A moving sight!

I debated for a few days if I should add this to my blog. The video below was taken by someone in the funeral procession for Spc. Don Nichols. The support from the community was an awesome sight. It is an emotional experience to watch the video even though it is very poor quality.  I did not personally know this young solider and most of the people lining the streets did not either, but their pride in the people who serve our country and the support that was offered to this family was amazing. I can not even imagine what they were feeling as they rode through these communities and saw all the people lining the streets with flags. This is a visual image that will not soon be forgotten but hopefully not soon repeated.

PSA from my childhood Aha moment

Watching the PSA's in class last night made me think of the ones I saw when I was a kid. This is the one I remember most. They were very corny but the tunes stuck in your head.



This one is a little disturbing. The pot of boiling water should scare any kid out of the kitchen.

There are several from the 70's about the constitution. They talk about different aspects of the document but all end with the tag line, "The Constitution is for everyone, even kids."

There were a lotof PSA's in the seventies that were geared toward kids. There was even the hour long After School Specials that were basically PSA's that told a story. Usually about topics like stranger danger, bullying, peer pressure, drugs and teenage drinking. They must have been somewhat effective since I remember most of them and I watched them over 30 years ago. OK now I feel old.
The youth oriented PSA's of my time were not as in your face as the ones that we watched last night, like the ones for crack and texting while driving. Maybe that is what is needed now to make people listen but I think I like the ones above better. I know I drove home last night singing, "grab yourself a hunk-a, a slab or slice or chunk-a, grab yourself a hunk of cheese!!"

you want to watch something silly you have to watch Shaun the Sheep. He is awesome
I love cartoons and this one is one of my current favorites. It is completely clean and child safe, I first saw it on the Disney channel and my four year old loves it, even if she doesn't get all the humor.


I also love old Bugs Bunny cartoons, they are so politically incorrect that they are funny.  This one is one of my all time favorites.
I looked forward to watching cartoons on Saturday mornings when I was a kid. Now they say all the ones I watched are too violent. But when I watch cartoons with my daughter now they are awful. They are not funny, they aren't fun in any way and they have way too adult themes to them. Why do they insist on making cartoons that are for teenagers instead of for little kids.

This one is very teenaged themed and is is on during the time that is slotted for little kids. The creators of kids shows need to do a better job of making kid approriate programming. That is why I really try to keep Amelia on PBS. This one is surprisingly from Disney.Catoons are a great stress reliever, that is what got me watching them today and I thought I would share them with all of you.

Aha for 4-11-11

Facination with Disaster

It seems that there has been nothing on television and on the internet news sources lately but stories about disasters. When the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan there was nothing but pictures and stories everywhere. I will admit I spent time watching the videos and looking at the pictures. They were amazing, the amount of devestation.

I have a friend that lives in Japan so I was trying to look at maps and photos to see if the area she lives in was affected. She lives around Kobe so she was safe from the worst of the damage.
Why are we so facinated by the misfortune of others. Millions of photos can be found on the internet showing natural and some un-natural disasters.

Floods from history as well as more recent and local events.

Forest fires, I personally witnessed one of the biggest in the history of Yellowstone in 1988. I lived in Cody that summer and there were some times when it looked like dusk at 10:00 in the morning. I would have a layer of ash on my car when I would leave work at night. Driving throught the Sunlight Basin and having fire on both sides of the road was an experience I don't really need to repeat.

Tornados in Iowa City and Parkersburg were both disasters that hit very close to home and affected people I knew in both locations.

All these events capture our attention and can be seen everywhere right after they happen. The internet provides us the opportunity to see many home videos and photos that are not included on the news, some of which you wish you hadn't viewed. I think back to when I was a kid, yes that was a very long time ago, and we would see articles in the newspapers and there might be a brief story on the nightly news but we didn't have access to the vast amount of information that is out there now. We as a world are so much more connected almost instantly. It might have taken days for news of the Japan earthquake to reach our local news but today it is with in minutes and we are hearing about it or seeing it on the news. It is amazing to me still how the sharing of information has changed over a very short amount of time.
My thoughts are a little deep today and maybe that is because I wonder how long will the earthquakes in Japan be called aftershocks and you have to wonder how they will recover from all that was lost.
The world's facination with disaster will not go away but it is certainly fed a much larger diet in this age of instant communication.

Aha 4-6-11

Class was a lot of fun on Monday night. I enjoyed all the Save The World presentations. It was incredible all the directions that the groups went with the idea. There was everything from the crazy plot to take over the world, magic seeds that grow magic trees that will produce food, shoes, clothing and many other needs, carbon foot print counters, the star wars related presentation which I can't rememeber and of course the most creative and only actual use of the stickers, the SunSpots super solar cells. Ok so I am a little biased in my opinion. I was amazed at the ideas that came from one little page of stickers, even when I posted on facebook and asked for suggestions I got such a vast array of ideas all of which were awesome. I would love to have the opportunity to use a project like this in a junior high technology class, they would have so much fun with this and it would be such a new concept to have so few guidelines. Middle school aged kids have such great creative minds that the chance to let them run free would be very interesting.