine and, when denied, flopped down on the rubberized floor and began wailing. And I--gasp--let him, prompting two different women to come ask what was up. The first was easily waved away, but the second set her hands on her hips and demanded an explanation: "Should you be doing something?" I was halfway through defending myself when I realized that what was wrong with the situation involved something far more serious than one toddler's angst.All this worry might be worthwhile if any of it were actually good for the children--or for us. But my son needs to know that tantrums won't be rewarded, and that little girl in the red sweater needs to know her own coping skills are developing nicely. As it is, I'll bet she would never dream of ditching her father, shimmying up the fiberglass climber and imagining herself in a secret fort, high above everyone else. Dad's hovering, after all, sends the twin signals that the climber is dangerous and that she's not competent to navigate it.Later, on our way out of the park, my son and I passed the little girl and her dad, this time at the moonwalk in Edinborough's gymnasium. She was bouncing straight up and down, her eyes trained on her father, who was standing less than a foot away on the other side of the net window, staring at her just as intently. Both seemed oblivious to the three other kids in the bouncer until one of them bounded into the girl's quadrant, near enough that her footing wobbled."Hey," Dad barked. "Hey, you could hurt her." His yell startled the girl, and after a minute she bounced over to the inflatable castle's exit flap and slid quietly out. If Dad keeps it up, he's going to find himself henpecking her teachers and ghostwriting her college entrance essays. I have a friend who works with people who commit awful crimes. If anyone I know hears enough horror stories to justify wanting to cloister her own children, it's her. But instead, she seems to have a sense of scale about the real roots of the bad things lurking out there, of how much has to go wrong, and for how long, for someone to end up in one of her case files.She has a son in kindergarten at a southwest Minneapolis school. He rides the bus, but most of the other kids get driven. In his class, in fact, there are half a dozen mothers who park their cars, walk their children inside, and help them off with their coats. Several of them then sit down and help the pupils get started on the day's first activity. One brings her younger kids.My friend fantasizes about standing up for these kids. "They can do this," she wants to tell their mothers. "It's their life, not yours." But she knows what the moms would think, and maybe say: that my friend works. That she isn't even raising her own kids. And that to complain of their hovering really only suggests what's wrong with her.And she's probably right. Like her, most of those mothers are educated and spent years building careers before having kids. It stands to reason that we can't just shut it all off, the jockeying and positioning and thinking two steps ahead. Which makes the playground a far more competitive arena for parents than for kids, the most popular game of one-upmanship being I'm More Attuned and Attentive than You Are.At its most basic level, this involves sacrifice for the good of the children--anything from planning meticulously to assure that every day holds a steady stream of stimulating activities to giving up that job. Compare notes with enough parents and you'll run into more extreme variations. There are people who argue that strollers and baby carriers are "detachment devices," putting an unnatural, unhealthy distance between parent and child. There are advocates of "noncoercive parenting," who believe children shouldn't be made to do anything they don't want to do. There are parents who only allow wooden toys, organic food, and incandescent lighting. It's as if the biggest worrywart stands to win a Parent of the Year award.Worrying is a secular form of prayer, according to David Anderegg, a psychology professor at Bennington College in Vermont, and the author of Worried All the Time: Rediscovering the Joy in Parenthood in an Age of Anxiety. Earlier generations coped with the thought that they couldn't control what happened to their offspring all the time by reasoning that once the kid walked out the door, God took over. But accidents are no longer seen as divine intervention, and the parents Anderegg now sees in his private practice often equate worrying with being devoted.Pathological worriers often believe that worrying will stave off dire happenings. "The reason why many worriers have difficulty responding to treatment is that they are afraid to give up worrying, because worrying is seen as something good," Anderegg writes. "Worrying about a potential plane crash ahead of time might have some marginal value if those worries motivate a person to study the relative safety records of several different air carriers, but once the plane is up in the air, no amount of worrying is going to hold it up."Anderegg's book has sold well with teachers and mental health workers, but not with parents. "Parents come to my talks and listen politely and invariably say, 'I don't need this, but I know someone who does'," he says. "With parents, it's not selling well. People don't want to hear it."Meanwhile, pathological worrying has made its way into the diagnostic manuals as "generalized anxiety disorder." Cognitive behavioral therapists have long advocated teaching sufferers how to evaluate the chances this or that calamity will actually befall them. But this task is complicated, of course, by histrionic media treatments of isolated abductions, molestations, and the perennial ratings driver, substitute caretakers gone bad.Personally, I find it quite telling