Uncategorized – Page 5

Making up superheroes

October 12, 2009 Liz

Moomin had a lot to say today in the car on the way home from dance class, where they were learning the dance to “Thriller”. I asked him to tell me it all over again when we got home so I could type it and put it on the blog. Maybe he’ll write with me on this blog and we’ll all get an education about the secret origins of all sorts of superheroes, a topic in which Moomin is an expert.

Enjoy!

Me and T. and E. play a game now where we’re basically heroes in a team where we have nature powers like wolverine and wildebeest and of course, us. Anyway, T. is the leader of the team, which he always tries to be, and has all sorts of forest and nature powers. We can all fly thanks to robotic wings like in Batman Beyond. E. has liquid nitrogen mechanism on his back, well, on him, anyway, which can freeze things with ice. I am called Rockslide and I of course have rock powers,

Just today, the ending part of our playing was when we were flying over a desert and crashed an atomic bomb into it to escape it. I have no actual plot to this, by the way, but there’s an episode where an evil revengeful desert spirit enters my mind and I become its host and it tries to take over the world. but first it has to go through the rest of the team. It would be like possession, a little like Karma, the Marvel comics character who can possess people so that their mind is hers and her mind is theres.

I know her secret origin. She’s Vietnamese and was in the Vietnam War and a war explosion caused her powers to come out. When a soldier tried to kill one of the villagers, she stopped him by possessing his mind. Her brother Tran had the same powers but while she just saved the boy, Tran made the soldier kill himself. Tran was into his powers but Karma was afraid of them. Tran joined their uncle who was in a criminal organization, in other words, evil. Karma soon went to America with Leon and Nga and went out one day on an errand, but when she went back to the apartment she found it ransacked and her kids gone. They had been kidnapped by her uncle and Tran and if she wanted them back she would have to join their criminal organization. It was part of a Spiderman/Fantastic Four comic. Spiderman and the Fantastic Four help her and soon they capture the kidnappers and get Leon and Nga back. I won’t tell you the stuff in between.

Oh wait, did I mention that we all went through a quiz to become the superheroes we were? It talks about what powers you would have if you want to be a superhero, what costume, what team you would join, and so on and so on. T. made it up. We just had B. take the quiz and he chose to be a Fire superhero and he can control fire.

By the way, have you noticed that in books where there’s a dragon who’s actually good, the people still want to kill it? Even though it hasn’t done anything, they’re all yelling “You scourge, you pest!” and shaking their fists. And it didn’t even kill anything or burn down any houses.

Then we looked at 70 cute baby animals and watched Kittens Inspired by Kittens, which I leave you with,

Hip hop camp!

August 27, 2009 Liz

Moomin’s been going to dance camp the last few weeks and he loves it. For years we’ve noticed this club, Community Street Jam, in the local parades and downtown performances, standing out from the crowd as they dance well and have a great time. It turns out that in their unpretentious looking gym in the strip mall next to my office building they really are a fantastic community, living up to their name. The kids are hanging out, teaching each other, taking the dance classes, in a warm atmosphere that encourages creativity.

This week Moomin participated in the downtown “jam”. Along with performances and dance lessons where the crowd was invited to join in, there were a bunch of informal circles where people were doing freestyle. So as people felt like it they’d jump into the middle of the circle and do some dancing. Moomin loves to dance and is good at it, but is a little shy. I was so proud of the way he jumped in and of all his dancing!

Here, Moomin jumps in around the 1 minute mark – you can see his blue hair. He’s interested in doing handstands and spins like some of the other kids his age.

All the dances and performances were great! And especially how the audience joined in and everyone felt comfortable.

This was the finale, with all the kids participating, and very impressive and cool!

This was my favorite dance, choreographed by one of the older boys in the club, Francisco, for himself and two little kids about 6 years old. They work together beautifully and the triangular formations they get into impressed me. I also liked their choice of music, making something old really fresh.

One thing I noticed across many of the kids’ performances was the style of starting off with one song, then abruptly switching music, not blended together like a DJ or a mashup might, but just jumping tracks. Once I got used to it, it was interesting and made me think. My expectations would go one way with the first bit of the song, and then I’d get a jolt and have to adjust how I was watching the dance! Very cool!

The joy of PVC pipe: Marshmallow guns!

July 20, 2009 Liz

We made another Howtoons DIY project: Marshmallow Shooters out of bits of PVC pipe. It was so amazingly easy!

First Moomin and I made a list of the PVC parts we’d need. At the hardware store, we got a few 3 foot lengths of pipe, which was extremely cheap. We also bought enough slip connectors to build 2 guns, and as an experiment, I bought all the pieces to try making a threaded pipe gun as well. It takes a while browsing all the bins of parts to pick out the right sizes, in this case 1/2 inch pipe and connectors, and to make sure all the joints are slip joints, not threaded!

We bought a small, racheting, pvc pipe cutter for about 15 bucks.

