IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

On my way back to Digby, thinking to comment on a Fallwell blurb highlighted today, I was distracted by a news bite on 82-year-old Sarah Nome, whom Kaiser Permanente’s San Rafael Medical Center is suing. In 2002 “she broke both legs” (well, I doubt she took a mallet to them) and after several operations landed in a nursing home, unable to care for herself any longer. Then a year ago she was admitted to the hospital for a mental health review. She was deemed mentally healthy. She has no medical problem other than lack of mobility (the broken legs, result of an age thing here I’d imagine). The hospital attempted to show her the door but as she had nowhere to go (she is suing the nursing home where she was living) she insisted on staying put. And for some reason the hospital simply didn’t roll her bed to the door and drop her on the street. Imagine! Thus, though she has no medical problem, has not been taking medication, is merely occupying a bed, her medical bills have now topped $1 million, for which reason she’s being sued.

Nome has neither newspaper nor television privileges. I assume she is being fed and that her daughter isn’t daily coming around before work and dropping off a lunch pail of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Hostess cupcakes. Assuming the bulk of the million dollars she’s racked up in charges comes of the year she’s been idling in the hospital bed, reading and looking out the window, then what we have here is a pretty costly bed. Yeah, it’s got buttons that raise and lower the head and feet, and I trust she has bedpan privileges and that the linens are periodically changed. Still, it’s quite an expensive bed.

OK, she’s in Marin County. I do a quick web search for a studio apartment in Marin County (she wouldn’t need anything bigger) and come up with a nice little modern studio with a new kitchen at Valancia Street and Belle Avenue. Nice and quiet earth-toned color scheme, wood floors!, sunny yellow walls. $685 a week. That’s kind of pricey in my book but what do I know about Marin County. That’s $35,620 a year for a dwelling. Ouch, too much. Search again. Here’s a studio apartment at Mill Valley for $900 a month, gas, electric and water included. OK deal. $10,800 a year. Much better than the Valancia Street rip-off and the kitchen walls are at least a kind of happy mustard color that could be sunny yellow maybe with more light or a new paint job. Now, let’s say you have round-the-clock caregivers at $15 an hour, that would be about $131,400 a year.

Let’s allot Ms. Nome, hmmm, a generous $600 month allowance for food and spending money. Toiletry articles, freecycled mysteries and an occasional new pair of socks and lap blanket are about all she needs any more if her legs are now just for show. I don’t think it’s asking too much of anyone to figure out how to eat on at most $5 a day so that leaves plenty for cable. At 82 (and immobile), how many calories can you use?

The total for round-the-clock care and room and board and some extra cash comes to $149,400 a year. The median income for a household in Marin County is $71,306 a year. The median US income for a female with no male present is $29,307, while for a person over 65 (no sex given) it is $23,787 a year. Let’s knock out the round-the-clock care at $15 an hour and give her drop-in care at California’s $6.75 minimum wage, 40 hours a week for $14,040. The caregiver would not be able to afford Ms. Nome’s now very pricey $900 a month apartment but we’ve reduced Ms. Nome’s yearly expenses to $32.040 a year.

If Ms. Nome was on the $131,400 a year plan then it would take about 7 Ms. Nomes to rack up a million dollars in expenses over the course of a year. About 31 if she was on the $32,040 a year plan.

Yeah, I know that a hospital bed is not a $900 a month studio apartment that a minimum wage worker wouldn’t be able to afford. It’s a very specialized bed that Kaiser wants back, which is why they are suing Ms. Nome, which Kaiser admits is their attempt to entice her to pack her bags and call for a taxi to drop her off at a bus stop rather than them having to do the dirty work. Attempt to convince Ms. Nome to do the dirty work herself.

But let’s not linger. Ms. Nome sounds like a woman who’s better able to take care of herself than I would be if in her position. Had it been me and the hospital handed me my suitcases I would have ended up parked in some landfill in a short period of time, end of story. If you don’t have the material resources to exist on this planet (I mean outside of the clay and water you got as a birthday present) then you ought not to be here.

And besides, my little one wants to visit the Great Wall of China.

Oh, Digby and the Fallwell comment? The one where Fallwell was taking back what he said about choice sinners in America (pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU, People for the American Way) having caused God to lift the veil of protection which had allowed no one to attack America on our soil since 1812? A few battles between American Indian Nations and Americans spring to mind as having happened, subsequent 1812, on what is now American soil or was American soil even at the time of such battles though shortly before had been soil treatied to those Indian Nations but what’s a treaty worth when none were ever kept.

