Welfareloser's Blog

I’M WORKING ON A PROJECT UP IN MY ROOM AND I CAN’T SHOW IT TO YOU BECAUSE IT’S TOP SECRET UNTIL IT’S FINISHED AND THEN I CAN SHOW YOU IT AND I MADE A LIST OF THINGS I NEED TO MAKE IT I NEED FOIL AND CARS AND BOXES AND DO WE HAVE ANY RECORDS? OKAY, I’LL CHECK OFF RECORDS TOO AND NOW ALL I NEED IS BOXES AND RECTANGLE BOXES!

EvilGremlin likes science. a few weeks ago, he was asking about how acids work. which led to acid-base chemistry. which led to a discussion of valence and electron shells. which led to a discussion of chemical binding. which led to crafting both ball-and-stick and space-filling molecular models. and then there were some big ol’ loopy sidetracks: the periodic table, the latin roots of most of the elements, the impractical nature of the transuranium elements, and what the hell the point of a neutron is. thank god it didn’t occur to him to ask about sub-atomic particles. i’m going to have to read up on that shit again before i can give him any coherent explanations.

anyway, all of this led to him reading PRM’s old biochemistry textbook. no shit. i only gave it to him because i couldn’t find my high school or college chem textbooks, and both PRM and i had gotten rid of our college organic chem texts. so… he read the first couple of chapters in a bajillion page pre-med biochem textbook. and understood it. and enjoyed it. and took notes on it. check this out, with the relative sizes and the binding sites marked:

…and then he reminds you that, yeah, he’s smart, but he’s definitely still just 9 years old:

this is what happens when you give a 6-year-old access to teh intarwebs. he figures out how to use google. and he sets about teaching himself japanese.

then, he tries to do his homework in japanese. he doesn’t yield to the list of reasons why his spelling homework ought to be done in the latin alphabet. the only thing that eventually stops him is the fact that there’s no “L” sound anywhere in the japanese alphabet, leaving him unable to render his own name.

making kitchens smell like satan’s jalapeno popper farts since 1972.

these, of course, are not name-brand shrinky dinks. those do still exist, but the much larger pack of several different colors of blank sheets cost less. and actually, i had to consult wikipedia to find out how long this childhood staple has been stanking up kitchens, and the article also supplied the helpful fact that any plastic marked with the recycling code 6 can be used as a shrinky dink. yep. so next time, they’re not even getting a nice new sheet of this stuff, they’re getting some shitty tub i rinsed clean of yogurt residue!

so the latest pastime around here is origami. EG read “one thousand paper cranes” at school, and talking about the story segued into googling an origami pattern for the crane. he learned how to do that, and even memorized the pattern (and impressed his friends at school.) i grabbed a couple of little origami books i had on the shelves, and we dug out some more patterns and origami paper they had gotten for christmas. then we looked up other patterns on the internet. then shit got out of control. here we are a week ago:

and here we are today:

origami has completely taken over our kitchen table. they started inventing their own patterns. i also introduced the art of kirigami, which is forming pop-ups or other 3-dimensional figures by making cuts to a single piece of paper. so if origami is folding, and kirigami is folding plus cutting… i was soon informed that folding plus cutting plus taping is called “pelligami.” and folding plus cutting plus supergluing plus setting it on fire is “uligami.”

so here are some of the patterns they’ve invented. personality shines through each example, i think. EvilGremlin’s: precise, clear instructions (he even ran the scan through photoshop so he could blur out the 3 holes he punched in the page):

then there’s SpazMonkey’s. he found “alien” instructions. 9 pages, 200 steps. his response? “200 STEPS IS LAME. I CAN MAKE AN ALIEN IN TEN STEPS. I’LL SHOW YOU.”

and DramaQueen’s. don’t know what the hell’s going on.

so i picked up the books “mathematical origami” and “unit polyhedron origami” which are awesome so far. should be educational. at least until we set them on fire. then it’s just good clean fun.

