Another Friday

CAUTIONARY TUNE: This song played in our house approximately 128 times today. (I may be understating it, actually.) Catchy tune by Tangerine Kitty. And it may save your life. :)

COVER TO COVER: Today we scored the last copy of "The Third Wheel" off the shelf at Target. It's the latest in the "Diary of Wimpy Kid" series, CJ's favorite books ever.

He started reading it for about 10 minutes between Target and acting class, and then half the the way home (with Annabelle getting the other half of the time to read), and then for about an hour once we got home. He managed to finish it off and said he enjoyed it.

Annabelle will likely finish before bedtime.

Too bad these books only come out once a year or so.

END SESSION: Today was the kids' last class for the year (sounds weird saying that) down in West Seattle. So, Bollywood, Scratch (programming) and acting are on mothballs until January.

At the end of the Bollywood class, the kids did a couple of dances for an admiring crowd (moms and siblings). And at the end of acting, the class demonstrated "You Can't Get Rid of Me," a fun improv game. One room in the house is selected as the setting, and then the players play the roles of objects in the room. One actor says they need to clean up said room, and goes from object to object expressing their need to declutter, and the object lobbies to save themselves, stating the reasons they're keepers. In the round they demonstrated, the room was a kitchen, and CJ elected to be a silverware drawer, while Annabelle was a fridge/freezer combo. Both of them made the cut. :)

BRAINS!!!!: I glanced over at Christian's computer screen tonight and saw a big ol' brain photograph. Turns out it was none other than Einstein's brain. Cool!

Naturally, I called the kids over right away, saying, "Who wants to see Einstein's brain?!!" They came running like hungry zombies. BRAINS!!!!

The photo was accompanying a story on Nature.com, a weekly journal of science.

According to the story, the photos were taken by pathologist Dr. Thomas Harvey, who, in 1955,  removed Einstein's brain, preserved it in formalin and then took dozens of photographs before slicing it up into 240 blocks.

Photos: Left and Right views of Einstein's brain, National Museum of Health and Medicine

For years, the blocks sat in a cider box under a beer cooler in his office for years. Relatively recently, anthropologist Dean Falk of Florida State University obtained a dozen of Harvey's original photos from the National Museum of Health and Medicine (a Department of Defense museum), and Falk and associates analyzed the photos, comparing the patterns of convoluted ridges and furrows of Einstein's brain to 85 other brains described in other studies.

Interestingly enough, Einstein's brain is smaller than average. However, his brain had some remarkable characteristics, that you're best off reading about in the Nature.com story here: http://www.nature.com/news/snapshots-explore-einstein-s-unusual-brain-1.11836

I HAVE A DREAM: CJ spends a fair amount of time on the computer each day. If it were all - or even most - playing games, that would be a problem, IMHO. But for him, the computer is primarily a research tool. He's way more likely to be reading about the history of a video game or character or company than actually playing the game!

In the course of a given day he probably reads dozens of articles about any number of people or things. Today, while he was writing down the rules to a new political board game he's devising, he started asking me questions about past presidents and Martin Luther King Jr. I helped as best I could and then reminded him that he could find all of his answers on the magical Internets. Pretty soon, he wound up on YouTube, watching MLK Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech, respectfully requesting silence from the rest of the household so he could hear it. And he watched the entire 18 minutes or so.

"That was great!" he said afterward.

For more than one reason, I had to agree with him.