Strollers with additions

If you've ever struggled to get a baby buggy - or its current equivalent onto a bus - you'll know what I'm talking about here.

The original baby buggy we used to have folded up quite neatly and was a bit like a large umbrella that you'd could hang over your arm.   Apparently they turned out to also fold up over the child if you weren't careful and this could be a little hazardous.  And they did have a tendency to poke other passengers in various places while you were trying to keep your toddler from falling flat on his/her face as they raced down the bus aisle.

Modern models, by comparison, seem to be incredibly complex, and folding them up is not only an art, but unfolding them is as well.

Now along comes the city select stroller - and apparently with this item you start off with the basic unit then add bits on as your child grows (or you add another child to your family).   This is obviously not designed for use on the average bus; rather it's likely for those mums who drive the family SUV around town and have plenty of room to get the stroller in and out of the vehicle.

According to the manufacturers, the stroller fits through all doorways (always a plus - though getting at the door is sometimes an issue).  It's not as long as other tandem strollers and the second seat can be quickly removed.   (Always remember that manufacturers have a different meaning for the word 'quickly.') It's also 'easy fold'.  (I say nothing more about that.)  And it has a huge storage basket as well.

Let's not go into the fact that it probably requires the mother to work out at the gym every day of the week in order to haul both kids around in this stroller, let alone put all the bits together and take them apart.  

Take no notice of my cynicism: I detest prams, strollers, buggies and the like because my experience in recent years has not been pleasant (think prams whose four wheels all seem to go in different directions).  I was happy with the baby buggy when it came out, and amazed that it got into strife.   I'm sure these double-barrel strollers are just the cat's pyjamas, and I wish every mother who buys one (and all the additions) every success!

I make the top of the search list more than once!

I have to ask, what the heck is a crowl cage? This is what someone went searching for on Yahoo a couple of days ago. I shouldn’t worry, as it brought my blog up at the top of the list, but since Yahoo thought that John Cage and Mike Crowl had something in common with a crowl cage, it seemed a bit of a pointless result for the query.
Various other equally inconsequential results turned up, none of them having anything to do with a crowl cage. The results are much the same on Google, and I still come up at the top of the list. Well, good on John Cage for providing me with some assistance in terms of search queries.
I'd still like to know what the person was looking for, and what they thought 'crowl' meant.
I didn’t do nearly so well when it came to people getting search results for Baldwin St and wheelie bins. I’ve written about the incident in which a student died elsewhere, but it’s interesting to see that a number of other people have also written about this, and several of them have got their facts wrong. Word-of-blog can be just as muddled as word-of-mouth, rather like the equivalent of Chinese whispers on the web.
Which reminds me that I had a good idea about blogs at lunch time while talking to a friend – which I’ve now forgotten. Maybe it’ll come back before I finish this post.
I did manage to get to the top of the Google list with ‘skin game coughing’ – a fairly meaningless phrase, you’d think, until you realise, as Google apparently did, that it might have something to do with Hitchcock’s movie, The Skin Game, and the scene in which the auctioneer has a persistent cough.
Eeyore’s characteristics turn up again, and I get to third place. Pretty good for a little blog that only three people ever read….
The film, Deliverance, must be being studied at the moment, since a common search is for ‘notes deliverance’. And I get to third place for that too, even though my only comment on this film is to quote from another source – the Christian Science Monitor, in fact – which actually has something good to say about the movie. I remember it as a shocking and nasty piece of work, with the only brief moment of quiet and gentleness being when one of the four main characters stops to play a duet with a young mountain boy. It’s a well-known sequence, but it has very little to do with the violent nature of the rest of the movie. Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.
Back in 2007, I mentioned that Peter Jackson was likely to be directing a film (or perhaps three films made back-to-back) about Tin Tin. Seems like that’s going ahead, with Jackson and Spielberg co-directing. One source says they’ll each direct one movie, and then co-direct the third. I get the impression this is all still in the pipeline as yet.
Extraordinarily I make it to the top of the list again, with a query about John Adams Composer. I was very taken with a piece of music by this composer that I heard in England, and intended to get to know his music better when I got back home. For a brief period, Adams was flavour of the month on the local Concert radio program, but they didn’t play the piece I’d heard, and what I did hear didn’t great excite me. Adams appears to be in the mode of composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich, guys who have their moments, but who have chosen to compose minimalist music that can drive you quite insane. Unless that’s their intention, of course.
I’ve been trying to think how I can introduce strollers into this post, and so far haven’t succeeded. Strollers, for those who don’t have, or never have had, children, are those awkwardly-shaped devices that fold up into equally awkwardly-shaped shapes, and in which you carry your toddler (when it’s not folded up – the stroller, I mean, not the child). We used to call them baby buggies, and I think they have a number of different names, depending on where in the world you happen to live. Baby buggies were okay – they were lighter than some strollers I’ve since come across, and we didn’t go through too many of them in carting our five kids around over a period of several years. Nor did any of them ever fold up while the child was in them, which I’ve seen happen with later versions. When we first bought one (in fact, I think we brought it back from England with us), they were the new thing. After that, everyone had to have one. Of course.