What inspires #12-Spring Training with All-Star Baseball Movies for Kids
What Inspires Me? Spring Training!
Last season, the Atlanta Braves, after besting the Houston Astros in five games, became the 2021 World Champs. Shohei Ohtani, best 2-way player since Babe Ruth, swept the awards. But that’s old news now!
While the MLB teams are warming up, we’re warming up too. Here’s five movies we’re watching (rewatching) while we wait for the season to begin!
(Sorry I am not including viewing/buying links but they are all online & YouTube!)
Yep, you’re not seeing double! There are two posters for Bad News Bears: the original, 1976 Bad News Bears with Walter Matthau and Tattum O’Neal and the 2005 Bad News Bears with Billy Bob. Why not watch both and compare—But hurry! The 2022 MLB Baseball Season opens April 7!
World Read Aloud Day 2-2-2022--Let's do it!
Tomorrow, Feb 2nd is World Read Aloud Day. So you’ll be all ready to read, I’m sending this post and #read-aloud today! I recorded it just for you to enjoy, share—and maybe laugh at—have fun! That’s what read is supposed to be!
Happy World Read Aloud Day! Let’s Get WRAD!
People all over the world—in at least 173 countries! —are celebrating reading—and the power of reading—by all reading books together ALOUD today, Wednesday, February 2, 2022.
What’s WRAD?
“LitWorld founded World Read Aloud Day in 2010 to celebrate the power of reading aloud to create community and amplify new stories, and to advocate for literacy as a foundational human right. Since then, millions of people around the world commit to reading aloud together.”
Celebrate World Read Aloud Day 2022 with me. Sit back, get cozy, and whenever you’re ready, Click on the link below to enjoy NORMAN ONE AMAZING GOLDFISH (illustrated by Noah Z Jones, published by Candlewick Press).
Norman and I think it’s flipping fintastic that we are all together, here today celebrating reading—because we can. And now that you’ve finished listening, if you’re in the mood, click over for MORE from NORMAN!
Happy World Read Aloud Day!
They Call It "Tabanca"
"Tabanca" our friend, and Carnival costume creator, Ian, finally named what I was feeling, after a chain of text responding with a bandaged thumb. (Ian literally ground off the tip of his thumb Thursday last, while trying to wedge a rock under the rear tire of his car so he could drive up a steep hill.)
Here's Ian hot-gluing Curtis's "Horns"pre thumb smash.
"That's what we call what you're feeling my dear: Tabanaca. It's Carnival Blues."
I do have Tabanca!...Or feel Tabanca? Or am Tabanca-ish?
How could I not have Carnival Blues? Dang it, after weeks of planning, collecting, gluing, beading and feathering. . .
Ian, Charisse & Curtis during a "Bead & Feather" session.
Followed by weeks of playing and limin' and chippin' and whinin' bhoy--not that I am much of a whiner (the Trini kind anyway)--Post-Carnival, rather than coming as a welcome relief after way too much revelry, hit me with, as my mother likes to say, "A dull thud!" Tabanca.
I tried getting busy. Still Tabanca.
I tried ignore in it. More Tabanca.
I'm tired of wallowing it in. So now I've decided to go with it.
In a veiled effort to vanquish Tabanca, I decided to relive Trinidad Carnival 2016 by sharing memories here. Enjoy!
Jouvert 2015, we played with a band called "Cocoa Devils" and by the end of the night were smeared with cocoa "mud"
Carnival Weekend starts Sunday night, well really Monday morning about 3:00 am with Jouvert. Revelers dance along beside music trucks--Steel Pan and/or DJ's spinning Carnival Music.
Splashing, smearing, dunking in paint, mud (cocoa powder), and clay until after daybreak.
The origin of Jouvert and this "camoflaging" isn't "pleasant" as it came about as a response to Officials, mostly British, trying to ban Carnival celebrations. (The Spanish, absentee landlords, really, didn't seem to know about Carnival; the French by most accounts, joined in.)