Before I sign off, however, on the flip side, the good side, Marty brought home for H.o.p. (boy has he been in a great mood all day) some more colored pencils and a box of pastels. We already have both in an assortment of brands but we welcome new to try out. My mother has been drawing a lot, taking a course that uses Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain as a base. She sends us scans of her drawings, which has been a good bit of fun. H.o.p.’s drawing implements of choice remain pens and magic markers and I imagine will remain so for a while. Still, I asked the paper banker for a loan and H.o.p. gave a couple of sheets and I did a quick sketch of his pretzeled computer-absorbed form. “Look, see,” I said, “that’s you.” He was polite; studied my version of his right foot for a bit with real curiosity. Having only observed it previously in real life and in photos I imagine my misrepresentation was yes, well, a curiosity.

Now, I return to the land of Godzilla.

I never can remember Karl Rove’s face. Rumsfeld is easy. When I think Rumsfeld I think Wes Craven’s “Hellraiser”. Rumsfeld has always, always been “Hellraiser” to me. But Rove? Nothing. A suit with a zero for a head.

Continuing.

My son can draw like crazy. This is not one of his drawings-drawings. This is my son doing a quick deliberation on what he was at that moment considering andwhat he was considering was evolution. He brought it in, dropped it in husband’s lap, said, “This is a picture of evolution,” and went on to sketch something else.

He has about as much problem with the idea we arose from an ancestor common with the apes, as he does with our having crawled out of the briney ocean on our bellies. Which is zero. One will note that the stick-human is carrying something. A suitcase. I guess more important than us having a heavy investment in making tools is the fact we move around and carry them from place to place.

We have talked about this and read some to him on it in a casual manner. Then he was asking about all this last week and we spent a while talking time, long stretches of time and mutations upon surviving mutations, and really long stretches of time. Because for him, at seven, there’s the matter of context to be absorbed which in this case is lots and lots of time, and it’s that he ended up trying to comprehend.

Anyway, we homeschool. In red state Georgia. And we believe in evolution.

And because we homeschool I thankfully don’t have to put up with this kind of shit, (via Pharyngula) Beauty Dish being called down to the school to pick up her son who was being suspended for the day for the following:

So she told me what he did. And as she told me, I started to laugh. I didn’t laugh a little, either, but I belly-laughed and grabbed my stomach. My son stood with his class this morning, put small right hand over heart, faced the American flag, and recited his own personal pledge of allegiance:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Federation of Planets, and to the galaxy for which it stands, one universe, under everybody, with liberty and justice for all species.

“Mrs. Jaworski. This isn’t humorous. The Pledge is an extremely important and patriotic moment each morning in the classroom. I am ashamed of your son’s behavior, and I hope you are, too.”

I wanted to say, Hey Lady, it’s a big universe. Why should we pledge allegiance to a mixed-up country? Why shouldn’t my son embrace the potential of stardust? But I stood, extended my hand, apologized for my laughter, slung my purse over my shoulder, opened her door to find my son, 8, red-eyed sitting on the wooden bench bordering the World Map wall.

And there you have one of the reasons for which my son is homeschooled, because had it been me, I wouldn’t have extended my hand and apologized, I would have said something off-the-top-of-my-head down the order of, “Well, rather than being ashamed of my son I happen to be proud of him for exhibiting a measure of sanity and pledging to honor the idea of affinity universal rather than mindless acceptance of imperialist lies and subservience to the slaughtering greed of slave-hungry corporations. My son is learning to measure actions against words and make calls on what’s proven specious and rather than being brainwashed into accepting two and two makes five, believe me, he’s going to call you on it every time. He does it at home, I will not tell him not to do it here. And if you have a problem with this then you and your teachers need to put on the seatbelts and get ready for a hell of a ride, but at least his peers will get an education.”

That’s what I would have done. Ask my husband. Ask my public school teachers, who hated me with the exception of a precious few. Ask the individual I knew from high school, who eight years ago, before son H.o.p. decided to show up unexpectedly, saw us with a van and said everyone he knew who’d gotten a van ended up with a kid in a couple of years and he wanted to be there when I showed up at the PTA meetings.

But continuing, the principal would have gone Karl Rove on me. I would have gone Shakespeare’s Sister on her and then told her all about cutting away shadows.

