Alice Steps Out

Alice is 14 months old and walking around. She also loves to dance (you can tell she inherited our family's famously perfect rhythm).



She has her share of spills, but Alice has approached the whole walking endeavor with more caution than Elliot, who would launch himself into space with no sense of self-preservation.

I'm not sure if this is a boy/girl thing or just their personalities, but Elliot's face was constantly bruised at this age. And he was always subjected to the back-of-the-leg test at the doctor's.

I'm glad Alice has emerged as a biped with a little less violence.

Baby Does Some Human-Beatboxing...Sort Of

Following the video of the dad freestyle rapping in the delivery room, here's a baby human-beatboxing.



Well, actually it's just him making random sounds and then the dad heavily editing the results.

Still, cute kid.

Thank God for Preservatives

Making necklaces out of O-shaped cereal is a popular pastime at Elliot's preschool.

I'm grateful for the use of BHT in Froot Loops; otherwise, this priceless piece of jewelry wouldn't be long for this world. Take that, natural-food nazis!

Even so, the risk of this necklace winding up in Alice's mouth is at best 50-50.

The Glamorous World of Urinals

I discussed the use of urinal flies last Monday. Well, here's another solution to the problem of poor aim.

At Bix in San Francisco, they've installed a marble slab to guide the flow. Classy!

It's disturbing that this is my second post about urinals in the past week. Maybe they're on my mind more often now because of our 3-year-old's fascination with them.

When he first became potty-trained, I tried to get him excited about using public restrooms by talking about how great urinals were. It worked a little too well. Now when Kelly has to take him into the women's restroom, he throws a tantrum because he can't use a urinal.

Once again, the trick with kids is thinking through the implications ahead of time.

The Bumper Badger

I noticed a lot of cars in New York with "Bumper Badgers," a product that goes over your bumper to protect it from dents and dings.

I don't think I've EVER seen one of these on a car in San Francisco or Berkeley, even though we have plenty of tight parking spaces. (And San Franciscans have to park on streets with gradients of 30 degrees or more — a challenge New Yorkers don't face.)

So why hasn't this product taken off in the Bay Area?

I'd like to think it's because we're less materialistic about our vehicles.

UPDATE: It turns out the inventor of the Bumper Badger is from Brooklyn. So maybe the product is just taking awhile to make it to the West Coast.

The World's Most Dangerous Place to Bring Children?

We went into the Toys "R" Us in Times Square, and once again I was grateful not to be traveling with children. The place is gigantic and seems designed to turn kids into complete lunatics (not that they need much prodding).

There's a car-themed Ferris wheel inside the building...

...along with a giant, animatronic T-rex...

...and Superman saving shoppers from a runaway truck.

The toy selection was impressive, though I don't remember seeing much in the way of marshmallow ballistics.

I do wonder why anyone would purchase this Wolverine claw for their child. Put this on a kid, and he or she is virtually guaranteed to obliterate any breakable items in your home. The toy is also inadvisable if your pets currently have functioning eyes.

And remember, parents: It is your sworn duty to keep the next generation from EVER learning about Jar Jar Binks.

Please take this responsibility seriously.

Scenes From New York

During our New York trip, we tooled around the Upper East Side, Midtown and Queens. Here are some random snapshots.

Well, which is it?

Museum makes plastic-surgery joke.

A wall of conspiracy theories in Hell's Kitchen.

Another Episode of Hollywood Seeing Double

I've written extensively about Hollywood's propensity for releasing two movies on the same topic in the same year.

It's uncanny, and not something that appears to be letting up. Last year, it was two movies about friends with benefits.

Now it's two movies reimagining Snow White. What are the chances?

You have a seemingly bright, goofy retelling of the tale ("Mirror, Mirror") and another, much darker version ("Snow White and the Huntsman"). All the while, there's a show on ABC called "Once Upon a Time" that attempts its own twist on the story — not very well, in my opinion.

In any event, I guess it's a good time to be a fan of Snow White.

UPDATE: It doesn't help that the "Mirror Mirror" tagline ("the Snow White legend comes alive") does nothing to tell you what's unique about the movie. It's probably the least elucidating tagline since THIS.

A 'Rotten' Run at the Box Office

What does it say about America's movie tastes when EVERY ONE of the 10 highest-grossing films has a "rotten" rating on RottenTomatoes.com?

I'd like to say this is a first, but it's probably fairly routine.

Why Is There a Fly in My Urinal?

We took a quick trip to New York this past weekend — without kids, which turned the journey into the most luxurious experience imaginable. (Even when a baby on the flight shrieked at bird-like sonic frequencies, I just smiled and thought, "Poor little tyke. Glad he's not mine.")

But when we landed, I was a little perturbed to find a fly in the urinal at the airport bathroom. What's the message here? "Welcome to New York. We hope you don't have unrealistic hygiene expectations."

I'm glad no one reported me to TSA for taking a picture of a urinal.

It turns out that all the urinals have the same fly, and it's not real. The flies were installed to help reduce urinal messes, because they give people something to aim at.

And the practice isn't new — it dates back to Victorian times, when the bee was the favorite pee target.

NPR did a story on urinal flies back in 2009:

"There is a deep-seated instinct to aim at targets," says [May Berenbaum, head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois], and having a fly to aim at reduces what she politely calls "human spillage." 

When flies were introduced at Schiphol Airport [in Amsterdam], spillage rates dropped 80 percent, says manager Aad Keiboom. A change like that, of course, translates into major savings in maintenance costs. 

Thaler has tried to imagine how the airport made its calculations. "I'm guessing somebody went to the urinals without flies and repeatedly soaked up the ordinary spillage with a paper towel," which he then figures was carefully weighed on a scale. Then the same experiment was done at fly-emblazoned urinals, and presumably the scales reported a dramatically measurable difference in soakage.

Flies work better than, say, a bull's-eye design because men like to aim at a potential moving target.

Still, encouraging people to pee on vermin would seem to create a perverse incentive — especially in New York.

Later on, I saw a rat scurrying down the track while waiting for the E train. Fortunately, everyone resisted the temptation to take aim.

BuboBlog Joins Pinterest

I don't fully understand Pinterest or what I'm supposed to do on it, but I figured I'd give it a try.

Come check out my page — chock full of recycled BuboBlog content.