Well, there's more than one way to skin a cat, allegedly. If you happen to have a tiger mom -- the moniker given to the likes of Amy Chua who rule the roost with an iron-fist -- then rebelling at home means writing a book.
No, not just any old book but a manifesto. It seems drastic, yet that's exactly what two Beijing school girls have done to get out of their violin lessons.
The Complete Book of Combat With Mum is an online manual on how to survive life under a tiger mom's roost. Aimed at kids aged 6 to 12 is a quasi-response to Chua’s notorious Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Earlier this year, Chua's draconian parenting style gained notoriety and sold a lot of copy. Among other things, she out and out banned her daughters from attending sleepovers and vowed to char beloved toys if they didn't hunker down in front of the piano.
As part of their rebuttal, Combat's ten-year-old authors even include crudely illustrated diagrams which, according to the Times’ Leo Lewis, "exactly capture the savagery of a Tiger Mother in full cry: a domineering powder-keg of ambition."
Some of the fight-back tactics listed by the girls include "answering her punishing questions with your eyes closed and fashioning 'mini weapons' out of household items."
Ironically, it was Chen's docile dad who uploaded the guide to China’s equivalent of Twitter.
Sounds like the perfect stocking stuffer for the Chua daughters, if you ask me.
Health Canada has reissued its 2007 recall on the popular Bumbo Baby Sitter seats with the patent information "Manufactured by Bumbo South Africa Material: Polyurethane World Patent No. PCT: ZA/1999/00030" following further incidents.
Despite the warning not to use the seat on any raised surface, Health Canada has received 5 further reports of children falling out of the Bumbo™ seats, resulting in minor injuries. Previously it had received one report of a child suffering a skull fracture resulting from a fall.
When the seat is placed on a table or any uneven or elevated surface, young children can fall out of the Bumbo, posing a risk of serious head injuries.
The original recall required additional safety warnings be placed on the seats to prevent incorrect usage.
Customers whose Bumbo was purchased prior to 2007 should contact Oyaco Products, Inc. by email or phone at 1-866-768-4224, Monday to Friday 8AM to 5PM MST to obtain a new warning label and instructions.
The recall does not involve a return of the product.
Since 2003, approximately 320,000 of the seats have been sold in Canada at Toys R Us, Babies R Us and other retailers.
Another reason not to believe everything you see. H&M is getting more flack for the models on its website, after a rep admitted the retailer uses cyborg models to "best display the clothes."
So rather than see a model airbrushed for its ads, H&M cuts and pastes a model's head on a virtual body then matches the skin tone. In essence, we are getting sold a single generic skinny body time and again. Even, spookily, down to the same cloned belly button.
Apparently H&M isn't the only culprit; virtual models are increasingly standard practice in the fashion industry.
In its defence, H&M claims that clothes look better on virtual mannequins than on real women. “It is regrettable if we have led anyone to believe that the virtual mannequins should be real bodies. This is incorrect and has never been our intention,” Nicole Christie, spokeswoman for the chain’s U.S. operations, told ABC News.
Some suggest the ads should come with warnings and disclaimers, much like cigarette packs, saying this ad has been virtually modified, so as not to lead young impressionable women astray.
"To all involved, we say, keep doing what you're doing if you must -- just tell us you've done it. Maybe then we will realize that the women in those ads and spreads are about as real as Avatar, and thus, we'll see it as escapism and not as realism to which we don't measure up," said Seth Matlins on the Huffington Post.
Are the cyborgs any worse than the radically Photoshopped bodies of models? Is this a kind of false advertising?
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