Saturday, April 19, 2014

Leads to flowers

"Since the advent of the viral rhyme 'stranger danger' in the 1970s (and the 90 percent reduction in roaming area for children playing outdoors), we've seen correlating negative health statistics. Most children in this country don't play outside anymore, they don't go far when they do, and their bodies and minds are paying the price."

~ Let Them Be Eaten By Bears, page 5.

The Let Them Be Eaten By Bears author on violent video games.

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"In college I went shooting with my dad, sister and brother. I'd been playing Resident Evil for a few weeks. As soon as I had a little .22 rifle in my hand and I saw my brother a few yards away, I had this sudden urge. My brain screamed 'shoot him!'    

Seriously.

It only happened for a split second. It's not like it affected my actions at all, or was even close to happening. I felt sick about it, in fact. I wanted to throw up just for thinking it. Only recently have I thought about that moment and not felt sick to my stomach."

~ Temporary Focus post on violent video games.

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Went looking for The End Of Boys and somehow wound up finding Otherhood.

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Then the post about the flower artwork on the cover:

http://melanienotkin.com/2014/02/28/otherhood-meaning-behind-the-cover/

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And then was looking for that book review that called the cover with a girl and flowers on it "feeble" but at first I couldn't remember the title correctly and wound up reading about A Taste of Honey.

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"Ciezadlo tells the story of a young Iraqi girl about to celebrate her 11th birthday in 2003. She had been out of school for a week because of a bombing that occurred on the first day of Ramadan that year, and her mother decided she wanted to get her a cake, because she was beginning to go 'utterly stir-crazy' at home.

'This would seem like a simple thing, right?' Ciezadlo asks. But in Baghdad at that point in time, conditions had begun to deteriorate. Driving around town looking for just the right birthday cake was not only an act of bravery, but also a tremendous act of love, because it was so dangerous.

'It became this odyssey for her mother,' Ciezadlo explains. The cake, she says, became a symbol of everything they couldn't have — like normalcy."


http://www.npr.org/2011/03/13/134455829/day-of-honey-the-unifying-sweetness-of-food

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