Lenore Skenazy of The New York Sun left her 9-year-old son at Bloomingdale’s with “a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.”
Several hours later…he turned up at home, safe and sound.
Surprised?
Half the people she told that story to were, but for what reason? Have we come to distrust our fellow man so much that we feel the need to keep children under lock and key so that they have no chance to foster any type of independence? I think we have, and Lenore would agree.
The problem is not that we aren’t aware of the risks, and haven’t heard stories of what can happen, it’s that “we all know that story — and the one about the Mormon girl in Utah and the one about the little girl in Spain — and because we do, we all run those tapes in our heads when we think of leaving our kids on their own.”
Except, instead of making them safer, locking them up just makes them dependent and afraid of the world.
The statistics show that this is an incredibly rare event, and you can’t protect people from very rare events. It would be like trying to create a shield against being struck by lightning.
So perhaps it’s time for everyone to just relax a little bit, trust a little bit, and give a little bit, because otherwise, what kind of world have we created for ourselves?
Get a jump on the Easter season with MOO’s Egg Hunt.
MOO has hidden eggs online, in MOO products, and in the great outdoors, and finding one could win you one of over 3,500 prizes.
Each working day they’ll hide new clues in the MOO Blog, and there are also clues hidden in orders for current MOO customers.
The first person to find each egg wins a prize, and another nine random finders will also win prizes, for a total of 10 winners per egg.
They’ve also partnered with Flickr, so if you’d like to get started with finding eggs in the great outdoors, and live in either London, Montreal, Bordeaux, Oaxaca, Tokyo, Paris, Niagra Falls, Toronto, New York, Brighton, Glasgow, BC, Oslo, Barcelona, Brussels, Silicon Valley, Wellington, Oxford, Austin, Konstanz, or San Francisco, then check the map for an egg near you.
If you’re getting ready to stuff your turkey filled self into a car to camp outside of your favorite store at 5:00 in the morning so that you can save a few bucks off your holiday shopping, then be sure to do your homework first!
Black Friday Ads is the official Black Friday website, and features scans of all of the most popular store’s Black Friday ads, as well as hot deals for both online and offline shopping.
Use it to map out your plan of attack, and you’ll find yourself a much happier (and richer) gift giver this year.
As fires continue to devastate Southern California, many people have turned to the Internet for up to the minute information about what’s going on.
In response, the Los Angeles Times has created a map with information about what has burned and what has been contained; and it’s amazing to see just how wide spread these fires are.
Urban Monarch and Modern Drunkard put together two great guides about how to score free drinks when you go out. Put down the credit card, and slowly step away.
Artist Felix Beck created a non-visual graffiti project called Soundbombs, “innocuous-looking 6-inch plastic shells that broadcast short clips (lines from Shakespeare, flatulence, or anything else you record) to unwitting passersby”. He doesn’t sell them, but instead takes applications, and prospective users must tell him where they will use it and how much they’re willing to pay. Get loud.
Sodium Laurel Sulfate, and ingredient in toothpaste, blocks sweet sensors on your tongue, which explains why orange juice tastes so bad after you brush.
Stuart Haygarth created the Tide Chandelier out of man made debris that washed up along a stretch of the Kent coastline. “The sphere is an analogy for the moon which effects the tides which in turn wash up the debris”.