And I would not have then opened the door to find my son sitting red-eyed on a bench because I would have demanded that he be present at the conference as he should be there to hear exactly what was said about him and be able to voice his side.

I am not criticizing how Beauty Dish did things. I’m just saying what would have happened had it been me, and I don’t even like confrontation. Which is a reason why we homeschool. The school would want to deal with me about as much as they’d want to deal with a boy who doesn’t, in the first place, have the disposition to sit hours at a desk being lectured to and told what to do. He doesn’t like being fed knowledge. He likes being shown what’s available and then pursuing it on his own with someone there to talk to him about it (me or his dad), asking someone to go through it with him on different points (me or his dad), and then he’ll say that’s enough for now and mull and return to it a day or a week or three weeks later to learn and mull some more, or he’ll sit with it for four days straight mulling on one point alone.

I seriously doubt people like Karl Rove had that opportunity, if they so desired it, when they were 6 and 7 and 8 years of age.

What is it? Well, it’s a joke of H.o.p.’s. Dropped it on me and asked, “What is it?”

A dragon in the fog.

“What does the corporate monster look like?” H.o.p. says and hands me a piece of paper from his 3 inch high stack and a pen. “Draw it for me?”

H.o.p. has recently discovered Neopets and he wants a Neopet toy and of course at the Neopet website they have all the toys and where you can buy them. H.o.p. wanted one of them that was written to be only available at Wal-Mart.

His stack of drawing paper is usually 10 inches tall. He draws constantly and as a natural course of events he has now gotten deeper into studying what he draws. He examines his illustration book and sees they break characters down into forms and he looks this up on websites as well and he dutifully practices drawing the forms, circles and squares and building figures up out of them. He doesn’t need to do this because he’s great at on-sight copying but this is part of him teaching himself how to draw.

He teaches himself animation by making little movies on the digital camera and then watching them instant by instant to examine what happens. He used to do this watching cartoons, but now he does it with the camera.

The world is art. That’s how he relates to it. Drawing paper and pens.

Tamagotchi virtual pets are recommended for children ages 8 and up. He’s 7 and the age targeting looks to be about right as H.o.p. is suddenly interested in the notion of virtual pets. He found the Neopets website, which was just going to happen. And I helped him with setting up an account, and understanding a little of how it works taking care of your Neopet. Unlike the Tamagotchi the main idea with a neopet is earning points to get it things, so it seems, and you can collect points by playing games and clicking on ads and subscribing to different advertisers. Quite a scam in that regard, preying upon children. So far it’s sticking with him the aversion I’ve taught to clicking on ads, trying to teach him relatively safe internet practices all these years, he has been taught about spyware and viruses and since the age of 5 has been very aware of them. His computer is enough of a tool that he likes for it to run just the way he likes it and has a high interest in avoiding it being mucked up by spyware and viruses.

But he loves his Neopet. He does not want more than one Neopet because he’s worried that if he gets another virtual Neopet then he might lose his first one and he took great care in naming it and selecting it. He saw if you overfed it then it showed up in bandages and this was a great laugh but then he realized perhaps his Neopet could be hurt and no, no he mustn’t feed his Neopet more than it needs. I signed myself up for a Neopet so that I could learn a little more about it all and help him with any questions and as far as I can tell the primary goal is to waste time via taking advantage of a child’s natural desire to learn about dealing with the real world via fantasy situations. Plus the desire to have a relationship with your pet. Which is all consumer-based. When you sign up you’re given a very few Neopet points, some food and a toy for your Neopet and a few other objects. You feed your Neopet and it says yum or it doesn’t like it and now you must get points to purchase more food. You give a toy to your Neopet and it says something like oh that was great or not or give me more toys. The opportunity for interaction with the Neopet is next to zero and the time is consumed with finding ways to consume and consumer ways to get points in order to have a moment’s worth of interaction with the Neopet. The more of my time is wasted (even food is difficult to purchase and prices are high) the more frustrated I get and the more likely to go do a survey in which I’ll earn points. The surveys are marketing surveys. I volunteered for a survey and it was several pages concerning General Mills cereals, awareness of and likelihood to eat etc. and a question of awareness of them through the Neopets site. I went to try to purchase, again, food for my pet and it was all sold out and having been made aware that Neopets hawks cereals I noticed the cereal store, and found it doesn’t serve cereal but gives an opportunity to play a General Mills hosted game for points. The games are more designed to give Carpal Tunnel Syndrome than anything else. So you struggle to earn points to go buy food or a toy or whatever and with everything being constantly “sold out” the incentive is to stay online until the next batch of food arrives (in 8 minutes) and to meander about and be introduced to more marketing.

