Moments of the Day

[orichalcum]

1. cerebralpaladin: "So, one of the best meta-moments of Iron Man is when they play the Black Sabbath song over the credits.
Me: Huh?
CP: Duh-duh-da-da-duh....
Mac, in his high chair: Duh-duh-da-da-duh!



2. CP: "Right. Like the Gay Bar Association."
Me: "Um. I kinda hope that lawyers actually call it something different. Because there could be some confusion there."



3. Rereading, randomly, old quotes from the D&D game Stone Tablet, and coming across my favorite personal quote:
kidsnide: "Jerrit's goddess is the goddess of beauty and cheap sex."
fajitas: What's her name again?
Me, playing Jerrit: "I can never remember the next morning."



In other questions to ponder, does anyone have any idea how to stop getting seriously shocked by picking one's child off a plastic slide? I got a shock strong enough to black out for a second or two today.

Comments

[fajitas.livejournal.com]

Leave the child on the slide?

[orichalcum.livejournal.com]

Yes, well, then he gets pummeled by the impatient child sliding behind him...he tends to stop before the end and just sit there reveling in the glory, you see.

[fajitas.livejournal.com]

I'm starting to sense a pattern here. I think you need to leave the child on the slide; you won't get shocked, and he'll learn that if he sits and revels, he gets pummeled, which in turn will lead to him not sitting and reveling.

Unless, that is, there's some kind of congenital learning defect at play here. I mean, if you can't learn not to do something that causes you pain, maybe Mac can't either. I mean, rats in mazes learn that if they get shocked doing something, they should stop doing it, right?

:P

[orichalcum.livejournal.com]

I'll certainly agree that Mac seems bad at learning not to repeat activities that cause him pain - witness his game of tossing objects up in the air and then maneuvering so they hit his head.

As for me, I'll just ask if they ever put mommy rats in mazes with their baby rats behind the shock field about to get kicked in their tails. :) Cuz that would be an interesting experiment.

But I can't think very well right now - maybe I'm still fuzzy from the shocks. :)

Shock?

[darkforge.livejournal.com]

I presume you're talking about static electricity here? The best thing IME is to find a way to contact the probable object with a non-sensitive part of your body, e.g. a fingernail.

Also, I presume the problem is really Mac's mostly-synthetic-fiber clothing rubbing up against the plastic. Washing the clothing with a static sheet may help.

Blacking out for a second or two seems quite strong/bad.

Re: Shock?

[orichalcum.livejournal.com]

The static sheet idea is a good one, and yeah, that seems likely to be the problem. But yeah - these are pretty big shocks - and I can't imagine they're good for Mac either.

Re: Shock?

[orichalcum.livejournal.com]

Alternatively, Chicago is currently the locus of a sadistic playground experiment designed to promote child abandonment.

Hey, I only realized last month that not everyone was being massively encouraged to put their fingerprints into an electronic database so they could pay for groceries. That was only here in Chicago - until the company went bankrupt, leaving the question of what happened to all the fingerprint/bank account data up in the air. (Not that I subscribed; it unnerved me a bit.)

Re: Shock?

[feir-fireb.livejournal.com]

It's true. When I was a kid, playground equipment all over the Chicago area was metal and wood, neither of which had these problems with static. Then, ostensibly in the name of "safety", they replaced them all with plastic, which is also far less awesome fun. So not only is it an experiment rooted in sadism but the sadism itself is multi-layered in its nefariousness.

Re: Shock?

[orichalcum.livejournal.com]

To be fair, I remember mild burns from hot metal slides in summer. I take it you get shocked too?

Re: Shock?

[cerridwynn.livejournal.com]

And i once slid down a wooden slide on my stomach while wearing sandals, and got a giant wooden splinter wedged deep under the nail on my big toe.

I was very young but it was memorably painful. I don't really object to the switch to plastic.

[retsuko.livejournal.com]

Looks like you're going to raise a little headbanger! ;)

As for the shock... I don't know. Why does Mac need picking up off the slide? You could persuade him to get off by himself and discharge the static on something metal himself?

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

The way I usually discharge static without zapping myself is to hold the handle of a key really firmly so I'm in contact with a lot of its surface area, and then touch the tip to whatever is gonna zap me. But that's not going to work so well for you and Mac.

[meepodeekin.livejournal.com]

If you wear sufficiently thick rubber soles he shouldn't be able to discharge his static electricity onto you? Of course he'll still be shocked pretty bad the next time he touches something conductive.