LeBron James not satisfied with domination of the sport of basketball, now seeks to become successful meteorologist

Below is an actual report from the National Weather Service, documenting both LeBron James' first foray into weather reporting and the first time Instagram has been used for anything useful whatsoever:

 

 Source: The New England Sports Network, for some reason

Frank Bruni doesn't understand why people take parenting so seriously and treat their kids so nicely

However, he's very upfront about how little he understands about parenting, so that's nice, I guess.  He leads off his article thusly:

MODERN parenting confuses me.  The vocabulary, for starters. 

Better write a whole article about it, then, so we can learn from your confusion.

Take the word “last.” Usually it means final. Last exit: there are none beyond it. Last rites: you’re toast. 

But the “last chance” for a 4-year-old to quit his screeching, lest he get a timeout? There are usually another seven or eight chances still to go, in a string of flaccid ultimatums: “Now this is your last chance.” “This is really your last chance.” “I’m giving you just one more chance. I’m not kidding.”

Frank is indeed quite confused by why parents would not be straightforward and punitive with their children.  "This is your fourth-to-last chance, Johnny.  Why aren't you better behaved?"

Of course you are, and your kids know it. They’re not idiots.

Already, we can see the source of Frank's confusion, because the thing is that kids most certainly are idiots.  They're impossible to reason with, think that $5 is a lot of money, and they like the dumbest TV shows.  This isn't meant to be a judgment of kids, because it's not really their fault.  They're just dumb, because they are children and not old enough to not be dumb yet.

But they’re also not adults, so why this whole school of thought that they should be treated as if they are, long before they can perform such basic tasks of civilization as driving, say, or decanting?

What is decanting?  Is it something that should be considered a basic task of civilization?
/consults dictionary
Oh.  I hate you more, now.

Why all the choices — “What would you like to wear?”— and all the negotiating and the painstakingly calibrated diplomacy? They’re toddlers, not Pakistan.

"Put on the fucking corduroys, Johnny.  I don't give a shit if they make you look dowdy." 

 I understand that you want them to adore you. But having them fear you is surely the saner strategy, not just for you and for them but for the rest of us and the future of the republic.

This is kind of fucked up.  It seems like you are advocating 1) not teaching children to think for themselves and 2) making sure they fear you because...otherwise it might be a little bit annoying to Frank Bruni (a.k.a. the future of the republic).

Seemingly everyone has parenting opinions, so I hereby present mine, which are those of someone who isn’t in fact a parent

So, someone who has only a passing awareness of the difficulties and joys of parenting, and might therefore not be best equipped to give out parenting opinions?

and maybe has a valuable distance and objectivity as a result.

Or that, yeah.  This inspires me to share my opinions on how to fight alligators--I don't have any experience, but my distance and objectivity will be invaluable to any potential alligator fighters.

Instead of the battle hymn of a tiger mother, it’s the baffled hymn of a cubless bystander, his thoughts turned toward children as the calendar reaches yet another holiday when we shower them with attention and chocolate. 

Aww, Frank!  Do you wish people gave you chocolate too?  And attention?  But mostly chocolate?

While I have no kids of my own,

Please, continue to emphasize how little experience you have in the subject you are advising us on.

I have many I can (and sometimes do) lease for the weekend:

Most people call it "babysitting".  Unless you're paying people so you can borrow their kids, which: Frank, are you paying people so you can borrow their kids? 

11 actual nieces and nephews, whom I’ll be with this Easter Sunday, and perhaps twice that number of honorary ones. I have put in my time around tots and teens, and enjoy them. 

"I spent a few hours with kids one time, so I've got a pretty good handle on this whole parenting thing."

I have seen my share of parenting, and am not certain what to make of it.

"I'm not certain what to make of it, so let me tell you what to make of it."

Just a few decades ago, parenting wasn’t even a proper verb or gerund. Now it’s a compound one. There’s of course helicopter parenting, which hovers, and “free range” parenting, which doesn’t, but only by principled choice. 