To give an idea on the prices of things, cereal is 298, a “chip butty with tomato sauce” is 1106, a chocolate techno cookie is 1344. If you want a Neopet home and to fill it with goodies, you must raise and spend 1512 points for a “hand cared bed from finest oak, this classy bed is truly amazing”, 1800 for a fireplace, 3000 for each window, 472 for daisies, 3080 for a rug that never curls up at the corners, 3600 for a bathtub, 1500 for a toilet, 4000 for an earth faerie oven, 900 for a fire toaster.

Commodity Broker Chia will teach you the ins and outs of the Neopet stock market.

You can gamble for points. You can spend points on a number of gambling games in order to take your chances.

You can bank your Neopet money, which you are given incentives to do as sometimes “ghosts” come through and steal it.

There are people on the Neopet board talking about how they preferred Reagan to Bush. Single line conversations. “I hate Bush.” “He’s better than the alternative.” “I preferred Reagan to Bush.”

Adults play this??? I guess so.

H.o.p. loves his Neopet in the same way when I was 7 and loved certain toys like they were pets.

What a racket. Preying on a child’s natural affection.

Today’s Neopet news was Bar-b-que grills are now available.

Over on the left sidebar was a place where you could log in a code from your McDonalds Happy Meal, McDonalds Happy Meals for the time being coming with Neopets. H.o.p. had already discovered the place on the site where it showed this and he promptly called his dad to please please pick up a Happy Meal on the way home because it had a Neopet in it. I could tell his dad was on the other end thinking H.o.p. didn’t know what he was talking about and I told H.o.p. to tell him to trust him, he knew what he was talking about. I was thinking about, actually, the times when I was 5 and told my parents that I’d seen a television clown was going to be at a nearby grocery store, and they didn’t believe me, and by the time I got them to believe me and we got down to the grocery store the clown viewing was over and though he was still there he refused to talk with me. No big deal for an adult but important to a child.

I aided and abetted. The Happy Meal arrived home and I noted there was the code H.o.p. could use for more Neopet points , which he didn’t know about, and we logged it in.

He went to bed happily with his new Neopet toy. Cuddled up with it, all grins and contented.

So H.o.p. had been looking at the Neopet toys and he had asked about getting one that was given as being sold at Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart, by the way, is a top of the list sponsor of Neopets. Which is kind of confusing to me. Online Media reports that on June 21 2005, MTV acquired NeoPets.

IN HOPES OF EXTENDING ITS cachet with kids, Viacom’s MTV Networks on Monday said it acquired Web content company Neopets for about $160 million.

Analysts said that Viacom, New York, which also owns Nickelodeon, had lacked a significant online presence before this deal–at least compared to its TV presence.

The intensely interactive nature of Neopets has led to page views that currently exceed five billion a month (four billion from U.S. visitors, while membership has grown to over 25 million from 90,000 in 2000, according to Doug Dohring, who will retain his current position as the chairman of Neopets.

Similar to the popular 1990s phenomenon of Tamagotchi pets, which had to be “fed” regularly by their owners, Neopets inhabit a virtual online world called Neopia, where users must earn Neopoints in order to buy food for their colorful, Pokemon-like pets.

Nielsen//NetRatings ranked Neopets as the fifth most popular site for kids in May, behind Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, eBay Toys, and category leader Disney Online.

Launched in 1999, the site now generates annual revenue in “eight figures,” said Dohring, and regularly ranks among the top 10 “stickiest” Web sites–a common measure that reflects how much time its users spend on average during the month–according to comScore MediaMetrix.

Ad dollars from the likes of General Mills, McDonald’s, and Disney make up about 60 percent of Neopets’ revenue, while the rest comes from merchandising. Last year, Neopets partnered with McDonald’s to include plush Neopets toys in Happy Meals, and is planning a similar initiative, which will launch on July 8 and will include “unique item codes” in Happy Meals for kids to plug into their computers to win extra Neopoints.

The whole arrangement is confusing to me. That a Verizon/MTV owned website has a page where you can sign up with sponsors to “help keep Neopets free of popups and other annoying ads” and “to help keep Neopets free” the top one listed being Wal-Mart.