In case you wonder where I'm getting my info, I've been reading up on it in John Cowley's Carnival Canboulay and Calypso.
“Carnival was introduced to Trinidad by French settlers in 1783, a time of slavery. Banned from the masquerade balls of the French, the slaves would stage their own mini-carnivals in their backyards — using their own rituals and folklore, but also imitating and sometimes mocking their masters’ behavior at the masquerade balls.”
As with Carnival, despite it's beginnings Jouvert is now pure fun for everyone. Here are a few more pics beginning with us at 3:00 am sparkling clean and ready to play! This year we played Jouvert with "Caribe" and finished smeared with paint (or, as we say, with "improved work-out shirts)
Like Jouvert, Trinidad Carnival's has ebbed and flowed. Carnival came to Trinidad in the 1780s along with French planters and their slaves from other Caribbean Islands. In the beginning the celebration went from Christmas right up to Ash Wednesday services.
In wasn't until after 1797, when the British "Captured" Trinidad that serious issues and ordinances against Carnival began cropping up.
Wealthy white French residents would hired steel pan bands to play for their pre-Lent, "Fat Tuesday" parties. The bands, accompanied by friends and family, made the best of the work. They'd dance and party as they pushed the heavy steel pan drums from house to house. Eventually the revelers inside joined the party outside. But before the revelry can begin, there are costumes to be made:
Carnival Monday everyone dresses in part of their costumes and parade down the street.
Carnival Monday costumes: halos, purple wig and comfy shoes.
Carnival Tuesday is the culmination of "Bacchanal Week" with steel pan band competitions, King and Queen engulfed by costumes as big as floats--some fully 30 ft high x 30 ft wide--Kiddie Carnival, Band Camp "practice" sessions and parties "Fetes" to support the bands everywhere. Here's a fantastic link to more about Trinidad's Carnival.
And here are some of my photos (with apologies as I only had my baby phone to click with. We played with a small band sponsored by Vene Mange restaurant, the owner, Roses is pictured with her parasol below:
And alas, instead of quenching my Tabanca, it's made me long for more...next year!
Trini Translations:
- "Playing": is getting costumed up, and parading through the streets
- "Limin'": Getting together with friends
- "Chippin": bouncy walking to the music
- "Whinin'": Trinidad-style dancing (precursor to Miley's "Twerking")
- "Bhoy": Boy in Trini-ese
For more images of Trinidad Carnival 2016 click over to view these by Rapso Imaging
Tabanca Playlist:
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NOT YOUR AVERAGE GOLDFISH
Just because Norman the Goldfish swims around and around and around...inside a fishbowl all day, you might think he's empty-headed. You'd be wrong!
Norman far from your average goldfish. In addition to pina coladas and getting caught in the rain, Norman loves music. Sure Tuba music is his favorite, but he likes all different kinds of music, especially if it's fishy. In preparation for Jumpstart's Read for the Record© 10-22-2015, we've compiled his music playlist. (Norman glugged them; I wrote them down.)
Norman the Goldfish’s Music Playlist:
Norman says, There are way too many fishing songs out, far too few fish songs. These are his favorite fishy songs in order of glugs recieved:
- Under the Sea from The Littlest Mermaid
- Octupus’s Garden by The Beatles
- Fish Gotta Swim from Showboat, sung by Ava Gardner
- Somewhere Beyond the Sea, sung by Bobbie Darin
- Three Little Fishies by Wake-Up Group
- There’s A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea by Katie Cutie Kids TV
- Swim by Jack Mannequin
- Let’s Go Swimming by The Wiggles
- If I Were a Fish by Katie Cutie Kids TV
- Barracuda by Heart
- Rock Lobster by the B52s
Bonus: Punniest Fish Song of all time (How could we not include this?):
If you aren't registered yet, whatcha waiting for? Here's the link to Jumpstart's Read for the Record© 10-22-2015: http://conta.cc/1L97qpM
Confessions of a Former World Record Holder
Home of the Oilers. the Tower still stands.
t was The Bicentennial Year: 1976 (and all that entails)! The Country was turning 200! Our school, Huntington Beach High School was turning 70! We were graduating! And we wanted to leave our mark on the world! What better way that to set a world recorded! Recorded for all eternity in THE Guinness Book of World Records!
