I've worked as a nanny/babysitting for most of my life, so cranky two year-olds are totally norm for me. Whether they have autism or not, two year-olds can be hell on earth. They can throw huge temper tantrums and cry for hours and generally make the cutest, funniest, most well behaved little human into the most evil of tiny demons.

Seriously. Don't mess with two year-olds. They just don't possess the skills to deal with stress or the mental maturity to manage their anger or frustration. There's a reason my family says, "Don't taunt happy fun ball" about my two year old nephew.

Couple that with autism, which can make trigger points unpredictable from person to person, the stress of a new place/airports, and a brisk flight attendant and Mt. Vesuvius is not far off.

Personally, I don't know why the flight attendant was tightening his seat belt rather than his mother. Why didn't she ask the mother to do it for him? Little kids can be weird about strangers sometimes and a stranger touching them could cause any little kid to have a crying fit. And as for his wiggling, seriously, he's two, they are wiggle machines. They can have attention spans of gnats sometimes. And yelling at a child, regardless of disability, seems a very bad way to calm a situation.

Regardless of who's to blame (and most likely no one really is), the airline definitely needed to show more sensitivity during the situation. I've personally witnessed children both with disabilities and without be treated with creatures from the depths of hell for doing nothing more than being curious, wiggly kids.

I remember making fairy houses out of twigs and bits o' nature when I was younger and then I remember getting yelled at for stripping the bark off the birch trees. So I'm hoping people won't go about stripping away bark and moss willy nilly. Generally, if it's not attached to a plant anymore, it's fair game, otherwise, leave it alone.

Oh, yes, because those of us who suffer from mental illness really need help with being stigmatized by the media.

And hey, this was the same list that once included homosexuality as a mental disorder.

Oh, this is horrible. I love bats so much and they are so essential to the ecosystem as a whole. I can't imagine a muggy summer without fleets of bats at dusk picking off the bugs.

I used to shelve the zeros through 300s (Dewey) when I was a lowly library page during high school and the occult books were always divided between the philosophy and religion books with a few in reference for good luck. I do remember right before I left that we had moved most of them behind the librarian desk because they kept being stolen or lost.

One of the most amusing things about the occult books was that if I came rumbling down the aisle with my book cart, any one who was reading an occult book would look up guiltily and sneak off as if I was some crazed library employee on the warpath FOR GOD.

As most of our immediate family reunion dinners end in improvised tableware drum jams between the three drummers, I think this is totally awesome and I'm buying one for our cabin.

Congratulations to them, I hope everything goes well and for a healthy baby. I'm sure they will have to endure stupid questions, ill remarks, and snide comments but I hope that these will be few and far between.

And in regards to what pronoun to use, as with most other titles and names, one should use the one the bearer most prefers if no other name or title is generally considered proper (such as calling the Queen "Your Highness" instead of "Elizabeth").

I would not call someone named Robert "Bob" unless they indicated that was all right. I would ask first. Same goes with any other pronoun or name confusion. It's just simple manners.

Good Lord, Catholic Church.

I'm totally taking back all those amusing altar kid stories I told about you.

I think they should have set some keas on him or something. The Franz Josef is awesome.

I'm an asthmatic who lives in Minneapolis and i have to say that the smoking ban is one of the best things about living in this town. I recently went to Chicago and it was horrible going into a smoke filled bar. I had to leave almost immediately.

I totally understand that it sucks for smokers to go outside especially in the cold Minneapolis winters but quite frankly, I would much rather you suffered the cold for five minutes than I suffered through an asthma attack and its fall out for the next three days not to mention the affects of second hand smoke on myself and other patrons/employees. Call me selfish.

This reminds me of the Thorne rooms at the Chicago Art Institute (and other museums) or Collen Moore's Fairy Castle at the Museum of Science and Industry (also in Chicago).

http://www.msichicago.org/exhibit/fairy_castle/Fc_home.htm

We had three sets of Legos growing up, this one (my favorite), the castle/Robin Hood set, and a pirate one. So pretty much all we ever did was ransack the castle with space invaders and pirate canons.

Every time I see these on T.V. I have an overwhelming desire to buy them for random friends.

I have no idea why.

Most of the people in my family suffer from this. For some reason, I've always been under the impression that this somehow relates to a specific kind of eye pigmentation. Everyone in my family has relatively light blue/blue-grey eyes or was born with blue eyes that turned green later in life. Generally the people with the green eyes had the reflex worse than everyone else.

My great-grandfather worked for the railroad and my grandfather always tells us stories about him and his brothers and his cousins going down the train yard to play. They chased trains and picked up coal and jumped out of boxcars, and, amazingly, none of them ever got seriously injured.