Before there were birds, plants, or candies, there were snakes. The semi-addictive game debuted on Nokia’s mobile phones and become *the* mobile game, until colored screens and higher end hardware pushed it into obscurity. But what if you had fond memories of the game, a penchant for modding any hardware you can get your hands on, and lots of time … Continue reading
Mercedes has rolled out a new vehicle that will be going on sale in January 2015 and landing in the first customer hands in March 2015. The new car is called the CLA Shooting Brake. A shooting brake is a vehicle we call a station wagon in the US, but this isn’t that station wagon your aunt had back in … Continue reading
Mikme is a portable wireless microphone offering musicians and other audio hobbyists a way to capture studio-quality audio without setting up a recording station. The idea behind the device is that users should be able to start recording whenever the moment strikes without having to put the moment on hold to set up a quality microphone — or, alternatively, without … Continue reading
Long time, no Kim Dotcom. Well, perhaps the reason the German-Finnish Internet entrepreneur has gone so quiet is because he’s flat broke.
When we reviewed Amazon’s Fire Phone, we said that you’d better off waiting for the sequel. That’s good advice for you, but not ideal for the company, since it ate a $170 million loss and has $83 million worth of unsold devices piled high in warehous…
Before October 1st this year, you were probably a criminal. On that day, UK copyright law changed to include a private copying exception that, simply put, means you’re allowed to copy media for your own personal use (not distribution, obviously). Thi…
Keeping track of what is going on in your home is important, especially when you happen to be at work or are on a holiday, and would like to know that everything is running fine and dandy when you are not around. Having said that, a home video camera would definitely come in handy, and izon has a couple of such models at their disposal for your consideration – and regardless of which one you choose, they will be compatible with Android-powered phones and tablets.
Regardless of which particular model that you choose, both of them will not break the $100 price point, which means that izon’s cameras will be able to offer the best value option on the market. The izon view as well as the izon 2.0 happen to be Wi-Fi enabled video cameras which can be set up in a jiffy anywhere in your home or office. It will work in tandem with the companion Android app, allowing you to stream video as well as audio to your device, so that you will have the ability to be there even when you are physically unable to be present.
The izon view which will boast of night vision, and the izon 2, will retail for $99.95 and $79.95, respectively. Both of these cameras can be purchased online, and the manufacturer intends to enable both of them to punch above their weight category, so to speak, as they will be equipped with comparable technologies as the more-expensive, category competition.
The izon view can be used on any flat surface and can be mounted to a ceiling as well, where it can tilt and swivel easily on its unique magnetic base. Setting it up is a snap – there is no need for a computer, and it takes mere minutes to do so. As for the slightly cheaper izon 2.0, this model will feature a minimalistic design, where it supports push notifications on your mobile device, and will also be Wi-Fi connected.
Press Release
[ Izon announces new home video cameras copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
This is a strange year, even an awful one, to celebrate Thanksgiving. A grand jury’s refusal to indict Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson has crystallized ugly truths. Many Americans feel unsafe in their own neighborhoods, not despite law enforcement but because of it. In some places, the police seem, and act, like an occupying force. If the law does not represent you, but only governs you, you are a second-class citizen.
So what are the “blessings” that Americans should “gratefully acknowledge,” as Abraham Lincoln put it in the 1863 proclamation creating the first national Thanksgiving? That you are one of the lucky first-class citizens who feel safe wherever they go and expect polite help from the police and other authorities? Or, if you aren’t so lucky, that things aren’t worse? That you’re still walking around? Taking satisfaction in national blessings feels grotesque just now.
This November, I’m remembering a mostly forgotten American tradition that lies behind Thanksgiving’s cheery feasting and mutual congratulation. In 1776, the Continental Congress announced “a day of humiliation, fasting, and prayer,” a day of acknowledging “manifold sins and transgressions” and seeking “sincere repentance and amendment of life.” Such fasting days were fixtures of the founders’ civic culture. Prayer, repentance, and thanksgiving were woven together in the national holidays that George Washington and other early presidents announced.
Yes, remembering national wrongs and seeking “amendment of life” seems better now than just being grateful. But even that 1776 proclamation contains the seeds of today’s troubles. It warned that the British were trying reduce Americans to “ignominious bondage” with the help of “the savages of the wilderness, and our own domestics” – that is, slaves. The prayer and repentance of 1776 were ways of seeking God’s help in building a white man’s colony, an empire of liberty pitched on the back of unfree labor and land cleared with violence.
