insomnia strikes again

But I read this great interview that Powells' did with Neil Gaiman, and you should read it too.

Dumb kid's awake again. Wanna buy a child? I'll take $22 made up of fur pelts and beads at this point.

they like it because ... well, because we tell them to, really

I have always wondered about "kids meals". Why is there the assumption that All Kids Like Chicken Fingers, for example? Mine doesn't. I'm sure there are other people's kids that don't. So where does that sort of thing get installed? McDeath hasn't figured out how to advertise in the womb as far as I know.

Also, children's music. The assumption is that kids like 'kids' songs'. I know this because they sent a pamphlet home from Sean's group on his last day there (he's moving to another group starting September in the local elementary school - same style setup, different teachers and such) with "some of our favorite songs". (You may remember this from the little bunny foo foo incident.)

So when Sean asked me to put some music on this morning (he will drag one of us over to the stereo and move our hand toward it and then stand there expectantly as if to say, 'well, mother/father, put some tunes on, get on the stick') I tried an experiment and dragged out one of his Raffi CDs. (He has one. I don't mind it. Raffi is one of the least objectionable children's artists out there.)

He started to cry.

So I put on 'Fear of Pop' and he settled down again.

So obviously these likes are not installed at birth, but are some kind of OTA update. I think they lost us when we moved or something, though, because obviously these updates are not installed in SeanersXP 3.10.4.

Maybe it's done through the TV. Sean shows little to no interest in the TV (well, he does find the Law and Order theme song to be utterly cool), which is not a blind thing, because Chris showed interest in the TV.

There you go. Conclusion: our children are controlled through TV sets. You're welcome. :-D

Unrelated: they found my Barsuk records order! It had been lost at the post office. Yay!

it just works, except when it just does weird crap like this

Right. All of my applications are INSTALLED. None of them show up in the Applications folder. The Applications folder is apparently empty.

What the what?

I mean, I can still launch things from the dock ... they're all there ... but not showing up in Finder. WTF?

A totally amusing blog to keep an eye on (it's just getting started): Handcraft House of Horrors. (link from mactavish.)

Edit: Okay, find applications folder (which still exists) and move it over into shortcut sidebar. Quick and dirty fix. Still not make sense why it did that in the first damn place, but eh.