Once Upon A Time...

Here's a couple of news items that sound exactly like something out of a fairytale - a tiny village that lies at the foot of a mountain, which is so dark and gloomy in the winter that it uses mirrors to bring warmth and light to the villagers. And a rarely blooming, bad-smelling plant which draws crowds from miles around.

I really hate those St. Jude Thanks and Giving campaign. It's a good cause and everything, but the extreme close-ups of celebrities on a movie theater sized screen are just distressing to me. What is the deal with celebrities and bad skin? SJP, Morgan Freeman, Ray Romano (dude, could you at least shave for a public service-y announcement?). Bad skin, all of them.

I love the knitted DNA (scroll down to the bottom). Or maybe a nosecone which looks kind of fairytaleish in a medieval Heironymous Bosch-y way.

Apparently, spanking your kids makes them more aggressive and hostile. Well, duh. There's also the whole issue of parental anger and spanking being a manifestation of it, rather than a considered punishment. It's pretty hard to be mellow if you know you're going to get whacked upside the head if your mom's day sucked. I would venture to say most spanking is an exasperated spur of the moment thing rather than a considered parenting strategy. Though there are books that tell you how to do it right.

The last survivor of the World War I Christmas Truce has died. I always thought it was so weird that after a day of embracing the enemy and seeing them as human beings that the next day it was war as usual. It's also a reminder of the power of the individual; if those soldiers had the belief that they had that power, could they have changed history? Or do we always instill our leaders with that kind of authority but never ourselves?