Ferguson arises from conditions – black poverty, mutual racial distrust, a tradition of policing by and for white people – that are the direct legacy of Jim Crow. Segregation, in turn, was the direct legacy of the slavery that many of the founders practiced and prayed for help in defending. The same words from 1776 contain a spirit of searching reflection and a steadfast willingness to protect what later generations would learn to call white privilege.
In 1808, preaching in Philadelphia, a former slave named Absalom Jones urged a national day of thanksgiving 55 years ahead of Abraham Lincoln. Jones’s date was not a harvest festival but January 1, the dead of winter. Why? January 1, 1808, was the day that Congress banned the import of slaves. (The Constitution protected the slave trade until 1808, a time-limited compromise that the founders made iron-clad by immunizing it from amendment.) On that day of remembrance, Jones said, “the history of the sufferings of our brethren” should survive down “to the remotest generations.” Absalom Jones’s Thanksgiving is more help this November than Abraham Lincoln’s or the founders’.
The root of thanks ties the word to think and thought: at its base it means “to hold in mind.” Gratitude is a kind of remembrance, an act of holding in mind, and so is meditating on an unjust past that remains terribly present.
Lincoln praised “fruitful fields and healthful skies” in creating Thanksgiving. He also warned just 18 months later, in his second inaugural address, that after centuries of slavery, “every drop of blood of drawn with the lash” might be repaid with the sword before the country knew peace.
In a better Thanksgiving, we would try to hold both these thoughts at once, the call to gratitude and the call to justice. No doubt this is hard for everyone, and for different reasons. For some, racial inequality and fear are raw realities every day, and anything inspiring in American history rings false and remote. For others, the call to reflect on injustice sounds feels like a personal accusation. But we are caught in this history together.
Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation called for thanks “with one heart and one voice by the whole American people.” He did not say that, for those words to be more than hypocrisy or obtuseness, Americans needed to build a country where one voice could be possible. But he knew that they did. And still do.
As we age, there’s a tendency to let go of some of the traditions that have always been part of our holidays. They often seem like a lot more work than we’re willing to do, and since many of us now spend our holidays at our children’s homes, allowing them to start their own traditions, why bother? Looking back at past holidays, we often wonder how we were able to do it all. Gifts, cooking, entertaining. Whew! Get tired just thinking of everything I used to do, hoping that the family and friends would enjoy the holidays.
What I found is, it had become easier to not decorate the house quite as much as I used to, not bake as many of the traditional holiday goodies, and it was certainly much easier to give checks to everyone, rather than shop for the perfect gifts for them. I used the excuse that since we were spending Christmas morning and Christmas dinner at our children’s homes, as well as Thanksgiving, it really wasn’t all that necessary now. I may have been lessening my work load, but I hadn’t realized the impact it was having on my children. That wake-up call came when my daughter asked me a few years ago if I would bring my coffee cake to their house on Christmas morning. I’d always baked one and we ate it Christmas morning while we unwrapped presents. Then she asked if I would bring a few things to Christmas dinner. She told me they were part of the spirit of Christmas for her and she’d really missed them.
She’s right, I thought. I’ve stopped doing a lot of the things I used to do because there wasn’t as much happening here at my house now that one of my children was a good plane ride away and the other was starting family traditions for her family. Maybe on some level I figured I could just slide with it and no one would notice. Not so! I decided it was time for me to make a new tradition. Christmas Eve dinner would always be at our house. It gave me a reason to decorate the house and cook the things that made our holidays special to all of us.
This morning my daughter asked me if I’d mind having Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year. She told me she’d enjoyed doing it, but it wasn’t the same as she remembered growing up and she missed it. She said maybe we could alternate years. Absolutely!
If you’re like me, you probably have certain traditional things you serve at Thanksgiving and a memory of them. I want my children to establish their own traditions so their children develop fond memories of special things. What I didn’t realize was that my children still have childhood memories of certain foods and traditions that were a part of the holidays for them.
As much as I love to cook and experiment with food, some things are sacred. I would be violating the sacred Thanksgiving meal if yams or sweet potatoes weren’t served. And if I ever forgot the dressing that, according to my husband, isn’t dressing unless it has sausage in it, there would probably be an uprising, at least on his part. May not be to your taste, but was certainly part of our traditional meal.
It’s also about the memories we have of past holidays. It might be as simple as what someone always said or did at the meal. It doesn’t seem like that particular holiday unless it happens. For example, when everyone was seated and ready to be served at the Thanksgiving dinner meal, my husband would always ask each person, “Would you like white or dark meat?” Funny thing is, I remember his father saying the same words. I’d bet everything my husband will say it this year, just as he always did in years past. I never told my daughter, but even though Thanksgiving dinner was at her house, I still cooked my own turkey. Black Friday without turkey sandwiches? Not to even be contemplated!
