33% of the size, Shirley, not 33% smaller.

Not much use in the UK where we mostly use bayonet fitting bulbs which would be hard to do.
Anyway, in this house we have lovely CFL bulbs which come on in less than a second, last for many years and can be recycled at the local dump and some shops.

Ah, playing with matches - one of childhood's great joys. Rather than stop ours, I encourage them to burn small things - but down the garden away from anything important and with a bucket of water nearby.
Far better than doing it in secret under the bed.

Can't beat a good cardboard box though.

Rare? No thanks, I'll have mine well done, please.

Nice, but hardly new. Kew Gardens (at least, I think it was Kew - somewhere Londonish, anyway) had them well over 100 years ago.

From the other side of the pond, please vote for someone who will engage with the rest of the world by other means than the gun.

It gets very blowy up there, too. I guess the sheds stay on the ground better for being that shape, too.

Here's a clip we took earlier this year coming back across the causeway from Lindisfarne.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=tFAbC-kQl8g

Heh, their English is still way better than my Balinese.

Mottley - yes, guns are common in Switzerland, but so are shootings.

Going to look good turning up in that to tell someone their kid's been run over, innit?

Ain't new - I remember eating them in the 60s as a kid.

Perhaps he's holding it up close to the camera. Either that or it's a rabbit in drag.

Sure, swimming pools are hazardous, but simply comparing direct risk to risk figures fails to take any account of utility. Life has risk associated with it; Levitt's broader point in Freakonomics was that cost/benefit isn't properly considered, not that absolute risk isn't understood. It's the failure to balance cost against benefit which distorts perceptions.

Swimming pools are useful, and besides, they quite possibly save a considerable number of lives in a year through healthy exercise.
Privately held machine guns serve no useful purpose.

Yeah, and it's those darned /American/ sqrls.

I wouldn't like anyone to think I was stereotyping Americans - my closest American friend is a Quaker!

I'm not talking about joining in if the parents are there. I'm talking about seeing a kid drop a bit of litter and handing it to them along with "There's a bin over there, you might care to use it."

Were either of my two to do anything when I'm not there I'd be glad if another adult dealt with it. I'm not always there, I don't follow my kids around slavishly, they're given considerable freedom but are expected to behave properly.

Your view is that no one should ever deal with a problem because they don't "own" it. Daft, in my view. What if I see one kid beating up another? You want me to walk past? If one of mine's getting thumped I'd like someone nearby to at least break it up.