I know that Fifi is a little girl, partly because she's pretty, pretty loud and also completely fails to have a willy, despite her best efforts to have one like her brothers for weeing purposes (this is an irritant to her). I suppose the fact her volume control goes up to 11 and she's always pre-emptive on the thwacking front, coupled with her love of violence masquerading as slapstick, has on occasion stopped her seemly quite as girly as she has the potential to be.
Well the potential has now been realised with a spot of decoration and a new bed and some nice new pyjamas. The room is the same colour as it used to be but is now trimmed with girly accoutrements in the shape of a pink border with matching curtains and matching bedset on her nice new bed. Chuck in some butterfly (pink) wallstickers and you get the picture.
The bedtime routine is now extremely girly. There is a story in our bed and then she's tucked and snuggled in her bed by her mummy. I have to go in and give her two cuddles, and say good night. She looks so sweet and adorable snuggled up in bed I can almost forgive the naughtiness (she's been picking at the border already you know). It's the kind of cuteness that makes you all protective as a Dad, willing to rip someones head off and punch the stump if they mess with her and break her heart. Metaphorically of course.
Are you a 30 something who couldn't give a stuff about 13 hours of CBeebies a day and the endless cycle of Sponge Bob and Ben 10? If so join me on a journey back to my childhood in the late 70's/early 80's.
TV has to be educational now days, especially kids stuff on any BBC channel. This inevitably makes it "boral" (a combination of boring and moral, ho hum!). Still, it never used to be this way and the first cartoons I remember were the not for kids but watched by kids Looney Tunes. We recently bought a big DVD box set of these and they're as great as I remember them. But I guess the first for kids cartoons I watched were probably the endless Hanna-Barbara repeats. Hanna and Barbara actually started off working for MGM on Tom and Jerry, another great set of violent cartoons that make our 2 year old laugh hysterically.
Everybody remembers Scooby-Doo, the Flintstones and probably the Jetsons but there were literally dozens of others like:
Undercover Elephant
Secret Squirrel
and of course that favourite, Hong Kong Phooey!
The one thing you notice about looking back at old Hanna Barbara cartoons is how rudimentary the animation is compared to theatrical stuff at the time.
No list would be complete without the absolutely insane Jamie and the Magic Torch though, and if you're of a certain age you will love this:
There were plenty of other cartoons I loved but I want to take a diversion into puppetry for a moment and not into Gerry Andersons world of Supermarination either. I did love Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds, Stingray and even Fireball XL5 but in the early 80's there was only one puppet show that every little lad had to watch and that was Starfleet!
Starfleet had everything; spaceships, lasers, giant robots, small robots, and erm, a space motorcycle sidecar?! The theme tune for what was the English language version of a Japanese programme Bomber X was even sung by Brian May!
How could you go wrong with three smaller vehicles that linked together to make the Dai X robot?
Awesome stuff, which leads me on to another Japanese import and another cartoon, Science Team Ninja Gatchaman. You've probably never heard of it because it was heavily reworked (for plot, violence and other stuff) for the Western market but I'm sure you've heard of Battle of the Planets!
Reading about the genesis of the American version is fascinating, and well worth spending a couple of minutes on.
There are three European cartoons that I have to include at the end of this list. What list would be complete without the bonkers Dogtanian and the Three Muskahounds?
A proper take on Dumas, it teased at the end with a promise of a return for a second equally long series. This came years later and was crap. I was crushed.
Still, following Estaban and his chums around in search of the Mysterious Cities of Gold was much more fun, if no better animated.
And finally, the French/Japanese co-production, Ulysses 31, which like most of the other programmes here had an absolute kick arse theme tune.
So there you have it, a list of reasons why kids have a really crap time of it nowadays compared to the stuff we used to watch. True, kids TV was only on for a couple of hours a day and we had to put up with stuff like Grange Hill, Why Don't You? and Blue Peter but there was some great stuff in there. Don't even get me started on the Banana Split Show....