This may be true (though I tend to think people used the word "parenting" a few decades ago).  That said, this is just what the Internet has done to every subject--there's a community and a name for anything.  For example [ed.: this reference is extremely forced because the writer wanted to find a way to shoehorn it in], we have communities that are specific to subsets of adult men who like My Little Pony and are also in the military.  They are called FOBEquestria, apparently.  Returning to the matter at hand, yes, there are lots of types of parenting communities now, because people get a little crazy about things they are passionate about, and for some reason people care a lot about their stupid kids.

As the Me Generation spawned generations of mini-me’s, our rigorous self-fascination expanded to include the whole brood and philosophies about its proper care and feeding. 

It's really awful, the way people keep trying so hard to figure out how to care for and raise their children.

About the feeding: explain to me what’s gained by the voluminous discussions, within earshot of little Edwin or Edwina,

Please, don't name your child Edwina.  Edwin's not so hot either, actually.

of what he or she probably won’t eat or definitely won’t eat or must somehow be made to eat, perhaps with a bribe. Any food that lands on the table after that much tortured preamble is bound to be eyed with suspicion and ultimately spurned, in part because it has ceased to be a vessel of nutrition or an answer to hunger at that point. It has become a power struggle: the parents’ wishes versus the child’s defiance.

This seems like an absurd strawman, because most parents debate this sort of thing while their kid can't hear them because that's pretty obviously the better way to approach this issue.  Also, kids don't go on hunger strike because they're concerned about parental power struggles.  To reiterate from earlier, kids are not the smartest. 

And the battle seems to end one and only one way. With chicken fingers. 

You seem like you'd be a great babysitter--oh, excuse me, I meant great child-leaser.

I’M equally confounded by the all-encompassing praise. Not every kid is gifted at every endeavor, and I wonder about the wisdom of telling him or her that a bit of doggerel is Shakespearean or that a wan patch of warbling is an “American Idol” audition waiting to happen.

I'm guessing parents do this because the alternative is to say, "Johnny, good try on this poem, but it's fucking terrible.  Give up on writing forever."  As for the "American Idol" reference (topical!), most children are vastly superior to your average American Idol contestant.  Did you forget about this guy?  He's a professional in the field of being terrible at singing.

I wonder why everybody has to be a winner.  You can eliminate the valedictorians from high school but you can’t eliminate them from life, which metes out Super Bowl rings and stock options with an uneven hand, and is probably best tackled with some preparatory girding for that. Do today’s parents provide it?

If you don't repeatedly call your child a failure, how will they know how much of a failure they are later in life?  Preparation is key.

Parents routinely surrender control when they shouldn’t, replacing rules with requests, and children are expected to chart their own routes to good behavior, using the faulty GPS’s of their flowering consciences, I suppose. Families are run as democracies. Parents forget: in the political realm, you don’t get a say until you’re 18. There’s a reason for that. 

Where are these families that you keep talking about?  Not that families like this don't exist, but you just seem to be taking examples you saw one time and assuming that all families are like that.  As Frank Kotsonis put it, "the plural of anecdote is not data." [ed.: that quote was also pretty forced in].  Anyway, Bruni goes on to make a long-winded point about how kids pretty much are who they are and parenting generally doesn't change that, which seems to presume a whole hell of a lot of knowledge of childhood psychology that I don't think he has.  There's some value to reminding parents that not every decision is life or death, but Bruni's insistence on alternating dispensing advice with reminding us how very unqualified he is to dispense said advice is just weird.  It might be interesting to hear a parent discuss the benefits and risks of hands-off parenting--it's less interesting to hear some guy talk about how he saw kids and sometimes leases them and therefore has a firm grasp on the ins and outs of parenting.

Wealthy financiers sometimes have to do household chores, not always able to afford new shoes

As someone who sometimes is a bit short on cash, I'm always looking for ways to save a buck.  Thankfully, some British bankers have compiled their tips!  I'm sure this will be helpful and not at all hilariously out of touch.

