Today’s PubWages Daily Game is brought to you by Armor. It is called Elephant Quest and involves trying to retrieve a stolen hat from an elephant named Wooly. This is a comedic game, where players revel in the silliness of the situation rather than thrilling to an action adventure.
Here is a still shot from the game:
I got the image from a blog post review of Elephant Quest. Apparently this game is by John Cooney. If you would like to learn more about it, read the review on Gamers with Jobs.
If you’d just like to play the game, here it is:
Play Begin a journey to gain back the hat that Wooly stole from you. Read more
There are a lot of myths about what you need to do in order to be successful in life. As parents, we often buy into the commonly accepted wisdom:
* a high school dropout has no chance in life: keep your children in school, whatever you do.
* in order to be competitive in the job market, you probably also need a college education.
* people who marry before they have a high school diploma are likely to derail their lives and become complete and utter failures. Keep your children from marrying young, even if they are in love.
* teenaged mothers are bad citizens.
We want our children to be successful, so we nag them to stay in school, get good grades and avoid an early romantic commitment. But every once in a while we notice that these rules don’t apply to everybody. Take Loretta Lynn, for example.
The childhood home of Loretta Lynn
Loretta Lynn was born in 1932 and grew up in a small mining town. She grew up very, very fast. By the time she was thirteen, she was married, and in less than a year, she was a mother. According to popular belief, that should have been the end of her. A life of poverty and drudgery was supposed to ensue.
But you know what? That’s not exactly what happened. When Loretta was twenty-four years old, her husband bought her a guitar. She didn’t have music lessons. She didn’t have voice training. Nobody taught her composition. She taught herself to play the guitar. She sang, she composed the music and wrote the lyrics to her own songs. And… she cut her first record the next year!
In 1967, Loretta Lynn charted her first sixteen number one hits. And success after success followed. Her marriage was rocky, but it provided a lot of material for her songs. If she had not been precocious in life, she could not have been so successful as a songwriter. And despite the ups and downs, her marriage was of long duration. She remained married to Doolittle “Doo” Lynn from 1945 until his death from diabetes in 1996. A lot of other people who waited until they were more mature to marry were not able to stick it out in a relationship this long.
Loretta Lynn had four children before she turned nineteen, and then she later had twins. One of her most controversial songs was about birth control.
When success stories like Loretta Lynn’s are mentioned, many people will tell you: she’s unusually talented and very lucky, but an ordinary person had better stick to the straight and narrow path, to avoid failure in life. This is not necessarily true. One doesn’t have to be a musical superstar in order to have a successful life after quitting high school. Read this pub by one of our star pubbers to see another example where allowing a child to follow a different path eventually resulted in a successful life.
Each of us has to make our own choices in life. In the end, it is very hard to tell what path is right for another person, and parents need to learn when to push and when to let go.
If you would like to learn more about Loretta Lynn, her life or her music, please consider the following products:
A food dehydrator can be a terrific addition to your kitchen small appliance arsenal. Not only is a dehydrator a great way to preserve food but it’s also a wonderfully easy way to stretch your food budget.
In hard economic times when food prices are rising, adding a gadget like a food dehydrator to your cooking equipment will pay for itself in a short period of time.
Using a food dehydrator to make dried apples is just one of the many ways you can put your new tool to use. Dehydrated apples make excellent snacks any time. They can also be used in many ways as you’ll see below.
Finished dehydrated apples
DRYING APPLES WITH A DEHYDRATOR
What you’ll need:
Food dehydrator
Apples
Ascorbic acid (if desired to prevent darkening)
Lemon, lime, pineapple or orange juice instead of ascorbic acid.
Dehydrated apples are best if fresh but you can also use apples that are slightly past their prime. (This is where the money-saving aspect of owning a food dehydrator comes in)
If using organic apples that have not been treated or sprayed, scrub vigorously. If desired, peel apples, core and seed. Slice into 3/8″ slices.
If pretreating with ascorbic acid or one of the natural solutions above, soak for 5 minutes before placing in dehydrator.
Arrange apple slices spaced closely on trays in food dehydrator but not too close to prevent air circulation during drying.
Stack trays in dehydrator and set temperature to 130-140 degrees. Depending upon the amount that you are drying, dried apples should take between 4 and 10 hours to be fully dehydrated.
DEHYDRATING APPLES
Here are some more points about making your own dried apples in a food dehydrator.
Most dehydrated fruits can be eaten “as is” after dehydrating – no need for rehydrating them
Add them to fruit soups or hot breakfast cereals for added nutrition and flavor
Rehydrate for applesauce or even to make a pie
Canned or frozen fruit can be dehydrated
Dried fruits with the peel or without the peel retain their fiber content and calories after the drying process
Use your dehydrator to make apple leather or fruit roll-ups. This is a great favorite of kids and it is all natural!
Buy apples when on sale and capitalize on the low price by making up many batches of dried apples
Dried apples also make great additions to craft projects such as wreaths, potpourri, etc.
