Coming to a Science Museum near You…Harry Potter the Exhibition
Posted by: tpsky on: September 26, 2009
From one of the brochures my daughter collected at the Boston Museum of Science:
Harry PotterTM: The exhibition offers fans the opportunity to experience the amazing craftsmanship of more than 200 authentic costumes and props from the Harry Potter films. These artifacts are displayed in settings inspired by the film sets — including the Great Hall, Hagrid’s Hut, and the GryffindorTM common room.
If the Harry Potter fans out there don’t mind me voicing one teeny tiny detail on the museum’s…umm…shall we say “artistic” direction — last time I checked, Harry Potter has nothing to do with science.
Oh sure, we aren’t talking about witchcrafts here. It’s the costumes and props that are in the exhibit! The special effects must use a lot of physics and chemistry, right? Right. But they aren’t showing the howtos of the special effects (not mentioned in the brochure anyway). I’m sure a lot of HP fans want to see the phoenix feather on Harry’s wand, the stitches on Dumbledore’s robe, the fat lady painting that served as the door to the Gryffindor common room, and the Nimbus 2000 broom. But they’re not science.
As for the pricing, well, of course it has to be appropriate for the magnitude of the event. Adult, 26 dollars; Senior, 24 dollars; Child (3-11), 23 dollars. Members: Call for special pricing! To get to see Harry’s scar, priceless! For everything else, just try as you can to tap some of that Harry Potter dough to raise money for the museum.
I guess there are a lot of mothers who stay home…
Posted by: tpsky on: August 26, 2009
It seems only not so very long ago that I was making heart wrenching choices of choosing daycares, and suddenly I realize it’s time to start thinking about kindergarten for next fall. I find myself browsing our city’s public school website and gasping – the school only goes until when???!!!! Don’t other parents need to work too? What do they mean the the morning class switches with the afternoon class in the January? After-school program? Huh? She’s only going to be in kindergarten.
Thinking back, I really was blessed. I started going to kindergarten at three. In Taiwan, the kindergarten had the “small” class, the “middle” class, and the “big” class. The names of the classes had nothing to do with the size of the classes, but the age of the children (as I sadly found out one morning after my mother had told me that I was old enough to go to the “big” class). So, instead of going to preschools for 2 years, and then kindergarten for 1 year, as in the US, the preschool and the kindergarten were combined into “kindergarten”. Every morning the bus would pick me up from the gate of the elementary school where both my parents taught, and then in the afternoon the bus would drop me off at the same spot. After drop off, I would simply go inside to my mother’s or my father’s class, and went home with them.
My two younger sisters didn’t go to kindergarten at all. That’s where my grandmas came in. Each of my amahs took care of one of my sisters, and neither of my sisters went to any kind of school until first grade. I never thought about this before, but now I wonder what other parents did. Certainly not everyone was as lucky as my parents to have a job where the kids can go hang out at their work. Although, I think there were an abundance of amahs who were more than willing, eager even, to take care of their grandkids. I think this child care model is akin to the idea that “it takes a village to raise a child”. As a year 2009 mom living in a first world country, I really don’t see a “village”. I see a society that has more wealth than ever, and yet even a basic need such as child care is a challenge to be “worked out”.
When I Bring Out the Scare Tactics…
Posted by: tpsky on: April 20, 2009
“Let me wipe off that purple stain on your lips.”
“No, I want to see it in the mirror first.”
“You know, Sweetie, you could learn to be more cooperative when Mommy or Daddy tries to help you, rather than always being so opinionated.”
“I want to see it in the mirror first.”
“…that means sometimes you could just do what Mommy or Daddy says when Mommy or Daddy tries to help you.”
“What if I am in a hole in the ground?”
“Excellent example. Say if you’re in a hole in the ground and Mommy drops down a rope and asks you to hold on to the rope, so Mommy can pull you out, and you say, ‘No, I don’t like holding on to a rope!’ That wouldn’t be very helpful, would it?”
“Maybe you should find a ladder instead.”
“Umm…no, a ladder wouldn’t work because it would take too long to find one, and if a big bear comes and tries to eat you up that wouldn’t be very good.”
The Foreign World in Hollywood Pictures
Posted by: tpsky on: April 3, 2009
- In: Culture| Movies
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Some time ago we watched “The Painted Veil”. It was a good movie. Edward Norton is a very admirable actor. But it really bugs me when people don’t do research when they portray foreign cultures. For example, in one scene, the doctor E. N. portrayed went to the river bank to look at the water source, and then was frustrated when he saw a hand sticking out of the dirt, implying people were ruining their water source by burying their dead right next to the river. Hello, people, have you ever heard of Fong Shui? Chinese people care a lot about the after lives of their dead, because the Fong Shui of your ancestors’ burial places directly affect yours and your offsprings’ prosperity. (Not that I believe it, but back then everybody believes it. Even nowadays people may not really believe it, it’s still a tradition, and it’s part of a sentiment that making sure their dead can be in a well-prepared place is the least and the only thing you can do for them now. BTW, FongShui in many ways is just good common sense. For example, you wouldn’t like living in a damp place would you? A place that’s prone to flooding wouldn’t have good FongShui.) And burying right next to the river where it’s damp and the dead bodies can be easily wash off into the river, least of all without a coffin, is unthinkable. Even very poor people give their dead a coffin, even if it has to be one made with cheap thin wooden boards.