And so the launch to find a record to break began. As this was one of those last minute Brilliant Ideas, there were limitations to our record-breaking abilities. Any record we broke had to be:
- Easy
- Cheap
- Fast (It was the next-to-the-last, if not the last day of school)
This is not us, but this is what we did.
We had one thing going for us: Bodies! Our graduating class of more than 1500, was one of the largest, if not the largest, in HBHS history.
It took some doing, but someone (s), somehow came up with a record to break: Lap Sitting
“Then came the question: How exactly are we supposed to achieve this Group Lap Sit?”
I haven't thought about that day for well, pert near 2 score years (2 score is so much less painful than the alternatives). And if not for Jumpstart’s Read for the Record® campaign featuring Not Norman, I probably wouldn't be confessing now. (BTW: If you haven’t signed up to read Not Norman on 10-22 please do. Everyone can. All you need to do is gather a group of folks to read to and register. Click over to www.readfortherecord.org for all the info.)
That day was hot, hot, HOT! (A rare occurrence in Huntington Beach, California, even in June). I remember me and my girlfriends—Valerie, Michelle, Theresa, Cathy, Lori, Myrna, —glossed up for the occasion (Bonnie Bell “Lip Smackers”) in hopes TV News camera really did come out for the event, and hope of hopes, snapped a photo of us!!!
In an effort to look like Farrah, I’d permed my hair. (We all wanted to look like Farrah…or Kate or Jaclyn, the other of Charlie’s Angels) Big mistake—judging from photos through the years, just the first of too many “hair disasters”—so instead looked more like Barbara.
Everyone gathered on the track to break the Lap-Sitting record.
The P.E. Coaches, whistles drawn, corralled us into one single file line winding around the track.Then came the question: How exactly are we supposed to achieve this Group Lap Sit? (Remember this is way before the Internet; there were no How-To videos to Google)
What I recall were many hilarious starts to the Lap Sit which definitely resulted in sever leg muscle strain. In these early attempts “Starting Sitters” (I’ll call them, for lack of a better term) would hunker down then a classmate would sit on his/her lap. Another classmate would sit on that persons’ lap, and another on that persons, one-by-one-by one back up and sit.
By the time the 3rd person sat, the “Starting Sitters” legs were trembling. By the time the 4th or 5th person sat, the “Starter Sitter” would collapse and the “chair” would come tumbling down…Tumbling Tumbling
And in the midst of our “serious efforts” some boy would “just happen” to sneak into line behind one of us so we ended up sitting—Cue the Squeal track—his lap!
Finally, someone devised a plan: In all seriousness, we circled the track single file, spaced ourselves lap-distance apart (several test-sits were required to make sure each of us had the spacing correct, of course). Then, on the signal, with complete confidence and trust in the person behind us, we all sat down thus setting the 1976 world record for Lap Sitting!
Don't bother looking in the '76 edition. We're not in it. (I have a vague recollection that a day or so after we set the record, another group in Japan broke it. Still, for one brief shining moment, We were the champions, my friends!
Confesstions of a World Record Holder Playlist:
- Crumblin’ Down by John Mellencamp
- We Are The Champions by Queen
- Camelot sung by Richard Burton
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Secret of Eternal Youth
That got your attention. Mine, too! An eager seeker of the secret of eternal youth, of course I read it. Should have taken a better look at the source of the advice, or not. It definitely was not a rag mag as the secret to eternal “youth” revealed was mental, not physical. (Call me shallow but, I confess to a degree of disappointment.) Nonetheless, I read on:
The key to keeping mentally open and vibrant is having friends of all ages, the article expounded. It stressed that we should actively—purposefully—seek interaction with people of both genders from each decade. That doing so exposes us to new ideas, new music, new fads, new mores and conversely to old ones.
