Issue 19: Note from The Editor

Welcome to Issue 19 of TopBlogMag.

The sounds track to this weeks issue is Kelly Willis about whom you can read more in our Voices to Hear music review written by John from altjiranga Mitjina.


The theme for this week is Questions, a theme that many of us can relate to whether it is the constant barrage of questions from our little ones whose inquiring minds want to know everything but attention spans rarely last long enough to listen to the answer before the next question comes; the "where is my..." questions from the bigger kids and supposed grown ups who think we are responsible for finding things they have lost, or questions like the ones I find myself muttering (or shouting out loud depending on the number of times we have asked the same question in the last 20 minutes) daily, like "where the hell has my post just gone?", "why won't this stupid computer do what I tell it to?" or the ever present, even if only said in our heads "What the F@*&k?"

As some of the more observant of you may have noticed I have a new blogging name, The Farmers Wife. After the harrowing 'father finding my blog and not being particularly happy about it' episode I decided to move all of my posts and comments and set up a new blog over on Wordpress which means that this last week in the Farmers household has been spent mainly asking questions of the last kind as I set everything up, moved all the stuff to my new sidebar and spent a few frustrated hours fiddling with the Wordpress code to tweak my new blog to how I want it.

Now that it is up and running again you are all cordially invited to come for a chat over for a glass or two of wine after, of course, you have spent some time browsing through this weeks issue of TopBlogMag.

Speaking of code tweaking, I have spent some time this week developing a new template for TopBlogMag as I can't seem to fix the viewing problems in IE for this one; so if you have any ideas or suggestions, things you do or don't want to see in the next design please leave a comment letting me know.

The Farmers Wife.
Running In Wellies

Feature Post

Is Sixty the New Forty?

Written by Lady MacLeod from Braveheart does the Maghreb

When I read this headline in the New York Times this week, my immediate reaction was to sit up, raise both my arms into the air and shout, "Yes!". I have been thinking it over however and I am put in mind of what Gloria Steinem said when she was told, “You don’t look thirty.”

She replied, “This is what thirty looks like now.” Perhaps this is what sixty looks like now. With a new emphasis on exercise and eating right more people are remaining very active for much longer. Sixty is not an outrageous age to begin a new career, a new romance, take up a sport, or move to a foreign country. We see actors like Bruce Willis (50’s) and Harrison Ford (60’s) star in action movies, and doing it well. Women like Catherine Deneuve (60’s) still setting fire to the big screen, give us with a smaller stage, ideas.

I am on the close side of sixty and lie about it to no one. In the past year I moved to a foreign country in which I do not speak either of the languages, and very few people speak English. I have begun a new career, and I have a romantic life as well.

Being the exception to the rule is not new to me, but in this case I don’t think it applies. My daughter’s grandmother is 75 years old and runs rings around men and women half her age. She and her husband who is the same age are presently in the Bering Sea in their sixty-four foot boat for four months – quite alone and very much capable of the physical and mental agility required for such a voyage.

The cultural permission and even encouragement, to get out and do more challenging activities as we age is contributing to a generation that is going to the barn much later than generations before, and liking it. We feel we still have much to contribute to the world at large and our own lives in particular.

One observes climbers going up Everest that are sixty and beyond, marathon runners are getting older by decades, and even baseball legends are remaining on the field long after their predecessors had gone. I think this is a trend that will continue. Who knows with the advances in medicine and research how long the life span can be extended.

This generation is also more interested in the development of a true spiritual life, not to be confused with a religious life, than their parents. There is no longer a stigma associated with meditation, yoga, and exercise that also centers the spirit such as Tai Chi.

Tales of study into the creation of human clones, growing new organs with stem cells, and the old standby of plastic surgery lend credence to the hopes of active and attractive centenarians. What was once science fiction may become the scientific truths of the near future.

I think in this day of longer and healthier lifespan we can ask ourselves the same questions we did at twenty. What do I want from this life? Who do I want to be? Do I want to coast along or have adventures, take some chances? It is easier this time ‘round I should think as we are not now encumbered with the responsibilities of parenting a young child, or starting a new career, or meeting our parents expectations. Take that trip you “always wanted to”. Learn to skydive. Flirt with a stranger. Close your eyes and point to a place on the map and then head out.

I think this is what sixty looks like and it looks damn good from here.

Lady Macleod at Braveheart does the Maghreb.
The daily tales of a western woman living in North Africa with the occasional political rant. Posting recently on heat, shopping, emergency medical care, and how to dress for a Moroccan wedding.

He Just Is.

