Yamato Tanooka, a 7 year old Japanese kid, was throwing rocks as people and cars, so his parents let him out of the car as punishment. He was lost in the woods of Hokkaido for almost a week.
Damned if you do and damned if you do not. Yamato Tanooka, a 7 year old Japanese kid, was throwing rocks as people and cars, so his parents let him out of the car as punishment. A few minutes later he ran off and was lost in the woods of Hokkaido for near a week. He was eventually found by the Japanese Army, dehydrated but unharmed.
This Oster meat slicer model 319-66 is not professional but does the job well enough. It is a little hard to adjust and clean, but was inexpensive.
Big Boss likes to stir fry, and so if I cut the meat too thickly, I catch hell. Yes, small but terrifying, and I am not talking about the knife. We want fresh meat sliced very thinly for Chinese stir fry, or for Korean hot pot. Thin enough to be translucent. How do you do this with fresh meat? Buy pork loin, drain liquids, cut in half, freeze, slice with meat slicer, and then if you wish, vacuum seal in small bags, then refreeze.
The Moyu Cube Stand has some clever design, and it looks really good as well. The stand came with the WeiLong GTS cube. photo 1 by Don Tai
Bought, Little Weed did, yet another cube. This was because the new cube had great reviews from a reputable company, and was supposed to be fast. He was not disappointed. The new cube, a Weilong GTS from MoYu, came with 2 plastic cube stands, convenient for displaying the cube. Or are they really just cube stands?
Here is a very cool news article about girls in engineering, from University of Toronto. Girls are smart, they work hard and have all the tools they need to succeed in engineering and computer science. We need to encourage them to do well in all technical subjects. Girls add a new dimension to technical fields, a new way of looking at situations, and a new way of reacting to new problems. Go girls! Big Weed makes her mark in the world.
Back at the University of Toronto, the children’s science course instructor, Michaela Tai, explains the dangers of incorrectly connecting a circuit.
Kids will be kids, in that they buy stuff, play with stuff, and then eventually break stuff. My job is to repair the stuff they break. Which brings me to the Ripstik casterboard. There are three variations: Classic, Ripster, Ripstik G, and the DLX. My local group, which includes my Little Weed, rides on Classic, G, and DLX models. Two of their G models broke in the same manner, with two different boys, of different weights. My advice for Ripstik buyers is to steer clear of the G model. I apologize to all for y 6 month delay in posting this info, but I was distracted by work.
Little Weed has been in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) Gifted Program for elementary school for a couple of years now. Overall it has been a great experience, though not without the occasional bumps on the road. I thought I’d write down some of my impressions, from one who is in the middle of the journey, to those who may be thinking about starting the journey.
Difficult as it may be, hard decisions often need to be made. The Toronto District School Board, Toronto, Canada, has seen an average of 4% falling enrollment for their students for a good decade or more. This is a well known problem, but has been highlighted recently because of funding shortfalls and possible scandal at the school board. The under utilization problem is very well known. There was even a Queen’s University study on the subject.Yet there is no political will to close schools, even in the face of an obvious decline in students and therefore, government funding. Elected school trustees seem to not be able to do their jobs.
The scene is an all too familiar one: A parent takes his/her kids to the park to play. The parent then gets on their cellphone to either talk or surf, leaving the kids to their own devices. The kids beg the parent to help them, all to no avail. The kid gives up and plays by him or herself. This is just morally wrong. Why squander the opportunity to spend some quality time with your kids, rather than give your undivided attention to a small 3″ x 4″ box? We are negatively addicted to our smartphones. All this observed in my predominantly Mainland Chinese community here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Ripstik rear skidplate in metal, mounted on a DLX. Photo by Don Tai
Little Weed has been Ripstiking on a used Classic for 2 years now. I had just recently found a new Ripstik DLX on Kijiji here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, so I bought it for him. Learning to wheelie, he had been grinding down the tail end of his DLX. I feared, correctly, that the plastic on the ass end of the board was wearing thin and would eventually grind through. We took the rear deck off, designed and fabricated a rear skidplate out of metal. Here is our design.
The way we choose to live goes a long way to determining how long and how well we will eventually live. More troubling is that our choices are observed and learned by our kids, who then take on very similar choices and lifestyle. While kids theoretically have a choice, in reality they follow their parents, for better or for worse. This study from Active Healthy Kids Canada is really troubling, in that it points to what I call “Rich Country” disease, where here in Canada we have lots of organized sport activities, lots of proper environment and equipment, but not a lot of actual physical exercise. It would be more appropriate to have the best of organized sport, with great facilities, that results in the fittest, most healthy kids on the planet. This is certainly not the case.
