Stuff that isn't political

Babble on.

I once complained over a beer to Bob Tarantino that the hardest thing about blogging for me was thinking up clever titles to posts. He replied that he'd given up on that and was simply pulling quotes from his links instead. I'm beginning to think that's not a bad idea, given my complete blank on this post.

At least the title's descriptive, if not even close to clever. Ah well, you get what you pay for, etc.

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My darling Litlbit and I saw some Jay Strongwater pieces at Harrods in London, and coveted them greedily right away. If I had a tip jar, I'd be begging you to hit it now, since this stuff is way out of our budget. Way out. The truly crappy aspect of this is that it's carried in only three stores in three cities across Canada: Vancouver, Montreal, and...wait for it...Winnipeg. Yes, that Winnipeg. Not a single shop in T.O. where we can go to drool over the stuff. I mean, Winnipeg? WTF?

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About a month ago, one of my brothers asked if he could take my five-year-old Boo to a movie, which I thought was a great idea. All of us, including Boo, thought that Over The Hedge would be a perfect choice, and so after installing the car seat in my brother's car, off they went. As it turns out, they missed the showing, and my brother called me to see if he could take Boo to another flick - Superman Returns. I hadn't seen the movie at that point, but my brother had, and I told him I'd trust his judgement. He replied that he didn't think there was anything inappropriate in the film, but that he wasn't generally familiar with what might or might not be OK for a five-year-old. So instead of checking it out myself first, I told him I trusted his judgement, and they went to the Superman movie.

After seeing it myself a couple of weeks later, I realized it really wasn't appropriate for Boo - not my brother's fault at all, mind you, but mine. Part of the problem was that I had no idea where I would have turned to see if the movie was appropriate. Another of my brothers provided that answer: Kids In Mind.

The purpose of kids-in-mind.com is to provide parents and other adults with objective and complete information about a film's content so that they can decide, based on their own value system, whether they should watch a movie with or without their kids.

It's like a food labeling system which tells you what a food item contains. That's it. We make no judgments about what is good or bad or anything else. Indeed, we do not "condemn," "critique" or "criticize" movies. And we don't "praise" or "recommend" movies either. We advance no "beliefs" and we do not "preach" anything. We are not affiliated with any political party, any cultural or religious group, or any ideology. The only thing we advocate is responsible, engaged parenting.

If one reads our reviews one will often find many instances where our descriptions are so detailed they seem absurd. But we'd rather err on the side of comprehensiveness. It's up to parents to decide which details are useful to them and their family, and which ones they consider fatuous.

What an excellent idea, and only a dozen years old, or so. Smack me with a clue-bat. I need to stay with the tour.

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It's too bad she's decided that she needs to out-skank the rest of the field to compete, because Christina Aguilera can flat-out sing. I know, I know, not a particularly sophisticated music consumer, am I? Well, I like to think that musically I know a hawk from a handsaw most of the time - but sometimes a song is just plain catchy. Ain't No Other Man fits that category. It's got a nice beat, and my kids dance to it. Sometimes, that's good enough.

Try watching the live version as well. I'm partial to funky big bands.

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As always, your mileage may vary.

Babble off.