“Cultivate friendships with people of all decades and genders.”
In case you’re doing as I did, mentally slotting friends & family into decades, go back and put question marks by “Family.” Do our interactions with children, grandchildren and parents counts? YES…and NO. Yes, culturally, family members will and do expose us to so much we wouldn’t know about otherwise. But as for interacting with them as “friends. That depends. . . .
“Do you/Would you tell your mother or father, or your auntie, the same things you tell your woman/male friends? ”
"Ok so we'd had a few drinks and we weren't wearing seatbelts when..."
What about your children?
Be honest, do you really want them confiding “those things” to you? Do they? Do you? (I don’t.)
"OMG, Dylan! That mother of yours..."
Knowing this truth—befriending people of all decades is good for you—and doing this are, like many things that are “good for us”: not necessarily easy.
Shortly after learning this secret of youth, I shared it with a friend who’d recently moved to L.A. Ironically, the friend who was a decade and more older, physically recoiled at the idea. “Young people don’t want anything to do with me,” he argued.
Knowing my friend took photography classes—at UCLA and the Art Institute, not the Senior Center—I pushed him on the point.
My children’s writing community includes people of reading age up, literally. 10-20-30-40…70, 80, beyond united by virtue of being writers. Years fall away while we strive for similar goals. That common thread initially brings us together, from there other connections form. Surely the photography community was much the same?
“Don’t you discuss photography things with the other students?” I pressed. He did; they did. “So why can’t you try to extend the friendship? Ask them for coffee or drinks, to an exhibit…” He scoffed.
Water and time have passed since that conversation. I’m older. I’m more isolated. I’ve moved often and far, and my writing community has shrunk. My community while global is puny, too.
Frankly, the family and friends I have keep me so busy, I didn't even realize it was happening. That decades of people, are rising up with whom I have no contact.
To be honest, I hadn't missed that interaction with new, younger, older, different-- people--Or realized I missed it.
And, I must confess, like my friend, as I've gotten older, I've perhaps become a little, if not fearful, definitely lazy about reaching out.
It's what a twenty-something son of a friend I spoke with at a wedding said about dating. He'd recently broken up with his high school sweetheart, but was thinking about getting back together with her. I asked him if he'd been dating anyone else. He got a pained look on his face then answered:
““I’m too tired. You have start all over with the ‘what sign are you? Where did you go to school? Getting to know you stuff.” —Son’s friend on dating after a break-up.”
Reaching out, making new connections, learning new--older, younger, different languages--takes energy. Perhaps way more than sticking with the familiar. And it's easy to let ourselves think we're doing just fine, why stir things up?
Decades apart, but so much the same, I totally got what he was saying. Reaching out, making new connections, learning new--older, younger, different languages--takes energy. Perhaps way more than sticking with the familiar. And it's easy to let ourselves think we're doing just fine, why stir things up?
I hadn't realized how much "stirring things up" and doing the "getting to know you" stuff mattered, and how much I've been missing it, until recently. . .
Earlier this month, at my sis-in-law, Marilyn Bennett’s invitation, I joined her for a week’s retreat on Sanibel Island. (Marilyn's an author, writing coach, video-biographer, documentary filmmaker, check it out at Truth in Progress).
Marilyn and me my Ist morning on Sanibel, the view from "Beach Baby's" lanai.
Marilyn had been invited to stay in a beach-front condo by friends of a dear, departed mutual friend of hers and theirs, named Carolyn. (I’d met Carolyn and knew about her via Marilyn, but that was the extent of it.)
Speaking of ride: here's Marilyn trying out the beach cruiser.
