Skip to main content

One for my Mom--

A few days late for Mother's Day, but so it goes.

Growing up as the son of an epidemiologist, public safety concerns were a prominent part of my upbringing. In particular, the importance of wearing a bike helmet when riding a bike was well and thoroughly established. To this day I think I could total up the number of times I've ridden my bike helmetless on two hands. I definitely owe a large part of my making it through childhood without suffering a traumatic brain injury to my safety-conscious mother.

So, when boingboing featured three articles related to bike-helmetry on three consecutive days it just seemed proper to provide links, and to give my beloved mother some props. Plus she's one of my only commenters, so I've gotta keep her happy. ;)

Why wear a bike helmet? Baseball bat wielding thugs!

Why wear a bike helmet? Protection against getting your head run over by a truck!

Why wear a bike helmet? It makes jerk drivers harass you!


And as Mom remembers below, I did have at least one helmet-wrecking crash in my youth. Plus that one time I inhaled too much helium out of a baloon and passed out for what seemed like a black-and-white lifetime, but was really only a few seconds. Dad said the sound my helmeted head made as it hit the asphalt made his blood run cold (paraphrase).

Comments

Anonymous said…
Finally, dual recognition as a noted blog commenter AND a nag...(just kidding). Pretty amazing about the kid whose head was run over by a bike - and just think how happy *his* mother must have been. Do you remember when you fell off your bike and broke your helmet? Dave was poopooing (sort of like boingboing but different) the crash until you held up your broken helmet.
Hope you are all done and enjoying you life in a school-free zone - and thank you, Andy dear, for wearing your helmet. Ma.
Mr Tambo said…
Hi Mom---

Just to clarify, "Dave" is my father, aka Dr. Dave. And I'm not in the school-free-zone just yet, but I am in the home stretch.

Popular posts from this blog

Be true to your school now!

This is a cross-posting of a comment I left on peacebang.com's recent post about my school, Starr King School for the Ministry. PeaceBang, who is apparently a UU Minister in the Northeast, posted a few days ago an item about my school's supposed "banning" of the term, "brown bag lunch," because of the racialized connotations of brown bags.* Her post was, to my reading, haughty and dismissive, and she seemed awfully pleased with her own wit and ability to take cheap shots at others with little to no basis for her opinions. I think the comments for that post are up to 40, and it's a pretty lively back and forth. So, here is my contribution: "This may not be the ideal forum for “deep, serious conversation,” but one of the cornerstones of Educating to Counter Oppression is the importance of having deep, serious conversations wherever they happen. The status quo of “waiting for the right moment or forum” to engage with these issues too often leads to...

Family and Gender in Ancient Rome

I mentioned below that Prof. Diane Lipsett delivered a wonderful lecture on the conversation currently taking place between New Testament scholars, family historians, social archaeologists and the like. The title of this post is actually the title of en entire semester-long course taught by Prof. Lipsett, so for our, geez, ninety minute session she condensed her focus to Men, Women, and Children in Ancient Rome. With her permission, I am posting my notes from this lecture below, tweaked a little for readability. Prof. Lipsett is interested in studies of gender formation among non-elites as well as elites, those people about whom we know much less because they did not have the resources or clout to commemorate and study themselves, generally speaking. Roman households were much broader than we conceive of in modern terms, with a wide spectrum of people connected by family and employment living under one roof (the terms domus/eikos/ikea capture this idea of an indiscriminate household...

Suspicious? What month is it?

So I had a great post written on questions of agency and identity as explored through Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men and High Fidelity (I focussed more on the film by Stephen Frears than on the original Nick Hornby book), and it mysteriously disappeared. I, of course, blame the government . The crux of my post was that letting outside events and relationships with other people shape your life is fundamentally selfish , and that each of us bears responsibility for claiming our own agency . One of my favorite lines from Richard Linklater's Waking Life is an offhanded remark by a passerby , late in the movie, who tells the nameless protagonist (played by Wiley Wiggins ) "As the pattern becomes more complex , it is no longer sufficient to be swept along," or something like the same. The patterns are becoming more complex, and we face peril if we are satisfied with passivity. But, like I said, that post got erased, so here's a BMW z3 Coupe, ...