that these tabloid tales are invariably punctuated by ads for antidepressants approved for the management of generalized anxiety disorder. "Mom," one of my boys said to me the other day, purple with rage, "I'm so angry I could kidnap you." The only parent I know who owns up to hovering is a commercial litigator; risk is his bread and butter. Yet he reports that the first thought he had on seeing his daughter born was, "I love you more than anything in this world." His second? "I will do anything to keep you from dying."He laughs at himself when he recounts this. "Here she's only seconds old and I'm thinking about her death," he says. "How sick is that?"I can't bring myself to admit to him that when my older son was a couple of weeks old, I demanded that my husband put screws into our second-floor window jambs so that no one could break in. When he suggested I was being a touch irrational, I threw a hormone-juiced tantrum. I did agree that he could leave two windows unpegged; they aren't near a porch or tree and only Spiderman could reach them.Upon publication of his baby bible in 1946, Dr. Spock worried that the very existence of a tome of "scientific" advice would make parents more apt to worry. "Trust yourself," urge the opening words of Baby and Child Care. "You know more than you think you do."Spock encouraged parents to look for signs that their child was ready for more independence, and to applaud each new step away from the hearth. Overprotectiveness, he said, just makes for anxious children."Sometimes, the most important factor in overprotectiveness is the parent's inability to admit that she or he sometimes feels resentful or angry toward the child," he advised. "And a mother, for instance, may suppress her occasional mean thoughts and exaggerate the dangers of kidnappers or home accidents or inadequate diet. She has to stay close to the child to make sure the dangers don't strike, and her anxious expression convinces the child that her own fears are well founded."Alas, Spock is dead. In his book, psychologist Anderegg wanted to repeat the same psychoanalytic tenet that overprotectiveness is often disowned aggression. His editor, he says, struck that passage.Kids, of course, excel at exploring their mean feelings, and a good chunk of the parental playground hovering I've witnessed seems to be aimed at getting children to say only kind things to each other, to act selflessly, and generally observe the kind of social niceties their parents observe. It must be terribly confusing to them when we're so nice in public and then go home and say snide, judgmental things about one another. At the age of three, one of my boys found a dead pigeon in a gutter downtown. "Nyah, nyah, boo boo," he taunted the bird, jumping up and down with glee. "You ca-an't fl-y." Late on a weekday afternoon at the indoor park in Edina, a woman in corporate garb stands outside the moonwalk talking on a cell phone. She hangs up when her son, who looks to be about four, rockets out of the inflated bouncer and skitters across the floor. He scoops up a ball, throws it at a miniature basketball net, misses, and starts to cry when the ball rebounds at one of his shoulders. Next, he belly flops onto a wheeled platform and rolls across the gym. He stops twice, bursting into tears as he first stubs his toe and then nearly rolls over his own fingers. His mom is in hot pursuit, and each booboo earns him a rub or a kiss.His attention span seems to be about a minute long, and at first his mother just seems long-suffering. If you watch a little longer, though, that changes: She's hovering so close that the boy can barely move, and she's keeping up a steady one-way dialogue about perils he should watch out for and her opinion of each activity he takes up.After about five minutes, the boy loses interest in playing. He makes his way slowly over to the sidelines, where he clambers into an expensive McClaren stroller and starts to look at the ceiling. Mom produces an array of snacks and tries to get him interested. Right now this scene says more about the mother than the child, but that will change.Generations of psychiatrists and analysts believed that young children were governed by inborn drives and unconscious fantasies. The notion that unresolved conflicts from parents' early lives got played out with their children only came to be accepted about 50 years ago.In the 1930s a British psychiatrist named John Bowlby began collecting case studies on 44 juvenile thieves, ages 6 to 16, at the family mental health clinic where he worked. Each had a history of early deprivation and separation from his mother, and displayed "a remarkable lack of warmth or feeling for anyone"--themselves included. "Behind the mask of indifference," Bowlby wrote, "is bottomless misery and behind the apparent callousness despair."Bowlby spent the rest of his life studying the bond, or "attachment," between parents and children. Children thrive, he concluded, when that tie is strong and loving, providing a "secure base" from which a child can explore and, as she grows up, become increasingly independent. Bowlby's work and the research others have done to build on it revolutionized psychology and a number of other fields. (University of Minnesota developmental psychologist Alan Sroufe is one of the world's foremost researchers in this arena.)But as the concept began to filter into the popular vernacular, it was promptly perverted by a new generation of parenting experts. In 1993, pediatrician William Sears and his wife Martha published The Baby Book, which replaced Dr. Spock and became the central canon of a movement known as attachment parenting. In the translation, Bowlby's idea that children need a consistent, loving adult had been rewritten to suggest that great harm comes to kids when