The kiddo was drawing with sidewalk chalk today, after looking at a round-up of panorama fails. So he drew one.
Tag: NaBloPoMo 2015
AAAAAARP!
When I first spotted this sign, the ampersand in the middle looked like just one more A. It only resolved as I got closer.
Update: Sometime in January they replaced the ampersand with an E. No idea why. They didn’t use it somewhere else. Or maybe they did and changed it again, but didn’t bother to put it back where it made more sense.
Now it really looks like someone tried to write a burp — even in broad daylight!
Coin Slot For Your Cell Phone
The 5YO had an interesting idea tonight: “Devices should have slots that you can put real-world money into.” I explained that it wouldn’t be practical because someone would have to go around collecting it, and meanwhile your phone or tablet would get weighed down by all those quarters or bills. Then I brought up Square and similar card readers that you can hook up to your phone. I’m sure he’s seen us use them, even if he didn’t make the connection at the time he was thinking about the coin slot idea.
Thinking about it, though, why not use something like Square to power online purchases as well as point of sale transactions? Instead of setting up an account and entering a password to buy something, swipe your card. Or swipe a debit card to authorize adding value to it. Katie suggested taking it even further: directly add value to a cash card!
Mobile payments are mainly looking for ways to eliminate the physical card. Card readers are mostly being used to allow sellers to accept physical cards on the new infrastructure, but the technology could easily be adapted to give online buyers another payment – or banking -option.
Symbolic Costuming: Stage vs. Screen
We took the kiddo to see his first live theater play today, A Year With Frog and Toad. It’s a children’s musical based on the Frog and Toad books, with each song adapted from one of the stories. The costumes in this production tended toward symbolic representation rather than realism. Frog and Toad themselves just wore old-fashioned patchwork suits with green or brown color schemes. Birds had feather boas, aviator goggles, orange tights and yellow shoes. Moles had miner’s helmets and jumpsuits.
That’s something that works well in live theater, but moviegoing audiences want realism. Or studios do. So effects budgets keep climbing, regardless of storytelling quality, as they strive for ever more detail.
The only recent movie I can think of that went for this sort of look was Into the Woods, with the wolf. But everything else in the film went for realism (even Cinderella’s frozen-in-time inner monologue of “On the Steps of the Palace”), so it just looked way out of place. On stage you’d go with it. In another movie you might. But in this case it was just Johnny Depp in a weird outfit. Gee, I’ve never seen that before.
Epi-pen How-To
A great visual explanation of how to administer an epi-pen to someone experiencing severe anaphylaxis as a result of a food allergy, bee sting, etc. Plus commentary from Tumblr.
I’ll add: Absolutely don’t be squeamish if someone needs you to do this for them. Once I accidentally bounced the epi-pen off my leg when I jabbed myself with it during a severe reaction. You need to jab and hold it. Basically none of the medicine actually went in. Fortunately I carry a two-pack and was able to use the second injector, and I’m still around to tell the story.