Days in the life…

Sir Ken Robinson speaking at the TED Conference. It’s 20 minutes, but definitely worth watching.

You can download the file directly here.

An amazing stop-motion animation… Done without photoshop!

“Flâneur” by Gould, Berlin 2007

From the You Tube entry:

“It’s a short stop motion film. There is no digital image manipulation in it! Everything you see has really been wheatpasted!

The film was a lot of work and wouldn’t have been possible without the help of these four artists: Bronco, Evol (CTink), Kowalski and Various. Music by From Dispo To Dispo.”

Apparently flaneur is a French word meaning “to stroll”. Hope to get time to dig into that Wikipedia entry in more depth at some point…

Ok, so I’m catching up on some of my blog reading, trying to come to grips with this world we live in… And I come across a link to an abstinence education site, Stop & Think.

This is a program that’s currently being funded by the Department of Health and Human Services and is geared toward students in South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

There are some real gems here, especially on the “The Top 5 Questions Teens Ask About Sex–When Parents Aren’t Around” page:

3. Isn’t sex a good and natural thing? If so, why wait?

Like our hunger for food, sex is a natural urge. Just as it is against our nature to deny our natural hunger urge (which I try to satisfy as soon as possible), it may seem crazy that we would deny our natural urge for sex.

There are exceptions to this rule. There is a time and place to deny our natural urges. Several years ago a friend named Ben and I came home from a long run on a hot day. Ben burst through the front door and headed for the refrigerator. Without even thinking, he decided to satisfy his natural urge to drink something. He started chugging a carton of orange juice. The next thing I knew, he was spitting it out. The juice was chunky and rotten.

Even though sex is a natural urge (like Ben’s thirst) many teens choose not to satisfy the urge immediately. Many teens choose to deny their natural urge and wait because they believe their decision will benefit them in the long run. It is natural to feel a sexual urge and want to express it. Like Ben realizing he was drinking rotten orange juice, many teens who act on their sexual urge discover sex isn’t all they thought it would be. I don’t know anyone who regrets waiting until marriage for sex.

I guess maybe Ben should wait till he’s married to have a drink of water…

Also, clicking through to the “For Students Only” section leads to a site called Cool Maynard. (Check the “FAQ’s”, and then “Sexual Consequences”…) It must be cool to be named “Maynard” in South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Who knew?

By the way, I’m not suggesting that I think that every teenager should be going out there and having sex. I know a lot of you folks reading this are parents and will one day have to deal with these very same issues. No one wants their son going out and making babies at 15, or their daughter getting knocked up at 14. No one wants their child to get an STD.

Yes, sex is a natural urge. Yes, sex is is something that a teenager should “Stop & Think” about before engaging in. What pisses me off about these sites is the completely black and white way in which they deal with what is not a black and white issue. They fail to acknowledge that there are going to be teenagers out there who aren’t reading their Bibles or praying to Jesus hard enough who might be tempted to have sex. They fail to acknowledge that sex is something that can be shared successfully between two adults who aren’t married.

Talk with your kids about sex. Give them the facts. Give them all of the facts. Be there for them and communicate with them as the young adults that they’re becoming, not the 40 year old virgins you wish they could be.

This guy has mad stop motion chops.

Dav & Mie have a beautiful new baby girl:

What a great name!

It’s been ages since I’ve posted anything about a movie I’ve liked. It’s not that I haven’t seen any movies. Capote was quite good (Phillip Seymour Hoffman is a badass), Garden State was charming and I really enjoyed Christopher Nolan’s first movie, Following. I also highly recommend both seasons of The Office. (Ricky Gervais I bow down before thee!).

Which brings me to Shaun of the Dead.

This is a wonderfully funny little movie and a great twist on the typical zombie fare. There are some unexpectedly touching moments and I loved seeing Lucy Davis from The Office. (Martin Freeman also had a non-speaking cameo.)

Michelle and I came across this during a walk through Riverside Park this past weekend…

Turns out that it’s a variation on a quote by Confucius.

Wow…

found via Boing Boing by way of WFMU’s Beware of the Blog.

Archived copy here.

Ze, you completely rock!

“If the Earth Were a Sandwich”
“The Show” with ze frank

A very eloquent post on privacy by Bruce Schneier:

The Value of Privacy

Last week, revelation of yet another NSA surveillance effort against the American people has rekindled the privacy debate. Those in favor of these programs have trotted out the same rhetorical question we hear every time privacy advocates oppose ID checks, video cameras, massive databases, data mining, and other wholesale surveillance measures: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”

Some clever answers: “If I’m not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.” “Because the government gets to define what’s wrong, and they keep changing the definition.” “Because you might do something wrong with my information.” My problem with quips like these — as right as they are — is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It’s not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.
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