Prone to silly examples

(Daddy reads passage in novel in which the Doctor "lies prostrate")
E (lying on back): "Is prostrate like this?" (rolls onto front) "Or this?"

Me: "Prostrate is lying on your front. Good job, knowing it's one of those! It's also called 'prone', which you can remember because they start with the same letters".

E (rolls onto back again): "What's the word for this again?"

Me (putting book aside): "That's 'supine'. You can remember because normally (lies on front on floor) those little quilly mammals are porcuprone. If they're porcusupine they need your help."

E: "Is there a special word for lying on your side?"

Me: "Probably! I can't think of any though. At some point you need to leave those poor porcupines alone. Also, it's definitely no good if after a storm, you go outside and the woods are full of supine trees".

Asteroids will pter us apart, again

E was asking me today if I'd rather have one trillion dactyls, or one teradactyl. D, naturally, corrected him: they're *terra*dactyls, so named because they dragged huge clumps of earth with them as they flew.

I had to step in and explain that they'd never understand how to breed monsters at that rate. Worrydactyls came first, and it was only as their prey became more resilient and daring that they upgraded into the terrordactyls we all recall today.

Ultimate superbowl

E: "If if the earth were the size and weight of a bowling ball, would it be a good bowling ball?"

Me: "No. There's no holes for the fingers to go in."

D: "And it would be too bumpy".

E: "There'd be little spikes all over it, from the mountains".

Me: "I don't think there would, oddly. The tallest mountain is 5 miles high.

Inflicting excitement on others: eight observations on Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill Watterson

1. The two great insights of Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham were that monologues are more interesting if your characters move rapidly across a wide and dangerous array of terrain, and that you can tell a compelling story using only 50 different words. Bill Watterson was powefully influenced by the first of those insights, and not at all by the second.

2. Mo, the bully who torments Calvin, later went on to be Donald Trump's Nickname Strategist Timmy Jenkins, as interviewed by Steven Colbert. In kindergarten, of course, he was not normally that articulate, but he already had promise ("Hey twinky, give me a quarter... for the Let Calvin Live Through Recess Fund"). And the self-awareness to answer Calvin's philosophical challenges to his bully role with "Because it's fun".

Calling on, inattentive

(I will refer to my sons on my blog, from here on in, as "D" and "E", although in real life their letters are in an entirely different font)

E, calling from kitchen: "D! Did you know that we're going to see our friends in Cary today?"
D, at computer: "..........."
Me, in kitchen: "E, you should stand by him and get his attention first. He gets very focused on his gaming, and isn't listening to us."
D, calling: "I don't listen to anyone when I'm at the computer!"
Me: "Wow. Maybe he did notice us. That was weirdly relevant to what we were talking about."
D, calling: "I don't have any idea what you two are saying!"

Countdown bonus: Indelicates, "Sweet Sixteen" (2008)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcM9QsZNRxM

E (my 8-year-old): "Can you play the Indelicates video with the old people? What's it called?"
Me: "'Sixteen'. Sure."
E: "It's about people who want to be 16 and act like they're 16 even though they're much older".
Me: "That's right!"
E: "Why do they want to be 16?"
Me: "Well, when you get old, your body - well, if you're unlucky you die. But even if you're lucky, it stops working the same way. You remember having the energy and ability to do things that you can't anymore."
E: "But why 16? If I was old I would wish I were 10."
Me: "That's a possible thing too".
E: "Especially if I qualify for Lincoln Academy by then."
Me: "That could be it, though. Maybe the narrator didn't."

Snot the difference

My ten-year-old, presumably introducing a joke: "What's the difference between a garden slug and a two-inch trail of snot?"

My eight-year-old: "1. Most garden slugs aren't two inches long. 2. Slugs are solid, snot is more liquid. 3. Garden slugs don't usually come out of your nose. 4. Snot would need to be enchanted to come alive."

Every once in awhile, I see my influence shining through *exactly*.

Baby, knit a sweater in my coupe; you make me want a...

1. My eight-year-old has correctly noted that if "sheep" is going to insist on being a plural noun, the singular ought to be "shoop". In which case there's a Salt-n-Pepa single that needs a dramatically overhauled video.

(My Facebook friend David said "I can't wait for the sequel where they teach you about chromosomes so you can clone your own shoop. 'Let's Talk About X', they'll call it". At which point I point out to the jury that

Chicken vs. egg

Taking the "chicken or the egg" conundrum on its own intended terms, I've long thought it was an easy one: the egg came first. All chickens come from eggs, but at some point, historically, something we'd marginally class as a chicken was birthed by something we wouldn't. The real question is why I chose to accept the intended meaning at all, when my sons this morning found better ones.

For example: the egg came first. By hundreds of millions of years. Some tiny sea creature hatched.

Or: the chicken came first, because c comes before e. (I'll add that if someone starts selling the iChicken, it will also have come first:

Mini-Snoopy Batplane!

My 8-year-old is singing to himself a song he made up about a "mini-Snoopy Batplane" while flying a toy plane around. That's not the odd part.

The odd part is that he's singing it in the persona of his new toothbrush, and interrupting himself in the voice of the plastic package the toothpaste came in, which wants him to stop singing, and is getting increasingly upset that he won't.

Just so-so story

I've helped my 10-year-old brainstorm, as an English assignment, an original "just-so story" myth explaining the origin of an Earth custom; he chose, ambitiously, the origin of war. What we've come up with is that village disputes used to be settled by dancing competitions judged by the gods.

With the competition that became the first war, one problem was that the god in charge of deciding the dispute was widely rumored to be in love with a girl from one of the villages (and indeed, ruled her village the victor). But the other catalyst was that the dispute, taking place at a giant dinner party, was over proper table manners and utensil usage. The losing side, who felt that they had in fact danced better, were all "Never mind, the correct way to use sharp knives is like THIS *stab stab*". The old system never aroused enough trust again.

Valid exorcist math

I doubted my 10-year-old when he claimed he could turn his head 360 degrees, but it turns out he can! Holding his neck still, he moved his body around in a tight circle.

Impressed, I dared him to turn his head 360 degrees while holding the rest of his body still. "I can", I promised. He gave up and asked me to demonstrate. I turned my head sharply to the right, forward again, sharply to the left, and forward. 90 x 4 = 360.

Hey, when a store promises to be open 24 hours, I'm not gonna kvetch if I get there and it's closed - unless they promised "in a row"....