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Things I’ve been reading worth passing along:
This is a page of great suggestions, one of many pages on a site filled with great suggestions. I’m not so sure about the business with singing goofy songs, but I have recollections of playing the Cheerio-passing Cereal Kisses game and it working on her.
Reader, she married me, and then we decided to have some kids via adoption.
No, seriously – skin contact + eye contact + fun with food is a good thing. The Mirror Images one (like mimes pretending to be each other’s reflection) and the Blinking game (where you, like, blink at each other) I also remember fondly, and they seem pretty darn useful.
* Otherwise, I’ve been reading around things like Aaron Cohen’s war on human trafficking in Asia (and Africa). It’s a longish article on how one of Perry Farrell’s hard-partying buddies rediscovered his Judaism and used his years of training in L.A.’s most dismal nightclubs to help the State Department bust slavery rings in places like Sudan, Myanmar, Miami… and China.
Our specific country-of-interest is mentioned in passing a couple times in the middle, but the details of the trade – what happens to some poverty-stricken young women in some places overseas, and how some of them wind up in America – are pretty universal, and part of a problem that’s not going away.
* Hey, remember when I asked about Scott Simon’s paternity leave? Well, it seems like the NPR weekend guy went and did it again! Congratulations, Mr. Globe-Trotting Journalist!
* And lastly, I miss Michael Browning. He was, once upon a time, the Miami Herald China correspondent, and once he explained who General Tso was. The article has been popping up on the internet lately; I don’t exactly know why. But I love reading accounts of the The Taiping Rebellion. I mean, where else can you get civil war, Jesus’ brother and orgies? OK, maybe in Rome under Caligula, but the Taiping stuff is more condensed. And – now you know – it even has a popular chicken dish named after it.
UN.GIFT (United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking) website http://www.ungift.org aims to be an extension of UN GIFT activities worldwide. We would like it to evolve into a vibrant online community where people exchange views, showcase their work, talk about their experiences to strengthen the fight against human trafficking. With your help we can make it a valuable resource to take this fight forward. Organized crime of human trafficking needs a fitting organized response.