Bornfamous

the friday five
You have just won one million dollars:
1. Who do you call first?
Barb
2. What is the first thing you buy for yourself?
A car
3. What is the first thing you buy for someone else?
Clothes for Robby
4. Do you give any away?
Of course
4a. If yes, to whom?
$50k to each of my kids, and [...]

Her name is E. and she’s 16. She homeschools and lives about half a mile from here. They’ve spent every spare minute together since they first got together last weekend. The other night when he came home, he sat there with a sappy look on his face and said, “Mom, I’ve never been this happy.” [...]

A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that [...]

All about bagels — plus a recipe for making them yourself. Yum.

…and now it’s over.
Once I had an errand boy, a teenager to go to the store whenever I asked, but no more.
He has a girlfriend.
Sounds like, “We have liftoff,” doesn’t it? Well, it kinda feels like that too. My baby boy, about to turn 16 next week, has his first girlfriend.
We won’t be seeing him [...]

Captain Kangaroo, aka Bob Keeshan, 1927-2004

As the easy-going Captain with his big pockets and his bushy mustache, Keeshan lured children into close engagement with literature, science, and especially music, adopting an approach which mixed pleasure and pedagogy. Children learned most easily, he argued, when information and knowledge became a source of delight. Keeshan’s approach represented [...]

Study: Eating Organic Decreases Pesticide Levels in Kids
A recent study by Environmental Health Perspectives (March, 2003) found that children who ate primarily organic produce and juice had one-sixth the level of pesticide byproducts in their urine compared with children who ate non-organic food. The study compared children who ate produce and juice that was at [...]

It’s only 8:46 pm, Pacific time, but I’m ready to hit the hay. Hit the sack. Have a snack–no, hit the deck. I’m tired, too tired to go to bed. Because that would mean getting ready for bed. That’s what I’m really too tired for.
Because I spent most of the day on fragrance-filled buses, running [...]

My son got married Monday. I should have written about this sooner but I’ve gotten in the habit of not writing about him because he doesn’t like it. Or rather, he didn’t like it when I talked about him on the radio, so that’s when I broke myself of that habit. But this is okay, [...]

I fell in love with Virtuelvis’s rounded corners and cool quote marks, but I didn’t want to waste them on a few blockquotes here and there, you know?
So I was just wondering… if you can see them at all [and you can't with IE, so don't even bother], do the quote marks around each [...]

The recent exclusion of most cow brains, eyes, spinal cords, and intestines from the human food supply may make beef safer, but where are those tissues going? These potentially infectious tissues continue to go into animal feed for chickens, other poultry, pigs, and pets (as well as being rendered into products like tallow for use [...]

Rounded Corners in CSS - Virtuelvis:

Rounded corners in CSS has become sort of a holy grail. The problem with most of the rounded corner techniques is that they require alteration of the HTML document itself, which means that retrofitting it onto an existing design may require a lot of effort.
However, there is a solution that [...]

Update: never mind. I was using “#eee” and “#fff” for the cell colors. Apparently, IE insists on all six “e’s” and “f’s”. All fixed. Phew.
I just looked at this site in Internet Explorer and was horrified to see what IE does to my calendar:

Those little black boxes are supposed to be white! They look fine [...]

Fried chicken dinner is dead-easy to make, and delicious too. Secret ingredient: garlic salt. Mmmm…

Back when I was a waitress at a fancy downtown L.A. coffee shop, I used to spill coffee on my fingers, deliberately, in order to stay awake. I remember the Japanese businessmen who were my customers, looking at me strangely. Did they wonder if I was drunk or high? How could they know I was [...]