just thought i'd put a warning out there: i now have a Real Press Pass. also, as of 11:30 this morning, i am BFF with patrick fitzgerald's spokesman.

watch out, world!

over at unfogged, some comments in this thread are talking about undue pressures that kids as as young as 5 and 6 are facing. i don't have anything particularly enlightening to say about that, but it reminded me of a period when i was teaching at ASM (i taught 5-8 year olds, and, as another note, i did teach in milan, where most children wore armani for kids for picture day at school, and yes, i am being literal). i know you're not supposed to have favorites as a teacher, but, hell, i was only there for a year, and i was pretty much in love with florentia, a five-year-old from argentina who hadn't yet lived in once place for more than one year of her short life (her father was a diplomat of some sort). she spoke spanish, russian (her family's previous stint had been in moscow), english, and was rapidly picking up italian. at 5 she was already a near-fluent reader, and making up totally awesome stories about magical dolphins. being kind and funny and open, she was very popular amongst her classmates.

then one day at lunch, i noticed she wasn't eating anything, and i asked if she was feeling well.

"i'm fine," she said, pushing around her food. i didn't believe her (a bug had been going around in class and basically i was afraid she was about to vomit up a storm) so i pushed her to tell me what was going on. she said that her mother had told her she had needed to lose weight, so she couldn't eat her lunch.

i about blew a gasket (not in front of her) and went to talk about it with my much wiser and more experienced supervisor, who ended up speaking both with florentia and her mother about the situation. it was towards the end of the school year, and i left italy in july, so i'm not sure what the outcome ever was.

anyway, one piece of advice i took away from my much wiser and more experienced supervisor, who really was a brilliant teacher of young children, was to never, NEVER comment on a child's appearance. i thought that was obvious when it came to things like weight or odd features or glasses, but she meant absolutely nothing. not even if the child looks pretty/handsome. it seems innocuous and even encouraging at the time to tell a little girl that she looks very pretty that day, or that you love her shirt/skirt/hairstyle, but at such a young age it merely enforces weirdness about a) fashion b) appearances and c) teaches children that you can get positive reinforcement for something so stupid as what you're wearing - which, of course you can. but it's entirely freaky to think that there are five-year-olds out there realizing and exploiting that fact.

is anybody else kind of TOTALLY LOVING the new burger king ads?

i generally think it's pretty hysterical when children are mistakenly served alcohol, but this particular article takes the cake:

An Applebee's restaurant in New York City gave a 5-year-old boy a beverage he won't be able to drink legally for another 16 years. The boy's mother is taking Applebee's to court.

Cynthia Pereles can't understand how someone put Long Island iced tea into her son Seth's kiddie cup instead of the apple juice he ordered.

Seth took two sips and immediately spit it out, but then he couldn't stop laughing and started licking bread baskets.

funny, when tommy gets drunk, that's exactly what he does too!

Back in the good ol' days (mid-2005), when Catherine blogged a blue-streak for DCist and I simply basked in her local media aura, I was dismissive of her complaints about commenters on that site. "You're too sensitive," I would say. "They're just feeding their own egos."

This was and is true, but now I've completely lost my disinterested moorings. Today I made a really, really stupid mistake, accidentally posting something that said the Washington Times owns the DC Examiner. It was an easy mistake for me to make. Excellent sports section? Check. Red masthead? Check. Unseemly interest in deporting hispanics? Check. All the pieces fit. But somewhere along the line I got my megalomaniacal conservative media moguls confused. It was dumb of me.

To be honest, the commenters today treated me far more fairly than my boneheadedness warranted. But it's all relative — these are people who have expressed a wish for my best friend to get AIDS (that one was totally his fault, though). I wonder if Marc Fisher gets socked in the face by random passersby on the street.

i'm sorry: i know chicago is a culturally aware town, and the orchestra is very important, etc, etc, etc. BUT. the orchestra's REHERSAL is NOT MORE IMPORTANT THAN RADIOHEAD PLAYING TWO DATES AT MILLENIUM PARK. not to think of the sort of revenue that it would bring in.

i've got a compromise: let the orchestra back radiohead on those two dates. they're getting into all sorts of bizarre classical shit, and the orchestra could learn some new tunes. fun times all around!

Awesome.