Links for 2010-12-22

  • "I walked through my front door with purpose and gathered my family members in the living room to tell them about my vision. I was going to rewrite the birth of Jesus Christ and I was going to make it POP.

    My mom, always wanting to nurture my creative side, agreed on behalf of everyone that we should go forward with the production. I would be playing the part of Mary and my dad would be Joseph. My aunt and my grandma would play the wise men. My mom would be filming. The dogs were slated to play the animals in the manger, but they kept trying to chew the eyes off of the doll I'd chosen to play Jesus, so their parts were cut and they were relegated to the bedroom for the duration of the production."

  • ""We discovered that bumblebees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from," the students wrote in the paper's abstract. "We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before."

    The paper itself is well worth reading. It's written entirely in the kids' voices, complete with sound effects (part of the Methods section is subtitled, "'the puzzle'...duh duh duuuhhh") and figures drawn by hand in colored pencil."

  • "And then he says, look, we'll take anything. And so I say, as a joke, all right, you can go and sleep with animals if you like. And he says fine and slaps some money on the counter.

    He called your bluff.

    Yeah. And I say, I was kidding about that. And he says, and my wife's water just broke in your lobby. What could I do? I pointed him in the direction of the animals.

    It's better than having the baby in the street.

    I suppose so, but you know, if the reason they were in Bethlehem was because of the census, then he had family in the area, right? It's his ancestral home and all that. He can't say to a cousin, hey, give us a couch? There are some family dynamics going on there that have been conveniently left unexamined, if you ask me."

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