Parenting 101: How to Embarrass Your Teen

Okay now. I don't ever want to hear from my 15 year-old daughter that I embarrass her again! After viewing this video, visiting this guy's blog, and reading about what this father has done to his 16 year-old son, I now believe that I deserve a Cool Parent of the Year Award.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a tired, probably self-conscious, adolescent male boarding the bus for a day of high school. Then imagine that on the first day of school, your father sends you off to school by waving at you from the front porch. Embarrassing enough, no? Apparently, no. On the second day of school, your father decides to don a Chargers helmet and jersey while waving at the school bus. Okay, Dad, you're really embarrassing me. Day 3 brings out the Anakin Skywalker helmet, and Day 4, the swim trunks, flippers, and snorkel. By Day 5 and the sombrero and Mexican poncho, we've now entered serious humiliation territory, and Dad is not to be stopped.

You can visit "Wave At the Bus," this guy's blog and see all 170 days of his son's utter mortification. Show it to your kids--maybe they'll appreciate you a bit more!

Eating Dormice Isn't Nice!

A Tribute to the Edible Dormouse

by Alice Shirrell Kaswell (Source)

The edible dormouse (Myoxus glis) is the star of Giuseppe Carpaneto and Mauro Cristaldi’s 1994 study “Dormice and Man: A Review of Past and Present Relations.” The two Rome-based scholars—Carpaneto at Terza University, Cristaldi at the University of Rome—savor one of the tasty rodent’s two major historical roles. Though some scorned it an agricultural pest, many prized the critter for its succulence.

Carpaneto and Cristaldi suggest that dormouse cuisine and dormouse documentation owe much to the Romans, and almost nothing to earlier civilizations. “The ancient Greeks,” they write, “were not very interested in dormice because they did not eat them.... Oribatius (Fourth Century A.D.), a Byzantine author on medicine, wrote that their meat is untasty and purgative.”

Carpaneto and Cristaldi tell of how things changed once the Romans got cooking:

“A recipe was reported by the gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicus (First Century A.D.) in his work De Re Coquinaria: dormice were served with sophisticated sauces containing fish and spices (pepper, ‘laserpicium’ pine-seeds) often filled with pork meat and with dormouse entrails. Petronius (20?-66 A.D.) in his novel Satyricon described edible dormice served with honey and poppy-seeds during a luxurious dinner.”

The foodstuff became so well appreciated in Calabria, the southwesternmost part of the Italian mainland, that Calabrian dialects now have about 110 words for dormouse. There are also terms for related items, including dormouse-hunter (agglzjiraru), the jars for keeping dormice (ciglirera), and dormouse litter (carfata).

The earliest known drawing of a dormouse, done in 1607.

Modern dormouse hunting in Calabria is often done at night, by smoke-flushing the animals from their den, or by trapping or shooting. There can be a certain romance to this. The study remarks that “Nocturnal hunting consists of shooting at dormice walking on tree branches, silhouetted against the moon-light.”

In Corsican dormouse cooking, “the animals are eviscerated and burnt but not skinned in order to protect the fat layer between the skin and the muscles. Then they are roasted on a grate and the dripping fat gathered on slices of bread.”

Ukrainian chefs “used the fat of the Edible Dormouse in their cookery,” while the French and some of their neighbors “ate roasted dormice after having thrown them into boiling water.”

Carpaneto and Cristaldi say that Lord Rothschild introduced the edible dormouse into England in 1902. (Other sources specify that this occurred in Tring, Hertfordshire, a neighborhood where dormouse is now nearly impossible to find on a restaurant menu.) But some 37 years earlier, a curious book called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland documented the preparation of dormouse at a British tea party. Midway through the party, a young visitor named Alice reportedly “got up in great disgust, and walked off; the Dormouse fell asleep instantly, and neither of the others took the least notice of her going, though she looked back once or twice, half hoping that they would call after her: the last time she saw them, they were trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot.”

References

“Dormice and Man: A Review of Past and Present Relations,” Giuseppe M. Carpaneto and Mauro Cristaldi, Hystrix, vol. 6, nos. 1-2, 1994, pp. 303-30.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, 1865.

“Carolus Linnaeus and the Edible Dormouse,” C. Violani and B. Zava, Hystrix, vol. 6, nos. 1-2, 1994, pp. 109-115. The authors report that:

Carolus Linnaeus was totally unacquainted with the Edible Dormouse Myoxus glis (L.), a species not found in Sweden : while describing Mus Rattus in the 10th Edition of the “Systema Naturae” (1758), the Swedish naturalist confessed his ignorance concerning the “Glis” of the ancients

ALSO SEE THE DORMOUSE SOCIETY: http://www.glirarium.org/dormouse/

photo source

I'll Be Back!

Well, I'm off to the Garden State for a week. It's too far to swim back home, so think of me while I'm gone, my lovelies, and I'll eat a cannoli or 3 for you!

We Never Covered This In Driver's Ed!

And you thought it was dangerous to drive and text at the same time! From the files of inexplicable behavior, I bring you a recent case from the Fairfax County, VA Circuit Court that is set to go to trial next week: "Having sex at 85 miles per hour while drunk on a freeway is willful and wanton negligence."(wusa.com)

The defendant, court records show, crashed into a taxi on the Beltway near Telegraph Road in May of last year. He was convicted of drunken driving, but the cab driver filed suit asking for $75,000 in damages. Among the allegations of this lawsuit are the following: (from Washington Post)

Paragraph 10. “At the time of the collision, Defendant was going 85 miles per hour.”

Paragraph 12. “At the time of the collision, Defendant was having sex with a female.”

Paragraph13. “At the time of the collision, Defendant was driving admittedly drunk.”

Paragraph 14. “At the time of the accident, Defendant was partially or totally in the backseat of the car.”

For those readers who are not from around these parts, this accident occurred on "The Beltway," a major thoroughfare around the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. There is always major traffic on the Beltway. Traffic on this road moves like a herd of stampeding turtles. Thus, my first thought when reading these allegations was, "How the heck could anyone possibly drive 85 on the Beltway?!!" My second thought was, "What happened to Paragraph 11?" Wasn't there some important allegation in there? And lastly, "In the backseat of the car?!!" Now either this guy is sporting some major porn star quality junk or has the flexibility of Gumby, but I still don't see how this is possible.

The explanation, of course, is that the defendant insists that someone else was driving the car at the time, but that person claims that he wasn't driving either! The woman involved has been dismissed from the case.

So, to sum up: We have one woman, two guys, at least one of whom is drunk and having sex, all in a car traveling at 85 miles per hour on a freeway with no one driving. Sounds like a YouTube video to me!