We do the mash! We do the costume mash!

How do you dress your child up as a shapeshifter?

My sister's wedding is garb-optional, and she specifically has mentioned the wee ones dressed as her cadre of fairy sprites. I forget who proposed it first (my dad?), but a pooka/púca/pwca was suggested for the Spud. Which is neat, because his Nana has been calling him "a little pooka!" for some time.

The pooka is a shapeshifter, though. It's most typically in the form of a dark horse, all the better to give terrifying (but harmless) rides to the gullible. It's most famously in the form of a six-foot tall invisible white rabbit named Harvey.

My current thought is a bunny suit, maybe with red ears or, if that's too obscure, little teeny wings on the back.

Dear members of the media,

Your metaphor permit has expired. Please relegate all use of storm-related imagery to your coverage of actual storms, tropical storms, and hurricanes.

Yours,
telerib

"help me write a eulogy for Beowulf"

That Google query landed someone on my music research weblog, Mi Contra Fa.

First, I find the form of the query somewhat amusing, like a lead curse tablet thrown into Google's holy well. It's not a search string so much as it is a petition.

Second, I find it unpleasant to contemplate that my online research might be "helping" students cheat. I've got no beef with actually helping them, if my work points them in a good direction or they reference it (the fools). But I look at that search string and want to translate it as "show me a eulogy I can copy, change a few lines of, and hand in tomorrow."

Happily, my sister (the high school English teacher) assures me that, at the high school level anyway, it's dead easy to tell when a student has done this. When a fifteen-year old suddenly starts writing like a 32-year old PhD, the teacher notices.