Oh, and the scene where their housekeeper bring out a bowl of salad greens… Chinese don’t eat salad. Not traditionally anyway. Definitely not in that time period.
At this time and age, Hollywood is still presenting foreign cultures in stereotypes.
Being 16 Tired
Posted by: tpsky on: April 1, 2009
It was half-past bed time and the soon-to-be 4-year-old is still bargaining with us…
“It’s time for bath…now.”
“But Mommy I’m 16 tired.”
“16 tired? On a scale of 1 to 16, you’re 16 tired?”
“Yes, and I can’t walk. I want you to carry me.”
“Sweetie, you’re too big for Mommy to carry you upstairs.”
“But Mommy I’m 16 tired…I’m so so so tired.”
Yeah, just wait until you’re 40-with-a-preschooler-and-the-kid’s-birthday party-is-this-Saturday-and-I-haven’t-done-a-thing tired.
Where Can I Find a Roadrunner?
Posted by: tpsky on: May 30, 2007
- In: Life| coyotes
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One morning my husband came downstairs saying, “Honey, I saw two wolves in our backyard from our bedroom window.” Wolves? We don’t live near the zoo.
“You sure they’re wolves? I’ve never heard of wolves in this area. Coyotes, maybe?”
“They looked like wolves. On the other side of the fence. Umm, what do coyotes look like?”
So, we checked out the pictures on Google.
“That’s it. They looked like that animal pictured here.”
Since then I’ve been perusing the Internet for more information on dealing with Coyotes. Apparently they’re deemed to be an important part of the Eco system and we are not allowed to do anything to them on our properties, because if you remove a predator out of the food chain, then the population of the animals further down the food chain would explode, without the natural check and balance. So where are the coyote’s natural predators? And I don’t want lions in our backyard.
“Hmm…here it says coyotes only attack people when they get too used to humans.”
“Coyotes are used to humans in this state.”
“Oh.”
The articles also say that you should not turn you back to run when you see the coyotes, but have to move slowly and scare them away. That’s not good news…I’ve been afraid of large and/or hyper/energetic/agressive dogs growing up (I’ll spare you the recounting of the memories). I should call the garden service…the weeds in my garden are waist-high. I know I know weeds don’t grow waist-high if I had only lapsed for two weeks…last year we had the wasps.
No. It Does Not Have Anything to Do with Magneto…
Posted by: tpsky on: May 29, 2007
[Taking a sip of tea...sitting up pretty and straight] So, supposedly the earth’s magnetic field is going to reverse itself. And before it does that, the magnetic field would disappear all together for a little while.
Oh, said you, where did you get such authoritative news?
From the Economist and New York Times, of course. Astronomy Today gives a little too much information you see.
So, anyway I gathered from the said authoritative science articles that this will likely not occur in our lifetime, unless you were a fossil, in which case you wouldn’t have to worry about it unless you were a fossil bearing ferrous elements. Then again, we don’t know how much said will actually come to pass as described. Real scientists don’t commit to their hypotheses. They don’t kneel down with one knee holding a diamond ring. No, they just flirt and fancily wave their hands in front of the blackboard with equations, saying “if this happens, then it’s probably… and the best guess is…”, and make you wait by the phone and never call.
Check out the New York Times article here.
Check out the Economist.com article here.
Must Be My Magnetic Personality
Posted by: tpsky on: May 8, 2007
- In: Cars| Life
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Of the 21 years I’ve been the proud owner of a driver’s license, I’ve had 5 car accidents to date. Three out of the 5 occurred within last 35 days.
The first one happened when the lovely Massachusetts had the last snow storm of the season. Yes, it had to be the last one. And also the car hit an utility pole right in front of my house. I was this close to making it home. The day before my daughter’s 2nd birthday.
Then the next one, my car became demon possessed and kept getting sucked into this BIG tractor/trailer truck. You know people say your life flash before your eyes…? Those people obviously don’t know what they are talking about! How does your brain have the spare energy and leisure to retrieve and watch any flash movies when your brain and every nerve is busy going: NO! NO! NO! DON’T GO THAT WAY! GO RIGHT ! GO RIGHT! NO! NO! GO LEFT! STRAIGHT! STRAIGHT! DON’T HIT THE TRUCK! I DON’T WANT TO HIT THE TRUCK!???!!! So, anyway I hit the truck.
