PEARLS & AMBER

PLAY TIME

"There is a serious need for play" according to Scientific American Mind.

I love Scientific American Mind.  This magazine is for those of us who know it is necessary to know scientific things, but realize our ability to understand scientific jargon to be limited.

I am playing, therefore, when I read this magazine.  I sit outside, should it be warm enough, sipping ice tea with lime, and look at the pictures avidly.

This article shows a grown man (albeit one, I suspect, younger than my own son, thereby making it difficult for me to see him as the grown man the editors of this magazine wish me to), wearing a suit and tie, on his knees, playing with building blocks.

He is having such a fun time.  He's probably on lunch break, and he is so happy and childlike and caught up in what he's doing that he obviously won't worry about messing the crease in his trousers.

The editors have a list of suggestions as to how to play, should you be one of those adults who doesn't know how to play-- 

I wonder if they worried one may not know how to play as an adult, or they really believe there are grownups out there who honestly couldn't figure out how to play even if a gun was to their head.

I won't argue the point.

I just know when I read the list of suggestions, I felt totally superior, because this list didn't mention swing sets or building blocks, or my other favorite (a habit that took me through the first three years of my children's lives), coloring books and crayons.

It mentioned Body play, Object play and Social play.

Obviously they meant sex, shopping and partying.

But that's not play.  That is appropriate adult behavior, which not the point of this article at all.

 

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AUTODIDACT

An autodidact is one who is SELF-TAUGHT.

Always having hated school, I am instantly attracted to this word.  I'm attracted to the sound of this word, and needless to say, its meaning.

It doesn't sound like what it means.  It sounds dictatorial.  It sounds didactic.  I'm sure 'didactic' is related, although I think of being didactic as being bossy and rigid, rather than quietly learning things for oneself.

But so when I feel I'm letting myself off the hook by learning things on my own, rather than subjecting myself to a didactic teacher, I now can describe the course I wish to follow, the path I wish to go down, the trip to the bookstore and library and Internet I wish to take as being due to the fact that I am being autodidactic.

I've been called a lot of things in my life, but never this. 

I may wish to send out a tidy announcement to friends and foes, informing them that they may add to their list of things they can call me, should the need arise.  AUTODIDACTIC.

Feel free to do the same.

FARASI, SWISS BABY HIPPO

I am so relieved.  Life is good.

This baby hippo, named Farasi, who is a Swiss baby hippo, was looking like he was going to go the way of many European zoo-born animals--

He was going to be killed off because of over crowding at the zoo.  And specifically because after age one to four, he'd be rejected by his father....

And there were no other zoos rushing forward to adopt the wee (?) one. 

Thus, the death sentence.  And to add
fuel to the flames, his carcass would be fed to other animals, so as not to go to waste.

Before one can say, well what do you expect from those practical Swiss, let me hasten to explain this is acceptable practice for European zoos, in general.  European zoos believe in letting their animals fornicate to their hearts content, and any resulting progeny, if they are surplus, sad though it may be, are done in.

American zoos, it turns out, believe in birth control and keeping opposite sexes from co-habitation, to avoid the problem of over- crowding.  A-plus for American zoos!

European zoos DO try to find homes for their...excess...but this doesn't always work out.  Currently, according to the WSJ, or maybe it was the New York Times, there are eighteen thousand surplus youngsters looking for homes in zoos. 

I was not alone in my concern for the little guy.  All of Switzerland was in a uproar.  Farasi had become a favorite of the general public.  In fact he was a little (?) super star.

So this morning I rushed to the Internet for news.  And it was GOOD.  Farasi will live. 

He will stay with his mother for a year or more, nursing, the little cutie.  Then he will be adopted out--

Like his SIX previous siblings from this very same mother....

Who knew Europeans zoos were in such dire need of being taught the benefits of birth control. 

 

BARBIE'S BIRTHDAY

 Isn't she beautiful?  Just like Stevie Wonder says.

Today is Barbie's birthday.  She's fifty.  And all across the world, there is shock and amazement.  How CAN it be???

I never liked Barbie dolls.  She was too tall, too weird, too old.  A teenager, or whatever.  She WAS NOT a little girl, or better yet, a baby.  As in BABY doll.

She was a sharp edged ruler of a doll.  Her clothes were for grown-ups, not for me and my kind.  And since I was not one of those children who couldn't wait to grow up, well, I failed to see the point of Barbie and her teenage life at all.

No.  I was a Betsy McCall doll fan.  Especially the paper dolls.

And before that I was a Ginny doll fan.  Now those girls had CUTE clothes.  Ruffles and petticoats and all.  Slinky was not part of the Ginnie doll personae.

My daughter didn't play with dolls at all. 

My step daughters were given Barbie dolls once the oldest one realized that in order to be a card carrying member of the second grade elite, she had to have them, even though she told me she thought they were stupid.  Then one day her younger sister pulled off all the Barbie doll heads and flushed them down the toilet--

From then on my daughters stuck to My Little Ponies until they discovered real ones.  Which financially speaking, made me long for the relatively inexpensive days of Barbie and her politically backward raison d'etre.

