Princesses, by David Trumble

My favourites:

And the controversial Holocaust Princess changed to Diary Princess (because princesses are, after all, shallow and unworthy of the Holocaust *roll eyes*)

Just a Second!

If you want to browse illustrated books AND read an insightful review, look no further than Brain Pickings

The second doesn’t relate to any cycle in nature — it’s a human invention, and the shortest interval of time most of us use in our daily lives. The Babylonians came up with the idea of the second about 4,000 years ago, but they had no way to measure such a short interval of time.”

Steve Jenkins

In Australia everything is trying to kill you (and we'll never hear the end of it ;)

Found in They Draw & Travel

Done by Logan Wagoner

Thesaurus!

We are so much MORE than pink princess maids!

GoldieBlox Toys for Future Inventors

A postcard from Granny Angela - Koala bear :)

A Year of Parenting... (the fine art of Grant Snider :)

Pumpkins DON'T kiss the cook :[

Blackfish :[

Materrrr vants to siphon your gasssss :[

Happy Halloween with They Draw and Cook :[

Halloween (although in Portugal we don costumes for Mardi Gras / Carnaval :)

and because the Giraffe Blog is amazing :D








A History of Halloween Costumes [Infographic] by the team at Giraffe Childcare Dublin

Ah, to Hibernate...

New Favourite Book Publisher: BabyLit :)

Elephants in fiction - quiz from The Guardian

1. 1. What is the name of Babar’s wife and queen of Babar’s Kingdom?
   1. Celeste
   2. Luna
   3. Sunshine
   4. Estella
2. 2. Who wrote An Elephant in the Garden?
   1. Allan Ahlberg
   2. Jacqueline Wilson
   3. Jeremy Strong
   4. Michael Morpurgo
3. 3. What is the name of Elmer the Elephant’s cousin, who loves playing practical jokes?
   1. William
   2. Wally
   3. Wilbur
   4. Wilfred
4. 4. Who wrote Horton Hears a Who?
   1. Spike Milligan
   2. Dr Seuss
   3. Roald Dahl
   4. Michael Rosen
5. 5. In which Roald Dahl story does Trunky the Elephant appear?
   1. The Twits
   2. The Enormous Crocodile
   3. Esio Trot
   4. James and the Giant Peach  

Go check :)

You scored 4 out of a possible 5 Good effort! Your elephant knowledge isn't a grey area...

One Perspective: The Opium is Our Children

From More Intelligent Life magazine

If a Roman senator’s opium was his public life, a Viking’s was battle. Our ancestors have been addicted to honour, craved virtue and wealth, been hooked on conquest, on adventure, and on God. But ours is the first civilisation to find its deepest fulfilment in its descendants. Our opium is our children.

We’re all familiar with the results. There is the greater dismay we seem to feel at youth unemployment than at the poverty of pensioners, although some of the most disturbing scenes I’ve witnessed have been in the homes of the elderly. There is the way that older people are expected to give far more to voluntary organisations. We assume that the over-65s will take on almost the entire burden of supporting political parties, for which the young occasionally vote, and of maintaining the churches in which the young like to marry. We accept too easily that the young should not be called upon to carry the burden of sustaining communities because "their lives are too busy".

People who might once have been public figures, deeply invested in their work, are instead busy serving their children. Ours is a culture not of ancestor worship but of descendant worship. Children must sense that nothing an adult does is more important than their own desires. All political questions seem to come down to the interests of "the next generation".

I am reminded of the philosopher who was informed by a lady that the world rested on a turtle. When asked what the turtle rested on, she replied it was "turtles all the way down". Our purpose is our children, whose purpose is their children. And so on. Each generation more important than the one before. Generation after generation, all the way down.

This seems a self-defeating, infinite regression. I’d prefer our opium to be the struggle to create a living civilisation, which might daunt even our descendants. We should seek to emulate previous generations. Our obligation cannot be uniquely to the young, and those yet to be born. It is also to the living, and to the dead.

Have your say What do you think is the opium of the people? Vote in our online poll

Rory Stewart is a British MP and a former soldier who spent two years walking across Asia. He is the co-author of "Can Intervention Work?"

Elephant Fury

from the Africa Geographic blog, now following :)

Mr. Bean's car... and other British icons

Selfies...

Frozen

Geological Time

Growing Up

I'm just a little Penguin

The Elements According to Relative Abundance

Females in the natural world , and introducing Beatrice the Biologist ;)

WishList: Dino-Pet

A postcard from Granny Angela - flip flops / chinelos de enfiar no dedo :)

Other names Granny Kangaroo tells us about for this piece of apparel: Malawi = patapata Japan = zori New Zealand = jandals Australia = thongs let's add: Brazil = havaianas

the sea, THE SEA!

A postcard from Granny Angela - Crocodile!

a game of Shadows

introducing The QI Zoo

so many MORE :)

A very good Dinosaur Family Tree Explainer

So spake Vondell:

made rebloggable because people wanted it, this is a very very simple thing that i used to talk about why birds are dinosaurs and what that means and where they fit into the family tree, why “reptile" is a weird arbitrary term that excludes birds only because it was made up before we knew birds were dinosaurs and we’re stubborn, why “sauropsid" is a better term that isn’t as weird and arbitrary, and where lizards and other modern reptile descendants fit into the family

there’s a lot of very interesting detail to go into that i did not go into, this is very very simplistic, as evidenced by the fact that i used a good amount of land before time nomenclature. i grouped some different animal groups together for the sake of clarity that are not usually represented as a single group (sauropods & ornithischians are usually distinct, but the thing i wanted to get across was “non-theropod dinosaurs", turtles belong to a slightly more distant-past fork than lizards and snakes, there are many more non-dinosaur archosaurs than pterosaurs and plesiosaurs and crocodilians, etc)

if youre interested in any of that stuff and you have a little while to spend on wikipedia, pretty much any term is a goldmine of information and also specifically articles like “bird evolution" or “evolution of reptiles"

How to jump into a Swimming-Pool :)

How do I make a Picture Book, by Adam Rex

Read all about it here, at Muddy Colors :)