When I was little, one of my favorite books was “Are You My Mother?” by P.D. Eastman.
You might remember the story of the little bird whose mother is out scratching for worms when he hatches, leaving the baby bird to search all over for her until he’s rescued by a “SNORT,” which lifts him back to his nest where he finally finds his mom.
It’s not likely that the yacht a baby humpback whale has mistaken for his mother will be able to orchestrate a similar rescue. It seems so unlikely that a baby whale would mistake a piece of machinery for its mother, but the footage of the lost whale attempting to suckle the side of the boat seems pretty convincing.
When you consider all the technological advances man has made, it’s hard to accept that there’s no way to lead this baby whale to some sort of nourishment to save its life. If we can simulate human breast milk with baby formula, shouldn’t there be something to feed the whale? Does it really have to starve while everyone just crosses their fingers hoping that a whale wet nurse might just happen to pass by to take the baby whale under her fin?
Hopefully someone will figure out another solution. In the meantime, here’s the story from the Associated Press:
In this framegrab image taken off from Channel Nine television, a lost humpback whale calf swims around a yacht in the Pittwater, north of Sydney Harbour Monday, Aug. 18, 2008. The calf seems to think the yacht is its mother and will likely die within days if it doesn’t find another mother to adopt it, a wildlife official said Tuesday. (AP Photo/Channel Nine)
August 19, 2008 Whale lost in Sydney waters, bonds with yacht
A lost humpback whale calf that bonded with a yacht it seems to think is its mother will likely die within days if it doesn’t find another mother to adopt it, a wildlife official said Tuesday.
The 1- to 2-month-old calf was first sighted Sunday in waters off north Sydney, and on Monday tried to suckle from a yacht, which it would not leave. Rescuers towed the yacht out to sea, and the calf finally detached from the boat, but the creature returned to an inlet near Sydney Tuesday morning, New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service spokesman John Dengate said.
The calf can’t survive without mother’s milk for long, Dengate told Australia’s Fairfax Radio Network.
“It’s probably a question of days rather than weeks,” he said. “It’s a very grim prognosis.”
Artificial feeding would be impossible, so the calf’s only chance is to find another female whale to accept it, he said.
“If a lactating female with a calf goes past and this calf approaches that animal it may accept it, but … it’s a very slim chance,” Dengate said.
The movie “Tropic Thunder” hasn’t even opened and already it’s in trouble for the use of one word.
Considering that one character has his skin surgically dyed to play a black man, you might expect that the word would be a racial term. Instead, it’s a word that has somehow devolved into a derogatory term as society becomes more politically correct: retard.
Protestors from the Special Olympics and the American Association of People with Disabilities are calling for a ban of the movie and the word.
As I mentioned a couple posts ago, if it’s R-rated, then studios are giving up wider audiences in order to be offensive, but at least they’re warning you ahead of time.
Should the movie be banned? No.
The word on the other hand, is a different issue. The advocacy groups raise a good point about how hateful that word has become, but it’s happened so gradually that some people might not have noticed. If “Tropic Thunder” helps shed light on this issue, then something positive comes out of it.
The “r-word” is one of those terms that used to be used interchangably with other mean words like “stupid” (as an adjective) or “idiot” (as a noun). Now that we are more enlightened, though, we know we’re not supposed to be calling anyone names, but if we do, they better not be names that further perpetuate prejudice by demeaning an entire group of people.
This was actually a word my son and I talked about recently because last year’s “Big Brother” winner used the “r-word” to describe the autistic children he worked with and lost his job after winning the reality show contest. The only thing we were surprised by was that the guy really had worked with autistic children because he was so offensive that it seemed like he had to be lying about what he did for a living.
My son, at age 12, was fully aware that the word was offensive and while he doesn’t understand a lot of derogatory terms, he knows what’s wrong with this one.
For kids old enough to watch PG-13 movies (crude and obnoxious ones), there’s actually a pretty good comedy that gets right to the heart of the issue: 2005’s “The Ringer,” starring Johnny Knoxville, a guy who poses as a Special Olympics candidate. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but while it can be called offensive on many levels, its treatment of people with disabilities was surprisingly tasteful.
To put the current protest into perspective, the Special Olympics endorsed “The Ringer,” while “Tropic Thunder is being criticized for its hateful language. From the Associated Press:
The groups are outraged over scenes featuring the liberal usage of a disparaging term used to describe the mentally disabled. In the movie, director and co-star Ben Stiller plays a fame-hungry actor cast in a war movie who previously had a role as a mentally disabled character named Simple Jack.
“When I heard about it, I felt really hurt inside,” said Special Olympics global messenger Dustin Plunkett. “I cannot believe a writer could write something like that. It’s the not the way that we want to be portrayed. We have feelings. We don’t like the word ’retard.’ We are people.”
Andrew J. Imparato, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, said he and other advocacy groups met with DreamWorks co-chair Stacey Snider and watched a private screening of the film Monday morning. Imparato called the movie “tasteless” and said it was “offensive start to finish.”
“I have a sense of humor,” said Imparato. “There were parts of the movie where I laughed, but it seems to me that the movie tried really hard to go too far and then pull back on everything that was offensive except the issue of people with intellectual disabilities. I just think Ben Stiller and the people involved in this movie just didn’t think it was going to be offensive.”
– Derrik J. Lang, AP Entertainment Writer
Don’t take young kids to see “Tropic Thunder” and use the hype over it to teach them some sensitivity instead.
By Jenna Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 10, 2008; C01
William Glass III, 14, sends text messages like a middle-aged, technology-clueless English teacher. Properly spelled words. Correct punctuation. Precise capitalization. Lengthy paragraphs. No shortened words.
