OSFO just told Smartmom that she can write about her as much as she wants.

Everybody hear that?

OSFO is home sick today and she and Smartmom are having a great time eating cinnamon toast and reading nasty comments about Smartmom in the Brooklyn Paper.

OSFO is even writing back to some of Smartmom's most vehement detractors. That girl is fearless and she says exactly what she thinks. Oy, Smartmom is very proud of her girl.

The Paper is definitely milking this so-called controversy for all it's worth.They even ran this story:

After posting Smartmom’s piece last week — the one in which Smartmom wondered whether she should stop writing about her children in her tell-all column — The Brooklyn Paper asked readers

whether our popular parenting columnist should stop invading her kids’ privacy.

The overwhelming response? Yes.

Some readers even blamed Smartmom for the widespread perception of Park Slope as an island of self-obsessed parenting.

“Smartmom’s no small part of why Park Slope parents have become the
target of so much derision,” wrote “Advil Please” from Park Slope.
“Perhaps The Brooklyn Paper has allowed her to babble on for so long in
hopes of keeping the ‘controversy’ alive, but when even her kids are
telling her to shut up, you’d think she would finally get the picture.”

Tough luck, Advil Please — in this week’s column, Smartmom says she’s sticking to her guns!

In that case, most respondents said that Smartmom should prepare for
some hefty therapist bills as her tots grow up. And what’s worse, she
might even lose some of her readers!

“If your kids and neighbors won’t talk because they fear being
written up, think of something else creative,” wrote RK from Park
Slope. “It’s run its course. Bring it to the next level.”

“If Smartmom doesn’t stop, I suspect that she will find out many
years from now that the resentment on her children’s part will grow,
not diminish,” added Andrea from Gowanus.

Bottom line: few (except for Dumb Editor, of course, but he poses in the nude!) defended Smartmom’s decision to put her life — and the lives of her children — on display.

“These are her children — the heart of her heart — she’s playing
with,” added “Another Mother from Downtown.” “Maybe if she gets in
touch with that reality, she’ll reconsider her career imperatives, find
a more meaningful, less hurtful way to express herself and wind up a
much smarter mom (and wife, neighbor and friend, too).

The editors of Newgeography.com sent me an email about Peter Smirniotopoulos's recently-posted article "Musings on Urban Form: Is Brooklyn the Ultimate City?".

The New York Times reports that there were 598,000 job losses spread across both
manufacturing and services industries. Joblessness hits 7.6%. Pretty bleak. Especially as someone who is looking for WORK. Hello?

Here it is. That Park Slope upper duplex you always wanted. Space, charm, historical detail, AND A DECK

The public is invited to share their views on mayoral control of the schools. There are hearings on future dates in other boroughs. Info here.

Manhattan:
Friday, February 6, 2009
10:00 a.m.
Assembly Hearing
250 Broadway, Room 1923
19th Floor
New York, NY

Leonie Haimson, executive director of  Class Size Matters sent in this response to an OTBKB post about Learn NY, which she claims is an organization established by
allies of Mayor Bloomberg "to retain his choke hold on
our schools after the current governance system sunsets in June 2009."

Here is Haimson's take on that organization and what she thinks are the real problems and solutions:Whatever you think of Ms. Haimson's point of view you have to admit that the NAME of her organization is brilliant. 

 The organization’s paid representatives, including Peter Hatch,
Robin Warren, Brian Keeler, and Julie Wood, all claim that their activities
are not funded directly by Bloomberg, but they refuse to divulge who is
paying their salaries.  They also admit to having raised millions of
dollars, and have hired several prominent and well-connected lobbying and
consulting firms to push their agenda with the Legislature in
Albany . 

 The problem is that there are few if any involved public school
parents who trust this administration’s good intentions, after having
witnessed six years of unilateral, strong-arm tactics, in which the Mayor and
Chancellor have ignored their views, and have imposed misguided policies on
our children’s schools.  So Learn
NY is hard at work, trying to
recruit parents and make them
believe that they are actually interested in what
parents think.

On the Learn NY website, they may say they have “made open
dialogue with parents a priority”,
but they have turned down several offers to meet with established NYC parent
groups, and have so far refused to speak at any public forum that includes
representatives from groups with opposing views. They also claim to want to
increase parent input and transparency in the current governance system, but
have not made any substantive proposals on how this would be achieved, except
to suggest that there should be more public hearings. 

 Over the last six years, there have been numerous public hearings
held by the Chancellor and/or other Department of Education representatives,
but always after they have already decided what their policies would
be.  Never has
this administration’s decisions been affected by a single comment, suggestion
or proposal put forward by any parent or parent group.
 More public hearings without an administration that actually has to listen to the views of parents and
take them into account before making decisions would be useless.

 The position of Learn
NY on the need to improve
transparency also seems to be hypocritical, since they refuse to be
transparent about who is funding their own operations, and their tactics are
anything but transparent. An anonymous person
left pro-Mayoral control comments on several blogs,
until he was eventually unmasked as Brian Keeler of
Learn NY .
Moreover, their website includes much distorted data and PR spin, rather than
actual fact.

