A Wordle from Our Sponsors

Once again, the British have found a way to bring our entire country together. They did it the first time in 1775 with all their unfair taxes. We showed them! We can unfairly tax ourselves just fine, thank you.

They tried to unite us again recently with the whole Prince Harry/Meghan Markle thing, but it backfired. We just further divided ourselves into people who think that following the British royalty live-action soap opera is a worthwhile use of their time, and people who can’t give even one small crap about any of it, but think Meghan Markle is pretty hot.

But the British are not quitters. They’ve been going strong ever since the Norman Briton Viking Druids built Stonehenge in the year negative 702, if I have read Wikipedia correctly, and they aren’t about to quit now.

A few weeks ago, in a stroke of internet genius, the English have once again united our nation in solidarity, using, quite fittingly, English. Some company called Power Language in the UK burst into our lives with Wordle.

It’s a simple game that gives you six tries to guess a five-letter word. When you hit enter on your guess, it gives you clues. A letter in your word will turn green if it’s the right letter in the right place, gold if it’s in the word but in the wrong place, and gray if it’s not in the word at all.

There is one Wordle per day, and the whole world is trying to guess the same word. It keeps track of your stats on how many guesses each daily puzzle took you and allows you to share your results on social media to flex your word nerdiness. I like crosswords and I like logic puzzles, so Wordle is a natural fit for me. What is amazing, however, is that Wordle seems to be a natural fit for everyone else, too.

Middle schoolers like it. High school kids play it. Everyone in America, old and young, is playing it, and it’s actually ever so slightly educational. It makes you think. It makes you use your vocabulary. It might even teach you a new five-letter word, instead of all the four-letter words that come so naturally to you.

It doesn’t have fast moving graphics. It doesn’t have any graphics, at all, really. It has no guns, no cars, no explosions. Just six blank five-letter word slots, waiting for you to start guessing. And kids are actually into it! It’s amazing. What will those crazy British come up with next? First that fun baking show and now thi… wait, what?

Wordle isn’t from England? But the website is powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle

What? Anyone can have a .uk domain? It’s not restricted to residents and businesses of the United Kingdom? Well, that’s weird.

So, you mean to tell me that powerlanguage.co.uk is not British at all? It’s just some dude named Josh from New York?

No kidding?

Wow. Well, sorry, Old Original York, I guess you guys don’t get the credit after all. But keep after it. We believe in you, even if you couldn’t keep Meghan Markle around.

And thanks, Josh! Wordle is awesome.

Wait… what’s that?

The New York Times bought it from you last week?

Oh, OK, well, congratulations on the sale. Enjoy your early retirement. We’ll keep playing your cool game until the Times inevitably screws it all up.

It certainly has been fun.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2022 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Clash of Siblings

My wife and I caved. We caved hard.

Well, to be fair, since she’s going to read this and I don’t want to get into more trouble than I’m already in, it was probably me who did most of the caving.

OK, all of it.

She already went back to school. That’s essentially the problem. She left me here all alone with the three boys. We had a fun summer, and together we played fairly effective man-down zone defense. But now she’s off enjoying the peace and quiet of teaching high school math, and I’m stranded here, a week before the boys go back to school, hopelessly outnumbered three to one.

There was nothing I could do. They got on my last nerve. I was out of options. I snapped.

Sure, I tried movies. We watched them all. We watched the Batman movies. Everything from Lego Batman to Keaton, Clooney, all the way through Christian Bale, and into the who-paid-to-have-this-guy-cast-as-batman Ben Affleck debacle.

We watched Planet of the Apes, Rise of Planet of the Apes, and Dawn of Planet of the Apes. I have no idea why.

We watched Paul Blart, Mall Cop 2. Twice. You heard me.

When we passed through Ocean’s Eleven and got all the way to Captain Ron, I finally said enough is enough. I was considering calling Child Protective Services on myself.

“Get away from the TV! Go find something to do.”

The things they found to do were argue, yell at each other, get into fights, and cry.

“Go get in the pool!”

In the pool, they forgot to swim. Instead they decided to argue, yell at each other, get into fights, and cry.

“OK, fine. If you can’t get along, we’ll do chores! How do you like them apples?”

