Technically Speaking...

Kate and made laundry detergent before school using this new recipe - seems to working well.  I threw a load in this morning and then ran up to the local bookstore. 

I'm looking for a few certain titles for our summer reading, one of which was on hold at this store.  As I browsed the childrens section, I flipped through It's a Book by Lane Smith.  It's a funny story about an old school book-reading monkey being annoyed by a "new school" tech toy loving donkey.  The donkey, with his laptop, keeps asking the monkey questions like, "How do you scroll down?", "Can it text?", and "Can it Tweet?".  The onkey repeatedly responds, "No, it's a book."  In the end, in frustration, the monkey's little mouse friend calls the donkey by another "technically correct" term for donkey.  There are many discussions out there as to whether or not, because of that one word, this is appropriately marketed for 4-8 year-olds.  It is, technically, a correct word.  It is used, however, in a derogatory adult-humored way.  I think it's funny.  But I wouldn't buy it for my 4 year-old niece.
During my high school years and first few years of college, I spent my summers working at a Media Services Distribution Center.  We received books from publishers, typed up library catalog cards, repackaged the books and sent them on to public school libraries.  With some shipments, the publisher's distributor would sent a box of "gift" books; free of charge, to promote a new book or reward a library for a large order.  As we (me and about 6 other high school/college kids) spent the morning typing cards for stacks of books, we set aside anything amusing.  Over lunch, we took turns reading the books we had set aside, vying to be the one to find the most obnoxious book published and ordered this summer.  The summer of 1986 was my year.  The box I opened one morning contained free gift copies of Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book by Shel Silverstein.  This book is now subtitled, "A Primer for Adults Only" but it wasn't on those copies!  We couldn't hardly stay in our chairs, we were laughing so hard.  In the end, we took it to our supervisor and she sent the box back to the distributor instead of the elementary school it was bound for.