 Instead of Mayoral dictatorship, we need a system in which the
Mayor would have to forge a real partnership with parents.  Instead of
PR spin, we need the truth. For more information about our concerns,, please
visit the NYC public
school parent blog. Send us a message at NYCPublicSchoolParents@gmail.com.  And please, testify at the hearings on Mayoral control to
share your views; the schedule is here.

  My friend Nancy O. Graham reviewed the new Henry Selick 's Coraline, on her blog oswegatchie and Alternative Films for Kids. The film opens today at the Park Slope Pavilion at 2:00, 4:25, 7 and 9:40.
Here's an excerpt from Nancy's review:

My son Ray has been making movies since he was six: stop motion animation, live action, and lately, CGI parodies of Star Wars.
He reads film production books and bios of animators like Chuck Jones,
and loves ‘making-of’ bonus features and little biopics about revered
figures like Ray Harryhausen. One of his ‘mentors’ is Henry Selick, who
has just completed his adaptation (for 3D stop-motion animation) of
Neil Gaiman’s novel, Coraline.

It was our enormous good fortune—mine, my son’s, my daughter’s, my husband’s, and his mother’s—to visit the set of Coraline
a couple of years ago, and a real treat to see a preview screening of
the finished work the other night in Manhattan, with Henry Selick on
hand to answer audience questions.

Ray,
who is 11, wasn’t sure he wanted to see what he called a ‘horror’
movie. His 9-year-old sister, who acts in most of his movies and in her
own monologue-driven shorts, was firm: she wouldn’t go to the
screening. The monstrous Other Mother of the previews, and the prospect
of having her lunge from the screen, were horrors they could live
without.

So, Ray and I headed into NYC with the plan that he
would shut his eyes, pull his jacket up over his face, and hold his
hands to his ears if it all got to be too much. He was willing to
endure, if only for the Q&A portion of the evening.

As it turns out, he didn’t have to worry too much. He only shut his eyes once, and not for long. While the idea of Coraline
is truly terrifying—a girl is left alone to rescue her supernaturally
abducted parents—its creators have allowed the idea to carry most of
the weight of emotion, as with the best fairy tales, and haven’t piled
onto it with 3D shock effects or long, anxiety-provoking suspense
sequences. The Nightmare Before Christmas, with its cast of
characters in varying states of decomposition, is more horrific—at
least to me, and I think my son, who got to an age where he felt too
uneasy to watch it, and wouldn’t go near the undead-dominated Corpse Bride, would agree.

Henry
Selick has done a beautiful job of reconceptualizing the novel for the
screen and for stop motion. From the first moments, when metal hands
sew up a doll-sized version of the title character and cast her into a
void, this is a movie that invites contemplation of the animator and
the animator’s art. Our first view of the hands of the evil Other
Mother, creator and destroyer of the Other World, are bare of fleshly
trappings, primordial armature. We come to find that the energy of
children is what makes the Other Mother’s material other world, and it
is their life force that makes it beautiful, whimsical, and inviting.

If you have watched any of the featurettes about Coraline,
you have seen artist after artist toiling and tinkering away, as
artists always do on these projects, though now, with the Internet, in
less obscurity. They can even blog about their work for Laika Studios.
It’s hard to watch that image of armature hands making the Coraline
doll and not think of all the human hands that have gone into the
making of this supremely hand-made movie, and seeing in these moments a
tribute to them all (certainly they deserve a tribute, including those
several dozen Laika workers, I was sorry to read, who were recently
laid off).

OtherMotherWorld is especially fanciful and so packed
with detail it's hard to imagine not seeing the movie many times to try
to take it all in. Henry S. has ensured that the Other Mother’s
overture to Coraline is suitably seductive. She—and we—are truly
tempted to stay and sample more delights from the animators’ cabinet of
wonders. The wonders really are wonderful; we laughed throughout the
early other world scenes. In the post-screening Q&A, Henry S.
talked a bit about his motivation for shooting in 3D. He wanted the
audience to have more access to the animators' world—2D doesn't really
allow it. So the other world—more colorful, more fanciful—really is the
animators' world. (One could imagine a version that is flat when we're
in Coraline's world and 3D only in the other world, like the sepia vs.
color worlds of The Wizard of Oz.)

 Lots of new pix on the Coney Island History Project flickr photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27583836@N08/

Lynn Kowalewski , a
Brooklyn resident and member of the Coney Island History Project,
helped carry the DO NOT ROCK THE BOAT sign from Astroland's Water
Flume. Tricia Vita, Administrative Director of the Coney Island History
Project, holds the REMAIN SEATED – KEEP HANDS IN BOAT sign. The
Astroland Archives, historic signage and other artifacts from the 46
year old park were donated to the History Project by Astroland owners
Carol Hill Albert and Jerome Albert.