Today was another birthday party and this one proffered the chance for both kids to hang on to our legs for hours on end as we know the parents and we were all invited. As it turned out, we didn't know anyone else there whatsoever, aside from the birthday boy and his family.
We were able to prise him away from my leg long enough for him to plaintively wail, "I'm just shy", before he reattached. Typically by going home time he was warmed up and it was only the proffered party bag that convinced him to leave.
This has happened a lot recently, so much so the boy now has his sister doing the same thing, Eventually they'll rip the pocket off my trousers with all the hanging on behind me. Then I'll need them to cower behind me so I don't expose my pants through the rent in my trousers.
One of the things we seem to have accumulated in our house are pocket camcorders. We've got 3 different Flips, a Panasonic one and a couple of budget Disegos. I've also got an old fashioned Sony digital tape camcorder that now looks like it belongs in pre-history, which is a nice lead into the post really. But we didn't have a Samsung Full HD HMX-Q10 Camcorder until the last weekend...
Samsung thought it would be a jolly good idea to ship a few bloggers off to Dinosaurs Unleashed at the O2 Arena (or to be more precise a static rigid tent right outside it) and arm them with a proper digital camcorder in the Samsung Full HD HMX-Q10 Camcorder (which we got to keep afterwards) to show us all what the difference between smartphone/pocket camcorder quality and a real camcorder actually is. And to scare the kids witless with dinosaurs of course. So we met up with Jen, Jamie and (eventually) Sally for some excitement.
I have produced a little video for you to have a shufty at here:
All the editing was done on our 5 year old Dell core duo laptop. It's an old and fairly slow machine but it was just about up to the job of editing high definition video. The included software (installed on the camcorder itself) was very intuitive to use and pretty comprehensive. Obviously if you have better paid for software you'll get better results but I really couldn't fault it.
The one thing that Dinosaurs Unleashed didn't unleash was much ambient lighting but I think you can see from the video that the Samsung Full HD HMX-Q10 Camcorder coped pretty well in the dimly lit exhibition hall.
The camcorder itself is dead easy to use. Opening the viewing screen flap on the side turns it on and if you forget to slide the protective lens cover switch, it tells you on screen. The operational beeps that every single camera or phone come with can be turned off and the menus are simple and easy to navigate. The camera does default to a slightly zoomed in position every time you start it but the Samsung bod did tell us that the firmware (the software that runs the camcorder) was about to be updated with some improvements, so perhaps that's one of them.
The pictures are sharp and clear, even in 720p, which I changed the setting to as our telly doesn't do 1080i. It's a 4 year old Samsung telly, and we've had no problems with that either! All in all, it's a cracking little camcorder that really shows the benefit of a proper device over a camera built into a smartphone. I was even surprised how much better it was than a high end Flip, for very little difference in cost.
5MP BSI CMOS sensor
2.7” touch panel LCD
Flip Shooting (Switch Grip Control)
Switch/both Handed Grip
Smart Record Pause
Ultra Compact and Full HD Recording
Built-in USB/PC S/W
Auto Focus
Face detect (up to 6 persons)
Smart Auto
HD Time Lapse recording
Intelli-Studio 2.0
Tripod screw
Display
2.7” touch LCD
2D S-motion Graphic User Interface
Video Recording
HD resolution:
1920 x 1080 60i
1280 x720 60p
SD resolution:
720 x 480 60i
Battery details
110min (1h50m)
Still capture resolution
4.9MP (2MP)
And finally finally, Dinosaurs Unleashed is good fun for your kids, just make sure its not 25 degrees Celsius when you take them: you'll melt!
Because I like to be meticulous I'm generally a bit useless, it takes me forever to get anything done. I'd been in the process of redecorating the lads room since November, but a couple of weeks ago I had the final push and got it finished. As you can see above, the boy loves the Walltastic wallpaper mural I put up for him. Walltastic probably don't remember kindly giving me the mural back in the autumn but lets face it, decorating with two kids happens when it can be fitted in around everything else and I did have to switch the rooms around first.
