when parents fail: parrots!

macaw, y'allPolly want an honorary degree, consulting fee and reality show?

Well it IS the Twenty-First Century. Even parrots have gone upscale.

It seems that there’s this kid Dylan, and he was, not unlike the great Tennyson, moving forward in age while showing no respect for some of the great milestones of childhood such as learning speech. Indeed, from our vantage spot somewhat farther along in space/time, we ourselves tend to think that such activities are highly overrated; all our alter personalities agree.

So language was all like, Dylan, learn me, and Dylan was all like, talk to the Lego and his parents were all like, OMG he’s autistic! Let’s get a parrot, and that solved things.

Dylan Hargreaves, four, has severe learning difficulties and had never uttered a single word.

But after listening to macaw Barney, he can now say “Night, night”, “Dad”, “Mum”, “Ta”, “Hello” and “Bye”.

And experts think he is close to his first two-syllable word

Michelle reckons her son’s first two-syllable word will be Barney, because he loves his pet so much.

Hell-O?

Okay, so it looks like the gene pool isn’t very deep here, but what is the excuse for A) these so-called “experts” and B) the hacks at the Sun who presumably know the meaning of the word syllable?

HELLO???

Dylan, boy, when you grow up to be Poet Laureate, please remember raincoaster was in your corner back in the early days. Good luck; with a team of supporters like this, you’re going to need it.

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10 counting cat, the motion picture

From the Shebeen Club‘s April presenter, artist and publisher Robert Chaplin. This short film, based on his book 10 Counting Cat, is obviously the perfect present for your budding Goth. You can see the world’s smallest book, Teeny Ted from Turnip Town, right here on the ol’ raincoaster blog.

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quiz: which book of the Chronicles of Narnia are you?

You scored as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. You are The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. This is the first book C.S. Lewis wrote in the Narnia series, and the most popular. They have a movie out in theaters, though they should have started with the first book in the series, The Magician’s Nephew.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
83%
Voyage of the Dawn Treader
75%
Prince Caspian
75%
The Silver Chair
67%
The Last Battle
50%
The Magician’s Nephew
50%
The Horse and His Boy
42%

Which of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Books Are You?
created with QuizFarm.com

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Mr Brains’s Faggot Family of Doodys

Betty and Me and Theo and Clay and Mike 

Words.

Fail.

Me.

From the BBC, for the LOVE OF THE SWEET BABY JESUS, via Reddit:

A West Midlands family is playing a central role in the quest to raise the profile of a forgotten British dish – faggots.

The Doody family from Wolverhampton has been crowned The Faggot Family in a national competition, and to kick off their reign they will launch National Faggot Week.

The family will be touring the country extolling the virtues of the dish, which is best-known for its links with the Black Country.

Oh, they just had to get racism in there too, didn’t they?

Also: bonus headline on that page:

What’s in the great British banger?

Probably Jude Law’s DNA.

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Fame, Glory, Sex and Money through Blogging: what it takes to beat the squirrel babies

Jedi Squirrels unite! 

Fame. Glory. Sex. Money. You want it all. You want it now.

And you want to get it by blogging.

I hear you, baby. I know how you feel. I’m one of you.

I’m about to give you some bad news

The Fame? That comes fast, as long as you define “fame” as “slightly known, in that they can kindasorta recognize my header but have no idea what I look like way, to people who already read blogs.” This is a smaller group than you currently imagine, and even your late-night entreaties of the retired longshoremen on the rail at your local watering hole are not likely to change it on a measurable scale.

If you want to be famous to politicians’ research staffers, WoW-playing slackers, or sysadmins, however, you’ve got it made.

The Glory? See above, plus your mother will be proud of you once you spend three consecutive holidays explaining to her what blogging is and showing her how to put YOUR blog in HER email signature. Unless you’re a porn blogger, and then we don’t want to know about your relationship with your mother.

The Sex? You mean with other people? What would I know about that? Ask the porn bloggers if you must.

The Money?Ah, the money. Now we come to it; you figured that if you stuck Adsense on your cat blog that you could just sit back and watch the millions roll in, didn’t you? You’ve taken a couple of overpriced SEO seminars and can’t understand why you aren’t able to quit your day job just yet.

In point of fact, there are three ways to earn six figures from blogging.

  1. Be Robert Scoble.
  2. The engtech method
  3. The Manolo method

Of these three, we at the ol’ raincoaster blog favour #3, for lo, we are in truth and in fact not Robert Scoble and yea verily we can hardly understand what engtech says half the time (and could only get a six-figure job if you left out the decimal entirely), so that leaves only one option.

Fortunately, the Magnanimous Manolo has laid out a simple yet superfantastic planenabling you to scale the heights of the six-figure-blogo-strato-sphere. Or, as he puts it, “to beat the squirrel babies.”

You may think, Mr. Arturo G. Bloggerman, that your grand mission is to enlighten the unwashed masses, to whom you declaim the unpleasant truth from your exalted perch at declaimingloudly.blogspot.com. But in the point of fact, if the unwashed masses do not find your loud declamations entertaining they will quickly move down the street to the Cuteoverload to look at the pictures of the squirrel babies.

So, what must you do to compete with the squirrel babies?

Read the rest of the articleto learn the superfantastic surefire secret to six-figure success!
(sorry, been reading a lot of marketing faff lately)

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