I'm thinking the article sounds more tongue in cheek than serious. That said, my niece has the trampoline, and the kids all go pretty wild on it. No big injuries yet. My daughter's preschool and kindergarten had the stepper stilts, and even with crowds of kids playing, they were never a problem. One of the more popular recess activities, in fact.

Now I know what to suggest the next time my kids want to do a gingerbread house. Would've been fun to do for the contest my daughter was in last year.

Same here. I don't do pot or any other illegal drugs, but I have no problem with legalization and think it would solve more problems than it would create. There are potential issues, sure, but the problems we have from drugs being illegal strike me as far worse.

Thank you. My son plays soccer in an under 8 age range, and his last game was against a team with a really serious coach. She was screaming so much at the kids on her team, that parents on ours started cheering for the kids to just have fun. She was really ridiculous, especially when our team managed to tie the game for a time. Tough game, other team won, but I think our team enjoyed themselves more and I'll take that, especially at so young an age.

Give the kids tips on doing better, sure. But there's no need to expect them to win every game or to be the best. Not like it's likely to be a career for most kids anyhow, and even then there's no need to get so serious this young. Let them love their sport. Win or lose, having fun is what keeps them going.

See? Music!

Such an appropriate typo, I love it.

Well sure, the internet is for music!

No on the pensions. Around here, my husband has to contribute to it if he wants a decent one. And once again, I don't see the government contributing to a pension so different than if the government contributed to a 401k for him instead. Still tax dollars.

Is a pension really that different from a 401k that your employer contributes to? My husband works for the state, and he contributes to his pension, as does the state. Seems pretty similar to me, just a difference in how it's paid off later. While state employee pensions have some problems where we live, mostly it's due to politicians not funding them correctly in better years, which is creating trouble now that times are leaner. If they had been funded correctly the entire time, there wouldn't be so many problems.

And I'd hardly call the wages my husband earns inflated, not by a long shot. His job, at least, doesn't pay all that well, and I know plenty of other state employees who don't earn anything all that special. The overpaid people you hear about are the exception, near as I can tell.

Too true, and if one eve hit Oklahoma, we'd have a lot more to worry about than just a tsunami.

My son needed a surgery for craniosynostosis, that would be best performed at age 3 months. My husband was just in the process of changing insurance due to a new job, and we had chosen Kaiser until the pediatrician warned us that Kaiser didn't have a surgeon qualified to do that surgery, that we'd have to wait until he was 6 months and have a much riskier surgery. Fortunately, the paperwork hadn't gone through, so we made some urgent changes and got Blue Shield. The surgeon covered by them happened to be the one who pioneered the endoscopic version of the surgery my son needed.

This surgery meant a significantly shorter recovery time, and no blood transfusion. One night in the hospital was required, a second allowed at my request. The version for six months olds would have required a blood transfusion, much more time in the hospital and a more difficult recovery. I'm ecstatic we didn't go Kaiser.

Same here. Folders make my searches faster because I know which part of my inbox the email should be in. They also let me check the emails I'm interested in at the moment, so the stuff I don't need to pay attention to at the moment is out of my way.

That's what I was wondering too. Hotels and such aren't creating the technology alleged to be infringing. They bought it in good faith. If you're going after someone who infringed on your patent, you go after the one who actually infringed. I only hope the judge in this case has enough sense to see this, throw the case out and massively fine the trolls.

The problem I have is that schools don't always just cut music, art and PE. My neighborhood school didn't bother teaching science or social studies to my second grader most of the school year. Kids did one lesson in each of those subjects, and those only after state testing was done. The rest of the year the class only worked on math and language arts, in an effort to get the school's test scores up. I'd say they would have been smarter to broaden the education and include all the subjects they were supposed to teach. They even had the frigging textbooks in the class - they just never used them. Workbooks came home at the end of the school year untouched except that single lesson.

It didn't surprise me at all that we got a notice the following year that the school would be closed and replaced by a charter school due to poor performance. I'm really hoping the charter school does better. They've chosen a tough program, and now have to do a full curriculum to comply with the program they'd like to become a full part of. They're just a candidate school now, but have to teach a foreign language starting in kindergarten, social studies, science, and my kids tell me they do get art now.

I do know how hard it is to fit a full curriculum into a school day. I did an online charter school with my daughter for third grade which required art and either music or a foreign language in addition to the usual. It was tough to get it all done some days, but other days we could finish quite early. Not at all the same as running a class of 20-30 students, of course.

Same here. I don't check my emails much, but the infected spam rate is atrocious right now. Overall spam is about normal, I think, but more of them have infected attachments.