We cleaned the house. We cleaned the backyard. We trimmed trees. We cut grass. We weeded vast expanses of lawn. We washed cars. And during it all they decided to argue, yell at each other, get into fights, and cry.

I simply couldn’t take it anymore. Like I said, I snapped.

We have always had a “no video games” rule in our house. In general, my wife and I believe that video games warp their tiny brains and turn them into moody, obsessed, psychotic little blobs of pasty-white flesh.

I still believe that, but I just don’t care anymore.

“Here’s an iPad. Why don’t you get that Clash Royale game you heard about?”

“What? Dad, are you feeling OK?”

“Shut up and get the game.”

They have all since graduated to something called Clash of Clans, and they are officially obsessed. They have learned an entirely new language in just a few short days. The people at Rosetta Stone should look into this technology for language acquisition.

Here’s a sample conversation I just heard when I was able to pry them away from the screens long enough to eat lunch:

“Bro, what if you put your dark elixir in front of your magic archer, with a dragon queen and a scarmy behind them?”

“Dude, then you could totally balloon a city hall with your pekka. But your barracks would be completely hard-pushed.”

“Not if your wall breakers were in front of a barbarian king or an archer queen. Then your goblins could balloon a hog rider, with a lava bowler hound golem….”

I tuned out after that.

We don’t have normal conversations anymore. It’s all they can talk about, 24/7, but I don’t care. Because they are talking, not yelling.

For now, I will take it. I will pull the plug the minute school starts and go back to being a responsible parent who cares about their mental health.

“How much longer can we play?”

“Shut up and play the game. Don’t ask questions.”

Right now, we’re dealing with my mental health.

School cannot start soon enough.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2019 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Screen your Kids for Drugs

Our kids are getting addicted to screen time. No, not like, “Yeah, we should cut back on that a little.” Like you might as well be giving your kids crack.

A guy named Dr. Nicholas Kardaras just wrote a book called Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction is Hijacking our Kids – and How to Break the Trance. I recently read his article on the subject, and although I have never heard of the man before, my usual exhaustive two-minute Google search confirmed that despite the similarity in last names, he is in no way related to or associated with the Kardashians, so he’s OK in my book.

It was a short article, but filled with references to studies by other smart-sounding people from places like UCLA and the Pentagon, all saying the same thing: Screens are REALLY bad for kids!

Here’s the scary upshot - screens affect the brain’s frontal cortex - which is presumably in the front, and apparently in control executive functions including impulse control – exactly the same way cocaine does. In other words, a brain on Minecraft looks the same as a brain on drugs. They also said technology is so hyper-arousing that it raises dopamine levels as much as sex.

So apparently, instead of more screen time, you might as well be encouraging your kids to have sex, smoke crack, or, depending on how much screen time they get every day, both.

In fact, as the article points out, besides the obvious negative health effects of drugs, they might actually be a better thing for a human to become addicted to, because quitting is easier. It’s much simpler to get into a drug-free environment than a screen-free one, unless you happen to be someplace like Tijuana, Columbia, or Detroit.

That’s it for Casa de Smidge. No more screens.

I have always had a natural inclination to limit our boys’ screen time. My only real reasoning when I started was, “I didn’t have them as a kid, so you don’t need them.” That logic is good enough for me, and I also apply it to things like GoPro cameras, hoverboard scooters, five hundred-dollar baseball bats, and name-brand breakfast cereals. It saves us quite a bit of money every year.

We don’t have any game consoles, and they don’t have any handheld devices other than our old smartphones. Well, after this article, those are officially gone now, too.

Now that our kids will have no home screen time at all except for the occasional TV show or movie, I have come up with a list of alternate activities since I know we’ll need to be ready for the pushback from our crack-addicted children as they detox from the glow.

A short list of things to do when you feel the need to stare at a screen:

- Go swim in our pool. Or sit next to the pool and stare at the water. It sorta glows like a screen. Or wait until I’m not paying attention and get the ladder, climb up onto the patio roof and see if you can jump all the way into the deep end. Even if you miss and break your legs, that hospital visit will be better than checking into a rehab clinic. Plus, you will have learned a far more valuable lesson about velocity, trajectory, and gravity than you could have ever gleaned from Angry Birds.