I’m really looking forward to the holidays and it’s nice to know that the children, grown as they are, still want to repeat some of their memories at their parent’s home.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!
Earlier on Huff/Post50:
A few years ago, a controversial book entitled Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother captured considerable media and public attention because it seemed to argue that overly-strict discipline borrowed from Chinese parenting philosophy was superior to the allegedly more casual Western parenting style.
The book was actually less controversial — and far less interesting — than media coverage made it seem, and the author, Harvard-educated Yale law professor Amy Chua, was actually less of a witch than she was made to appear.
What bothered me more than her apparent belief that depriving her daughters of play dates and threatening to give away their favorite toys if they didn’t master their piano lessons was sound parenting was that her parenting philosophy seemed to be a social experiment to her and her husband, fellow Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld.
(The “happy ending” to Chua’s story seemed to be that after all this strict discipline, her older daughter got into Harvard. Hmmm. That may have been about discipline or it may — just may — have been about having parents who taught at Yale and had degrees from Harvard and Princeton. Discipline, I suspect, had close to zero to do with her college admission.)
I was, and am, a Pussycat Father, the polar opposite of Chua’s Tiger Mother. This was not a philosophy I put into practice when I became a parent, it was simply a reflection of my conviction that from the moment we have children, it ceases to be about us and is about them — our kids.
Some of my easygoing style of how I raised my children had to do with them dealing with a lengthy and awful divorce and custody battle. But most of it had to do with the fact that I felt from the beginning — even before they were born — that having children is the most wonderful experience life can offer, and in my view, at least, that meant praising my kids at every turn, telling them I loved them as often as possible, being there for them no matter what else called away my attention.
My way may be good, may be not so good. But what I know with certainty is that my kids never had to doubt where I stood in relation to their importance in my life or how I felt about them.
Allison Pearson, the British author of I Don’t Know How She Does It, and other works, asked this about the Tiger Mother approach:
“Amy Chua’s philosophy of child-rearing may be harsh and not for the fainthearted, but ask yourself this: is it really more cruel than the laissez-faire indifference and babysitting-by-TV which too often passes for parenting these days?”
Um, Allison? Yes, it is more cruel. Parenting is not an experiment in putting a philosophy into practice and seeing how it works. It isn’t a Skinner Box where we try out our theories about behavior.
At one extreme, we have people defending Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson’s beating his four year old with a “switch” as acceptable behavior and may just be a cultural issue not all of us understand.
Are you freaking kidding me? Beating your young child — or any age child — is just a cultural issue? What, exactly, did Adrian Peterson think he was “teaching” his four year old by beating him?
Less extreme are countless examples of people becoming furious with their children in public (and one can only assume it’s worse in private) simply because mom or dad is stressed and after all, there’s only so much stress from our kids we can take before we boil over.
Again: are you freaking kidding me?
I’m sick of angry, mean parents. I’m sick of mom or dad (and believe me, it’s often mom) screaming at the three-year old at the store, making fun of a child, swatting a backside because after all, parenting is stressful. You know what? Don’t have kids if you are going to treat them that way.
You’re thinking, beating your child, or even yelling at your child, is a long way from being an overly strict Tiger Mother. Maybe. Maybe not. Those behaviors all stem from a somewhat similar belief — “I’m the parent and this young human being is my property to be experimented upon.” Yes, beating a child is worse than threatening to throw out your child’s favorite toy, but emotional cruelty is terribly damaging and in the long-term, maybe worse because it undermines the most important thing a child needs — knowing that those who are responsible for your well-being are unconditionally on your side and won’t humiliate you.
My kids may have benefitted from my parenting style. They may not have. That’s certainly not for me to say. I love them dearly, and through all the twists and turns, they love me (I’m pretty sure…)
They are productive, caring people, in healthy relationships. They haven’t followed traditional paths, which is fine with me (they both went to fine colleges and despite not being disciplined to the point of exhaustion like Tiger Mother’s kids, one was an Ivy Leaguer for whatever that may be worth).
I have no patience for parents who beat their kids or yell at their kids or threaten their kids. That teaches nothing. Parenting isn’t an experiment. We choose how we behave as parents. How our children are 20, 30, 40 years later depends very heavily on what we do in those first years.
I chose to be a Pussycat Father. And now a pussycat grandfather. I’m fine with that decision.
Earlier on Huff/Post50:
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