This is another Facebook game similar to other farm-tending games like Farmville, Farmtown and Country Story. I just thought of checking it out after seeing a friend's post about it. The very first thing that came to mind was that it looks and feels a lot like Ranch Rush of Yahoo!, although there isn't any character that you order around to do jobs. Games like these are already so common in Facebook that the developers didn't even bother setting up a tutorial. Speaking of developers, I am still checking out who they are, because they don't seem like from Playfish or Zynga.
Some of the features of the game:
1. No more crops going bad if not harvested. I thought I won't be playing the game for long since the first crop you can plant, Clover, matures in four hours. Which is quite fast for a casual player that only gets to check Facebook once or twice in a day, even if it goes bad at the same rate that it ripens. But turns out it doesn't spoil, even after I visited the game several days later.
2. There are a couple of machines that you can use to process crops you harvest. For starters, you get to use a cheese machine to process milk that you get from feeding clover to cows. Then there's the ketchup machine, the flour mill, and a chicken coop. They just introduced rabbits, but I don't exactly know yet what they are supposed to produce.
3. Crops, animals, and machines can actually be gifted to you by friends who already reached a certain level to be qualified to gift them. You will also need a certain number of friends to become your neighbors for you to be able to expand your ranch (or you can shell out some real cash for it).
The game do require that you spend a considerable amount of time feeding animals, planting or processing harvests. More so than you would playing, say, Cafe World. But I guess that's the game design and it's fairly reasonable.
That's it for now. I am pretty new in the game, but I will try to update on this as I go along.
Yahoo! Shine recently featured the product refund in the US for Baby Einstein videos primarily because they (quoting the article) "...did not, as promised, turn babies into wunderkinds." You can read the full article by clicking on the pic at the left.
As a parent of young kids, I am sure I have a couple of such videos at home, along with other kid staples like Barney, Sesame Street, Backyardigans, and even not so common ones like Land Before Time. These videos have always played two roles for our family: they entertain while at the same time they introduce children to educational concepts. In addition, we got tons of picture books and starter books and playboards and toys at home, all intended to spur the kids to curiosity and imagination at every turn possible. And it is implied in all these that we as parents will be there to guide and educate them. That their learning will primarily be due to our teaching them, and these materials only as tools.
It would appear then that some parents had other ideas in mind. Reading the article, it seems that the sale of Baby Einstein was anchored on a promise (or two): an easy way to educate kids that would bring extraordinary results.
In the modern world we live in, it's not really surprising to accept that promise as gospel truth. We are regularly bombarded by news of successful people who seemed to have it made it big "overnight". So, easy is not really a hard thing to accept (pun intended). But the fact is, easy is only easy when you have prepared for more than just overnight. For most of us, the only part we see of these successful people is their time in the limelight and possibly the minute before that. We do not see what they went through in the proverbial dark room before that impressive picture of them comes out in the light. I seriously doubt that anybody, other than being born into wealth or doing something illegal, could actually make it big without putting in his dues. But then again, we choose to accept what is pleasing to our senses.
To be fair, some parents are simply already overburdened. They got a job, home chores, and so many other valid and worthwhile things to do that it sounds good to have a product that can deliver as much promise. Well, any burger will taste good if you're hungry. This is one of those hungry moments for parents. It really does take willpower to decide to cut back on some things to make way for something of paramount importance as the education of our children.
And then, some are simply lazy. To the point of irresponsibility of abdicating their duty of educating their children to "experts". So the children watch these videos while the parents are on their Facebook's virtual farms, in the phone, or in some other time-wasters.
Teaching children is indeed a challenge. I have to say it's even a skill that one needs to learn and will be good at only with constant practice. But it's something that we cannot fail on. The education of our children is simply something we cannot leave to automation. After all, each one of us is unique in his or her own way. And no standardized educational tool can account for that uniqueness.
Hopefully this product refund will awaken many to the reality of what true education entails.
Been reading about lemons on the Net lately, after that night when I thought of throwing a slice of lemon on my glass of water. The rest of what you will read below is a recollection of what I've come across so far, as far my recall goes.
A simple Google search led me to a couple of sites about Master Cleanse, which is a detox/weight reduction approach using primarily lemons and not much else. I've never been a fan of anything about detox or cleansing that excludes a whole bunch of everything else except for a few food types, regardless if it was intended to be done only for a period of time. Besides, it was also intended for weight reduction, which is something I don't have need of. So I move on.
The next thing I started reading about is the alkalizing property of lemons. Alkalinity is generally that state of being not acidic. Being acidic carries with it certain limitations in how the body can absorb nutrients and dispose of wastes, hence bad. Technically, being not acidic can be measured in terms of ph levels, with about 7.0 ph as being "neutral", and anything lower than that contributing to acidity. Coffee is about 4.5ph, while lemons goes a long way down at 2.3ph.
Now, that seems to run counter in most sites that says lemons actually contribute to lessening acidity in the body, or technically, bringing the body fluids closer to 7.0ph. That's where the term "alkalizing" comes into play. Lemon, though being acidic, actually contributes to alkalinity because it triggers a reaction in the body's organs to produce stuff that reduces acidity and bring about alkalinity. Hmmm sounds interesting, so I asked a medical friend of mine.
My medical friend calls the reaction of the body to the lemon as a possible form of "compensation", which happens to other situations in the body to account for certain imbalances. But this can lead to longer-term problems. For example, a situation in the body can reduce the heart's ability to pump blood, for which the body will compensate by increasing the heart rate, or the number of pumps in a given time. The desired effect may be obtained, but may result in greater damage to the body in the future. What needs to be done instead is to possibly remove the reason why the heart is not pumping blood as well as it should, like having enough exercise and proper diet.
In possibly the same way, when we take in a certain amount of lemon juice, the body is releasing substances to induce alkalinity because of the high level of acidity. Which makes drinking substantial amounts of lemon juice to induce alkalinity (some sites recommend the juice of half of a lemon to be squeezed in a glass of water, three times a day) essentially pointless, even dangerous to the body.
So far, I have yet to find a site that's actually a "medical" one that has something to say about lemons. Hope you could share here if you have come across some.
