Yesterday

Yesterday, I took a day off of just about everything but work. Wrong thing, right?

Well, work eats up most of my days on the Mondays I go down to Lake Orion for meetings at the office. Then they sent me down to Taylor, south of Detroit, to warm a chair while some guy in Utah dialed into a server. Good times, good times.

And I thought about doing some work on the basement, but my right wrist was still a little sore from all the hammering and whatnot over the weekend. Feeling better today, so we’ll see how that goes. I also picked up a Bosch SDS from one of my buddies at work, so that should make short work of the drilling into concrete business. My father-in-law is worried that I’ll drill deeper than I need to, and wind up creating a moisture issue. Frankly, though, if my slab is less than 3″ thick (which is deeper than I can go with the bit I have), I have bigger problems than a damp basement.

Anyway, today’s pimpage is as follows: Tobias Buckell has re-launched SF Novelists, a group blog for a number of Science Fiction and Fantasy novelists. It started as a wiki and informational site, I think, last year sometime, but Tobias elected to relaunch it like this. Go check it out. Go now, scoot. I’ll post more later.

This Is Not A Baby Einstein Commercial

I dig Baby Einstein. I realize that the Mozart Effect is over-stated in most cases, but unlike something like Curious George, it’s the sort of kid-friendly fare that I can tolerate best, since most of the time the audio is nothing more than simple treatments of classical tunes, and I can dig that. Not as good as the real thing, of course, but tolerable.

And now, Time wants to tell me that Baby Einstein slows my son’s acquisition of language. Funny, it sounds like he’s talking just fine. Of course, I’m also not sure about the math they present. To wit, that he fails to acquire 6-8 words per hour of Baby Einstein? So… he should have thousands more words than he does now? Really? Because he’s watched a lot of that stuff.

Now, I’ll be the first to say you shouldn’t let DVDs be the babysitter, and I quite assiduously make sure that they’re not, at least when I’m primary caregiver around. We read, we turn off the TV and turn on real classical music (or real rock music, or whatever), we let the baseball game play in the background while he colors for epic lengths of time. (He has yet to repeat the feat, by the way.) We could stand to get out more, but we manage enough of that that he’s got tan lines on his feet from his sandals.

But… seriously? In the half hour of Baby Einstein he watched when we got back home from the grocery store, he would have picked up three or four more words? Really? In the two hours since it went off, he learned twelve to sixteen?

Seriously? I call shenanigans. As it is, I know he’s added to his signing vocabulary since he got the video with Marlee Matlin in it, and I know he’s said quite a few words for the first time while watching them. I guess I’d need to see the study itself and look more closely to see what the exact parameters of the experiments were.

In the meantime, we’ll go on doing what we’re doing.