their parents--the Searses prefer Mom, but offer suggestions for how Dad can play helper--aren't with them virtually all the time. (The Searses have gone on to crank out an entire "Christian Parenting Library," something the zeitgeist has conveniently ignored.)A decade later, the notion of putting a newborn in a crib panics most first-time parents, who fear that being alone will scar the tyke emotionally. And even though the number of women working outside the home continues to rise, we still spend vastly more time worrying that daycare harms children than we do trying to find ways to make sure all kids have access to high-quality care.Return, for a moment, to the notion of disowned aggression. Raising children in our time and place requires huge amounts of self-sacrifice (forget Adventure Peak--homeschooling, anyone?), money, and, despite the fact that in most families both parents need to work full-time, apparently the constant physical presence of Mom or Dad. Who wouldn't, on occasion, have aggression to displace?"The mother impelled to possess her child's love," Bowlby wrote, "by her endless self-sacrifice, tries to ensure that her child is given no excuse for any feelings other than those of love and gratitude. This mother, who at first sight appears so loving, inevitably creates great resentment in her child by her demands for his love, and equally great guilt in him through her claims to be so good a mother that no sentiment but gratitude is justified." At a cocktail party last summer, I mentioned to a group of grandmothers how lucky I am that my parents are nearby and quick to pitch in. One of the women, whose job includes daily responsibility for the welfare of hundreds of children, told me her own grown children usually turn down her offers to babysit."I know plenty of parents who see leaving the kids with Grandma as selfish," I told her. "They think it's important their kids spend as much time with them as possible."She gasped. "So you mean they're trying to be good parents?" Aghast, the other grandmas shook their heads. When I was a toddler, my father's parents both were hospitalized for long periods, Grandpa for emphysema and Grandma for a heart condition that was diagnosed as the result of trying to care for him by herself. My mother logged long hours at the local hospital, which in those days didn't allow children on the wards. She would drop me off in the waiting room and whoever was there would play with me until she came back.I asked her recently whether she was embarrassed to admit this now. No, she said, everybody did it. Besides, it wasn't like she shopped me from one rank stranger to another. The people in the waiting room weren't friends per se, but they weren't exactly unknown quantities. They were from the neighborhood, and many also had kids who couldn't go back onto the wards.My generation, meanwhile, won't drop Jr. off at the neighbor's for an afternoon. No, much like the squad of grownups policing Adventure Peak, parents these days stay for the duration of the kids' "play dates." If they permit them to occur at all, that is. This business of treating kids like hothouse flowers seems to go hand in glove with the idea that we should endeavor to keep them away from the rest of the community.Before the Industrial Revolution, families had to produce virtually everything they needed, from bread and clothes to agricultural implements. To accomplish this, everybody worked, including children. And there were lots of children: Their survival wasn't assured and their labor was valuable, so people cranked them out. After mechanization drew people into cities and factories, the luckiest families were able to keep one adult out of the workforce: the housewife, whose job was to school and protect her little ones. Quickly, Mom's self-image entered into the picture."In part, the reduced birthrate was a matter of economics, as middle-class parents regarded their children not as sources of labor but as 'social capital' requiring substantial investments of time and resources," writes University of Houston professor Steven Mintz in Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood. "As a result of rapid changes in manufacturing, transport, and marketing, adults could no longer rely on passing on their farms or shops or imparting their skills to their children, who increasingly needed formal education."Birthrates have only continued to fall, and the need for education and the availability of resources to provide it to rise. In search of ever better launching pads for the brood, families have flooded out of the central cities and into suburbs over the last 50 years. In the process, however, more and more families find themselves not just far from relatives, but from other social supports.We don't seem to realize that our response to this, further closing ranks, is terribly counterproductive. People had stronger attachments back when they had more of them."People identified strongly not only with their family or clan but with their church, their village, their guild if they belonged to one, and their social class," writes Robert Karen in Becoming Attached, his survey of Bowlby's legacy. "They worked, worshipped, celebrated, and amused themselves in the context of these groups. They did not consider themselves to be special or apart, but cut from the same cloth as their peers. Indeed, personal identity was inconceivable outside these affiliations, which were emotionally and spiritually sustaining and saturated with mutual help. They were in every respect attachments, social attachments, as imbued with love, rage, hurt, and happiness as a child's attachment to his parents."With this breathing room, everybody fared better. "In previous generations, Bowlby noted, mothers were surrounded by teenage sisters, cousins, and their own mothers, all of whom pitched in with the child care," Karen writes. "The child, meanwhile, has alternate attachment figures; and less pressure was, therefore, placed on the bond with the mother to provide him with all his needs. 