yeah. it’s special, alright. special as a ride on an over-crowded short bus. this 11-minute video is the “pikachu news.” apparently, pikachu and piplup give a newscast, but are interrupted by a metroid attack. or so the twits tell me. we’re working on such concepts as “clarity of plot” for future video endeavors. SpazMonkey and DramaQueen did all the special effects themselves… except for one caption that i snuck in myself. probably obvious which one it is.

the twits made the dvd cover art, and then wrote up invitations to their friends in the neighborhood, ran around delivering them, and came back, friends in tow, for the official screening. should you be bored enough to actually watch it, you will want these 11 minutes of your life back, but 5-7 year olds think it’s awesome… enough to watch more than once, even. the lightning effects! the bouncing, swirling, scrolling captions! the funny voices! the non-stop sound effects/soundtrack mash-up! the “artistic” camera angles!

they also wanted to show it to others not within barefoot-sidewalk-traversing distance. burning 100s of copies on dvd got nixed by their cheap-ass mother, so they decided to upload it to youtube. having their very own youtube channel obviously makes them internet superstars, and with that status comes an awesome responsibility to entertain the masses, which they take very, very seriously. so expect more excruciating nonsense to follow on the welfareloserskids channel soon! soon-ish, anyway, given the limiting factor of me figuring out how to transcode the video files to divx and then split them into youtube-friendly chunks. anyhoo. the lightning effects at the beginning of part two might be the only 20 seconds worth your time. you have been warned. proceed.

my gift from EvilGremlin: an original work of art, sharpie and watercolor carefully mounted on black construction paper and ready for a frame:

and an original poem. he didn’t give it a title, so i’ll call it “deep thoughts in the key of mother.”

my card from SpazMonkey, quarto on pink construction paper. the outer cover:

i’m wearing an ice suit and wielding a plasma beam.

the inside of his card. with the space chickens. and mother brain, identifiable by her spikes. and ninjas. lots of ninjas.

my card from DramaQueen. folio on pink construction paper. he displays a rudimentary understanding of what girls like: pink, flower, heart, star. he also displays a love of manga, given that the “front” cover is the back by euro standards.

and the inside. sort of a family portrait. this was actually a lot more fun to post on facebook, since you can tag photos so that mousing over the photo causes the names of the people pictured to pop up. since i have no idea how to harness this nifty little trick on my blog, we’ll play it like a game of i spy: after you find all the family members, you can look for the cat, the sun, the ants, the pile of one thousand one dollars, and the dead martian. also, if you can identify any of the unlabeled creatures under the earth are, let me know. i think the cluster of three things on the right might be rock-paper-scissors, but that thing on the left looks like some evil shit.

this was actually a replacement for his first mother’s day card. this morning, he made me a paper airplane out of purple origami paper. i think it had flowers drawn on it, and a ninja pilot. from what i gather, it was later eaten by a nazi zombie, necessitating the replacement card. and the extra half-hour of staying up tonight to make the replacement. sneaky little shit.

and finally, they even sat together and sort of held still for a sort of portrait.

werd to your muther!

you’ve seen a lot of SpazMonkey artwork lately… here are some DramaQueen masterpieces for you. as goofy as SM’s are, DQ’s are much more abstract. he draws like his daddy… his hand swooshes over the paper once, you see squiggles and swirls and then BAM! it’s suddenly a completed work of art, somewhere between realism and impressionism. or something. i’m just saying, it’s cool. check it.

not that he doesn’t do some storytelling, listmaking, and other writing-type projects like SM and EG, like this one he labored over and then stuck on the fridge:

the last row of characters (after “do not touch a iron”) is various triforces. just because.

SpazMonkey came home with this in his backpack. he drew it at school. if his teacher noticed it, deciphered the squared-off “robot letters,” sounded it out (taking into account the deep-mountain southern drawl that the boy seems to keep on reserve for all bad words), and figured out what he wrote, she didn’t say anything.

yep. and his daddy cackled when i showed it to him the exact same way the boy cackled when he showed it to me. also, PRM’s “well, at least the boy said ‘please!’” bore a striking resemblance to SM’s “but he said PLEASE!”