Tag: creepy

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Political Advertising in San Francisco

I was watching the Daily Show the other day because that’s where I turn when I want to see Fox News. They had an interesting piece on an ad being run by Rick Santorum called, Obamaville. We never get to see ads like this in San Francisco and it made start to think why and I think I’ve come up with an answer.

First off, San Francisco is so far to the left that people [except for Tony Hall] of the Republican kind call themselves Conservative or Moderate. The R word is something Tony Hall has the guts to utter in a public meeting place. It made me think about my parents who were Republicans until the Nixon impeachment. They were nothing like the Republicans of today such as Rick Santorum who called President Obama a snob for wanting kids to go to college. My parents would have given me a big old beat down if I said I didn’t want to go to college. Then there’s Mitt Romney who when asked if he knew any NASCAR racers said, no, but I know several of the team owners. That says rich snob to me.

You won’t see any ads for the re-election of Obama because he knows he’s got us in the bag. He did make a quick stop here for a fund raiser, but you won’t see any ads here because he knows he’s got us in his pocket. The Republicans on the other side don’t bother because they know they don’t have a chance in the Bay Area. Meg Whitman and Carli Fiorina tanked here. California while having a red section in the great white north and deep south is a dark blue state and the Bay Area is the darkest blue part of it. The only time we see political ads is when we have a Mayoral race or possibly a Governor’s race.

People who want to get into politics in San Francisco should know that using the R word won’t help you one bit. District 4’s former supervisor Ed Jew was a Republican who switched to the Democratic Party to get a chance on winning which he did, moved to Burlingame and now is serving 64 months in prison for bribery and extortion. I’m not saying Republicans are all corrupt. Whitman and Fiorino aren’t in jail. Oh wait, Meg had that undocumented housekeeper and Carli had the creepy demon sheep ad which turned against her. Not enough to imprison a person on, but not the way to run politics in the Bay Area.

For those who haven’t seen it I thought I’d give you a taste of Rick Santorum’s ad campaign tactics. Note that every person in the ad is a blue collar white person and that whenever Obama is referenced they’re actually showing pictures of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not Barack Obama. Rick Santorum’s ad has, well, Santorum all over it. While we may live in the bubble, if the Republican’s keep up their current tactics, in the next five years they’ll turn into a footnote of history like the Whig party.

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Why The Hell Is My Daughter Speaking Dutch?

Every once in awhile some really strange happens that catches me off guard. My daughter who I’ve mentioned previously is autistic. She doesn’t talk much, but this is getting a lot better. I suddenly noticed her saying phrases that weren’t English and of all things sounded Dutch. It turns out that she was indeed speaking Dutch. How did this happen? I can blame it all on Sesame Street.

Sesame Street is shown all around the world in just about every country if not every country. Add to this an iPad and YouTube and there is where it all started. She’s going to be 5 at the end of the month and took to the iPad quicker than a pair of senior citizens I was hired to teach them how to use one. Since she loves Sesame Street and understand how YouTube works she finds lots of videos to watch. the odd part is that when she selects a video it shows suggested videos to watch. She watches a bit in English and there might be a suggested version of it in Spanish or Dutch as the case may be.

I don’t mind her speaking Spanish because, well that is a language I can at least understand. Dutch is one of those languages that I don’t even know how to say anything that would get my face slapped in [there are 12 other languages that I know how to get my face slapped in, but that’s another story.]

I understand how a young child’s mind is very malleable and it is very easy for them to learn new languages. I get a kick when she walks in the room and says hola or wants me to do something and says vuelve conmigo. That I can understand, but when she starts singing the Teletubbies theme in Dutch it becomes a little creepy. She even gets the lispy S at the end of teletubbiesh.

Since she has creeped me out quite a bit with this I felt it only fitting to torment my beloved readers with the Teletubbies intro in Dutch. Enjoy and be horrified.

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I Have No Need For Glow In The Dark Pee Or Poop!

As many of you are aware, we have a daughter who is autistic so things move a bit slower. She’s coming along quite well with many things, but potty training is the last step. We’ve gotten into serious mode with potty training. There are lots of schools of thought with this from the free elimination parents who watch and then notice what’s going on and hold their kids over a bucket to eliminate and never allow diapers. That’s a bit extreme for us, so we’re taking a bit safer, albeit more expensive route.

With our therapists we have gotten her to learn to sit on the toilet for five minutes straight and moved onto five minutes straight with her pants pulled down. Now we’ve switched over to panties instead of diapers for most of the day and every 30 minutes go through the potty training routine. We’ve had only a few accidents and have managed to only get one stained chair out of it, but I think I can handle that.

A friend of ours suggested that perhaps she would get the idea more if we had a Betsey Wetsey type doll. My wife and has been looking left and right for one and they’re in the $25-$30 range. This seems a bit much for something we don’t even know if it will work. None of these dolls by the way come with a toilet to sit on. That of course, costs extra.

So wife, daughter and I are at target today and we discover a doll that even when you’re potty training a kid and are used to getting vile human produced substances all over your body this was a bit too much for either of us. It’s not really a potty training doll, but it’s a doll to teach your little girl how to change diapers because of course, it’s their job to do it right? [ducks quickly, I’M NOT SELLING IT!] This is a doll that comes with a little somewhat hard plastic diaper that is somehow control by artificial intelligence by the doll to tell the diaper to show that it has peed, pooped, or both. How does this happen? Well, I don’t know the code someone had to write to make this happen, but the end result is that the diaper has a yellow and a brown led in it that glows to indicate whether you have a number one or number two.

Yes, you ready that write. This is a doll who’s poop and pee are so nuclear that it makes the diaper glow with light. Luckily the lights will go off after a certain time and you can put the diaper back on your atomic baby doll which would add to the mix of having to explain to your daughter why the poop and pee just disappeared and why that doesn’t happen with normal babies. My comment which wouldn’t go over very well would be, because Mommy and Daddy bought you a radioactive doll who’s poop and pee glows to wake you up in the middle of the night from it’s flashing diaper so that you know to change the diaper that the poop and pee actually just disappear from which means you can ignore it because it will go away all by itself. Wow, that was a bit of a mouthful.

Apparently I just read that you actually have to wipe a hard plastic wipe across the diaper and not the baby to make the lights go off which isn’t exactly the right way to change a diaper either, but I guess they really don’t want to teach anyone something they could use later in life. I can tell you from the number of diapers I’ve change that while less than my wonderful and lovely wife, this ain’t how you change a baby.

Hopefully we will find one of these little peeing dolls to show our daughter how the process works because I don’t want her to one day ask me why her poop and pee doesn’t glow like her dolly’s