The Neopets site is not just filled with ads, it is an ad.

It gets confusing to me when you have corporations hawking other corporations as sponsors like this is a philanthropic website and we need you to click on our sponsors to help keep us free.

So, H.o.p. was asking if he could have one of the Neopets from Wal-Mart.

I had H.o.p. turn to me so we could have a cozy chat and I explained to him that mom and dad didn’t shop at Wal-Mart.

“Why not?” he asked.

I explained as simply as I could that they had so much money they could buy tons and tons of city blocks and apartment buildings but that they didn’t pay their people well here or overseas. Yes, I called them corporate monsters. H.o.p. understood the poor part and he immediately said no, we won’t go there, and he looked for another Neopet that he could get somewhere else (the McDonalds Neopet) and of course he hadn’t a clue about corporate monsters, though it is a phrase that falls so casually from my lips, and he handed me pen and paper asking me to draw what the corporate monster looked like.

I explained it is people and looks like people.

When H.o.p. hands me drawing paper and asks me to draw the “corporate monster”, well, at times like that I remember the humorless Judy Davis character in the dark comedy “Children of the Revolution” and though I’m not like the character I wonder exactly how H.o.p. is going to remember me when he grows up. Mom is nice and has a good sense of humor but she’s not exactly cheery. At least I’m a kind-of cuddly mom. Before I had a child at 40 though I had never once in my life called anyone, “Honey”. Not even my husband. I never left first name territory. Terms of endearment seemed gushy to me. I didn’t like holding hands. And then I had a baby at 40 and “Honey” came popping out of my mouth. And after a few years I caught myself calling my husband, “Honey.” It was weird.

Neopets are a nasty, heartless racket as far as I’m concerned. I’m not going to tell H.o.p. that though. I will try to make him aware of what the website is trying to teach him.

How to be a dutiful consumer.

I don’t know how they sort out the dross in the marketing surveys. I lied all the way through the ones I took.

To something brighter.

The place is a veritable disaster wrought of creative play. My desk is stacked with dozens of drawings all done in the last 24 hours. Modeling clay creatures made this afternoon. Ink stamps and pads lay all over H.o.p.’s computer keyboard. He was painting this afternoon too and his paints are out. Last year he made a papier mache dragon head (I helped a good bit but he drew the model) which he started to color but never finished it. I knew he’d probably one day want to finish it and after leaving it out for months I put it in the back room. Early this evening he started hunting for the dragon head, where was it. I brought it out for him and he painted it blue. Ready by now. I don’t know why now and not before but I knew he would get around to it one day which was why I’d saved it. He comes running in with 12 pens in his right hand and a three inch stack of paper in his left and sits down before the computer and pushes the ink pads and stamps off and puts his pens on the pad and starts drawing again. Blocks lie strewn all over the floor from things he was building and crashing earlier. A mask he made yesterday lies on the floor in the middle of the blocks. And one of his toy robots. There are cotton balls and felt everywhere from transient puppets, stryofoam balls with ink eyes drawn on them litter the floor, cut-up pipe cleaners out of which he made a small forest, sticking them in another block of styrofoam and parachuting a toy man on it that he got the other day at a birthday party. Play doh and modeling clay everywhere, the rugs, the futon. Cut-outs also of more dinosaurs he’s drawn in the past couple of days

Neopets can get sick. You go back to visit your Neopet on the computer and somehow it is sick. H.o.p.’s was sick and he isn’t a maniac about playing the games, he likes to draw the Neopets, so he has no points. He doesn’t worry about points for food because you can get free soup if you don’t have many points. He gathered enough points to build his Neopet a twig house and he was satisfied with that. Then the Neopet was sick and needed, the game said, “medicinal soap”. He had 200 Neopet points. There was no medicinal soap at the Neopet pharmacy to buy and H.o.p. was greatly concerned, had to make his Neopet well. I went to the Shop Wizard and found where “medicinal soap” was being sold. The bars ranged in cost from 9,000 to 13,000 points. And H.o.p. with only 200 Neopet points.

For which reason I now have a modeling clay Neopet on my desk. He made a copy of his Neopet out of modeling clay so it would be well, and now he’s not very greatly concerned with the online Neopet needing a 10,000 point bar of medicinal soap. Which is a good thing. A child in grief over an ill Neopet wouldn’t be good.

Lots of creativity charging around that seven-year-old brain.

And I need to clean up.