Friday List!

Sarah's List:

Remember a while back when everyone was diagnosing each other with the ahem, less-than-happy resting face? Check it out. Now there's a cure. All you have to do is hop a plane to South Korea.

Baby resting face.

Along those same lines, science proves: Haters Are Gonna Hate. Researchers asked participants how they feel about camping, health care, architecture, taxidermy, crossword puzzles, and Japan. Note: this is not an Onion article, you can't make this stuff up.

"No word yet on whether playas gonna play 

or ballers gonna ball, but we'll probably find out soon. 

Researchers gonna research."

Okay, okay, everyone's seen this already by now. But in case you missed it, Zen Pencils hits the meaning of life dead on. More great stuff from Zen Pencils here: Ira Glass' advice for beginners, Roger Ebert on Kindness and Confucius in French.

© Gavin Aung Than 2012. Zenpencils.com

I've always kinda wanted to write about my thesis on how raising twins is surely easier than having kids less than a-year-and-a-half apart. But the fear of twin mom backlash was too much to handle. Then my twin mom friends started posting this. You've been outed mothers of twins! Slackers.

 

With my favorite twins in Dubai. Circa 2008. (Praying I won't have twins two years in the future.)

My favorite character on television. Hands down. (Not that we have television. More like my favorite character on bootleg downloads from friends' hard drives.)


On Being African in China. What happens when a girl from Ghana goes to Beijing. Maybe Mama Congo needs to do an exclusive on those roadside construction crews: "On Being Chinese in Congo."

Charlotte gets ready for her close-up when spotted by Asian tourists in South Africa. Photo credit: Jill Humphrey

Here's what happens when mainstream media starts paying attention to your country. Things get confused and no one really knows the answer. And it's not always about violence and politics. Sometimes it's about fatwas banning croissants.

Leave Syria's croissants alone.

  by  Nouhailler 

Jill's List:

We had a happy reunion with Madame Sidonie and her classroom today...on the way to meet Loulou and Charlotte's new teachers.  That's right.  Plural.  The "twins" are being separated.  Here's some reading on the topic.

This summer, I celebrated my extremely late-arrival to the world of cute cat videos on You Tube.  It started during Loulou's unfortunate 3am jetlag awakenings and ended up making the early-morning hours almost bearable.  I was thrilled to find out this week that watching such videos actually increases my productivity.  So...get working:

Kids learning foreign languages.  It works!

Image and story from the lovely Mama's Minutia.

In an effort to become sufficiently and appropriately outraged, I've been trying to keep up on Syria.  It began with listening to the extended Parliament debate this morning (good lord, those people are well spoken and satisfyingly rowdy) and proceeded to reading this, this, this, and this.  The Onion article is particularly helpful.

Somewhere nearish to Syria (I think).  From my Turkish Air window a few weeks ago.

Thinking about Andrew Jenner who confessed his illegal milk crates on Modern Farmer this week. What are you storing in your milk crates?

Image by Andrew Jenner for Modern Farmer.

Our hometown of Harrisonburg made the Atlantic.  "City of the future"?

Nostalgic Harrisonburg walk.  Circa 2011.  Red Front to the right.

And.  Joey speaks French.  (Sarah says this classic episode is a watching option on every Air France flight. Bien sûr.)