Written by BetteJo from A Bead A Day

“Sweetie I’ll be back in a minute, I need to keep an eye on the pizza.”

Y’know he didn’t even ask anything out loud. He just looked at me in horror. It took me a second and then I explained “Honey, I’m not actually putting my eye on the pizza. It just means I need to go into the kitchen to check on the pizza.” Relief flooded his face. My little literal boy was probably four-ish years old at the time.

He could read by then, which started when he was about two years old. There is something very startling about a boy that age in a diaper, actually reading. He would run from one end of the room to jump up on a chair, back down, across the room to the couch, up on that, back down again, only stopping when he would catch some text on the TV. He would stop, hopping from foot to foot never still, and would read whatever he saw.

“Oh he’s not really reading. He’s just memorized some words, or the commercials.” I got tired of saying “no, he is reading.” I would grab a magazine, a book, whatever was closest “Andy Honey, come here and tell me what this says, Sweetie.” He would stop what he was doing and look at what I was offering. And he would read it. Not always perfectly, but he would do it. And he understood it.

Hearing a pre-school teacher tell me that they didn’t think Andy would fit into their environment very well, maybe we should take him for testing, was frightening. Testing? What kind of testing. “Well” hemming and hawing, “we think he may be autistic.”

So there it was. Someone said it out loud. The precocious reading skills, the hyperactivity and the lack of eye contact, even the way he sat, were all indications that he truly was different. But autistic? There is no cure for autism! He is so smart – obviously I didn’t know anything about autism.

Having him tested just over twenty years ago, the diagnosis was hyperlexia with autistic tendencies. So what the hell did that mean?? I cried about it twice, once when I told my pediatrician the results of the testing and this tiny four foot ten inch Indian woman wrapped her arms around me and I bawled like a baby. Again that night in bed with my husbands back to me because he did not know how to comfort me. After that, we moved on.

There were no answers for anything I asked. Will he go to regular school? Will he be able to play and have friends and someday date and go to the prom and drive a car and get a job and do all the things I always thought my kids would do? Maybe, maybe not.

Oh my beautiful baby boy. So incredibly smart we never worried about his grades, mainstreamed in first grade, it was always the social skills and “normality” we worried about. He is twenty three years old now. We don’t talk about it as if he ever had any kind of diagnosis. He still learns things a bit differently than other people but he has his associate’s degree, a job, he drives a car, he has a website and moderates a second one. His sense of humor is wickedly dead on and quick and while it isn’t evident to the casual observer, he has a soft, sweet heart.

There were no answers to everything I asked. Only living, growing, learning with, and loving, my son Andy.

A Mom with two kids and a crazy amount of cats. New kid on the blogging block, selling jewelry online but more often, talking about whatever strikes me.

You can find me at http://bettejosbeadcreations.blogspot.com

Why I wish I’d Asked

Written by Anthea Rowan from Reluctant Memsahib

My children’s questions – if you closed your eyes and disguised the tones of their voices so that there was absolutely nothing to give away who was saying what other than the words they spoke – are a dead give away anyway.

This is my youngest: ‘Can I make ice lollies?’

This is my beautiful angry-verging-on-womanhood middle daughter, ‘OK, whose got my bloody lipgloss?’

And my son - my eldest - tall, gawky, perpetually hungry, ‘What’s for lunch?’

All children ask questions. They start young. And ask a lot of really stupid, really irritating, really frustratingly difficult-to-answer ones.

What’s that?

It’s a rolling pin.

What’s a rolling pin?

This. The thing in my hand.

Oh. Why is it in your hand?

Because I’m going to roll out this dough and you’re going to cut it into shapes.

Why?

So we can make biscuits.

Why?

So we’ve got something nice to eat for tea.

Why?

But you have to keep trying to answer them don’t you. Even if they can’t see the point of having something nice to eat for tea themselves. Even if you can’t articulate a response that won’t just elicit another Why. Or What.

If you stop answering their questions, they’ll stop asking them and questions are how they navigate their world. Later, asking questions is what makes them nice people to know. Ask a person questions and you demonstrate an interest in them; your questions engage them. Think about people who never ask questions: they’re dull as hell.

Ever wished you hadn’t asked a question? Ever asked a question that changed your life? I have: I asked my husband to marry me. If I hadn’t, somebody else might have done. Or I might have been waiting forever.

Ever regretted not asking questions. Often. There are hundreds I ought to have asked.

Oddly the questions dry up somewhere between adolescence and your thirties. It’s because you think you know everything then. Well you do, don’t you? And by the time you’ve realized you actually know remarkably little and certainly not as much as your parents and grandparents, the opportunity to ask may have gone. Because they have.