When we got home we laid out the plans and started marking 3 inch lengths of pipe to cut. The pipe cutter was *definitely* easier than using a hacksaw!

The best bit of this was: I didn’t have to do anything but provide materials. All of the cutting and assembly was easily done by all the kids who made the shooters, from 5 years old up.

Then, Iz came over with a bag of mini marshmallows. She made a gun too. Onward to the great marshmallow shooting!

Then our next door neighbor came over too. I had to give up my gun! While the threaded pipe made a decent gun, the parts were more expensive, so I’d just stick with slip joints in future.

Everyone wanted to modify their guns and make new things. So we went to the *other* hardware store, the local tiny one, to get more pipe and connectors and ice cream on the way… Pipe was a dollar for 5 feet so I bought 10 feet of pipe and another 10 bucks worth of various connecting bits!

We ended up making guns for all our neighbor’s small cousins too. So, if you do this project, I recommend you just buy about 20 feet of pipe and way more connectors than you think you’ll need! Everyone will want one! They shoot marshmallows all the way across our backyard, over the fence, and into the driveway over the cars. There were marshmallows all over the roof. It was epic! The only down side was, with the 90 degree weather we had a lot of melty splodges on the cars and sidewalk. Luckily the kids picked up most of the solid marshmallows, and our baby raccoons and probably some rats and possums took care of the rest by the next day!

I think next we may buy a lot more big lengths of pipe to make a huge “marble drop”.

Ice cream in a bag!

June 25, 2009 Liz

Moomin and Rook made Howtoons Ice Cream tonight in a couple of heavy-duty ziplock bags. The cream and eggs and sugar were in a small bag locked inside a larger bag of ice and salt. So, they wore welding and gardening gloves and threw the bag of ice back and forth for a while!

I had the idea to put the bag onto the bouncy horse (the kind on springs that little kids ride), which worked for a while. Standing next to it and bouncing the horse worked better than actually riding hte horse while holding a big wet freezing bag.

20 minutes later they put chocolate chips in it and voila, ice cream!

Free comic book day!!

May 4, 2009 Liz

This weekend we celebrated Free Comic Book Day again. Actually I missed it, but Rook took Moomin to Lee’s Comics to pick up a handful of free comics.

It’s a great “secular holiday”. Moomin gets very excited about it!

Of course, we end up spending more money in the comic book store, but it’s worth it.

It’s always great going through the 10 cent and 25 cent comic book bins!

But my downfall is the big thick compilation books of old superhero comics.

And relatively new stuff, like Digger, but that should realy get a separate review. It’s a great comic for adults and for the YA crowd which could go down to about 9 or 10, Moomin’s age… with some ethics, religion, and scary violence issues, and a complicated story, so might not be ideal for earlier readers. I love it so much! It’s about a nerdy, tough, geology-loving wombat who gets lost underground and comes up in a country far from her home.

Things to do with rubber bands

April 15, 2009 Liz

Moomin’s friend “Good Landru” has a toy that is basically a board with some nails around the edge and a bunch of different colors and sizes of rubber band. This is going to be my next craft project with Moomin. I ordered this to start with,

Rubber Band Ball kit

Which is nifty looking in itself and he might enjoy. Clearly it is just a big pack of rubber bands with instructions that say “Wrap these suckers around each other till they’re all gone” but unlike so many gimmicky toys, it’s cheap – only 4 bucks. So, I ordered it, it’ll come in the mail as a surprise, and then I can rummage around for a board.

***

We got the rubber bands! I still don’t have a board, but we made a great shoebox guitar and a sort of giant box-zither thing. I realized that Moomin doesn’t know anything about scales, or what a third is, or anything about music theory. He might like it.

My plan for the board is:

1 board about 1 foot square and maybe 1/2″ to 3/4″ thick
32 nails (I think finish nails will work best)

9 nails to a side, gives good scope for making complex rubber band patterns.

I’m not sure if finishing nails, with almost no head to them, will be best or not, so I might get a few other kinds for an experiment.

Anyway, I highly recommend a big bag of multicolored rubber bands – it has a lot of possibility for projects.

Watch out that your cats don’t eat the rubber bands!

The elusive kilogram!

April 15, 2009 Liz

Last night I had this conversation with Moomin. “I just want to make sure you actually understand this metric system stuff rather than doing the problems blindly. So let’s draw a little chart. How many grams in a kilogram?” “Um… ummm… ummmmmm…. Oh yeah! 1000!” “Okay, how many centigrams in a kilogram?” “There’s no such thing as a centigram.” “There is!” “No there’s not! They didn’t tell us that! Look, I wrote it down… Can you just let me finish this page? It’s my bedtime!” Bedtime is not a good time to explain the entire concept of the metric system so I gave in.

Later a certain person assured me that Moomin was right! Well, they are wrong! 8-P

And then led me into a delightfully pointless reading: Wikipedia: Kilogram.

