Rainy Day Soccer

It rarely rains in Temecula and I can't remember much rain at all during September in years past. It's raining today though, and our 8 AM game was played mostly in the rain and cold. It was less than 60 degrees during the game. The slick ball didn't help as many of the kicks didn't go far and there were some balls slipping through the goalie's hands. We suffered our first loss, 2-0. The game was close, with no score at halftime. The other team came through with a couple of goals in the 3rd quarter. One seemed to be helped by the wet ball and on the other one, it looked to me like an offsides call was missed. We didn't have many shots, and the other team played well. They will now move into first and we should drop down to 4th or so. It's a 10 game season and we'll be in the playoffs at the end, I'm confident.

LA Times for kids

The LA Times has a nice page for kids each day in the print newspaper. This week's feature has been about the LA Times and how the newspaper is produced. Interesting to me because my dad worked at a newspaper when I was young and I remember making some visits to the building where they printed the paper -- The Perth Amboy Evening News. I did a school report on typesetting and had some pieces of metal type to show.

One thing they don't mention on the LA Times kids page is the pay wall which hides most of the stories they publish:

Each separate Web page is tied to the main site for latimes.com, called the "home" page. It's like a table of contents for the whole website. All these pages are tied together and arranged so you can find every story in the paper. Then they are sent to a central computer, called a "server."

So maybe you can find every story in the paper the day it's published, but if you look for something next week you may not find it.

CW Nevius blog

People sometimes say that sportswriters are some of the best journalists. Jim Murray of the LA Times was one sportswriter like that, and CW Nevius, although not a sportswriter any longer, does a really excellent job on non-sports topics. I really liked his commentary on overbearing parents at children's sporting events a few months back, and today he has a great piece on the James Kim story. While he addresses the complaints that some people have about the story, he gets to the heart of why it was so compelling and sad for most people.

CommonSenseMedia

One problem in many families where children use the Internet extensively and parents don't is that the parents aren't engaged enough in monitoring what their kids are doing. I have always been surprised at the number of kids under 10 who are allowed to play video games with Teen or even Mature ratings and watch R rated movies at home. I've interviewed many children who have told me this and have also heard more examples through my sons. To me, it's just a time bomb for parents to not be involved in what media their children consume. SFGate has a story today about CommonSenseMedia.org is a website where people are trying to address this problem by rating movies, games, music, books and websites. Their recommendations for what age is appropriate are a little more realistic than the movie industry's -- for example, they say that the movie Blood Diamond, rated R, is okay for anyone older than 15. It's a good resource for parents and children.