If you want ways of saving money, an investment banker may not seem the best source of advice. Believe it or not, however,  bankers are changing their spending habits as their bonuses shrink and become allocated over several years. Both bankers and their once free-spending wives

Bankers are fiscally responsible, of course--it's those durn free-spending wives you gotta watch out for!

are suddenly becoming familiar with the art of thriftiness. For your benefit, we’ve spoken to a selection of current and ex-bankers and to their spouses about how they’re cutting their personal spending.
 
This is what they have imparted. We hope it is of use.

1. Go on a clothes diet

Sadly, this doesn't mean eat your clothes.  2-4 are all basically the same and could be summarized as "sometimes spending a gazillion dollars on your children will not be affordable".

2. Involve the entire family

3. Put your children into the state school system
  
4. Make your children pay their own university fees

“People forget that in the UK the government offers student loans that cover fees,” said one ex-banker who is making his son pay his own way through higher education.

Indeed!  People just forget about that option, and by "people" I mean "all of the people except for the ones who make merely a reasonable income and always have to borrow money for large purchases because damn, I don't just have fifty thousand bucks lying around here."

In any case, I'll acknowledge that these first four were a little out there and not pertinent to most people, but hardly offensive to less-well-off individuals.  Rest assured, that will change shortly.

5. Change your travel habits

Oh, you mean maybe drive to family vacation instead of flying, or travel a little less to save money?

Eli Lederman, a former managing director at Morgan Stanley who has reinvented himself as an author,

said he’s ditched business class flights.

“I still go to New York  five or six times per year, but now I forego business class to travel in premium economy,” he said. “With the new flexibility to plan ahead – which was impossible when I worked for a bank – you can get good fares. And if you’re smart about it, the airlines still give you all the perks.”

So you had to give up business class for premium economy?  I'd be sympathetic if I had a fucking clue what the difference was.  You said yourself that you still get all the perks.

6. Start ironing

This may sound like a small thing, but while they’re working most bankers do not iron their own shirts. When they stop working or lose money, they start ironing.

“Now I iron all my shirts,” one ex-banker told us. “I’ve always loved doing this in a Zen kind of way, but I never had the time to do it.”

In all honesty, this is the one guy in the article I felt any sympathy for, because this is the kind of thing that only someone desperately trying to come to grips with losing their job would say.  "Oh, no, getting fired was great!  Now I have plenty of time to spend in the outdoors, since that's where I sell all of my worldly possessions at garage sales to feed my family."


Another banker, who used to work at Goldman Sachs and now runs his own business, said he gets his wife to iron his shirts nowadays. “At Goldman there was a service in the basement where I dropped my shirts off for a fee, but now I ask Jane to do it for me,” he said.

How self-sacrificing of you, taking on the monumental task of making your wife do your personal chores for you!  Let's see if we can find a worse way to say that, though.

“The wife is doing the ironing,” another banker told us. “She’s not loving it, but she doesn’t want to get a job herself so is having to accept it.”

Nailed it!

7. Don’t carry so much cash

“Stop carrying a wedge of cash around with you,” said the ex-Goldman banker. “It reduces the temptation to tip people so much.”

The problem with carrying around cash is really that you're tempted to be too generous to the minimum-wage-earning folks serving your food?  Glad we fixed that particular money sink.
  
8. Start tutoring your children yourself

Well, that's just crazy.  What's the point of being a banker if it doesn't get me out of actually raising my own children?  I know it seems like I'm joking, but wait until you hear what bankers have to say about going on vacation with their kids.

9. Stop skiing, or ski more cheaply

Thanks for offering a backup option in case "not skiing" was too extreme for me.

