Keep Your Kids From Coraline

It's been a while - I've been a little bit busy.

However, I wanted to drop back in because I'm a little disturbed.  The Mrs. decided to rent a movie called "Coraline".  It's from Henry Selick, of Nightmare Before Christmas fame.  It is a stop-motion animation film, and the visuals look similar to Nightmare.

The film is listed for kids, and carries a PG rating, but I would not suggest that you let your kids see it.  The visuals in the opening scene are disturbing, and give you a sense of what is to come around the halfway point in the film.

The problem with the visuals in this film is that since everything is stop-motion, all of the figures - the "real" ones and the "dolls" or "other" ones look similar.  It quickly becomes difficult to tell them apart, so it is very easy to confuse them.

The story of Coraline is something you can read in any of the reviews.

However, if you are the protective type, here are just a few clues early on that might say "it's time to shut this off"
1. Coraline's "friend" is a boy named "Wybie Born"
2. Coraline's parents are preoccupied and continually scold her for bothering them.
3. Coraline gets an early, fairly graphic lesson about poison oak.
4. When she visits the "others", their eyes are sewn over with buttons, and the thread is pronounced.
5. Coraline's neighbors in this world and the "other" world are a pair of burlesque performers and a circus/vaudville performer.  In the other world there are a couple of numbers and acts that are not appropriate for kids.  Period.
6. I'll stop at this one. In the other world, Coraline's other father tells her that sewing the buttons over her eyes will not hurt because the needle that will be used to do it is so sharp.


As an adult, I found the film to be interesting, both visually and as a disturbing psycho-thriller.  However, even I had enough after a while, and I certainly would not let kids watch it.

Are We Really Going To Let This Happen?

It is amazing how one-sided, skewed, and WRONG the story is out of Honduras.

If you don't know anything about what has happened in the last two weeks there (let alone the last two YEARS), maybe this will help.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124683595220397927.html

An Interesting Post-Mortem

There is an interesting Post-Mortem in the Wall Street Journal on the Al Franken Win in Minnesota.

The moral is:  Don't be high and mighty and above the fray.  Get your ass in the fight and fight dirty.  If the goal is winning, then win.  If the goal is to look like you're above it all, then don't be surprised if you don't.

Is This The Dead Cat?

Over at the Daily Telegraph we have an article from yesterday discussing how the action in China (that might be very reckless lending, ala what we were doing over here a few years ago) may be leading to a dead cat bounce that is going to ultimately lead to a long period of deflation and decay:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/5675198/Chinas-banks-are-an-accident-waiting-to-happen-to-every-one-of-us.html

One obviously hopes not.

It's Been A Month

And I'm back to talk about what else?  A little politics - but foreign politics in this case.

Here's an interesting opinion piece on the trouble in Honduras:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124623220955866301.html

If this is true, then what the hell is the Obama administration doing?

Guess What: You Owe $546,668.00

In what I found to be a shocking article in USA TODAY this morning, I found out that I owe a lot more money that I thought I did.

If you add up all of the obligations that the Federal Government has racked up on my (and your) behalf (in other words, if we never run another deficit, ever), we owe $546,668 per household.  Think about that for a second.

That is debt and Social Security, Medicare, etc., etc., etc. promised that have been made mean that you have a lot of work to do.

So stop reading this blog and start making money to pay for it.

REMEMBER THE MILK!!!!!!

My day is just FULL of things I have to do - whether it's for work, for home, for one of the hobbies, the kids, etc., I have a lot of tasks that I have to complete.

I have been looking for an effective tool to manage all of that for a long time.

The thing about most to-do lists is that it did not allow the tasks to repeat day-after-day for the things I just have to do every single day.  One would think that such things would just become part of the routine, but there are just SO MANY of them that it is difficult to remember them all, especially ones that, if not completed, could be disasterous - things like moving money around, checking on various investments to ensure that that I'm not taking a bath or that I shouldn't be rebalancing, or buying various supplies.

That's where Remember The Milk comes in.  This site is a to-do list on steroids.  Priorities, check.  Due dates, check.  Sort a bunch of different ways, check.  It also lets you generate tasks that repeat periodically - pay the property tax by such a date, the car insurance by such a date, check the performance of xyz corp on weekdays.

It also has in inbox - if the spouse wants you to stop by the store and pick up something on the way home, they can send you that task.  You can use it on your mobile device, and it integrates more-or-less seamlessly with a variety of webmail, calendar, etc. sites, and even can publish a private news feed that you can hook into.

The thing that REALLY makes RTM work, though are Tags and Smart Lists.  Unfortunately, using these features takes a little bit of learning, but they are very powerful and allow you to build in features to RTM that aren't currently on the site.

For example:  When I complete a daily task in RTM (let's say my check on XYZ corp - and again, I can tell RTM to only put that task in my list on weekdays, if I want).  As soon as I complete that task for today, RTM creates the same task, due tomorrow, and puts it back in my to-do list.  Well, I don't want to see it again, because I already did it today.  I could ask RTM to only show me tasks due today, but then projects that are due in a day or so wouldn't show up.  What I can do instead is mark my every day tasks with a "tag".  I made up one called "Daily".  You can make up whatever tag names you want, and you can mark each item with multiple tags - say "daily" and "home".

Creating Smart Lists in RTM is just a matter of asking RTM to find various tasks.  So in the case of MY to-do list I want all tasks that I haven't done yet (duh), but I don't want to see daily tasks that aren't due today (because that means I already finished it for today).  Bingo.  Done.

RTM is free.  As I said, some of the advanced features can be a little challenging to begin with, but I'd encourage you to try it and then comment back here if you have any problems that you can't figure out.