Now though, now I can relate to Barbie and her birthday.  Fifty, I want to assure her, will be a good decade--

Especially if she has a good plastic surgeon.  Especially if she has a creative plastic surgeon.  Especially if she has a plastic surgeon who thinks she is already beautiful, so his job won't be all that difficult.

But obviously Barbie doesn't need me to tell her this.  Obviously she already knows all this.  Why the doll hasn't aged one little bit.

I now totally approve of Barbie.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, pal!

CHER GOES TO LAS VEGAS

What's not to love?

The outfits.  The surgeries.  The god awful taste in boys...I mean men.

The houses.  And more outfits.

The making that voice out of nothing...I know, it's not Judy Garland, but neither is Liza Minelli.

The verve.  On stage at least.

And on stage is where I'm talking about.

And in movies.  Has she played some interesting roles or what?  Huh?  A lesbian one time.  That's cool, right?

That time she played the mother of a teenager (Winona Ryder), and younger kid (Christina Ricci), at an age when the average actress was still claiming they were too young to have had sex yet.

How about the movie where she wore a leather jacket to defend her client in court?  You know  that costume choice was all hers.

She nabbed Nicholas Cage before...well, the rest of the world, for 'Moonstruck.'  That choice got her that Oscar--

Yes, Sonny Bono made her.  Yes, apparently he was the nicer one of that duo. 

But so, she got too big for her Sonny and Cher britches and divorced him ( or was it the other way around?), and then he went skiing one day and ran into that tree, and WHO is left standing, lo all these years later?

So here she is again.  Opening in Las Vegas, again.  Eight zillion costumes--

You do know, don't you, just how tiring it is to deal with all those costume changes?  Don't forget how hard it is to get out the door some Saturday nights because the choice of ripped petticoat or feathered bra stopped you in your tracks.  C'mom, you can admit it.

It takes energy and chutzpah to be Cher.  I'm sure I don't hear any argument there.  That Las Vegas gig--a nightmare of glitter, yelling into a microphone, and lack of sleep.

Maybe she ought to take it slower next time, and do some interesting little movie and just deal with Sundance...and okay, throw in Cannes--

Because I'm too tired to deal with Vegas.  Would someone please bring Cher back to my local movie theatre?   I'm overdue for my Cher fix.

TOILET PAPER WORLD DOT COM

 I was looking for Handiwipes.  Nice, clean cut Handiwipes, which had disappeared from the grocery stores I go to so insidiously, I hadn't really come to grips with it.

I don't take kindly to favorite items disappearing from the shelves of our great American grocery stores--

It happens.  God knows it happens, and it even happens to ME.  Even when I try like hell to keep my personal demands of the grocery stores easy, simple, and the SAME thing, year after year after year after--

You get the picture.

Kitchen apparel is extremely important, and the rag I have hanging out at my sink, just waiting to be of service, is the most important item in my kitchen.

I love and adore Handiwipes.  I have used them since my first kitchen, back there in those hazy days when I got married in college, and found out my mother was right--marriage is a lot harder than boring ole college.

Handiwipes have been disappearing from my grocery stores for about three years now, and it has been a hard adjustment.  First it was locating them in different grocery stores than my regulars.  Okay, I could deal.

Then it seemed to become incredibly hard to actually find them in said grocery stores, and indeed, it was as if the grocery stores were playing mind games.  Why, for instance, would Handiwipes be hanging next to cat food?  Next to frozen pizza?  Next to scissors?

By now, vaguely alarmed that they might disappear altogether, I took to buying every packet hanging there, when I found them.  I figured this action might prod the buyer for the store to purchase more, since Handiwipes were so obviously popular.

No.  No, this did not create any kind of compensating action.

And Handiwipe continued to fade from my life.

Until they were gone altogether, and I was being forced to use all kinds of terrible items that had the nerve to look like Handiwipes, claim they could do the same thing as Handiwipes, and indeed, make me HAPPIER than Handiwipes.

I've been a slow learner in terms of buying things on the Internet.  Even slower in rushing to the Internet to find me what I think I can't find anymore.  Like Pacquins.  I went for years without Pacquins, mourning quietly and in private, until one day, unable to hold back my grief any longer, I spewed my tale of woe to a friend, and she said "Have you checked the Internet?"  Voila I had my Pacquins, before I could cry myself to sleep one more time!

So it was with my precious, much missed Handiwipes.  One day last week, the lightbulb went on.  Suddenly I thought Handiwipes retrieval = Internet.

Sure enough there they were.  Pounds of them.  Boxes of them.  And I bought big time.  And I am happy with life here in these United States once again.

I do, however, have one quibble.  The company from which I bought my Handiwipes is called

TOILET PAPER WORLD.

Toilet paper?  That's the item they chose to use for their all important name, when they in truth, sell eight million other items equally as recognizable as toilet paper.

I apologize for my squeamishness.  I myself certainly make good use of toilet paper, and of course have my favorite brand...which come to think of it is getting harder and harder to find--

And in fact, the lightbulb just went off again.

It is crystal clear why they chose TOILET PAPER as their sobriquet.

Everyone but everyone uses this item...OFTEN, COPIOUSLY, FOREVER.