The Lady Pond

Know who's hilarious and intelligent and poignant and who I love down to my toenails even though she subjected the world to "It's Pat"?  Julia-frickin'-Sweeney.  Below is a short talk (about 5 minutes) she did at TED one year, about what happened when her 8-year-old started asking where baby frogs come from. I LOVE HER.

OK, does anyone know how to scale embedded videos from TED instead of cropping them?  This hurts me.

Kids are weird

Thanks to Public Television, I understood as a kid that to have babies, you have sex. Thanks to network television and the copy of "The Joy of Sex" my friends and I discovered in one of our parents' bookshelves, I understood that to have fun, grown-ups have sex.

What I didn't understand was that both could be accomplished at the same time. I had the idea that in order to get pregnant, you needed to have sex in a hospital, fully clothed, sitting up and facing each other. It had to be very clinical in order to work. If only, right?

A little later on I had the idea that a woman couldn't get pregnant if she had an orgasm. Something to do with muscle contractions expelling semen, perhaps? Wishful thinking? An extension of my previous goofy beliefs? Who knows. Kids are weird.

These are some choice former beliefs from people on the interwebs. Kids may be weird, but they're hella entertaining. Feel free to share stuff you believed in mah comments there! It'll be fun!