It was pretty easy to put up, it comes in 12 rectangular pieces, each one about half a drop long, that you put up like normal wallpaper. The instructions are easy to follow but a bit alarming- if I read them properly, they suggested that each strip could shrink by 1.5cm while drying. That would have left massive gaps. As you can see though, no such issues arose.
The boy loves it and it does make a difference to just slapping up some posters.
Today has been an odd day with the two kids. It started off inauspiciously, with the theft of the other bunny by the wee lass from the boys room. He wasn't playing with it and has hitherto shown little or no interest in it but obviously because it was in the clutches of his sister, it was the most important thing in the world. Much whining, mock crying and flinging himself about occurred until it was repatriated.
Fifi really had the devil in her today so there was a lot of tit for tat theft going on between the two of them all morning. This ranged from sheets of stickers, to comics, crayons and colouring books and saw both of them take a turn on the naughty step- Fifi for robbery and M'laddo for attempting a Tatsumaki Senpūkyaku straight from the manual of Street Fighter. Fortunately his karate isn't up to much yet.
Oddly though, when we moved on to gardening and then out the front, the two of them played really well together, lots of helping each other out, and just getting along. Even with the water pistols, which was pretty astonishing. Maybe a spot of lunch had mellowed them out or maybe the sun was just a bit too hot for anything like the rucking they were doing.
It reminds me of a photo of the two of them that wifey published on her blog a couple of days back and I've reproduced below. When they get on, they really get on. Fifi refused to go to bed tonight until Sam had come in and given her a kiss, which says it all really.
This is a poop bin. Once your dog has evacuated it's bowels, you put it in a bag and drop it in one of these bins dotted around the place. It's part of the ownership investment in having a dog.
What you don't do is heave the bag over the iron railings. That's worse than leaving it for some unsuspecting person it walk through. At least the weather will wash it away eventually. Whats the biodegradability of a turd in a plastic sack?
This post was brought to you from the mind that runs St Albans Turds. Don't click the link if you don't like the odd bit of foul language or foul images.
Our daughter, at two and a quarter, has an all consuming hobby. She likes sitting on a swing and being pushed. The lengths she'll go to to further this hobby are astonishing. Yesterday she went out in the garden barefoot and sat on the swing in our garden for 20 minutes on her own. On Sunday she scooted a mile to the park and spent the second half of the Arsenal-Man Utd match on the swings. I know it was 45 minutes as I watched the footy on my iPhone while pushing her.
Can't wait until she's old enough to go on the junior rollercoaster at Legoland, she should really love that.
I'm going through a phase of feeling a bit rubbish at the moment. I don't know why, I occasionally get these phases. I've felt like this since the couple of funerals I went to last month but don't think they've really got anything to do with it.
My attempts at stewed rhubarb
When I feel a bit rubbish, I get a major attack of apathy and lose all confidence to make decisions or do stuff properly. It's a vicous circle of crapulence that I have to painstaking dig myself out of.
The litany of failure for the last week is longer than our weekly foodshopping receipt and reads like this:
Forgot to put the recycling out this morning. Had to come back after dropping Fifi off at childminders to do it.
Neglected to take any money to Kimpton fun run to watch my brothers attempts to win it, meaning as a family we had 20p between us. Kimpton has no cash points.
Forgot that I'd put my rhubarb on to stew, came back to a carbonised mess of blackness.
Didn't realise that curtain rings also need plastic attach-y things to go in the curtain itself
Generally got in the way and not shown any initiative at anything.
I've even been reminded constantly that I've got the dentist today and let's be honest, no one will be surprised if I miss the appointment. I know roughly where the dentists is but not exactly (I'm off to register at a new practice), so I should look up the location on a map but I'm struggling really hard to even do that.
