My 5-year old son is gay

…and he dressed in drag for his Christian preschool’s Hallowe’en party, and his awesome Mom stuck up for him in real life and online. Win, win, WIN.
Thanks to Virtue for Facebooking this.

David Crowder Band – Shine

Aw man, I was thinking about my old Lite-Brite just the other day. It’s still in my parents’ basement somewhere, no doubt buried under some Star Wars action figures and a My Little Pony. That warm glow is really gorgeous on video. I can’t say enough how much I love this kind of elaborately-executed low-tech art. It takes so much craft and so little money; it’s a beautiful thing. And check out the piano in the background- it’s playing!
Thanks to Peneycad for the tip.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes on

Here’s an adorable stop-motion film voiced by Jenny Slate (the woman who swore in her first sketch on Saturday Night Live) and animated by Dean Fleischer-Camp. I love it so much; I’ve already watched it about 10 times. You can watch it here.
It’ll for sure be the cutest three minutes of your week.

Thanks to Donaldson for the tip.

Like Father

This morning, my dad and I went into a subway station together. Just as we approached the turnstyles, a homeless lady spoke to us.

HOMELESS LADY: Spare change?

ME: No, sorry.

MY DAD: Sorry.

I don’t always give change to panhandlers, but something about this woman kind of drew me in, and I thought I probably did have a bit of change, so I kept walking and pretended to be digging for a token, when really I was fishing for some money for her. Meanwhile, my dad was edging towards the turnstyles, reaching into his pocket for his subway pass.

ME: Den, wait, I think I have change for her…

My father still had one hand searching his pocket, but as he turned to me, I saw that his subway pass was already in his other hand. This meant that he had actually been looking in his pocket for change all along.

MY DAD: Oh, yeah, me too, that’s what I’m trying to find here.

Turns out we both had some change for this lady. I haven’t lived with my dad for about a decade, and I don’t recall ever seeing his personal giving-change-to-the-homeless-procedure before, but we had both done the exact same thing: deemed this lady a good candidate for a handout, yet said no and walked out of her sightline while we checked our pockets so we wouldn’t disappoint her in case we had none. We pooled our coins and my dad handed her some loot.

I am a big fan of behavioural resemblance.

Raised by a single mom

Meg is a med student in NYC whose blog is one of the highlights of the whole wide internet for me, usually because it’s really funny. The other day she wrote a particularly lovely, heartwarming, thought-provoking post about her work in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit:

I say things that sound important at my job all the time:

We’ve found the mutation that is causing your child’s lung disease. I’ll need DNA from every living relative so we can see who else might be a carrier. I’m sorry. We still don’t know why your baby can’t breathe on her own.

Those are all important-sounding things. And they are, in fact, important things to the family and to the medical team, and there is a lot of science involved and research and papers and that is the reason I can say those words, and that is the reason people care about them.

But sometimes at my job, without anyone’s permission or direction, without any papers in hand or abbreviations or acronyms or any right except a self-imposed one, I say something that feels very, very important to me. It’s this:

It’s going to be okay. I was raised by a single mom, and I turned out just fine.

Go read the whole post, it’s so great. Then add her blog to your RSS feed and get ready for a great post every week or so.

Beluga birth

This beluga whale calf was born Monday, December 14, 2009 at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. Ever cute!

Out of Body Experience

There’s so much in this video. I don’t even know how to describe it.
Thanks to Peneycad for the tip.

Piano duet for the elderly

This is Fran & Marlo Cowan (married 62 years), playing an impromptu piano recital together in the atrium of the Mayo Clinic.
Via Nurse K (wicked Emergency Medicine blog, by the way, worth checking out. I’m pretty sure the writers of Showtime’s excellent Nurse Jackie read this blog and used Nurse K as inspiration for Edie Falco’s character.)

Grocery Store Musical by Improv Everywhere

Improv Everywhere is well-known for the frozen Grand Central Station thing they did last year, and the spontaneous wedding reception they pulled off earlier this summer. Here’s their latest: a seemingly spontaneous musical number in the produce section of a large grocery store in Queens.

I bet they were hoping to get the patrons in the grocery store to squish their fruit together, too. I think the onlookers might have participated if the request made a little more intuitive sense- I don’t really get the fruit-squishing thing and I’m gonna assume that means the grandmas in the grape aisle must have been even more confused. Still, fun!
Here’s their interesting photo-essay about the process.

Thanks to Peneycad for the tip.

Gorillas in love: so dreamy

A new male gorilla is due to arrive at the London zoo later this year. To prepare them, the keepers gave each of the zoo’s three adult female gorillas a picture of their pending paramour, and the gorillas went, uh, ape.

One female gorilla shrieked in delight, while another wedged the poster in a tree to stare at it. A third, clearly overcome by emotion, held the photo close to her chest — then ate it.

This made me very happy.
Via Zeldalily.