There are a million questions I’d like to have asked my dad. He died when I was Know-It-All-Nineteen. And years later, years and years later, I found I needed answers. And they fell into a void. Why did I need answers then? Why? Because, said the kind counselor who listened to me ranting (and asking questions, of course, because recent history, and the knowledge I really didn’t know everything, had reminded me of their value) in our thirties we strive to connect with our parents. So we need answers. Is that what our three year olds are doing? Are their incessant, sometimes unanswerable, questions more than a navigational aid; are they a way to connect with us?

So I ask questions now. I ask my kids, ‘are you OK, you seem quiet?’, “I’m OK, Mum, really. Don’t nag’. And I ask my mum questions. A lot of questions. About her childhood. In India. About my grandmother. About dad.

Some people are like treasure troves. They store gems beneath tightly fitting lids which you need to prize off in order to enjoy their contents. That’s what questions do. They lever lids and draw more than just answers out of people, they yield stories, whole histories, they unwind the very fabric of a person so that you might know them better.

I think that’s why I wish I’d asked dad more questions most.

So that I might have known him better.

And could answer my children’s questions about a grandfather they never met.

Written by Anthea Rowan
Wife, mother, general dogsbody, sometime-writer living in Splendid Isolation in Africa.

Bambi Meets Warhol

Written by The Good Woman from My Wee Scottish Blog

One, two three wheee!

I like to think Andy Warhol would have approved of Bambi's entrance at his exhibition in Edinburgh. But, as an artist who unashamedly was out to make money, the fact that we'd gleefully handed over the entrance fee would probably have been enough to get on his good side.

She briefly considered the portraits of Debby Harry, Liza Minnelli and James Dean and pronounced them happy (although not one had cracked a smile – such is the power of colour!). She accurately identified the entire 'Pictures for children' exhibit ('Aeroplane! Boat!, Robot!,'Doggy!') thoughtfully all hung at her eyeline. And then she spent an entire hour gently prodding at silver clouds. Literally hundreds of visitors to this exhibition now consider my daughter to be part of the installation.

And then we played together in the studio downstairs. We made stencil prints of butterflies, created dramatic tissue paper backdrops for stark black screens and made our very own time capsule with the contents of my handbag. I doubt the entire exhibition was deigned with children in mind, but children, including those of the 'inner' kind, were well catered for.

Did Bambi leave with an understanding of pop art? Probably not. But then that wasn't the point. This was an exhibition to enjoy. She experienced art and she had a brilliant time.

Later, when I showed her this portrait I made of her, she laughed and said, 'I match Andy Warhol!'. If that's not early art appreciation, I'll eat my easel!

The Good Woman is a South African expat wife, now living in Scotland. Read more of her adventures and thoughts at her wee Scottish Blog. Please drop by. She loves visitors.

News That Makes You Go "Ohh..."

Brought to you by The Farmers Wife from Running In Wellies


Scientists claim a bowl of tomato soup every day can help boost fertility among men.

A new bra for men has been made by an Australian company that is designed to flatten man boobs.

70% of babies in Iran are born by caesarean section. Guess what Iranian hospitals are allowing for the first time to try to lower that figure.

Designed by Japanese toymaker Tomy, the Ombibot17u i-SOBOT is 6.5 inches (16.5 centimeters) tall and is listed by the Guinness Book of Records as the world's smallest humanoid robot.

An Italian writer decided to put his mobile phone to good use during his daily commute to and from work—by writing a book.

Wish you could get by on 3-4 hours of sleep per night? You can if you zap your brain with this electromagnet.

All links found via Clipmark

Type rest of the post here

Blog Review: Mommy Has A Headache

The Blog: Mommy Has A Headache

The Reviewer: Nutmeg from Simply Nutmeg.

First Impressions: My first impressions of Mommy Has a Headache were not good. When I began reading the landing page, which consisted of about eight posts, I was actually offended. In the first few posts I read, the writer managed to deride fat people, ugly people, blacks, Hispanics, and even panda bears. Also a part of the landing page was a post in an advice column series called E-Spot in which readers write in with their sexual problems and receive advice from Emma. This particular 'letter' was from a swinging husband who didn't want his fat, ugly neighbor watching him having sex with another man on his back deck. I found it tasteless and not at all funny, but I'm a bit of a prude.

Emma and I did not start out on the best foot. Her posts also tend to be very long, and I found myself struggling to wade through the negativity.

