Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
China Daily is reporting that the Chinese police are starting to put together a national DNA database to help combat child trafficking and help lost children; 107,000 kids and 35,000 from anxious parents. The database is composed of blood samples taken by the police from missing children’s parents, children suspected of having been abducted or [...]
Four ten year old girls make enough noise to wake the living and unliving dead. In the meantime, i’m hiding in my office in the basement and listening to the rumbling of elephants across my ceiling from afar.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/225492/page/1 The Power of Two: http://www.newsweek.com/id/225098 Photo gallery of the kids, etc. The Intro picture is particularly stunning. This has been in the works since spring. Newsweek came in with a Pulitzer-award winning photographer who was fresh from covering the White House and Obama and Bush to do the shots. The interviews mostly were around [...]
Child stealing and smuggling rings in China, including a bust in the twins’ home town. Shanghai Daily _ 上海日报 — En.. (PDF. 28 k – pdf’d version of story)
Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on his old 31-year old criminal warrant from America. I didn’t think they’d ever manage that one.
Both of the kids do, indeed, have sinus infections (probably as a result of their not taking care of themselves with bad allergic sinus reactions to pollens, etc.) and both are sick and cranky. And both are on antibiotics; Mere still can’t handle pills, so we end up trying to see what we can get [...]
ORPHAN: My readers quietly passed along some information on this still-yet-to-open movie that I trashed earlier…and a little more information on a personal note. Susan talked to Mere, and she got the impression from Meredith that the sheer scariness of the poster got to Mere more than anything else. Arthur passed along this article from [...]
This weekend, Meredith, her cousin Kay and I got out on a rare outing to a movie, and saw STAR TREK on the big screen; the kids were ‘I-dunno-about-this’ until they got sucked into the story, and they want MORE. I thought for a re-boot of the original series, it was actually darn decent. [...]
I absolutely refuse to watch the train wreck of Jon and Kate Plus Eight – haven’t for a while, and I did catch about 10 minutes of the start-of-season one before I got nauseated. I’m hearing stories about their ratings falling apart, and I’m just as glad. First off, while some find the whole thing [...]
Horrible story (with the names blanked out) from a divorce court in Britain about an effort by the husband to get a L500000 settlement from his ex, which the judge shot down – because the husband had been a terrible pedophilic monster, preying on the wife’s grandchildren. Describing the man as “manipulative”, Mr Justice Moylan [...]
ABE Books sent me a note with this list of 20 fiction and non-fiction books dealing with horribly messed up childhoods. Interesting set; I’ve read several of them, but I’m avoiding depressing or sad stuff recently. Worth a look for my readers in the audience…
CORALINE (7 out of 10) – Recommended, with care MONSTERS VS ALIENS (6 out of 10) – Recommended Meredith is a big fantasy fan, and was interested in both of these due to the heavy TV advertising. We saw both of these in Tru3D, which I recommend as adding to the story (as it did [...]
Got the reservations in for Duckon yesterday, and working with the con to make sure that the twins can bop back and forth between the rooms at night. Trust me, this is important for them and for our sanity. Susan decided to not go off with her mom to Sioux Falls for the Memorial Day [...]
I wonder how many of the people who are going on about “teabag” protests understand the common slang usage of the term? Retail vacancies at malls and shopping areas are soaring. Men aren’t buying new underwear, which was one of Alan Greenspan’s classic uh-oh-the-sky-is-falling barometers of how well business is doing. My question on Coleman-as-sore-loser-and-endlessly-litigating-this [...]
I like reading Alonso Duralde’s reviews of movies on MSNBC – I don’t always agree with him, but he’s fun and he catches things I want to know about. Susan (and then Mere) are big fans of the original WITCH MOUNTAIN movies; there’s a lot of the 1970s and 1980s live action Disney that I [...]