Xmas countdown: November 20

Xmas countdown: November 20: 35 days to go. Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.
Rabindranath Tagore

March 2: Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss

DATELINE: March 2: Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss… Theodor Seuss Geisel (March 2, 1904 – September 24, 1991) was an American writer, poet, and cartoonist most widely known for his children's books written under the pen names  Dr. Seuss.  Geisel published 46 children's books, which were often characterized by imaginative characters, rhyme, and frequent use of anapestic meter. His most celebrated books include the bestselling Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Horton Hatches the Egg, Horton Hears a Who!, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

Fly with me, Peter Pan

Last night is a trip back to childhood memory land. A romance with the little boy  who dances without tripping,  sings without getting offkey,  flies around as if he owned the sky. He gets to have all the fun in the world and enjoys every single day of his life like there’s no tomorrow. More importantly, he doesn’t grow up and never stops believing in his dreams.

   With the sprinkling of some pixie dust, playing of  some swashbuckling music, and  of course flying, i watched   last night Ballet Philippines'  dance retelling of the beloved children’s classic Peter Pan at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) Main Theater. Delighting young and old for more than 100 years, Peter Pan is based on the tale by Sir James Matthew Barrie. The story revolves around the boy who never grew up and his magical, fun-filled adventures with the Darling children — Wendy, John, and Michael — as they meet Captain Hook, Smee, Tinkerbell, Tiger Lily, the Lost Boys, and the other denizens of Neverland.

Yes, there’s a lot of Peter Pan’s qualities that we admire and envy. Even as we grow up, we replay that one episode of our childhood wherein we believed in dreams and fairies and sunshine and clouds and green fields. Whether we admit it or not, we were once like Peter Pan. At one point in our lives, we felt invincible, ready to take on the world and to win the challenges ahead. We felt powerful, like a raging bull that never faltered in the face of its enemies. In more ways than one, Peter Pan will always be a part of us, a reminder of what and who we once were. He taught us to believe, to dream, and to live life to the fullest.

Nevertheless, there is one side of his character that is not-so-perfect. The so-called Peter Pan Syndrome or Puer aeternus is Latin for eternal boy, used in mythology to designate a child-god who is forever young; psychologically it refers to an older man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level, usually coupled with too great a dependence on the mother. The puer typically leads a provisional life, due to the fear of being caught in a situation from which it might not be possible to escape. He covets independence and freedom, chafes at boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable. Mythologically, Peter Pan is linked to...the young god who dies and is reborn...as well as to Mercury/Hermes, psychopomp and messenger of the gods who moves freely between the divine and human realms, and, of course, to the great goat-god Pan.... In early performances of Barrie's play, Peter Pan appeared on stage with both pipes and a live goat. Such undisguised references to the chthonic, often lascivious and far from childlike goat-god were, not surprisingly, soon excised from both play and novel.

  
My favorite lines from the 2003 Peter Pan film: 

Wendy: We must leave at once... before we, in turn, are forgotten.

Captain Hook: If I were you, I'd give up!

Peter: If you were me, I'd be ugly.

Wendy: Peter. You won't forget me, will you?

Peter: Me? Forget? Never.

Wendy: Will you ever come back?

Peter: To hear stories... About me.

Peter: Well I will not grow up! You cannot make me! I will banish you like Tinkerbell.

Wendy: I WILL NOT BE BANISHED!

Peter: Then go home. Go home and grow up. And take your feelings with you!

Wendy: My parents wanted me to grow up.

Captain Hook: Growing up is such a barbarous business, full of inconvenience... and pimples.

Violence In Cartoons

Recently, a trend  in facebook intensified wherein profile pictures were changed to cartoon characters to support violence against children. But what if these cartoons are the ones that provoke violence among children? will they serve the purpose of the FB campaign?

