Babble

 I’ll admit to only having watched maybe ten minutes total of “Jon and Kate Plus 8” ever. I have issues with people who abuse fertility treatment (you don’t end up with sextuplets if you and/or your doctor are doing what you’re supposed to) and then parade their kids around and accept a bunch of free goodies. And these two were apparently ...

 So Pixar’s latest, “Up” seems to be a big hit, earning rave reviews and scoring big at the box office. But it prompted Linda Holmes, blogger for NPR’s pop culture blog Monkey See, to write a heartfelt open letter to Pixar. “This is not an angry letter. It is especially not an angry letter about Up, which I adored,” she begins. “I could ...

Imagine calling the paramedics after your four year old had a seizure – thereby setting a chain of events into motion that causes both your children to be taken from your home for two years. That’s exactly what happened to Chris and Laura Dobbins of Midlothian, Texas. Two trials later – one civil, one criminal – they were found not guilty of ...

 I have never, ever, been good at pool. My great-uncle owned a bar at which my grandmother worked and we would go visit her there and fool around at the bar’s pool table but it somehow never kicked in. I’m bad, bad bad bad. So Keith O’Dell, the “pool playing prodigy” kid who’s been all over YouTube and recently profiled on CNN makes me ...

•    All hail the smart kids! And one of them, Kavya Shivashankar, of Olathe, Kansas, won the National Spelling Bee last night. She spelled “Laodicean” (and no, I don’t know what it means) to bring home a ginormous trophy and $40,000 in cash and prizes. •    In other competition news, turns out that nice Adam ...

 Although I live in Detroit, cradle of the auto industry, and thus have anxiety attacks on a daily basis about what will happen if GM goes out of business, we’ve been pretty insulated from the worst of the recession so far. It’s more because my husband works in academia and I am a freelance writer so it’s not like we had any money to begin ...

Go WINGS!!  Yeah, sorry, to most of the rest of the country this could not be less of a story, but here in Detroit (and probably Chicago and Pittsburgh as well) there’s not a bigger story than the Red Wings clinching the National Hockey League Western Conference Championship. We could use some good news around here, actually, because ...

 We’ve all heard them – those medical myths that we all believe, even though we don’t have any basis for them. This article in USA Today examines some of those myths, plus has a nifty little quiz that I scored so badly on, it appears my children are lucky to be alive. Here’s one fact I really like: That larger-headed babies are smarter. I ...

At first glance, I thought this was pretty ridiculous: Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell all donated their earnings for a movie called “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” to Matilda Ledger, the late Heath Ledger’s daughter. Ledger had a role in the movie and the three actors stepped forward to take over his role, playing the character at ...

 Rest in peace, Mickey Mouse. No, the little animated Disney icon isn’t being killed off – but Wayne Allwine, the man who gave him his voice for the last 32 years, died Monday of complications from diabetes. He was 62. He was only the third person to voice Mickey, the other two being Walt Disney himself and Jimmy McDonald, who was Allwine’s ...