'It has taken the world's richest societies,' Bowlby said, 'to ignore these basic facts.'"Mintz recalls that his generation fought with its parents at every turn--Vietnam, long hair, premarital sex--and was probably stronger for it. "Our sense of ourselves and our happiness didn't [used to] depend so much on what our children thought of us," he says. "Now, with divorce and instability, people want their kids bound to them with bands of steel. Marriage is fragile, so it's a lot safer to invest in your kids.... Parents still think they're raising kids for independence, but they don't."The developmental purpose of Bowlby's attachment might have been to send functional young adults out into the world, but we've redefined it as removing all speed bumps from the life of the child in the hope that they'll stay. Last summer, four-year-old Jenny Haffely got tangled in a rope ladder and strangled. It was a Saturday, the last afternoon in July, on a tiny playground in the housing development near Maplewood Mall where Haffely lived. According to newspaper reports, there were several adults and at least five children present. Haffely was probably trying to clamber from the slide to the ladder when she fell, tragically during the single instant when no one was watching.Everyone seemed to catch on at the same time. Haffely's 11-year-old brother and his friend worked together to untangle the girl. Her mother came running, hysterical. Another grownup started CPR. Police cars and ambulances tore over speed bumps and through the complex. Haffely was taken off life support the next day. The Ramsey County Medical Examiner's preliminary findings: asphyxiation due to hanging, as an accident extremely rare.Still, newspaper accounts seemed to search for someplace to put the blame. The company that manages the complex proved it had inspected the jungle gym and coughed up the age of the equipment. Neighbors defended Haffely's mother as ever vigilant. The stories dutifully consulted the University of Northern Iowa's National Program for Playground Safety, noting that every year on playgrounds 200,000 young children suffer injuries severe enough to require a trip to the emergency room; between 1990 and 2000, 147 children died of playground accidents.(Turns out the federal government keeps even more detailed numbers: 82 of those deaths were hangings. In two of the hangings, the children were wearing bike helmets, which became entangled in other things and choked them to death.)Stories about tragedies such as Haffely's rarely include any reassuring context, however. Those injuries are spread among the United States' 73.3 million children. And playgrounds are hardly the only place kids get hurt: According to federal statistics, there are nearly 13,000 stroller-related injuries a year, some 4 of them fatal; high chairs are involved in 10,000 injuries; and an annual average of 21,600 children 5 years old and younger were treated in hospital emergency rooms for shopping cart injuries during the years 1985 to 1996.It reminds me of the hysteria over the daycare molestation scares of the 1980s. Following endless news stories about one months-long high-profile trial in Los Angeles, scores of preschool teachers around the country were accused of everything from sex abuse to Satan worshipping. Most of the accusations turned out to be groundless, but they are as deeply embedded in the public consciousness as the equally rare nannies that shake babies to death and razor blades in Halloween candy.Given that this is the safest time in history to raise a family, I'll wager this obsession with eliminating small risks is another form of displaced anxiety. In the United States one in every six children lives in poverty, according to the Children's Defense Fund. Thirteen million live in households suffering from hunger or "food insecurity without hunger." One in eight has no health insurance. If we're so concerned with the welfare of children, how come we can't see past the ones in our own houses? A couple of weeks ago I read in the Wall Street Journal that Minnesota is one of several states that is considering mandating full-sized car seats for kids until they are eight. Seems car seat manufacturers have discovered that older kids are more demanding and image-conscious and want seats with cool fabrics and fancy drink holders.I e-mailed the story to a friend who keeps abreast of car seat ratings, along with the comment that I wondered what kind of lucrative new market this might mean for the manufacturers. Her one-word reply: "Cynic."She's right, of course. But I am, too. Over the course of my kids' lives I've bought eight different car seats, all but two of them costing well over $100 apiece. Wouldn't it do more for our collective safety to ban the Chevy Avalanche and at least pretend to enforce traffic laws? In addition to compiling safety statistics, the National Program for Playground Safety also issues report cards. In 2000, Minnesota's playgrounds earned a C. By 2004 the grade had gone up to a B, thanks in part to the elimination of crawl spaces. And for some time now, the state has earned A's and A+'s for "visibility"--that is, for the ability of an adult on the ground to see all of the action at once.While it's hard to argue against safer playgrounds, it's also true that by design the transparent playground offers kids no privacy. "As [playgrounds] were childproofed to improve safety, they inadvertently reduced the opportunities for the young to take part in forms of fantasy, sensory, and exploratory play, and construction