American Pediatricians hate hot dogs

Hot Dog warning is a bunch of bologna

Lincoln Logs are no longer logs, they're plastic. They were deemed unsafe and promptly mutated. When i was a kid we went through a very depressing red M&M famine while they sorted out the whole Red Dye #2 episode. (And yes, i'm still indignant that they tossed out a brown M to replace it with pink and blue M's.) Now, in the spirit of overprotecting and insulating our children, the American Academy of Pediatrics are saying that the shape of hot dogs is going to be the death of kids. They want the makers of hot dogs to redesign the shape and put warning labels on the packages until such changes are made.

Did they just run out of things to get riled at?

Really, think back to when you were little. Wasn't it just enormously cool to run around the house on a hot summer day with a cold and wobbly hot dog in your fat little fist? Any kid who belonged in the gene pool would take bites of it rather than cram the whole thing down their throat. If it was handed to us in little bite sized bits, it would have taken the fun right out of it.

When we grow up, we don't have a lot of play with our food options. I take enormous pleasure in lobster, not just because it's delicious, but also because it makes a huge mess, you get to play with the claws, and nobody looks at you funny while you do it. Ditto for artichokes. The fact that our options are so very limited makes a lot of adults cranky and they end up telling the children not to play with their food. It's just envy, pure and simple. If we can't play with our food, why should they have all the fun?

Today bologna makes my taste buds cringe and want to hide somewhere behind my pancreas. Ah, but when i was little, a cold bologna flap was a good fifteen minutes worth of entertainment. It felt funny when you put it on your face. You could take strategic little bites out of it and turn it into a meat mask. You could whap another kid with it and nobody got hurt. And, here's the best part, it wasn't just a hill of fun, it was also educational! Do you know how many kids would never have learned to spell bologna without the help of the Oscar Meyer jingle?

Hot dogs were the best short swords a kid could ever wield. Nobody ever got their eye put out when another kid rushed them with a hot dog while yelling, "Have at you! Die, foul traitor!"

And yet, now poor little hot dogs are considered vile weapons, hell bent on throttling our kids. It's a hell of a lot more likely that a kid who is wolfing down his food will choke on a hot dog chunk than a whole weenie. At least with a whole weenie, you have a handle to pull it back out. Kids will choke on anything if they're determined enough. They live in a trial and error sort of world in everything they do. That's why we keep an eye on them and hope they don't find a way to set themselves on fire if we leave the room for ten minutes.

So now i have to wonder what sort of shape they're considering safe for hot dogs? Maybe something round with no sharp edges? I'm thinking they already have something like that. It's called bologna!

Lily Robertson, who has no patience with people taking away simple kid pleasure just so they'll look like they saved us all, can be reached at canopicjargon@gmail.com or on Facebook.

Dragon Age: Origins slays me

I am a 47 year old woman and i have a weakness for video games that allow me to kill things.  I'm most partial to killing things that ought to be dead in the first place, such as zombies.  I could kill zombies for hours.  Throw in a puzzle/logic aspect, and i'm sucked into the thing for good.

Normally, i'm a bit of a hit and run sort of gamer girl.  I can play for a few hours, then walk away from the game for days without any qualms or having my fingers twitch every time i think about the X-Box controller.  Then i ran across Dragon Age: Origins.  There i was, minding my own business, little rabbit fu fu, stomping through the forest, hunting down the darkspawn and lopping off their heads...when the most extrordinary thing happened.  I took my little group into base camp to do a little character maintenence.  This is the part that's usually like playing with paper dolls. (Fess up, guys, it really is!)  You try this piece of armor on this guy, hand that two-handed axe to that guy, and it's all very routine.  You have a short conversation with everyone for party morale, dum de dum, then out you go to kill some more evil things that are threatening the realm.  But no, this day was different.

As my blood spattered little rogue elf headed for the tent, the hero initiated a conversation.  This happens on odd occasions when they want you to do something for them like find their grandfather's lost perpendicular ring of dislocation or something.  But no, this guy wanted to give me a rose.  I looked at my conversation options and none of them were, "What?!"  He proceeded to flirt with me in a charmingly awkward sort of way, and he actually blushed.  I sat there stunned, my jaw planted firmly in my lap, and the worst part was, way in the back of my aged heart i noticed a hint of a girlish giggle trying to escape.

Now i'm hooked. 

One really cool thing about games is that you can save just before you try something stupid.  I'd been noticing the conversation options i was given, saved the thing, and proceeded to ask the classic stupid girl question.  "Where is this relationship going?"  He freaked out, sent me a four point disapproval rate, and stopped calling me "Dear".  Hah!  I went back to my last save, didn't ask him the stupid girl question the next time, and sure enough, he still loved me.  If only it were that easy in the real world!

