This is quite funny. Matthew Archbold notes that mommyblogging is a far more prolific field than daddyblogging, and that this is unfair. After all, it's harder to be a dad than a mom:

1) When we gain weight we can’t blame the pregnancies.

2) When one of your daughters gets in a fight at school and your other daughter yells, “Sweep the leg Johnny” everyone blames you.[...]

5) “Wait until your Mommy gets home” just doesn’t sound as scary. It just doesn’t.[...]

10) When women see Dads out with kids they assume we’re sensitive people who like to chit chat. We’re guys. We don’t chit or chat. When we see people we know we say “hey” but we don’t stop moving. We never stop moving. We’re like sharks in that way.

Link via Brian J. Noggle | Photo by Flickr user JeffS used under Creative Commons license

Yesterday would have been the 107th birthday of Dr. Seuss. Chris Menning of BuzzFeed commemorated the event by writing more explicit titles for several classic works by the good doctor including The Sneetches and Other Stories.

Link via GeekDad

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This kid, who may henceforth be referred to as the most fortunate child in America, has his own high-tech backyard make-believe spaceship. Jon Howell and Jeremy Elson built the Ravenna Ultra-Low Altitude Vehicle. It has many lights, switches, and an audio countdown. The assembly even shakes on liftoff.

Link via Make

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Did Dr. Seuss' Oh, The Places You'll Go! ever strike you as a bit optimistic? Maybe the right approach is to prepare your children for the lives of tedious mediocrity that will surely mark their insignificance.

Redditor gljo took his/her kids on a surprise trip to Disney World. To hide their true destination, s/he created this fake flyer for their supposed destination.

Link via Boing Boing

Britain is getting ready for the next generation of aircraft carriers and accompanying fighter jets, and so is selling off those assets. These include Harrier Jump Jets, at least one of which was on sale on eBay. An overly-enthusiastic young boy, while signed into his father's account, saw the fighter jet and his opportunity to own it. So he hit "Buy It Now" to immediately acquire the plane. Which, by the way, cost £69,999. That's about $113,000 (US):

A youngster hit the "buy it now" button to purchase the restored fighter jet, causing his father to quickly apologize to the sellers and tell them his son was not able to buy the aircraft out of his pocket money.

"His dad rang up and profusely apologized to us, so it's still for sale. We've put it on as an auction now so that won't happen again," said a spokeswoman for Jet Art Aviation, of Bradford, central England, which is selling the Harrier.

Link via Gizmodo | Photo by Flickr user ell brown used under Creative Commons license

So much of parenting is watching your kids destroy your stuff. The other part is making the kids take responsibility for having done so. eBay seller daney21 is selling his sons' collection of Beyblades -- that's a type of manga-inspired spinning toy -- to pay for the bathtub that the boys destroyed while playing with them:

We are selling 8 Beyblades, 2 of them light up. As you can tell they are not happy about this! They have been using their bathtub as a "battle arena" and Beyblades + Bathtub = Destruction!!! With the metal ones they managed to scrape the enamel off the tub, take a chunk of tub out and break off the soap holder. SO if you "win" this auction DON'T play with in a bathtub!!! We have recieved a quote of $500.00 to replace the tub, some tiles, and soap holder + labor of course! They had approxamently $125.67 in their piggy banks that will be going to toward the cost. We will use the profit from this auction towards the balance and then it is onto other toys!

So far, the bidding is over $9,000.

Link via Kotaku

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Comedian Weird Al Yankovic has written a children's book! It's called When I Grow Up and is about a boy pondering his future career options, including giraffe milker and circus snail trainer. Yankovic, as you can imagine, is a great narrator for this type of story.

Amazon Link via Geekosystem

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A chemist is born. Rose, who is 26 months old, can identify more than fifty elements by their physical appearance and symbols from flashcards.

via Gizmodo

Over at Neatorama, we've mentioned the development of robotic avatars -- robots that could attend meetings and conferences in place of the physical presence of their controllers. Lyndon Baty of Knox City, Texas, uses one of them, but he's not a business traveler. He's a high school freshman with a diminished immune system. It's not safe for him to attend school in person, so he maneuvers a robot around school from the safety of his own home:

The Vgo telepresence platform is a four foot tall bot on wheels with a small screen, camera, speakers and microphone at the top. Baty logs into the robot remotely from his home, using his PC and a webcam to teleconference into his classes. Baty can drive Vgo around his school, switching between classes just like regular students. For a boy that has spent much of his life sick and isolated from his peers, Vgo not only represents a chance at a better education, it’s also an opportunity for freedom and comradery.

There's a video at the link.

Link via slashdot | Image: KFDX News

So, to clarify: Hobbits have large, hairy feet. If you'd like to get your little LOTR fan off to a right start, crochet up a set of baby booties like these by Penwiper. You can read the pattern at the link.

Link via Geek Crafts

5-year old Noah has an idea that would, by default, create the most interesting show on PBS. Many redditors are flocking to the idea and want to persuade PBS to follow through. There's a dedicated subreddit, so go forth, login, and upvote.

Link via Geekosystem

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Jorge Narvaez and his young daughter Alexa became an Internet sensation after a YouTube video of them singing together circulated widely. They're quite talented and they've clearly practiced, as you can see from this appearance on the television show Ellen. Be sure to watch until the end for the adorable interview.

via Urlesque

As I've said before, if you're going to start kids out to be well-adjusted geeks, you've got to start them young. That's why during bathtime tonight, I had my daughter practice her Klingon language skills. The parents of Mateo, who are of the Whovian persuasion, are on the same tack. The boy's father works in graphic design and corrugated paper, and so made a properly-sized TARDIS.

Link via io9

Panasonic developed a new type of heat insulation. In order to promote it, the company built a snowman and shipped it to Bahrain. There, children encountered snow for the first time:

It all started with a young girl named Amna Al-Haddad. The SPARKS team, who share their experiments and lifework on Facebook, received a message from this young girl in Bahrain on their fan page. "Snow never falls in Bahrain, so I would like to show my little brother his very first 'snow'."

Moved by her story, the SPARKS team knew what they had to do. "Let's deliver a snowman to Bahrain, to the kindhearted girl and fulfill her wish." And so the experiment began.

Upon seeing the snow for the first time in his life, Saleh and his friends were elated. “It was amazing. I didn’t expect the snowman to be so beautiful. I want to thank Amna for making all this happen for me,” said Saleh.

http://www.financialpost.com/markets/news/Snowman+Goes+Desert/4133330/story.html via Technabob | Photo: Panasonic