- Burn ants with a magnifying glass. It’s far more useful to me than you killing zombies on a screen, because we will have less ants. Plus, at some point, your feeble little mind will put your finger under the glass to see just how hot it is, and you’ll learn a real-life lesson about focal point energy than simply cannot be taught with a Play Station.

- Make a mud pie. It’s messy. There is no life lesson to be learned. It’s just fun and squishy. Plus, it will give us a great excuse to make you take a shower.

- Run. It’s handy, because the more you run, the faster you get. Remember – you don’t have to be faster than the bear. You just have to be faster than the video game kid you were standing next to when you saw the bear.

- Do some pull-ups. They are handy for when you need to climb up, over, or out of something. You’ll be back up on the right side of the zoo fence while the video game kid is still stuck in the gorilla’s enclosure.

- Read a book. Your dad is an author, for goodness sake. Let’s keep up appearances.

- Learn to make cocktails. It’s a skill you’re going to want later in life, and it would be great if I could just order stuff instead of having to make it myself.

- Learn to cook. See above.

- Play with your Legos. They’re like Minecraft, but you can touch them. You have no idea how jealous I am of your fancy curved Legos, your Star Wars Legos, and your Legos that actually shoot projectiles. You are spoiled beyond belief when it comes to Legos. Earn it!

- Open a lemonade stand. We used to be OK with the computer games where you ran a restaurant or ran a hotel, thinking at least they were educational, but no more. Run an actual business that makes actual products to sell to actual people. You will learn so much more, and you will make actual money. I will then teach you about something the video games never did: expenses. You will pay me rent, you will pay me for the supplies, and I will tax your profits. Welcome to reality.

- Wander around the neighborhood. It’ll be just like Pokemon Go, but without the screen. You’ll actually notice actual physical things around you, and you’ll be forced to figure out which way to go to get home, without the help of Google Maps. That’s an important skill that almost no one your age will grow up with.

- Play an instrument. It will get you girls later. Video games will not.

- Ride your bike off a jump. It’s fun in a way that video games can never be. You might get hurt. That’s good. You can’t get hurt playing video games. Not being able to get hurt is bad. Nothing good in life comes without risk.

- Make nachos. Share them with your father. Nachos are delicious.

- When all else fails and you can’t think of anything else to do, take a nap. You will get nothing accomplished at all and it will still be better for you than screen time. Plus, you’ll be less grumpy.

In the meantime, you will hate me because I am unfair and all your friends get to play video games and I am unfair and mean and unfair. I’m perfectly OK with that, because when you are not busy resenting me you will be able to concentrate on solving a problem. You will be able to create a story in your mind and then communicate it to another person coherently. You will be able to have a conversation with another human being that involves eye contact and active listening. You will stand up straight. You will be able to survive outdoors. You will be strong and tanned and tough.

And I don’t want you to worry for a second about “falling behind” when it comes to technology. You’ll be just fine. You are smart and resourceful. When you grow up there will be people your age who will know far more about the inner workings of the devices you all use. There will be people your age who will be far better able to create the “code” to make things work. That’s just fine. In fact, it’s great.

You’ll hire those people.

I love you,

Dad.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2016 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

The Rainbow Loom

Just when you thought that video games and smartphones were going to render an entire generation of youngsters completely socially retarded, I may have found a glimmer of hope. I think I just came up with a way to save them from themselves. It involves sweatshops and forced labor. We’ll get to that in a minute.

I volunteer in Son Number One’s third grade class every week. By “volunteer,” I of course mean that my wife forces me to go. Any healthy, sane, adult male would never enter a room full of 25 eight and nine-year-olds willingly. The other day I took the Xanax she provides me to steady my nerves, and in I went. I was tasked by the wide-eyed, frazzled-looking teacher to help the children with their subject and predicate worksheets. Being a professional writer, I had to quickly Google what the hell a predicate was, and once I re-learned that, I was ready to help them. The assignment was to come up with a subject to go with the provided predicate, and make a complete sentence. For instance, if the predicate provided was “jumped into the lake,” you would provide the subject “I,” or “The frog,” and then write the sentence “The frog jumped into the lake.” Simple.