OMG!?! R U Serious?
“I don’t know, I guess I just never started using the abbreviations, so I’m used to typing things out,” Glass texted. “Also, everyone understands words, but everyone might not understand the abbreviations.”
Even though Glass shuns shorthand, he embraces speed. At a pace that veteran secretaries might envy, Glass sends as many as 800 texts a month, his thumbs quickly flying across his phone’s Qwerty, or mini-keyboard.
That speed and respect for the English language landed the St. Mary’s County teenager in the LG National Texting Championship in New York last month.
It would be so easy to make fun of this story, but when you read the whole thing, it’s pretty cute. Usually, we see stories about how teenagers are mangling the English language, but in this case, they’re being encouraged to master it — on their phones at least.
This kid puts my text messaging ability to shame, along with most of the people I exchange text messages with. Too bad.
While I love the convenience, brevity and relative quiet of text messaging, it would be hard to convince me that it’s a skill that requires practice, but good for LG for rewarding kids for texting properly. Considering how much they charge for their phones, they can afford to give back.
In this season of “Weeds,” the central characters have moved out of their ticky-tacky neighborhood where the houses looked the same and settled in a town with more diversity.
Last week’s episode of the Showtime comedy reminded me that some things haven’t changed — in the show, and in life.
As teens Shane and Isabelle sat at a lunch table on the first day at their new school, Isabelle’s wistful comment struck home on many levels: “If only life were a Judd Apatow movie where geeks ruled the world. But it’s not, so let’s just suck it up.”
“Weeds” is not a kids’ show. Judd Apatow, in general, does not make kids’ movies.
Nevertheless, Isabelle’s comment fell right in line with current trends I’ve been reading about: As comedies get racier and raunchier, they’re also appealing to younger and younger kids. Not just teens. I’m talking about kids 12-and-under. Kids who are too young to know enough about relationships, political correctness and the downside to getting high to be able to walk out of the movie with the right ideas.
I can see the attraction, though. Kids are obsessed with fitting in, and the message in a lot of the comedies these days seems to be that you don’t have to be the coolest or the smartest or the strongest or the best looking kid to be accepted.
It’s exactly what their parents have been telling them, too, right?
The difference is that when parents console their freaky, geeky kids, they probably aren’t suggesting that the way to make it all better is to get a fake ID, find a dealer or just, you know, “do it.”
That’s what’s happening in a lot of of today’s popular comedies.
I’m not criticizing. I don’t mind the way comedies are shifting. I’m just worried about how they’re skewing the audience. The R-rating exists for a reason and why ignore it when movies seem ever more likely introduce our kids to things that we don’t necessarily want them exposed to and almost definitely don’t want them to mimic?
I’m not calling for censorship.
Those movies provide the perfect complement to the family fare I have to shell out an obscene amount of money for, just so some animated animal can hawk toys to my kids for 90 minutes straight.
There are gems like “Wall-E” and “Kung Fu Panda,” but there are enough stinkers that I feel like I’m justified in wanting to see grown-up movies, too. Sometimes that means I want to watch Sacha Baron Cohen when he’s more than King Julien in the “Madagascar” series or Owen Wilson when he’s not just the voice behind race car Lightning McQueen.
But let me make myself clear: If I am going into a restricted area, I do not want a little kid sneaking in behind me.
Parental groups can complain about the vileness of the new and upcoming releases, but I think the solution is pretty simple: We need to be more vigilant about what we let our kids see rather than complain about what’s showing up on the screen.
When my 5-year-old tried to carry her big brother’s backpack, the weight of it almost made her fall over backward.
It didn’t surprise me. More than once, I’ve pulled a muscle in my chest slinging my son’s bag over my shoulder when he forgot it or was too tired to carry it.
It’s no surprise that he instantly fell in love with Amazon’s Kindle, a lightweight electronic reader much slimmer than any of the fantasy novels he likes to read. For a kid like him, being able to download several volumes out of the air and carry them all at once between his thumb and forefinger must be a marvel.
At what point is the pricey Kindle going to become an accessible educational tool that will allow kids to download all their textbooks, and recreational reading besides?
For me, the Kindle is handy device and I quickly grew attached to it once I figured out how to stop losing my page. It’s a pricey gadget, but the books are cheaper and with two avid readers sharing it, it will eventually pay itself off.
Still, while it’s convenient and saves paper, but I don’t have a lot of practical application for it, considering I don’t do a whole lot of reading for pleasure away from home.
As an academic tool, however, it shows a lot of promise.
It could save a lot of students from straining their backs, a problem I’m well aware of after using a heavy backpack on one shoulder from elementary school through college, which seems to have permanently left me slightly bent to the right.
These e-readers have the potential to lighten kids’ loads and – assuming they keep track of their Kindles – it would also mean they could bring their books home with them every night to help them with their homework.
It’s unfortunate that right now, the Kindle and similar readers are too cost prohibitive to expect every child to have one, and even if they did, the Kindle’s extensive offerings don’t seem to include textbooks aimed at middle school students.
Why not market a more affordable reader that can help the younger set, and even save some trees along the way?
I’ll always have more affection for traditional paper books, but the Kindle’s convenience makes up for some of that. I have to admit that when I finished my book late the other night, I was happy to be able to download the next volume in the series without having to wait to hit a bookstore in the morning.
I don’t mind my son using the Kindle to read his favorite fantasy fiction, but I’d like it a lot more if he could use more to further his education.
I wonder, are affordable e-readers for kids even on the horizon?