Design: Again, the very first thing that caught my eye when I came to this site put me off. It was a request for a tip in the top left hand corner. This is something I had never seen before on a personal blog. I read many professional blogs in which you may find a small disclaimer toward the bottom that says something to the effect that if you have found this material helpful, feel free to donate to the site; but this was the first time a personal blogger had ever asked me to tuck a dollar in her garter belt. It felt wrong, because I'm cheap like that.

The rest of the design was clean and quite charming. The two-column theme with an original header and fabulous tag line (maybe it was one too many martinis) was refreshing. The left sidebar, (aside from the poll, which I find annoying,) was informative and easy to navigate.

Content: This woman can write, and she has a clearly defined voice. As a professional editor, I look for both. I found very few technical mistakes on this blog, and I read about 100 posts. After about ten or so, I could hear Emmak in my head, complete with accent. Her prose, despite the negativity and myriad references to shagging, is fluid and quite elegant. I think it helps that she's a Brit!

Let me make this perfectly clear: this is not a Mommy Blog, despite its title. There are very few references in her posts to her children or to her roll as a mother. She writes mostly about sex with an occasional post about how stupid or boring her friends' husbands are. This is a great site to visit if you are looking for a new sex toy or if you want to complain about your worst one-night-stand to a public internet audience. Emmak often asks her readers to share their own opinions and stories, which makes for a very lively comment section. She includes graphics and streams video that you would usually not want to view in the presence of children.

Reading this blog reminded me a lot of watching a Monty Python movie. I know it's supposed to be funny, and I can hear my own husband howling next to me, but I still don't get it! I started drinking beer after about twenty posts. By the thirtieth post I was smiling. By the fiftieth post I was laughing. By the eightieth post, I was considering driving to Baltimore to hang out with this chick! And by the next morning, this mommy had a headache!

Best and Worst: For me, the best part of this blog was Emma's intelligent, first-rate writing. It's a pleasure to read the way Emma puts thoughts together, even if I don't always care for the thoughts. As I continued to read Emma's content, I began to get a feel for her very dry and sarcastic sense of humor. This is one funny lady.

The downside of this blog was that after a bit, it was the same raunchy joke over and over. I also find cynicism a bit tiring after 40 or so posts. I think in smaller doses, Emmak would have a greater appeal to me.

Blogroll Worthy: I doubt Emma would feel at home in my blogroll. If your favorite comedy is Austin Powers, you might want to Blogroll Mommy Has a Headache. If your taste leans more toward Mrs. Doubtfire, you should probably take a pass. Although I probably wouldn't blogroll it, I can see myself stopping in to this blog on occasion when I'm in the mood for a little down and dirty humor.

Score:
I feel a little bad for this blogger because she got the repressed Catholic reviewer who loved Mrs. Doubtfire. Martini's just aren't my cup of tea! Nonetheless, this blogger has clearly carved out her niche; she is original and has a devoted readership. She is often very funny, if taken in small doses, and writes exceptionally well. I give this blog a 7.

Kelly Willis

Written by john from Altjiranga Mitjina



I consider myself being pretty up-to-date on what new albums are coming out and when. I know when someone has something new coming out and when it’s coming out. So imagine my surprise when I went to the store a few weeks ago and saw a new album sitting on the rack by Kelly Willis. Somehow news of her upcoming album had slipped through my radar. I like being able to keep up-to-date on upcoming releases but it’s nice when I’m surprised by an album’s release. (The whole knowing so much versus being surprised is worthy of a whole column itself.)

So this long winded explanation brings me to this week’s voice to hear. Her name is Kelly Willis and she’s one of my favorite singers. (I know I probably say that about almost everyone that I present here, but it’s really true, I have a lot of favorite singers.) Kelly has a voice that expresses a longing in every word she sings.

Kelly was born in Oklahoma to a military family. She moved around the country quite a big as a child as her Father was transferred from base to base. In her teens she joined the band of her boyfriend and before long the band changed its name to Kelly Willis and the Fireballs. After graduating the band decided to move to Austin Texas and not long after the move the band broke up. In Austin Kelly attracted the notice of several well known singers such as Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith who ended up introducing the fledging singer to Tony Brown of MCA Records.

She was soon signed to MCA Records and her first album, Well Traveled Love, was released in 1990. MCA did a big publicity push for Kelly and the album, but it still did not do very well. The next year saw the break-up of Kelly’s marriage and the release of a new album Bang Bang. In 1993 a self titled album was released. Despite the push of MCA and good critical word none of the albums did very well.

If you're reading this it can only mean one thing, that John from altjiranga mitjina has once again forgotten to provide a blurb after whatever it is he wrote for this issue. All he can say is that a mind is a terrible thing to waste. He'd write more but he'd just forget whatever it was he wrote.