An example of a violent cartoon is “South Park.” The famous scene in every episode is that Kenny, a small in size and shy character on the show, dies in every episode. The ways that he dies vary in every episode and some are more brutal than others, and the famous line after he died is usually something along the lines of ‘“Oh my god, they killed Kenny. You bastards!”

High levels of violence in cartoons can make children more aggressive, researchers claimed .They found that animated shows aimed at youngsters often have more brutality than programmes broadcast for general audiences.Children copied and identified with fantasy characters just as much as they would with screen actors.The study also found that youngsters tended to mimic the negative behaviour they saw on TV such as rumour-spreading, gossiping and eye-rolling.

They recorded 26 acts of aggression an hour compared with just five in shows aimed at general audiences and nine in programmes deemed unsuitable for under-14s.'Results indicated that there are higher levels of physical aggression in children's programmes than in programmes for general audiences,' the study said.

It added that the TV industry distinguished between animated violence and non-animated violence and appeared to rate the former as less harmful.

'There is ample evidence that animated, sanitised and fantasy violence has an effect on children,' the study's authors said. 'Research on the effects of violent video games, which are all animated, indicates that they have the same effects on children's aggressive thoughts, feelings and behaviours that violent TV shows have demonstrated. In fact, even cartoonish children's games increase aggression. Labelling certain types of media violence as "fantasy" violence is misleading and may actually serve to increase children's access to harmful violent content by reducing parental concern.'

The study, by academics at Iowa State University and published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, also found that children copied at school the verbal aggression they had seen on TV. It said: 'In addition, the effects of televised physical aggression were extensive, such that exposure to televised physical aggression was associated with a variety of negative behaviours .' This anti-social behaviour included verbal and physical aggression and excluding others from friendship groups.

Gradually, they begin to act and reciprocate as the cartoons on the television would. They begin to perceive the real world as the cartoon character’s world and enact accordingly. The stunts done are imagined to be real and performed by kids in real life. The underlined fact here is not the kid’s ignorance in differentiating between the real and the artificial but his perception of the real. At an age, when personalities, choices, tastes begin to get developed in kids, the cartoons have a deep effect on them

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1159766/Cartoon-violence-makes-children-aggressive.html#ixzz17PTN5adj  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_in_cartoons
http://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2010/12/effect-of-cartoon-on-children/

Rekindling childhood in Yokohama

Rekindling childhood in
Yokohama
(July 20, 2008, Japan)

                   Our feet took us today toYokohama wherein childhood days are rekindled in the world of toys…

               In the Tin Toys Museum, Teruhisa Kitahara’s collection of 3,000 tin toys produced from the 1890’s to the 1960’s is displayed here. he museum exhibits a part of curator Teruhisa Kitahara’s tin toy collection that he started around 1973. The exhibition comprises around 3,000 items mostly manufactured in

Japan between the 1890’s and 1960’s, and the ways they move are introduced on video. The collection illustrates the various trends in toys throughout history. As early as 1920s pre war Japanese toys to 1960s Baby Boomer Toys. You name it, the toy museum has it. If you like robots, space rockets, Batman items, Ultraman toys, Popeye toys or Mickey Mouse, this museum has them, and you will definitely be astonished just by looking at them. 

As a colllector of frog items in the Philippines, it gave me more interest in my pursuit of establishing the biggest museum for frog collectibles.

Then we hopped to the Doll Museum. In 1927, the port of Yokohama became the site of this dollhouse that features approximately 13,000 pieces of ethnic dolls, which represent the lifestyles of 140 countries. Now features displays of blue-eyed dolls, which contributed to cultural exchange between Japan and America

, along with documentary photographs of those days. Also displayed are traditional Japanese festive dolls and local dolls, as well as mechanical dolls. Starting with a collection of 3,149 dolls from 92 countries, the collection has been enriched over the years and now stands at 12,926 dolls from 140 countries.

We capped the day with watching fireworks at the pier with many Japanese most of them in their native kimonos, both male and female