Dried fruits are easily stored and make great additions to trail mixes and snack mixes
Today’s video game is called UFOwned. It is brought to you by Bubblebox.com. It’s another game about UFOs coming to dominate the planet, but this time, you are not on the defending team. Instead, you get to experience this tired old scenario from the other point of view. In short, you are the aliens, and your mission is to destroy.
In case you are not sure whether you want to play this game, considering the ethical issues, you can first watch a video that shows how the game works. Here is the video:
Now, here is the actual game.
Play Cause as much destruction as you can to the planet, with your UFO. Read more
Apparently there is a new movie out about Project Nim.
The story of Nim Chimpsky is one worth considering, and many think of it primarily as a cautionary tale. Here are a few things that I learned not to do from observing the experience of Nim Chimpsky:
Don’t attempt to teach a language you are not fluent in.
Don’t think of a chimpanzee as an expendable research animal.
Don’t pay so much attention to keeping records that you don’t notice the day to day interactions that you have.
When you do film, you need to watch the footage soon thereafter, not years later.
Do not constantly switch caretakers. Any child, even a chimpanzee youngster, needs security and love and to know there is someone who will always be there for him.
To avoid power struggles, go in with the chimpanzee one at a time, if he shows signs of wanting to start a fight. Don’t let him pick on the less powerful person in the room.
Do not become so dependent on external funding that when the funding runs out, you have to quit.
Use your resources wisely.
Here’s what I did not learn from Project Nim: that you should never try to learn more about chimpanzees. That you should never try to teach a chimpanzee language. That humans and chimpanzees can never be friends.
In the movie trailer, Herbert Terrace asserts that nobody keeps a chimpanzee past the age of five. You know what I did when Bow turned five? I caged myself, so I could be with him. I did this, when I had no institutional support.
Here is a picture of me and Bow:
If you would like to read more about Nim or Bow, or other apes that were cross-fostered in human families, please consider the following books. If you buy them through this link, you will be helping Project Bow.
Today’s PubWages Daily Game is called “Hungry Sumo”. This game comes to us from Ninja Kiwi.
Hungry Sumo features pleasant background music with an oriental twang. Your goal in this game is to make your Sumo wrestler eat lots of rice and get much fatter than the other Sumo wrestler, but without exploding. Need I say more? I’m sure you’ll figure it out.
Play Grow your sumo and have him convert all other Sumo. Read more
Today’s PubWages game is called B17 UFO’s Crusher. The game comes from a company called Clockwork Monster. Clockwork Monster has a logo of a giant dinosaur trampling through a big city with a windup key on its back.
At the Clockwork Monster Website, they categorize games like this:
* Action Games
* Puzzle and Strategy Games
* Shooting Games
* Sports Games
* Online Games
The description of B17 UFO Crusher is as follows: “Protect Earth from UFOs using your B17”. After playing this game, please let me know which of the above categories you think it fits in. Is it a shooting game? Is it about strategy? What other categories could it fit into?
Play Protect Earth from UFOs using your B17. Read more
Freestyle canoeing is a cross between a water sport and an art form. It is like dancing with a partner, but the partner is not another person; it’s a canoe. Take a look at the video embedded below, to the music of Phantom of the Opera.
In order to perform some of these intricate moves, each freestyle canoe artist has to find his “sweet spot”. Some of them practice in the sand with their paddle until they find it. Each person has his own sweet spot, and I suspect that it has to do with their center of balance.
In the next video, Molly Gurien demonstrates some of her moves.
So if you like canoes, but you also like dancing, then freestyle canoeing might be right for you. It also makes a great spectator sport.
All right, gamers, here is today’s new game. It is called “George Plimpton’s Video Falconry”, and it is brought to you by Newgrounds. This is an old game that has recently been revived. The history of this game is even more intriguing than the game itself. The game was created by George Plimpton, an American journalist, writer, salesman and inventor. He was also the founder of The Paris Review. He tackled assassins and pitched for the National League. But his most important contribution to mankind will always be this game: “Video Falconry.” The game was very popular, but for various reasons, involving insidious free market forces, it was discontinued and most copies were destroyed and sent to a landfill. One or two were allowed to go to such remote locations as Kazakhstan and Massachussetts, where nobody could ever hope to find them. However, quite recently the people at Newgrounds have reconstructed the game and made it available for us all to use.
According to the wikipedia article, Newgrounds is actually a well known American social media website that features flash animations and games. Their headquarters are in Pennsylvania. People send them video games that they have written, and the people at Newgrounds choose the very best ones to put on their homepage.
To make things really exciting here at PubWages, I signed us up for a Daily Game. What is a Daily Game? Once a day, a new game will be posted to this site.
This is the first Daily Game that PubWages has received as part of its subscription. It is called “Hands of War”. It is not necessarily as good as the game that was mentioned in the previous post, Bioshock, but at least you don’t need a Playstation 3 controller to play it. So give it a try, and see if you like it. After playing, tell us what you think about “Hands of War” in the comments!
Play Play the extended version of Hands Of War 2, with extra classes and content. Read more
If you would like to read more about Nim or Bow, or other apes that were cross-fostered in human families, please consider the following books. If you buy them through this link, you will be helping Project Bow.