Afterwards, I just sat there motionlessly.
I.
Hit.
A.
Truck.
Then I checked to see that I was still breathing. No blood dripping anywhere. I could still count to ten on my fingers. I wiggled my toes. The interior of my car was the same as before. I looked out the window and couldn’t see any damage from where I was sitting.
I.
AM.
ALIVE.
And I promise you I have been very very conservative and paying attention when I’m driving since then.
And then this morning when I was inching along in a stop-and-go traffic, another car rear-ended the rental car I was driving. My own car hasn’t even come back from the shop yet.
I’m seriously thinking about a telecommuting job.
In the meantime, if you ever see on the road an Asian woman sitting bolt upright in the driver’s seat, with her white-knuckled hands gripping the steering wheel, please – stay away from that car! Stay as far as you can from that lane. In fact, it would be advisable if you just go ahead and take a detour and go through another state instead. Because you never know if a meteorite shower is going to hit that vicinity any time soon.
Thoughts on Eating Veggies
Posted by: tpsky on: April 13, 2007
A month back I read a blog talking about bento lunches. After that I got a bento-healthy-lunch kick, and while I was searching for other sites talking about bento lunches and where they get their bento boxes, I stumbled upon a couple of vegan sites. I’d been wanting to add more vegetables to our diet, and the creative dishes I’ve seen on these sites are inspirational. And so, to my meat-and-potatoes hubby’s chagrin, I’ve been trying out the recipes since. Actually, I haven’t even followed the vegan recipes all the way – I use eggs and milk, and sometime I add a little meat just to convince my other half that I won’t be replacing his wool trousers with hemp any time soon.
In fact, I tried vegetarian during my preteen years. At that time, I didn’t want the grown-ups to know my intention, and pretended that I was just being a picky-eater (I figured being a picky-eater would cause less stress all around and less “correctional” measures from my parents.) It wasn’t because I didn’t like eating meat (my mother and my grandmothers are great cooks), but because of the religious books I read in my maternal grandfather’s study. You see, in Taiwan, people grow up with a lot of Taoism and Buddhism ideology infused into them. When asked about their religion, most people would say either Buddhism or Taoism, just because that’s what their parents would say, even if they’ve never touched any holy books of either religion or even know the difference between the two. But everyone can recite some of the Buddhist/Taoist ideas they’ve heard growing up. My maternal grandfather had a lot of religious books, some of them are periodicals, which I suspect were sent to him simply because he was a somewhat visible person in the city’s government. And I used to read whatever printed materials I could lay my hands on. So I read those. This is the type of content you would read in these reading materials: when people die, people will reincarnate to different places/levels, based on their merits and sins while they were alive. And so, if you are a very good person, you just might make it to heaven. If you’re not that good, but okay, you can reincarnate to be a human again. But if you’re a cheater, thief, loan shark, then you may reincarnate to be a pig, a dog, a cat, or a stink bug, etc. So, then the articles drill this idea into you: the pork chop you had last night could be from the pig who used to be your mother-in-law in the last life. In one of these periodicals, there was this special section, where you could have a “tour” of the underworld. The way it went was that the underworld gods had given a special permission for a medium in this temple (which produced the periodical) to tour the underworld in spirit with an underground “official”, and in each “Underworld Travel Note” session he would be describing the scenes he “saw” and transcribing the interviews with various departed souls while he was “there”. (Sounds like a 60 Minutes Barbara Walters exclusive interview, doesn’t it?) Imagine my fear of heaping any more transgressions on my already sinful soul by eating meat at that tender age… Although I never figured out why my maternal grandfather never had an issue with eating meat. My paternal grandfather, on the other hand, never failed to tell us that pigs were raised to be put on the dinner table.
Several of my relatives have embraced vegetarian diet in one form or another: not eating beef, vegetarian breakfast only, as well as a full-fledged ovolacto-vegetarian diet. It would pique their interest to hear about vegetarian/vegan practices in the west. Last summer when my sister visited Taiwan, my paternal grandmother told my sister this story: one afternoon she had a vision, in which her eldest daughter and husband had appeared to her (both of them had died for some time), one on each side. (My grandmother is over 90 years old. She probably dozed off.) She said to the vision of her husband, “I’m not going with you. I’m going with our daughter.” She explained to my sister, “Your aunt was a vegetarian. So she probably went to heaven. As for your grandfather, well, you can’t be so sure…” It’s an issue pertaining to eternal life for her.
The Power of a Two-Year-Old’s Vocabulary
Posted by: tpsky on: March 23, 2007
“I need hat! I need gloves! I need jacket!”
“Just a minute sweetheart. Wait untill Mommy’s here to pick you up.”
“I need shoes!”
“Come here and let me change your diaper.”
“I need door!”
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