Oh, i know, i know, he'll probably dump me for some sparkly human floozy and tell me it's because he has to be king or something.  Men are the same.  They always find some excuse to wander off.  "Oh, I love you, darling, but there's this whole realm that needs me."  I sincerely hope at that point my character is given an eye-roll option. He might even play the species card.  "My love, you're an elf, and i'm a human, and our parents would never understand."  Either that, or we'll just get to this point where i say something that vexes him and he won't speak to me again until the local teenager i snarf games from buys the expansion pack. 

Ah, but i'm a slow and meticulous gamer.  I have time.  Until then, i'll suffer the slings and arrows of the other characters teasing my avatarial boyfriend because i know after a long day of fighting evil and stealing from the rich (and anyone else in my path), he'll smile and gently brush aside the bit of entrails stuck in my hair as i slide into his pixel arms.

And hey, when you're an elf, 47 years old is nothing!  For now, i am the great and mighty Grey Warden, Herepuppy, and fated to share my tent with Alistair, the starry-eyed former Templar. (Sigh.....)

Lily Robertson, whose character has way better tattoos, can be reached at canopicjargon@gmail.com or on Facebook.

Kevin Smith denied by Southwest Airlines

Does Kevin Smith have too much baggage?

Southwest Airlines has declared director, Kevin Smith, too wide for a wide body.   They claimed his weight was a safety concern.  That's preposterous.  If a terrorist popped up on the plane, they would have been thankful to have Smith fall on him.

A long time ago, there was a huge fooforah about stewardesses being fired for being overweight.  That policy got overturned, and yet, the paying customers can't fly unless they look like they can stop themselves from devouring the entire peanut cart on their own. What is Southwest saying here?  In order to fly you must weigh less than a flight attendant?

I took a peek at the Southwest Airlines website.  Perusing the FAQ's produced no evidence that they are concerned about passenger weight restrictions.  Clearly, they're not being frequently asked if someone is too fat to fly. It's such a preposterous concept that people don't feel a need to wonder if they can squeeze their personal padding into a plane seat.  After a bit more searching, and many clicks, under the company policy section and further clicking into a section called "Customers of Size", I found a notice that they consider anyone who can't squeeze themselves into the 17" space between the arm rests to be overly round and in need of an extra ticket and a special booking procedure.  Your baggage can be 62", but you can't be 18". 


Really?  Shouldn't that be more easily accessible information?   Anyone just cruising around their site wouldn't have a clue that this happy little policy was going to incur a fat boot planted in your delicate posterior after you'd bought your tickets, gone through security, boarded the plane, and finally settled into your seat.  There's no obvious heads up that your round trip ticket will only get you a round trip back to the passenger lounge.

Sure, Southwest apologized their fool heads off to Smith with blazing speed, but not until after he'd tweeted it across the planet.  A sincere apology would have occurred before he'd ratted them out. 

Airlines are complaining about gas prices, lower passenger counts, and the fact that they've been "forced" to raise their ticket prices.  People aren't flying as often because they can't afford it, they don't want to wait around all day for Homeland Security to scrutinize toes before deciding whether they can or can't board the plane, and the fear of being blown out the the sky by a radical is a genuine concern.  And yet, Southwest is merrily asking people to get off the plane if they can't thread the seat needle.  I guess they have money to burn and they're one of the few corporations that actually believes any press is good press.

Southwest will never get the Panda transport contract this way.

Lily Robertson, who weighs less than your average suitcase, can be reached at canopicjargon@gmail.com or on Facebook.

High School Laptops in Pennsylvania secretly view kids at home

Pennsylvania Educators are a little too curious, George

The Lower Merion school issues laptops to all the students.  This is a wonderful thing.  However, the Lower Merion school failed to explain that they had remote cameras installed and could view student behavior off campus.  This is a highly suspect thing.

Who among us has had a 100% success rate teaching our kids to turn anything off when they're not using it?  Me either.  So, here we have laptops sitting open in teenagers' bedrooms, offering someone at the school district the opportunity to view what's going on in that room at the push of a button.  Teenagers are changing clothes and doing all manner of private teenager things in the same room they've left their open laptops running.  What father would risk having a stranger view his teenage daughter buck ass nekkid?  It's not even a little surprising that the parents are bringing a class action law suit against the school district.  What is surprising is that the school feels it will prevail.

