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

Google is holding a contest that invites children to draw Google's doodle -- the stylistic Google logo that appears on that website's homepage. Entries are due by March 2. The winner will get a $15,000 scholarship and a $25,000 technology grant for his/her school:

At Google, we believe that dreaming about future possibilities leads to tomorrow’s leaders and inventors, so this year we're inviting U.S. kids to exercise their creative imaginations around the theme, "What I’d like to do someday…"

Whether students want to find a cure for cancer or take a trip to the moon, it all starts with art supplies and some 8.5" x 11" paper.

Link via Geekosystem | Image: Google

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Mompetition, which we've mentioned previously, lampoons competitive mothering as well as other strange features of modern American parenting. In this episode, a mom a shocked to discover a man at the playground...and he's with kids! What's wrong with this guy?

If you find this video amusing, you might also like to read a more serious look at the same subject. Lenore Skenazy recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that fears of men as universal predators are vastly overstated, and even dangerous.

Link via GeekDad

Journalist Christopher Elliott shared an email from one of his regular readers. It tells a tale that is both sad and heartwarming. A 3-year old boy was murdered by the boyfriend of his mother. The family decided to take him off life support, so the grandfather flew in to say goodbye to him. To make sure that he got there in time, one Southwest Airlines pilot delayed takeoff:

According to him, everyone he talked to couldn’t have cared less. When he was done with security, he grabbed his computer bag, shoes and belt and ran to his terminal in his stocking feet.

When he got there, the pilot of his plane and the ticketing agent both said, “Are you Mark? We held the plane for you and we’re so sorry about the loss of your grandson.”

The pilot held the plane that was supposed to take off at 11:50 until 12:02 when my husband got there.

As my husband walked down the Jetway with the pilot, he said, “I can’t thank you enough for this.”

The pilot responded with, “They can’t go anywhere without me and I wasn’t going anywhere without you. Now relax. We’ll get you there. And again, I’m so sorry.”

Link via Gizmodo | Photo by Flickr user Pylon757 used under Creative Commons license

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Gotta start them young! As for myself, I've already taught my 2-year old a few words in Klingon and Ferengi. Why? Because she's at the perfect age for foreign language acquisition.

via reddit

Comedian Danielle Harrison parodied mommyblogging, that strange genre of blogging that seems to captivate so many modern mothers. It's a pitch-perfect depiction of the hyper, over-sharing, cyber mom. A sample:

June 20, 2010

I haven't given any updates on Pat in a while! How awful of me! I've been getting your emails asking how he's handling puberty and let's just say...not well. Not well at all. Yesterday his face was absolutely disgusting. He was up for going to school but I sat him down and said, "No way." I explained that in high school, your worst-looking day is always how people remember you. "Even when the acne clears up," I said, holding his hand while we had tea at the kitchen table, "your whole class will think of you as Pizza Face after they see you today. One bad-looking day in high school can ruin a person, Pat."

He said that he'd still like to go because he had an important biology exam, but I pointed out that even if he aced the exam and got into Yale and became a molecular biologist, there would be two hundred and fifty people in America who had seen his pustules and would never forget it. Finally I got through to him and he locked himself in his bedroom, probably to drop to his knees and thank Heaven above for a mother who really understood what it was like to be a teenager.

Don't get me started on his erections! Email me if you're interested, I have some great stories.

Link | Image: Urlesque