The kilogram is the only unit not defined off a physical constant – it’s defined from this particular object, the 130-year-old International Prototype Kilogram or IPK. And a whole bunch of other metric units are defined using mass, like newtons, pascals, joules, amperes, couloumbs, volts, teslas, webers, candelas, lumens, and lux. (The plural is not “luxes”. I looked it up.) It was created and then defined as the standard. But some replicas of it were created, like the Kilogram of the Archives, and over time they have diverged from each other. The story of what they’re all made of, and how they’re periodically compared and verified, is pretty cool. And sort of insane. Is that a whole bunch of people’s life work? Making sure that we know how wrong our kilograms might be? Eeeeeee! That’s so hot!!!!!!

And so are multiple bell jars over a brass-looking pedestal thingie! It’s like The International Geek Thingamajig on a Steampunk Cake Stand of Awesome!

Burrow deeply into the kilogram article and you will get to the proposed alternatives that would tie the kilogram to a constant. Atom-counting approaches (I liked the Avogadro project, which would use a silicon sphere); Ion accumulation; and the rather sexy sounding watt balance method: the electronic kilogram!

I am tempted to show all this to Moomin but not until he finishes today’s tedious homework, which is three pages of textbook problems of temperature conversion. No one needs that many examples – it is very pointless. At the least I will wow him with the revelation that there are exagrams, zettagrams, yoctograms, and zeptagrams which I will prove through the irrefutability of Wikipedia because we all know the important thing to teach 4th graders is that Wikipedia is totally true.

Flip fantasia!

April 2, 2009 Liz

After Moomin’s school choir concert — in which 50 kids sang Nickelback’s “Rock Star”, “Time After Time”, “I’ll Stop the World”, and (again) Bohemian Rhapsody — I tried to get him to think of some very silly songs for adaptation for a kids’ choir. He was underwhelmed by the Langley School Project version of Space Oddity, and didn’t think that Sleater-Kinney’s Words and Guitars would translate well to choral adaptation. I disagree, it would totally rock and has great lyrics.

Anyway, after that I was treated to this improvised dance to Cantaloop:

After the first minute the dance gets amazingly interesting! I like Moomin’s improvisations very much. At some point I couldn’t resist dancing a little bit with him so it’s rolling shaky-cam time.

In search of ping pong balls

March 27, 2009 Liz

The two gross of ping pong balls that I ordered online aren’t here in time to spray paint them black to use as cannonballs for the party. So I went off this afternoon in search of the cheapest ping pong balls in bulk in San Francisco. It ended up being super awesome.

First I found this place online, AMDT Club. As I drove over to it I couldn’t quite picture where it was, somewhere on Lombard St. so either in North Beach or Chinatown or in between. But on the way there I ended up on top of a very steep hill, looking out over all of San Francisco, Coit Tower, and the Golden Gate Bridge. The shop was on Lombard, but on the part of it that feels like a quiet residential street, across from a park and public pool. As I pulled up in front of the store I realized it was a neighborhood center for kids. About 50 middle school kids mobbed the shop on their way home from school, buying trading cards, sodas and candy, and also getting ramen noodle cups and heating them up to eat in the front part of the store. The back of the store was the table tennis club. Kids pay $100 a year to be able to come in and play, and lessons cost extra. They also have home work tutoring. On their site you can see the kids in team uniforms.

I stood around the shop waiting to buy my 144 ping pong balls (the cheapest kind) appreciating the spirit of the shop owner and the people who run the ping pong club for kids, not just giving lessons but really making a community center where kids want to come and hang out. I feel like so many people don’t like the chaotic and lively nature of middle school and high school age kids, but here was a place where they were welcome and appreciated. How beautiful!

Castle stories and rainbow drawings

November 16, 2008 Liz

Here is a snippet from an otherwise trashed 2003 notebook. I wrote down a story as Moomin told it and acted it out with little animals and his toy wooden castle.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful castle with a flag waving in the air. The handsome prince talked and he said “Hello Princess” and she was trying to go to sleep and snore and snore. He waked her up with a gentle kiss. The sleeping beauty came back to her castle. “Hi Sleeping Beauty” said the princess. And she came into the castle. And the witch cast a spell. Let’s have a picnic, we can make this a picnic table. They can have some grapes. Stir, stir, stir, stirring the grapes. And (Moomin) hammered the castle roof tight. And the castle floor. And they have a picnic. That’s the end.

It’s very interesting to listen to kids’ narrative structures and the ways they put in snippets of genre! How can tiny humans be only 3 years old and yet know how to make up stories? It’s so amazing.

Here is a zebra drawing from that same notebook. Like the castle story has all the elements of fantasy, the drawing has all the elements of a zebra, put together in a somewhat nonlinear way.

My zebra drawing (which I am sure he asked for; I drew a lot of little cartoons on request.)

One more cute drawing, of a rainbow, by Moomin:

I’m tearing out those pages for Moomin’s scrapbook, and throwing rest of notebook away!