Yes, the reason for the cameras is a good one.  It allows the school a higher recovery rate for lost or stolen laptops.  When you're handing out expensive pieces of technology, it makes good sense to be able to track it, especially when you're handing it out to kids.  When i was a kid, i couldn't keep track of anything but a book or a script.  It took me a year to learn to remember where i parked the car.  If i'd had a laptop, it could have ended up anywhere.  The school, however, what with being chock a block full of people with high levels of education and are theoretically smart, should know better than to install a setup that will turn them into Peeping Toms.

If we can find a lost dog with a microchip, why can't they find a lost laptop the same way?  When i remember to take my cellphone with me, i can be found via some wonky GPS device and a bit of triangulation.  Nobody has to hope i open it up and they can guess from the posters on the walls behind my back where on earth this Carmen San Diego might be standing at any given moment.

The school district is going to lose this battle, not just because of the way they track their laptops, but because they broke the rule that every policeman has drilled into their skull..."Reasonable expectation of privacy."  An overheard cellphone conversation on Madison Avenue is fair game.  No reasonable person can have an expectation of privacy when they're standing in a crowd and yelling into an object.  On the other hand, pillow talk is right out. 

The school is banking on the idea that the ends justify the means.  Well, in order to make my truck safe, i desperately need a new brake line installed, but you can bet if i made the guys at Meineke fix it at gunpoint, no law official would agree that having a safe truck made it ok for me to scare the living daylights out of a mechanic.  Most of us could rise higher in our career choices if we knew what the bosses are saying about us at the supper table, but planting a bug in their dining room chandeliers isn't going to win us a get out of jail free card.

The school system has disabled the cameras until everything can be sorted out.  In a way, that's a bit of a shame.  I'd gladly urge the students to make an effort to type with one hand on the keyboard from now on, with first digit of their other hand shoved firmly up their left nostril.

The administrators and teachers of this school district have given us all a valuable lesson.  No matter how educated you are, there's not a book in the world that can teach you one iota of wisdom or common decency.

Lily Robertson, who would NEVER want to see what her son gets up to in his bedroom when the door is closed, can be reached at canopicjargon@gmail.com or on Facebook.

Lindsey Vonn vs Shaun White

Olympic Whiners

In football, you loose major yardage for unsportsmanlike conduct.  In the Olympics, you can get away with being a self centered snob with no team spirit whatsoever, no sense of pride in your nation, and no need to cheer for everyone else who made it all the way to Vancouver...if you're Lindsey Vonn.

Oh, sure, she's the darling of the slopes at the moment.  It's just heart rendering that she fights through the pain in her shin to continue to compete, isn't it?  And everyone knows how she suffers, because lest we forget, she's quick to remind us herself.  That's the sportscaster's job, honey.  Your job is to do your best and be gracious whether you win or lose.

I admit, i have little patience for the whole pampered princess mentality thing.  I also allow that there are times and places where it can be carried off...like at home with your husband when you want him to take out the trash or take you out to dinner.  Standing on the podium to accept a medal is not the time to sneer at your fellow human beings as though they have a lot of nerve being within ten feet of your royal person without your express invitation.  If i were Julia Mancuso, i'd have a hard time restraining myself from greasing Vonn's pole grips.

So, on one end of the scale, we have Princess Vonn, who shames our nation with her performance off the slopes.  However, thank heavens, we have Shaun White on the other end of the scale.  He cheers for everyone going through their moves.  He cheers for everyone on the podium.  He reaches out to take the hand of everyone who's competing.  He encourages everyone who isn't an aspiring Olympiad to go out and try the sport just for the sheer fun of it.  White stands on the podium and reaches out to give his fellow winners from all over the world a pat on the back.  We gladly forgive him for playing a little air guitar during the national anthem because well, he's a kid, he's really excited, he won a gold medal, and he's sharing the rush with all of us.

Snowboarders are a world unto themselves.  Isn't it funny that the best sportsmanship we've seen to date comes from a pack of kids who compete only after they've made sure they have the right song blasting on their IPod, their pants are comfortably jacked halfway down their posteriors, and then they sing all the way down the run?  They make mistakes, they blow a landing, but when they reach the bottom of the halfpipe, they're laughing and jumping up and down like someone just told them they won free candy for life and they can have enough to share with everyone else as well. 

Shaun White wants to go to the White House.  Obama would be a fool not to invite the kid over for a whole week and let Shaun and three of his best friends teach the First Daughters how to skateboard on the front steps.  Let's declare the building the "Shaun White House" for a few days.

As for Vonn, the President's Rose Garden already has enough thorns, doesn't it?

Lily Robertson, who loves that the Olympics has an actual event where you ski really fast then shoot something, can also be reached for comment at canopicjargon@gmail.com or on Facebook.