In the ideal world, financial services professionals in the City of London would take a Powder Byrne skiing holiday every year. Unfortunately, this can be a little expensive.  “I took the family skiing with Power Byrne last year and spent £13k,” one hedge fund manager told us. “It was great – they take the kids away from you in the morning and only return them in the late afternoon, but you pay for that kind of attention.”

You took the family skiing so that someone else could spend quality time with your kids.  Thus far, the main benefit of being rich appears to be that you don't have to do any of the actual family stuff yourself.  Chores?  Nope, sorry.  Take care of the kids?  Why am I paying for a ski vacation if I have to do that?

10. Stay with friends

You mean when you're broke and unemployed, and just need a place with a roof to sleep?

When you go on holiday in the summer (or over Easter)

Oh. 

don’t pay for your accommodation – stay with friends. “I went to the Maldives six times in a row,” said the hedge fund manager. “But last year we didn’t go to the Maldives for the first time in six years – we went to stay with friends in New York.

Yes, save money by staying with friends when you vacation internationally.  That'll really help!
 
11. Sell the second home


Do you really think people with a second home just forget they can sell it if they run out of money?  "Sorry, kids, no dinner tonight.  We're broke!  Don't forget to pack for our trip to the summer home in the countryside tomorrow!"  The best part about this tip is that apparently, no one's actually using it yet:

“The second home in the country is where you rack up the most serious costs,” said the hedge fund manager. “A lot of people I know are talking about ditching the country house. No one’s done it yet though.”

Revised title for this tip: "Think about selling the second home.  Don't do it, though."

The remaining nine tips are pretty repetitive, so we'll call it there.  Apparently bankers think that tips like "sell your old clothes instead of trashing them" are useful thrifty pointers, so, thanks for that, guys!  I'll stop setting fire to my belongings when I'm done with them.  They also advise those seeking to cut costs to...buy expensive cars!

20. Get a Prius

Ukrainian military dolphins have left their posts for sex reasons

Per RiaNovosti:

SEVASTOPOL, March 12 (RIA Novosti) - Three of the Ukrainian navy's “killer” dolphins that swam away from their handlers during training exercises probably left to look for mates, an expert said on Tuesday.

Great, there's nothing that can go wrong when sex-crazed dolphins with military training are on the loose.  On the plus side, maybe they don't exist:

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry denied the reports, while refusing to confirm the navy makes use of dolphins, despite the frequent appearance in Ukrainian media of photographs of dolphins with military equipment strapped to them.

I don't mean to say that those photos are definitive proof, but...

Photo credit: Gizmodo

they're kind of definitive proof.  Any final words that might further terrify people who are envisioning a wild team of horny warrior-dolphins cruising around the Black Sea?

A military source in Sevastopol told RIA Novosti last year that the Ukrainian navy had restarted training dolphins to attack enemy combat swimmers and detect mines. The killer-dolphins would be trained to attack enemy combat swimmers using special knives or pistols fixed to their heads, the source said.

Great, thanks.

Photo credit: Heavy

In which we discover that juggling and Rubik's Cubes can be cool

The craziest thing is that he doesn't even look like he's trying.  I have to make my stupid tongue-sticking-out focused face when I want to type with two hands at the same time, and he just kinda laughs his way through jugglesolving a Rubik's Cube.

People in Norway are really into firewood

Sarah Lyall of the New York Times reports:

OSLO — The TV program, on the topic of firewood, consisted mostly of people in parkas chatting and chopping in the woods and then eight hours of a fire burning in a fireplace.  Yet no sooner had it begun, on prime time on Friday night, than the angry responses came pouring in. 

It seems impossible that these two sentences were intentionally printed together.  If you were on Family Feud and the category was "TV shows people might be upset about on a Friday night", answering "a show about a fire burning for eight hours" might provoke Steve Harvey to make this face:

 “We received about 60 text messages from people complaining about the stacking in the program,” said Lars Mytting, whose best-selling book

I just want to emphasize that the following is the title of a bestselling book in Norway, for real.

