There's few things more annoying than trying to get the creative juices flowing when the kids have a friend for a sleepover, and they're running around yelling so much it seems there is a reproduction of a Visigoth invasion happening metres from me, kind of like those people who recreate civil war scenes. I've been trying to get my radio interview from the CD onto my computer, and make a You Tube video with some Googled images. Got the images. Kind of got a power presentation happening. Discovered I had been unsuccessful with getting my interview onto my computer. Think I didn't 'import' properly, so will try again tomorrow. I cannot be arsed tonight, and I am weary. Not only are the kids galloping around, and screaming like rampant dragons, they are using my blue tooth speaker and iPod to play something they are trying to pass off as music. Not sure I'm liking this confirmation I have definitely bridged the generation gap. My ten year old has a musician's soul, I am sure. He is learning keyboards and in the school band. So why are they playing something that is only slightly less melodic than gravel in a blender? I even sounded like one of my parents (and my mother was a music lover with a glorious singing voice) as I demanded to know what in the name of God the awful racket was. 'It's teenager's music,' I was advised by our intrepid guest. 'That's MUSIC?' I spluttered in abject disbelief, 'If that God-awful racket is what passes as music these days, then I'm glad I'm not a teenager.' Oh, the pain! The pain of it all when one realises one is no longer hip. I never really was considered hip, but you know what I'm getting at.
Fed up to the bloody back teeth with overly censorious people out there. I was never really enamoured of the ice bucket challenge thing. Donating money to a worthy cause, go for your life, but making yourself uncomfortable for attention? Keep that one. 'Likes' on a Facebook page isn't going to help as much as money, or your time. But who saw the toddler from England get doused with water, and let fly with a wonderfully-accented, 'Fooking Hell!' As charmless as I consider foul-mouthed children as a rule, I must say I laughed like a drain when I saw that. So did a lot of other people. But so many people were incensed, and outraged. What terrible parents, they cried. What child abuse, they keened. So they have now posted an apology from their child on the 'Net. To all you people who were outraged: Get over it. Why should a two-year-old apologise for something she has no concept over? It's stupid. Yeah, swearing's not marvellous. But neither is overreaction, and twisting your pearls, and calling for smelling salts. Kids will occasionally drop an inappropriate comment because they will hear it from adults. When my oldest son was about three, we were travelling in the car and I had cause to hit the brakes very suddenly. From the safety of his toddler car seat in the back of my Commodore station wagon, my shocked and startled son cried out, 'Shit!' I muffled a guffaw into my bicep, cleared my throat, and told him not to talk like that. And my S-bomb dropping son has grown into a largely decent young man who was nominated as school dux. So there. Stop worrying about some little kid who swore, everyone.
Now, I drove around in a Magna today. Of that I am confident. Or did I? No, perhaps I hitched an unwitting ride in the De Lorean from 'Back To The Future' and found myself in the streets of Berlin in 1933, where burns a raging pyre of banned literature. An Aldi supermarket has pulled the Raold Dahl book about gory nursery rhymes after someone had a bitch about the word 'slut', which appears in the re-imagined Cinderella fable. She is referred to as a 'slut'. Now, for the naysayers, this word actually means a slovenly and slatternly woman, and it has been twisted to often mean something else in our society. In some versions of the story, the nickname of the poor kid with the shittiest blended family EVER is Cinder-Slut. It should be obvious to even the most idiotic reader that the context Dahl means it as a slattern, too. But oh, no, let's just get a book banned, shall we? Hey, here's an idea: you don't like a book, then don't bloody read it. Don't try and spoil it for everybody else. Is it such a bad thing to get kids interested in reading, rather than playing on the x-box? Or playing crappy tunes from You Tube on their mothers' iPods?
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