Jeff Stahler for March 28, 2015

It is at this point he turns out to be deathly allergic to butterflies.

Social Skills will be at a premium for employers in ten years!Or even Now.

“You really need to get out there,” mum said, “ampersand exercise something other than your thumbs.”“Who’s Ampersand?” Joey asked. “Does he have any cool video games?”

I guess you never noticed all of the adults texting, It has become a social skill.

The only people good at texting are those who are all thumbs.

I thought most parents were too paranoid to actually let their children go out side, at least with out massive supervision and safety measures.

Agreed mam.

Wait Tommy! Apply aerosol spray sun-screen foam..

I use the Swype keyboard, largely because I don’t want to burn out my thumbs, which I need for regular keyboarding and playing the piano, as well as drawing and that other thing.

Oh, yeah, writing.

My daughter spends a lot of time gazing at screens, but she also plays two sports and gets good grades. As a congenital reader, I’d like it if she was better disposed toward book reading, but I’ve made my peace with the knowledge that she’s not the same as her mother or me.

Unfortunately in our current social paradigm of “fear everything, there’s a terrorist around every corner, or just a rapist of kidnapper” this parent would be the exception rather than the rule.

National parks, and other outdoor opportunities are finding it hard to draw “youth” interested in the natural world. Well, unless you put them on an ATV, in a four wheel drive, or other mechanized and/or “recreation opportunity” that destroys and separates them from that very “outdoor” environment.

A considerable contributor to the “denier mentality” on cllimate change, and human impacts IS the industry (whether providing fuel or “fun”) profiting from that destruction and fear, and ignorance about the outddors and the natural world, doing everything they can to merchandise fear. Ignorance isn’t their enemy, it’s their method.

Tree? A seemingly never ending backyard wilderness?

Most kids have to make do with an urban wasteland for fun.

Me too. I lived in a neighborhood of tenements about 30 of them to each block. That translated to 600 kids on the street at once. You learned social skills: the hard way.

I have this theory that texting is such an essential social skill that it becomes a necessary part of the courting ritual. Eventually we will become a race of large-thumbed individuals.

I can see a future where a couple of teenaged boys are hanging out at the malt shop (OK, so I’m dating myself) and a girl walks by and one of them nudges the other and says, “Get a load of the thumbs on her!”