Annoyance: Children’s books with unavoidable innuendo

I’m reading stories to my children tonight and we decide to read some library books that we brought home recently. One book in particular featured a character named “Weiner”. Weiner is of course a loveable dog of the daschund breed who get’s involved in various anticts throught the book.

This is just plain annoying.

So for the rest of story time I’m trying not to snigger while I’m reading the book to my three year old daughter. They didn’t even have the good sense to include the glaring (and trust me, they were glaring) innuendos in places that are suppsed to be funny for the kid for other reasons so that I don’t get weird looks from the kid when I’m laughing for no reason that she can figure out.

I’m not suggesting that the book is doing this intentionally, but really…SOMEONE had to have thought about this when the book was going through the editing and publishing stages. I might be able to buy that someone who writes children’s books for a living would be naive enough to not think about the double meanings, but you can’t tell me that it didn’t cross the mind of at least a college-aged intern at the publishing company before this book went out the door.

Why is this so annoying? Because it puts me in that unconfortable place of trying to decide if they are doing this to me on purpose, or if I just have a dirty mind. So to them I say a loud “bad Weiner, no doughnut!”

I love lunch and other good tunes

I had a great time with my kids tonight. We were sitting around during that limbo time between dinner and bedtime and decided to get out my guitar and see if I could pique their interest.

Abby started requesting songs right away, and true to her norm they were not songs that actually exist (yet). So instead of trying to redirect her to a song that I know, I just went with it and made up a song for whatever she was thinking about.

It turned out to be a lot of fun and it wasn’t long before her sister and mother joined us and we were all singing and dancing to children’s improv music. We sang songs about aquariums, Sunflowers, and (my personal favorite) a upbeat little ditty called “I love lunch”. They all turned out to have a real Rafi meets They Might Be Giants feel that I liked quite a bit. I might get around to recording some of it if I’m not too lazy (don’t hold your breath).

Open HOSTS file with Notepad in Windows

Have you ever needed to edit your hosts file (and if you don’t know what a hosts file is, this post is not for you) on a Windows machine ? You have probably noticed that because it doesn’t have a file extention, Windows Explorer won’t let you accociate an application with it so you are forced to go through the list and choose notepad every time.

It’s something that I have to do painfully often, and after a while I got tired of having to dig into that deep directory structure to open the file so I made shortcut on my desktop. A few days ago I clicked my link and was prompted to choose the application yet again when it occurred to me that a simple edit to the shortcut would solve the pain for good.

Right click on the shortcut and choose “properties”. In the box that lists the target file, it will say something like “c:\windows\system32\drivers\ect\HOSTS”. All you have to do is pipe that path into Notepad by changing that box to read ‘notepad “c:\windows\system32\drivers\ect\HOSTS”‘. Simple eh? Now it opens quite happily in Notepad and I don’t have to mutter at the screen when it asks me if I want to “search the web” to find an appropriate application with which to open the file.

Enjoy!

Hello world!

I’m going to try my hand at blogging. We’ll see how this goes. And before you ask, no I don’t expect you to care. It isn’t always about YOU is it? Geez…