Clueless as to who our hosts were—beyond knowing they were retired—or what, if any interaction, I’d have with them, I was truly, along for the ride.
My first day on Sanibel, Marilyn and I joined our hosts, Deborah and John, for dinner at Trader’s Restaurant.
Marilyn and I arrived first, purposefully early. I don’t know about Marilyn, but I was What if they don’t like me? What If I don’t like them? What the heck are we going to talk about? Nervous!
“Buck up,” I told myself, as I ordered a martini “Up, dirty, large, extra olives.” Drinks and dinner—one evening—we can all make it through one evening.
Deborah & John taking a spin!
That get-acquainted dinner, there was no “making it through,” we shut the restaurant down! (But only after John had taken Deborah for a spin on the dance floor.)
Conversation floated and flitted From one topic to another, as “friend” chats do, with nary an awkward silence.
Birth year-wise, we were 3 maybe 4 decades; conversationally speaking we were contemporaries—interested, interesting, and challenging.
After that first introduction, for me, it was not a question of “Are we dining together again” but rather “When can we?”
United in a common goal! That 2nd sunset when the smoke alarms-all 4 of them-started chirping: "Silence Them!"
Each evening’s topics were rich and varied. Deborah and John's personal histories broadened what Marilyn and I knew of the recent past. May be we taught them some, too.
Motown: Everyone's Music!
Decade to decade commonalities were never so pronounced as the night Deborah and John treated us to “So Good for the Soul”, a tribute to Mo-Town music at Sanibel’s Cultural Center, Big Arts.
It was standing-room only in the theater. And Decade-schecade, it was OUR music!
Truth is, if fate—and Carolyn—had not intervened, none of us (even if we were sharing the same sundown) probably would have made an effort to get to know each other. But we did and I, for one, am richer for it.
Decades await!
Be the one to take that first step—or leap—across those great age divides.
The fountain might be on the other side.
Secret of Eternal Youth Playlist:
- The Motown Sound, medley
- Jump by the Pointer Sisters
- Call Me Maybe, Carly Rae Jepsen
- Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number, by Saffire the Uppity Blues Women
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One Candle, My Ferris Wheel, a Potato
Marvelous the way memory works. I think of mine like a Ferris Wheel*. When the music starts, the squeaky wheel spins for a while, slows to a stop, the door on the little cage closest to the ground swings open to let someone--or some memory--out, the door closes, the wheel starts spinning, that cage swings up out of reach, another cage swings to a stop.
I know what's in the cages on either side. I can almost reach them . . . almost.
As for those cages way up at the top? If I squint hard, I can see them. But danged if I know what's in them . . .
A book review of Eve Bunting's One Candle, on Lori Norman's writer blog: StoryQuill conjured a cage that must have been so far up on my Ferris Wheel it was lost in the clouds. It's out of season. Random, totally. But, that's how my wheel rolls:
The door swung open to a long ago Christmas Eve when in a panic, I pulled off the highway to call Ronnie because I'd forgotten the menorah.
I'd called from a gas station pay phone because we didn't' have cell phone back then. Rosie (as we called Lexi back then) and Max (ever Max) were especially excited because that year Hanukkah and Christmas Eve were on the same day, so we NEEDED a menorah!
With the last name of Goldman, everyone but the few acquainted with the prominent "Catholic Goldmans" of Tulsa, assumed we were Jewish, and I, a non-practicing anything, with two half-Jewish as possible--considering the Jewish half was not their mother's half--children was committed to upholding all traditions. Fortunately, my dear friend and writing partner, Ronnie, a full-blood Jewess and, as it happens the first women in Oklahoma to have a Bat Mitzvah.
In addition to baking & decorating the best Hanukkah sugar cookies, was educated enough for both of us.
"You can use a potato!" Ronnie told me. She went on to explain how during the Holocaust, because Jews were not allowed to keep traditions, were, in truth, imprisoned or killed if any religious accouterments were discovered in their possession, they improvised: thus the Dreidel game, a secret way to study the Torah; the common potato, a secret menorah.