Most of the children came up with subjects for all the different predicates that you would expect, such as “Sally,” “My sister,” “My mother,” “The boys,” etc. One kid, however, was on a slightly different wavelength than the rest of the class. When I went to correct his worksheet, I thought at first he might have been writing in some language other than English. The first subject he had come up with was Ratblaster1879. The next one was MegaMinecraftOne, and so on. After a second, I asked him, “Are these user names for video games?”

“Yes.”

“OK. Can you please sit back down in your seat? Everyone else was going with things like actual people and actual animals. MonsterBattle595 isn’t really a very good subject. It isn’t even English, actually, without the spaces.”

“How come your son doesn’t have any video games? I asked him what he had and he told me he didn’t have any at all. Do you really not have any video games at your house?”

“Nope. None. Can you please sit back down in your seat?”

“Why not?”

I fought off the urge to say, “Your worksheet here is the reason,” and instead just went with, “We don’t like them very much at our house. We have books instead. Can you please sit back down in your seat?”

He just stared at me blankly. I don’t think his little eight-year-old brain full of far-too-rapidly-vibrating electrons could comprehend a world without hand-held controllers and 950 gigabytes of input per second.

Hmm… This kid is not going to be able to carry on a normal conversation in a few years if his video game habit keeps up. Which brings us to my plan…

The glimmer of hope I have found is the Rainbow Loom. It seems to have the same transfixing properties on children that video games have, but without the negative side effects. If “looming” has not hit your town yet, rest assured that it is looming right around the corner. The Rainbow Loom is roughly 59 cents worth of plastic that sells for $19.95 at a store near you. It consists of 3 rows of pegs, 39 pegs in all, that you stretch tiny colored rubber bands over, weaving them into ornate patterns by hooking and unhooking them over each other with a 10-cent plastic crochet hook. Add a 1/2-cent “C” clip to hook the ends together when you’re done, and voila, you have an ornate bracelet made out of rubber bands.

My boys got their little plastic loom on Saturday, and have made approximately 300 bracelets in four days. I consider it to be a pretty decent use of their time, since it is a craft, and since it enhances fine motor skills. Also, I now have some pretty killer rubber band bling on my wrists. You’re jealous. The only problem I can find with looming is the expense. Apparently, rubber band looms are like computer printers. The initial cost of the device is low, but the ongoing supplies are expensive. In fact, the little colored rubber bands make printer ink look cheap. My kids are cranking though about $2000 worth of rubber bands per minute. Add into that the inevitable vacuum cleaner repairs in my future when enough of the little bands get sucked from their hiding places and wrapped around the beater bar, and looming might be a bank-breaker.

The negative financial aspects of owning a Rainbow Loom are not the glimmer of hope I spoke of earlier. The glimmer came when my wife first used the word “crochet” to describe to one of our sons what he was really doing when he hooked together the individual rubber bands to form a braid. Wait a second, I said to myself, these boys are learning to crochet with this thing?

Dollar signs lit up in my head. Not the outgoing dollars signs from the apparently gold-plated little rubber bands, but incoming dollar signs from my brilliant, partially formed new plan. You see, my wife is a lightning-fast crochet-er. She can whip out a baby blanket in a few short hours, and if you gave her a few days and enough yarn, she could probably make you a boat cozy. She runs the hook without even looking at it. She also happens to be pretty impressive with a sewing machine.

Kids get the hang of bracelet making in no time on these plastic looms, so why couldn’t they just as easily learn to crochet a blanket, or a sweater? And if crocheting comes so easily to them, why couldn’t they run a sewing machine with a little instruction? The Rainbow Loom has the magical power to keep them mesmerized and busily occupied for hours, so why wouldn’t kids have just as much fun sewing together a pair of knock-off designer jeans?

Just think of all that positive creative energy that could be channeled away from video games and silly rubber band bracelets and put to good use making counterfeit clothing that I can sell on the black market at a ridiculous profit. Simple. I am off to get 30 or 40 used sewing machines and supplies. You can send your kids over after school on weekdays and all day on weekends, and we’ll have them back to you before bed time.

Freedom from mind-altering video games, learning a new skill, and no more rubber band expenses should be payment enough for their time, don’t you think? Plus, I will read them classic literature over a loudspeaker, expanding their brains while their little fingers work to make me millions. It’s a win-win-win.

That kid in Son Number One’s class can thank me later.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2013 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!