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Mrs. Pharmboy and I saw Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" a few hours ago. It was brilliant.It took him 12 years to do this movie, following the principles through time with the focus on Mason Jr., who starts out as a 7 year old and finishes with his first day of college. The only actors you would know are Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, and both are great. But the reason I am writing this is to let you Freepers know that this movie has a huge surprise: at Mason's small birthday party celebrated at stepmother's parent's house, his step grandma gives...

Social conservatives feel betrayed by the popular culture, and why not? If Hollywood depicts someone with a gun or a Bible, he's a figure of ridicule, entitled to say with Rodney Dangerfield: "I don't get no respect." (But Rodney's was an act, and he got paid for it.) The coastal "sophisticates" mock the rubes, as in an episode on "True Blood," the HBO series with werewolves, vampires and theocratic bloodsuckers, which depicts two rich Republican stereotypes at a Ted Cruz fundraiser at the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas where a massacre follows. What fun. Relief is at hand....

All the employees of school districts on a witch hunt to expel and otherwise permanently punish young boys for shooting toy guns or forming their fists into the shape of a gun need to read Back to Normal. The purpose of psychologist Enrico Gnaulati’s 2013 book is to argue how ordinary childhood behavior is often misdiagnosed as ADD, ADHD, depression and autism — frequently with life-long, disturbing consequences. But along the way he raises the taboo question of whether we “label boys as mentally unstable, behaviorally unmanageable, academically underachieving, in need of special-education services, or displaying behavior warranting school suspension...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this week that nearly one-fifth of high school-age boys have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Doctors eventually medicate two-thirds of them. The diagnoses represent a 41 percent increase over the last decade. The primary gateway drug for teenagers isn’t marijuana or beer. It’s prescription medication. As the New York Times piece breaking this story points out, feeding a child a daily diet of Ritalin increases the chances of dependency, anxiety, and psychosis. Sports once channeled the energy of testosterone-fueled teens. Now our overprotective culture complains of the dangers of...

Have a bucket handy — it's time to take a peek under the rock of progressive culture. The Facebook page My Princess Boy does the J. Crew ads one better...... by offering a public reservoir of photographs of little boys dressed up like girls by their moonbat mommies.

In 1958, when my pal Glenn and I were 13, our fathers dropped us off at Limekiln Lake near Detroit and left us there with a pile of food, camping gear, fishing poles, and a rowboat. For the next four days, Glenn and I were Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn floating down the Mississippi. Limekiln Lake came to mind again the other day when I bought a copy of Conn and Hal Iggulden's bestseller, "The Dangerous Book for Boys." "Dangerous" is a challenge to the nanny state in which children are growing up today. Something has gone terribly wrong in...

Picture a world where your father walks with you down a starlit road, pausing to point out Orion. He recites Robert Frost, knows how a battery works—and all the rules about girls. "The Dangerous Book for Boys," by brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden, is peaking on Amazon's best-seller list (No. 5 last week) by recalling just that world. The compendium of trivia, history and advice is geared toward preteen boys, but it's found a surprising audience in men in their 30s and 40s, too. The book's marbled endpapers, archival illustrations and dry, humorous tone ("excitable bouts of windbreaking will not...

First, there was the question of the title: "The Dangerous Book for Boys." HarperCollins Publishers' Chief Executive Jane Friedman just didn't understand what it meant. Sure, the book had been a hit in England and Australia, but that didn't mean it would work in the U.S. But the sales staff urged her to stick with it, and in just two weeks, "Dangerous" has become the breakout hit of the season. The News Corp. unit initially ordered up 91,000 copies. There are now 405,000 copies in print. One senior HarperCollins executive, extrapolating from overseas sales and population data, projects that "Dangerous,"...

The 'Dangerous' book puts girls on the side http://www.star-telegram.com/408/story/80188.html By JILL LAWLESS THE ASSOCIATED PRESS LONDON -- Nostalgia ain't what it used to be. In these frenzied, media-saturated times, the lure of a simpler past is more powerful than ever. That may explain the success of The Dangerous Book for Boys, a deliberately retro tome that has become the publishing sensation of the year in Britain. Exuding the brisk breeziness of Boy Scout manuals and Boy's Own annuals, The Dangerous Book is a childhood how-to guide that covers everything from paper airplanes to go-carts, skipping stones to skinning a rabbit....

The Dangerous Book for Boyshttp://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20058973-5003900,00.html http://tinyurl.com/or3b2 Christopher Bantick 12aug06 The Dangerous Book for Boys By Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden HarperCollins, 400pp, $39.95 UNAMBIGUOUSLY blokey, The Dangerous Book for Boys will have many fathers, or even grandfathers, remembering their days with crystal sets and billycarts. But are such things dangerous? According to the brothers Iggulden, who have in place of an introduction a piece called I Didn't Have this Book When I Was a Boy, boyhood "is all about curiosity". But the kind of curiosity here is of a certain age and time. There's nothing wrong with a fair swish...

Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails are what readers of a surprise bestseller are made of. The Dangerous Book for Boys by the British brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden is a practical manual that returns boys to the wonder and almost lost world of tree houses and pirate flags. It celebrates the art of teaching an old mutt new tricks and accepts skinned knees as an acceptable risk for running through fields with the same dog yapping along. As of July 3, The Dangerous Book is the number one seller on Amazon UK and it is holding steady at...

Alex Rider: the proof that boys should be boyshttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-2269130,00.html http://tinyurl.com/m5dsl The Times July 15, 2006 As Stormbreaker, the first film about children’s favourite junior spy, opens in cinemas, Amanda Craig talks to his creator, Anthony Horowitz, about adventures, kissing and growing up “I STILL REMEMBER THE tremendous exuberance of being a boy,” Anthony Horowitz, the creator of Alex Rider, says. “It has an almost abstract quality that you can’t create by artificial means.” I reflect on this as I walk round my local park every morning and see my son slay an entire Roman legion with a sword, track rabbits...

Boys will be boyshttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2230571,00.html http://tinyurl.com/n3g5a DJ Taylor June 18, 2006 Why are fathers snapping up an old-fashioned book of boyhood lore? DJ Taylor looks at the gap in almost every father’s life -- Like practically every human relationship these days, fatherhood has become horribly institutionalised. A condition that was once thoroughly ad hoc and made up as one went along is now caught up in bureaucracy’s stifling grasp. Father’s Day (an American import that didn’t exist in my youth), fathers’ support agencies, parenting classes: on all sides comes evidence of a natural state hedged about with all kind of wholly...