We stopped at a grocery story before we stopped for the night. And that night and for the following seven nights, light our potato menorah, said prayers, and opened gifts.
This photo is not mine, but this is including the birthday candles--sans the gold paint--what our menorah looked like.
In One Candle, Eve Bunting shares another grandmother's potato menorah story. Hers wasn't a Piggly-Wiggly supermarket russet, hers was stolen from a Buchenwald prison kitchen. Here's a snippet of the review:
“With a little stolen butter and a thread from Rose’s skirt placed in a hollow she’d carved out of the potato, and with a stolen match, they made a candle in their barracks on the first night of Hanukkah. ‘It lifted us to the stars,’Grandma says. ”
Up up up to the stars . . . And on the way, nudged my Ferris Wheel. The power of words: it takes so few to coax down a distant cage.
*Wait! Before the music plays and the wheel spins again: Be sure to check out Dani Sneed's book, THE MAN WHO INVENTED THE FERRIS WHEEL. about George Ferris and his World's Fair Wonder! You and every kid you know will be glad you did.
Thanks for reading!
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Play it Again, Pal! or 2:48 Minutes More
Settle your little ones in front of the monitor, click on an Author Read-Aloud video (below), and let them watch and listen while you enjoy some lazy time. Okay, you can view, too--if you promise to act OUR age!
Reruns played a huge part in my summertime's past. (And, good or bad, are the reason why Gilligan's Island, Petticoat Junction, Beverly Hillbillies, "Dah-dah-dah-DA-daaa/Dah-dah-da-DAHHHHHHH"* & "People Let Me Tell You Bout My Beeeesssst Friend**...are high on my personal playlist.) We never minded--frankly enjoyed--watching reruns. Still Do!
With that in mind, I'm rerunning my blog post FREE BABYSITTING from a few weeks past. For those of you who viewed it then, and aren't into reruns, take heed: If you scroll to the bottom, you'll find a SURPRISE!!!! 2.48 minutes more (Thanks to Ink In Motion) and a chance to win a sweet SURPRISE!!!!
Here's What You May Remember From the July 30th Episode of Kelly's Fishbowl:
Summertime is fun time. Summertime is laz time. Summertime is read-all-those-books-you-don't-have-time-for-other-times. Summertime is I-don't-have-an-original-thought-in-my-head time.
Here's something that addresses all those Summertimes, especially if you may have had a little too much sun or fun time and need some laz time:
FREE-ABSOLUTELY NO OBLIGATION--BABYSITTING SERVICE!
"We want to hear you read it!" they tell me. "How do you say:
“ Bom bom bom baaaa Ba ba ba booo Bo bo bo beee?”
“ Oogie, boogie, bah bah lou.”
“Glug . . . Glug . . . Glug . . .”
The wondering is over! Thanks to my nephew Will O Bennett who recorded me reading, and Ink In Motion for their video magic, Author Read-Alouds are now available on U-Tube.
So, here's my Summertime Free Babysitting Service:
Settle your little ones in front of the monitor, click on an Author Read-Aloud video (below), and let them watch and listen while you enjoy some lazy time. Okay, you can view, too--if you promise to act OUR age!
And a preview of coming attractions:
If all went well, you've enjoyed 12:49 + 2:48 minutes = MORE! free time.
Don't you feel terriffic!
P. S. Should you need more time: Teaching Guides, Activities & Puzzles for these books and others are downloadable from my website. Click on the ACTIVITIES tab.
BTW: Yes, it's Beethoven's 5th Symphony on the sousaphone courtesy of Curtis.
* ** Play "Name the Theme Song" Correctly match these theme song snippets with their associated TV programs, post the name of the show in the comments section and you'll win a sweet surprise! (One entry per reader; No limit on how many can win!)
Bonus prizes if you sing one!!
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