“Solid Wood: All About Chopping, Drying and Stacking Wood — and the Soul of Wood-Burning” inspired the broadcast. “Fifty percent complained that the bark was facing up, and the rest complained that the bark was facing down.” 

Not only do Norwegians have strong opinions about stacking firewood, but they are dramatically diverging opinions, leading to spirited debate.  In the words of Mr. Mytting:

"One thing that really divides Norway is bark.” 

Indeed.


One thing that does not divide Norway, apparently, is its love of discussing Norwegian wood.

 Nearly a million people, or 20 percent of the population, tuned in at some point to the program, which was shown on the state broadcaster, NRK.

 For reference, about 36% of Americans watched the Super Bowl this year.

In a country where 1.2 million households have fireplaces or wood stoves, said Rune Moeklebust, NRK’s head of programs in the west coast city of Bergen, the subject naturally lends itself to television. 

Does it?

“My first thought was, ‘Well, why not make a TV series about firewood?’” Mr. Moeklebust said in an interview. “And that eventually cut down to a 12-hour show, with four hours of ordinary produced television, and then eight hours of showing a fireplace live.” 

So they had to talk you down to only 12 hours of firewood-related coverage? 

There is no question that it is a popular topic. “Solid Wood” spent more than a year on the nonfiction best-seller list in Norway. 

Also popular in Norway:

“National Firewood Night,” as Friday’s program was called, opened with the host, Rebecca Nedregotten Strand, promising to “try to get to the core of Norwegian firewood culture — because firewood is the foundation of our lives.” Various people discussed its historical and personal significance. “We’ll be sawing, we’ll be splitting, we’ll be stacking and we’ll be burning,” Ms. Nedregotten Strand said. 

But the real excitement came when the action moved, four hours later, to a fireplace in a Bergen farmhouse. 

The fire on “National Firewood Night” burned all night long, in suspensefully unscripted configurations. Fresh wood was added through the hours by an NRK photographer named Ingrid Tangstad Hatlevoll, aided by viewers who sent advice via Facebook on where exactly to place it. 

This actually does sound marginally more interesting than voting on how Hawaii 5-0 ends, which is an actual thing American viewers were invited to do recently.

"I couldn’t go to bed because I was so excited,” a viewer called niesa36 said on the Dagbladet newspaper Web site. “When will they add new logs? Just before I managed to tear myself away, they must have opened the flue a little, because just then the flames shot a little higher. 

“I’m not being ironic,” the viewer continued. “For some reason, this broadcast was very calming and very exciting at the same time.”

Is anyone else concerned that niesa36 might be an arsonist?  This sounds like how an arsonist would react. 

Regarding Gary Busey and my newfound phobia of inner tubes

Ever wondered if it's possible to fuck an inner tube?  Gary Busey has the answer.  I've always felt that "flabbergasted" is a word that people should only be able to use once in their lives, because that would make it special and it seems like a word that shouldn't be used lightly.  I'm thoroughly flabbergasted by this whole video, and by Gary Busey, and I do not want to go tubing ever again.  Video involves some NSFW language, if that was not apparent already.

TV interviewers find people with the strangest jobs sometimes

Need help deciding between the Mexican blend and the Monterey Jack cheese for your nachos?  Just ask this guy:

"Why yes, I know a great deal about cheese.  Where you at, ladeeeez?"

Having trouble with an oversized entranceway?  I've got a guy for that:

"I didn't choose the big door life--you could say it's more of a calling, really." 

 What about if you find that your knowledge of adult film history is lacking?  Yes, there's a guy for that too:

"Oh, yes.  1973 was a apecial year for the industry--a real turning point for filmmakers in many ways.  It also marked my own first foray into the genre, an experience which has obviously changed the course of my life."

What if you need--ah, fuck it, you'll never need this guy.

"No, wait--I think you misunderstood.  I'm an expert in kidnapped brides, not an expert at kidnapping brides--where are you going?  Is the interview over?"