activities apart from adults," writes historian Mintz. "Unstructured, unsupervised free play outside the home drastically declined for middle-class children. As more mothers joined the labor force, parents arranged more structured, supervised activities for their children. Unstructured play and outdoor activities for children 3 to 11 declined nearly 40 percent between the early 1980s and the late 1990s. Because of parental fear of criminals and bad drivers, middle-class children rarely got the freedom to investigate and master their home turf in ways that once proved a rehearsal for the real world."So much for the roving pack of kids each block boasted during Mintz's childhood, and my own. "The empty lot has disappeared," he quips. "And we are so concerned with legal liability that if kids do find one, you'd better be sure you'll get a call from the police."The same can be said of the telescoping in of our communities. It used to be that a girl who wasn't getting along with Mom had aunts and grandmothers to turn to, and that a boy who wasn't a social whiz at school had other places to shine. "The kid's world is becoming more narrow," says Mintz. "Religion is not so important, extended family is not so important, so kids have one world and that's school. And that's one thing if you're the star athlete or the most popular kid." If you aren't the homecoming queen, though, there really isn't anywhere else for you.Nor does the scrutiny let up at school. In addition to unprecedented academic testing, we're all on alert for signs of school violence--which might itself be an outgrowth of this pressure-cooker atmosphere, Mintz argues.At the very least, psychologist Anderegg fears, scrutinized children become ironic. "The British child analyst D.W. Winnicott wrote beautifully of the necessity for a child to be quietly alone in the presence of the mother, as a condition of vital self-creation," he writes. "What I often see in my clinical work is children who have never had this experience because a worried parent never leaves them alone. The surface becomes false, ironic, and self-mocking, while the real stuff--the stuff the child really cares about--continues on, but only deep underground." Last May, Nancy and Bob Williams (not their real names) moved into their dream house. They'd spent months looking for a house on a quiet street full of kids and adjacent to a park. The right house finally turned up, and on a beautiful spring afternoon a couple of days after the family moved in, Nancy told her two daughters, then seven and five, that they could cross the street and play on the playground. She stood at the front window watching and folding laundry.Things went fine for a while, until Nancy noticed a woman talking to the girls. Something didn't seem right, so she walked out of the house and started for the playground. There she learned that the woman was the park director, and that she was concerned that the girls were too young to play by themselves. The two women talked amiably for a while, but in the end the only thing they agreed on was how capable Nancy's girls were.Turns out that when the director first started questioning the kids, she had tried to get them to go into the rec center with her. The older girl had refused, saying that she didn't know the woman. The director explained that she worked at the park, but the girl wouldn't budge. "How do I know you work here?" she asked. "How do I know it's okay? I don't see a badge."The next day, Bob tried--and failed--to get someone to tell him how old kids had to be to play alone. The park director admitted there was no policy, but said she didn't want his kids coming back without a parent. The next park official up the food chain called it a "gray area," while the park police said they had no idea what the policy might be.The Williamses believe that what the park director did next was a sincere effort to help clarify things: She called Hennepin County's Child Protective Services to ask what the county's guidelines were. The screener who fielded the call asked whether the director was calling about real children, the director said yes, and next thing the Williamses knew they were the subjects of an official investigation. Commissioners from both Parks and Rec and the county board tried to stop things, but files had been opened.And so a CPS social worker came to the Williams house. She quickly acknowledged that the family hadn't been neglectful, but failed to offer up a solution. The guidelines the agency uses to measure neglect say kids seven and under can't be left alone in a house, but don't say anything about when children can be unattended outside the home--or, for that matter, about what constitutes away from home. The woman did say the kids were too young to cross the street, but only shrugged when Nancy countered that their bus stop was three blocks away because it is the policy of Minneapolis Public Schools that any child, even kindergarteners, can be required to walk a quarter-mile alone.CPS concluded that the Williamses had not been neglectful, but will keep the family's file open for four years. The explanation they gave Nancy: She and Bob hadn't done anything wrong, but if anything bad happened in the future, the mere fact that questions had been raised might itself suggest that the couple had a history of exercising poor judgment.While the saga was unfolding, everyone remarked on the way the older Williams daughter stood up to the park director. Nancy finally got tired of hearing people praise the girl's street smarts and started saying this: Her daughter's assertiveness isn't something she acquired on the street. It's something Bob and Nancy deliberately taught her because they wanted her to feel capable and independent, which they had thought was the goal.

