Don’t mess with October 31

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There’s a Boston-area parent who is frustrated by Halloween being on a fixed date and suggests that Halloween always move every year so that it always falls on Saturday. He enumerates a list of ways that Halloween on other days of the weeks inconveniences him and his family: rushing home from work to trick-or-treat, sugar rushes and early wakeups for school, homework neglect, and so on.

As someone whose birthday falls on Halloween, I say, “Feh!” to that idea. Maybe the problem isn’t the day of the week; maybe it the distortion of holidays by a commercialized and secularized culture. First, let’s be clear. The name itself tells you what day Halloween falls on: “Hallows e’en” or “the evening before the Feast of All Hallows.” Halloween is connected All Saints Day, just like Christmas Eve is connected to Christmas and New Year’s Eve is connected to New Year’s Day. What’s next? Moving New Year’s Eve to a Saturday night so all the party hounds can start boozing at 9 am? Should we move St. Patrick’s Day to a fixed Saturday for the same reason? Having Christmas move about is inconvenient too. Maybe it should always be on a Sunday so we don’t have to feel guilty about trooping out to Mass only once that week, plus we can shop all day on Saturday. You see what I’m getting at.

Halloween is October 31 for a reason. You don’t start messing with that for no good reason. And he doesn’t offer any good reasons.

Photo by ecstaticist – http://flic.kr/p/3KFmwv

What can Brown do for Yemeni terrorists?

By now you’ve heard about today’s excitement surrounding suspicious packages containing explosives found on UPS flights originating in Yemen. Reports say they were addressed to Jewish organizations in the Chicago area. Now, I’m glad no one was hurt and terrorism itself isn’t funny, but it struck me as odd that al Quaeda just decided to overnight their terrorism to their erstwhile victims.

I can just picture the Yemeni bombers finishing their bombs, but confronted with the fact that they were set to explode tomorrow.How would they get them to their targets in the US before they exploded?

Terrorist 1: “Well, we could buy plane tickets and fly them there.”
Terrorist 2: “Idiot! We’d never make it past security.”
T1: “Then I’ll put it in my shoe.”
T2: “Stupid dog! We tried that. Remember the Shoe Bomber?”
T3: “Brothers! Look at this book I just got from Amazon Prime. I ordered it yesterday and now it’s here just one day later.”

“UPS: When it absolutely, positively has to blow up overnight.”

(I know, it was Fedex’s slogan, but the terrorists decided to see what Brown could do for them and picked UPS instead. I won’t let them ruin my joke.)

 

World’s End

Bettinellis at World's End

We’re here at World’s End, which sounds pretty dramatic. In fact, it’s a park, part of the private Trustees of the Reservation system of parks. It’s in Hingham on an island and peninsula overlooking the Atlantic ocean and Boston harbor.

It’s beautiful with the foliage but very windy today. Definitely someplace to come back to in the spring and summer.

Posted via email from Domenico’s posterous

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What’s the real reason sales of picture books are languishing?

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Are picture books declining in sales because parents are pushing kids to chapter books earlier or is there perhaps a simpler explanation? The New York Times story claims that sales of picture books are declining because parents—as in so many other areas of life—are pushing their kids to excel and advance more rapidly than normal development phases would suggest.

Parents have begun pressing their kindergartners and first graders to leave the picture book behind and move on to more text-heavy chapter books. Publishers cite pressures from parents who are mindful of increasingly rigorous standardized testing in schools.

But is that really the reason? Undoubtedly, it’s part of the cause, but it could also include the fact that so many of the new picture books that the book industry is dumping on the shelves at an alarming rate are just dreck and drivel. One reason to believe this may be the case is that sales of classic books continue to be strong.

Classic books like “Goodnight Moon” and the “Eloise” series still sell steadily, alongside more modern popular titles like the “Fancy Nancy” books and “The Three Little Dassies” by Jan Brett, but even some best-selling authors are feeling the pinch. Jon Scieszka, who wrote “Robot Zot,” said his royalty checks had been shrinking, especially in the last year.

In other words, classic books that have stood the test of time and new books that have proven to be good are still selling well. But new books that are a flash in the pan or are just plain bad aren’t selling. Frankly, I think it’s a reflection of the whole book industry: People are starting to be choosy about the books they spend their money and fewer dollars are being spent on poorly written, edited, and produced titles that have filled the seasonal catalogs of publishers for years. The book industry, like the music industry, has gotten by for decades vomiting forth formulaic products hewing to the latest fads and sopping up disposable cash. But in the midst of the Great Recession and an era of easy access to competitive content online, people are less willing to spend money on dreck.

When I look at the children’s books that are out there—much of it the equivalent of junk food, some of it actively harmful to their development—I understand why parents are getting fed up. How many Winnie-the-Pooh equivalent books are produced in a generation? How many Seuss-quality writers have there ever been? Jan Brett is certainly top-notch, and we really like Otis by Loren Long. I’m having a hard thinking of another new picture book that stands out.

As usual, the old media producers of content miss the change in those who purchase and use their content. Music companies blame piracy for declining sales of music rather than their ongoing attempts to make us buy the same classic music catalog over and over again in every new format and then push the likes of Kesha and her doppelgängers at us. Likewise, Hollywood which rarely stumbles upon unique gems like “Lost” and then decides that if we like one “Lost”, we’ll love a dozen poorly made lookalikes. And then if we want to watch the TV shows and movies on something other than the decades-old technology they allow, they accuse us of piracy. And then also blame declining profits on piracy and anything else other than their own shortsightedness.

And thus with the book publishers. I don’t doubt there are plenty of parents pushing their kids into chapter books as part of their ongoing obsession with measuring their own worth by their children’s material success in life, but I won’t overlook the nagging suspicion that much of the blame can be found by looking in their own mirrors.

Two Gmail accounts on an iPhone: incorrect password

I encountered this problem while helping my sister-in-law Theresa set up here new iPhone 4. She has two Gmail accounts and while she could set up the first account just fine, when she tried to set up the second account, she kept getting the message: “Password is incorrect.” But the password was not incorrect. After she spent quite a bit of time pulling her hair out over this, I gave it a try. I tried setting it up as an Exchange account and a few other things, but kept coming back to the same issue. Finally I searched in Google for two gmail accounts on iphone “incorrect password” and came up with this solution, which was intended for a slightly different problem but applied nonetheless:

What the problem is that [sic] the password you enter in IS correct – but what u don’t see and why it says it is wrong IS because you also have to see a captcha (but the problem is, you don’t see it). But if you click here: https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha And it will unlock all the captchas for ALL your google accounts.

If the muddled grammar threw you, what he’s saying is that when you try to login using two different Gmail accounts at the same time, Google wants to make sure you’re not some nefarious robot and wants to verify you are you. Thus, if you were in a web browser, you would be presented with a captcha (the distorted word-picture that’s intended to prove you’re a human being and not a computer). But since you’re in the iPhone’s settings control panel, no such captcha can appear and it throws an unhelpful error at you. So if you go to that web page, logging in using the problematic Gmail account username and password, and enter the captcha correctly, you will unlock the captcha and it will stop giving you an error on your iPhone.

Hope that helps with your problem, if you came here with the same one. Keep in mind this solution was working as of September 12, 2010. No guarantees that future iPhone system updates and/or Google system changes won’t change all this.