Carl Pettit
Carl Pettit is a columnist, editor and writer working for an array of colorful publications. He specializes in cultural and social issues, as well as East Asia, politics and satire.
If you want to get your kids outside, away from their Xbox or Wii, and interested in some of your backyard garden projects, you’ll probably need to be somewhat inventive with your gardening ideas. Pulling weeds and planting flowerbeds just won’t cut it for most of children. Think incentive here.
We have some ideas.
When it comes time to celebrate the passing of another year, people around the world often gather together and make a lot of noise in order to demonstrate their good cheer.
Everyone knows Christmas Day is all about tearing open presents, spending time with loved ones, gorging on lots of good food and celebrating the holiday spirit in general. Even though most of us have got the holiday thing down by now, some folks out there might not be aware of some of the unusual and history-making events marking Christmas Day and Christmas Eve in the past.
Christmas is almost upon us, but that doesn’t mean you still can’t have some fun with your holiday decorations. Maybe you’re the kind of person who waits until the last minute to set up your tree, or perhaps you’ve noticed some bare spots on the limbs just crying out for a few more ornaments. Or maybe you need a last minute activity to keep the kids busy while they wait for the impending arrival of Santa Claus. Nothing is more maddening for a child than the last few days leading up to Christmas, before all of their holiday loot arrives.
Most people are familiar with the massive, and very impressive, Christmas tree that graces New York City’s Rockefeller Center every year. This tree has come to symbolize the holiday season for millions of people, and is something of national icon, appearing as a backdrop in countless movies and television specials.
Christmastime should be about family, generosity and good cheer, but sometimes there are a few baddies lurking about to spoil everyone’s fun. We’re talking about nasty Christmas villains here. Thankfully most of them are merely figments of some storyteller’s imagination. But not all of them. There are always a few real life Yuletide rogues out there just waiting to make a mess of the winter holidays.
Thanksgiving is a time for the family to come together, tell stories, then sit down and feast on some tasty, belly-expanding deliciousness. Turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie are all Thanksgiving staples, but if you want to really spice things up a bit this year, we have some ideas.
These days, most of the turkeys people gobble down are fattened up on farms. They’re only pale (under their feathers) imitations of the lean, mean turkeys roaming through the woods of North America
The United Nations deals with some pretty serious business, especially in a world climate as dangerous as this one, but even so, this august body of world representatives can get pranked now and again. It just so happens that two very audacious Canadian radio talk show hosts managed to pull a fast one on U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Our comedic brethren up north called into the U.N. this week and pretended they had Stephen Harper, the Prime Minister of Canada, on the line.
You know it’s a bad day when a judge decides you need to spend some time behind bars because you didn’t delete your Facebook account. Is having a Facebook page now a crime? It seems that if you irk the wrong judge in the state of Kentucky, it just might be.
Sometimes the food you eat is trying to kill you. Not in the traditional sense, with saturated fat, refined sugars and cholesterol. There are a few foods out there that can literally end your life if improperly prepared, or at the very least make you terribly sick. While you probably won’t encounter most of the items on this list during the normal course of your life, a few of them are surprisingly common.
Like our parole officer always says: "You only get one chance to make a good first impression."