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Gizmodo's Anti-RIAA Manifesto

2007-02-27T23:33:00.001-05:00

This is an overview of what the RIAA does, why it's damaging, and what we need to do to stop it. Consider this our planted flag.

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Getting 22 Episodes Could Mean Cancellation For 'Battlestar Galactica'

2007-02-27T18:46:00.001-05:00

Usually getting additional episodes in a season is a good thing for a television series. But if SciFi Channel opts to increase its fourth season order of 'Battlestar Galactica' from 13 episodes to 22, it could very well mean the end of the line for that channel's signature series.

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What We Never Saw...another view of 9/11

2007-02-27T11:34:00.001-05:00

Another haunting video from an eyewitness to the events of attacks on the WTC in New York on 9/11

clipped from video.google.com

2006-05-29T18:07:00.000-04:00

2006-05-28T21:55:00.000-04:00

2006-05-27T18:41:00.000-04:00

2006-05-26T18:15:00.000-04:00

2006-05-26T15:40:00.000-04:00

2006-05-25T20:22:00.000-04:00

2006-05-25T12:02:00.000-04:00

Post-NaNoWriMo Writing and other stuff

2005-12-15T19:42:00.000-05:00

Countdown to NaNoWriMo and more

2005-10-30T02:41:00.000-05:00

"13" in 100 days: Can it be done?

2005-09-21T15:50:00.000-04:00

Dragon*Con and Katrina: Quite an Overwhelming Weekend

2005-09-07T20:49:00.000-04:00

Talkin' 'bout Dragon*Con!

2005-08-15T05:28:00.000-04:00

Deep Thoughts by Jason Bond

2005-06-27T16:55:00.000-04:00

Big feet=big problems

2005-06-24T06:26:00.000-04:00

This one's for Shon!

2005-06-22T18:11:00.000-04:00

Boy am I glad the plans I had for June 20 fell through!

2005-06-19T14:35:00.000-04:00

Swinging from the gals to the guys (and probably back again)

2005-06-17T14:11:00.000-04:00

Bastards changed the number on me!

2005-06-16T17:50:00.000-04:00

Til Tuesday's newest hit: "Sounds of Construction Carry"

2005-05-31T12:34:00.000-04:00

Hey, what do you know? I'm off on a weekend!

2005-05-28T10:00:00.000-04:00

Defending Reverend Lovelace, by Most Right Rev. Billy Joe Paymemore

2005-05-25T18:32:00.000-04:00

Guess who I heard from today!

2005-05-21T22:36:00.000-04:00

Saturday...in the park...would be better than going to work!

2005-05-21T06:15:00.000-04:00

The show gets a fill-in host for the day

2005-05-20T16:22:00.000-04:00

Not safe for work erotic post Part III (by request)

2005-05-19T17:57:00.000-04:00

Not safe for work erotic post Part II (by request)

2005-05-19T17:52:00.000-04:00

Not safe for work erotic post Part I (by request)

2005-05-19T17:47:00.000-04:00

Who the Fark pissed in my corn flakes this morning? Part II

2005-05-19T14:07:00.000-04:00

Who the Fark pissed in my corn flakes this morning? Part I

2005-05-19T14:04:00.000-04:00

Time to play the game...again!

