jeez….let a kid be a kid. we all made it to adulthood and didn’t wear helmets and rode our bikes 5 miles away from home and played in the woods and all that.
----------

Are you a fool?

In my grandmother's farm neighborhood not one of the kids I played with is still alive. Army accident, hunting accidents, killed by father of girlfriend, drunk driving driver, drunk driving passenger, drunk driving pedestrian, fell off all terrain vehicle, cocaine overdose. Everyone of my generation on her "block" of farms was dead before 30. Every one.

I'm glad that all your friends lived, but to presume this is true of all kids everywhere is asinine in the extreme and insulting to the parents who grieve their lost children.

Things WERE NOT safer in the seventies.
---------

Yes they were, read the crime statistics for your state and county, duh. They may not have been safer in the Bronx is Burning era, but they were much safer down here prior to the crack war of 1987. They were measurably safer.

I have two kids younger than 9 and I've seen 13 year olds pick on my son and push him around while I've been on the other side of the playground with my other kid.

I was on the PATH subway coming into NYC in 1989 when I saw a 14 or 15 year old teenager push a much younger kid to the ground and try to steal something out of his backpack. The police intervened.

I think people who say that "nothing" will happen mean that the kid won't get killed. I find that young teenagers walking through my neighborhood are approached by other teenagers, sometimes in a threatening bully-style way, every day. These pretend gangsters will challenge, "Where you from?" Which you have to answer with the name of my neighborhood, I presume.

This is definitely true of the Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens and even Manhattan of 10 years ago and 30 years ago? Don't kid yourself.

How in the hell does having one's own sailboat Biff or Muffy, relate to a 15 yr old subway thief?

I never understood the ring finger thing, when that first came around everyone in my office could do it. How is it "impossible?"

I created a similar graph in the 7th grade from one of those books, probably Cave of Time? Only by the time I did it 5th and 6th grade books like Choose Your Own Adventure were no longer cool, so I thought I did something cool and was mocked like Martin Prince.

The British really are angry, spiteful people, aren't they. That's the thing that surprised me the most when I spent a lot of time with vacationing Brits, they are highly judgmental and don't have the ettiquette to keep it to themselves.

I heard some great interviews with people on the autistic spectrum on NPR. Not one single person with Aspergers tried to suggest that they were really happy that they thought differently. One woman hinted that she basically went into an alley with a rapist before someone shouted to her that it wasn't safe- she had such poor judgment of people that she literally needed friends with her in bars.

I work with a person with Downs Syndrome and he's a great guy and we do have to accept him, but in the same way the reason he has a good job is that he knows that certain behavior he wants to do is unacceptable- like hugging. So we see him sometimes get really excited and lunge and stop himself from hugging people and straighten his tie and act more like the rest of society.

If she wants to be accepted, she must recognize that acceptance comes with communication. By the 1970s people knew that autism was not a sign of mental retardation, so throughout my entire adult life this has been public knowledge. I don't know people who think automatically than an autistic person isn't intelligent, I think the average person believes that the autistic person is incomprehensible. I'm glad she has accepted that the only way for people to understand autism is to speak our language, to become comprehensible. If she was more educated then she'd know that this battle to communicate minority interests to the vast majority is a longterm issue that everyone deals with. So since communication is the key issue, there is no one who can change but her.

I don't know how they "found" it, but I watched this movie in the 1980s at the National Archives in Washington, DC.

Yeah, I read this and my first reaction was, "this is totally uncool."

Friends of mine got money from companies looking to invest in green energy and they used that money to train underage offenders in bike repair. So they get junked bike parts, the kids build bikes for themselves, learn a decent skill, get transportation and all during their community service. Then the kids come back and train other kids to fix bikes.

This guy comes up with a "time travel mart." You know, he's a jackass.

yeah, anyone who eats octopus doesn't have a soul, seriously.

Insane.

I manage a team of people from South Asia and in frustration yesterday one of the guys called me "Boss Uncle." It is very odd to hear them speak English almost perfectly with almost no accent, but use completely wrong words.

And yes, I said wrong. You never call your supervisor Boss Uncle.

And as far as Roosevelt serving hot dogs- that was on an outdoor picnic meant to represent the average American and the current queen of England wrote a letter a few years back declaring the event as "great fun." She was a teenager at the time. Some gaffe. Snopes is calling.

My half-brother is a linguist living in Germany and he said that JFK absolutely spoke correctly. There is nothing overly strange about saying "I am a Berliner" and at the time, what with the air drops and all, he was cheered because the US saved the Berliners from starvation. He said that it's common for Americans in Germany to ask about the gaffe, but no German would ever think it was a gaffe.

This reminds me of the Chevy Nova story. In high school we asked out Spanish teacher about the Chevy Nova, meaning "it doesn't go" in Spanish and she yelled at us. She claimed that was pure racism. Nova is a Spanish word meaning Nova- a star going Nova. She said in Mexico they used to joke that buying Notable Furniture meant you weren't getting a table. haw haw. Any English speaker knows that we don't confuse "no table" and notable.

It's nothing but ugly americanism to think Germans or Spanish speakers aren't also as sophisticated as we are.

That woman has the worst Chav fashion sense. It's like having a trailer park loser getting in someone's face. Please, HAVE your freaking currency if it means we don't get those "on the dole" sunglasses.

At first I was like, cool, you baked everyone cookies! Then I was like, wait, you asked other people to bake you cookies?