2005-05-16T16:49:00.000-04:00

Working weekends and missing out on the perfect house

2005-05-15T15:55:00.000-04:00

From the darkness of October to the light of May- Part II

2005-05-13T22:44:00.000-04:00

From the darkness of October to the light of May- Part I

2005-05-13T22:40:00.000-04:00

I don't remember what this is about, because Audioblogger screwed up on me today!

2005-05-13T19:09:00.000-04:00

Why size doesn't really matter after all-Part II

2005-05-13T19:08:00.001-04:00

Why size doesn't really matter after all-Part I

2005-05-13T19:08:00.000-04:00

Pleasure Principle (not safe for work)

2005-05-11T13:46:00.000-04:00

Lounging Around the Heartbreak Hotel Part 2

2005-05-10T16:20:00.000-04:00

Lounging Around the Heartbreak Hotel Part 1

2005-05-10T16:16:00.000-04:00

Rekindling dreams that died young deaths

2005-04-29T14:25:00.000-04:00

Dude was cast as a lady!

2005-04-28T13:09:00.000-04:00

Musing about the mystery of whom my romantic prospects are

2005-04-27T17:50:00.000-04:00

Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative

2005-04-26T13:34:00.000-04:00

Carla Withdrawal Symptoms

2005-04-25T14:35:00.000-04:00

Matt Hardy and I have something in common

2005-04-24T18:34:00.000-04:00

It's snowing outside, and I'm not exactly a happy camper

2005-01-29T15:50:00.000-05:00

If you wanted to hear the sexy voice I get when I am sick, then this is your lucky day!

2005-01-17T14:51:00.000-05:00

Gloomy Friday

2004-10-29T18:35:00.000-04:00

Bitch (almost) gets it in the head!

2004-10-23T13:32:00.000-04:00

Anne Coulter almost gets what's coming to her. Darn bitch was too quick to pick up on what was going on, so she avoided getting pied in her ugly face. If it had been me, I would have nailed that bitch! Muhahahahahaha!

The Cries of the Broken Hearted

2004-10-21T22:10:00.000-04:00

Adrift in the darkness of the soul

2004-10-21T06:24:00.000-04:00

Contemplation

2004-10-18T01:09:00.000-04:00

My new dream girl (of the moment)

2004-10-17T20:57:00.000-04:00

The fourth girl from the left? The one with the long black hair? She's mine! lol

You can find the link here.

What I would love to find in my tub when I come home from work in the mornings!

2004-10-16T16:30:00.000-04:00

I would also like this as well for Christmas. It'd ruin my diet, but I could go for plenty of fruit and Cheetos right about now, and these two hotties would be a hell of a way to work off those spare tires I have! lol

And for desert...

2004-10-16T16:28:00.000-04:00

This is what I want for Christmas this year. Just so you guys know! lol

Pet peeves, Pathetic pop stars and Post-Carlaism

2004-10-14T16:11:00.000-04:00

Forgiveness is a good thing

2004-10-13T13:51:00.000-04:00

Stupid cable companies, et al

2004-10-12T14:08:00.000-04:00

2004-10-12T06:44:00.000-04:00

This is the real me, from a few years ago!

Mondays suck like a black hole in space!

2004-10-12T06:31:00.000-04:00

More revelations about Carla! Film at 11!

2004-10-11T11:42:00.000-04:00

My mind is on sex, and sex is on my mind...damn you Carla!

2004-10-10T13:12:00.000-04:00

Friends with benefits?

2004-10-09T17:16:00.000-04:00

Broken Part II

2004-10-09T11:10:00.000-04:00

Broken Part I

2004-10-09T11:06:00.000-04:00

Testing one, two, three...Can anybody here me?

2004-10-09T02:39:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the new blog!

2004-09-21T22:25:00.000-04:00

This is my new View From The Hill blog, which shall take the place of my old one and will be home to what I had intended in the first place: a regular column about my various interests. Those would be sports, science fiction, politics, history, pop culture, current events, and life in general.

I hope to have the first of many up soon!