Katie, a BlogHer member who is a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill, brought to our attention a video from the Nike GameChangers series called Beat the BS. She said that " it really hits hard on a lot of the stereotypes we face as women (especially in sports) and how we can over come them." Naturally, I couldn't wait to check it out.

I'd say it's a good time to be a kid.  There seem to be endless clever and creative ideas available to parents for celebrating Valentine's Day.  I remember using store-bought Scooby Doo cards with my friends (because nothing breeds third-grade romance like a picture of Shaggy).  These days, however, the bar has been raised.  Here's a round-up of creative ideas for making this holiday special for your kids:

Sometimes I ponder the deep social implications and interconnections involved in producing a word (spoken in caps) like "FAIL" from my grandchild's lips. Other times I just wonder what the heck she's talking about. In an effort to keep you up on all the terms rushing into and out of our daily lexicon, here is a look at some of the latest slang. I say some because I don't know it all. Perhaps you can supply a few good terms yourself.

There's been a lot of buzz in the past few days about the "pink plague," the marketing phenomenon of getting young girls "hooked" on the color pink (and therefore pink toys and clothing). It looks like the pink plague extends to another segment of the market as well--girls who play video games. If slapping pink on Barbie makes her fly out the door, why shouldn't it work to put Lara Croft in some pink pants? Maybe give her a pink gun?

We bought our first video game system when my oldest son was six. He has intuitively been a fan of gadgets and technology from his earliest days; I knew, just knowing my kid, he was going to be a gamer. I greeted this fact with some trepidation, at first; I wondered if the purchase of our first system (a Nintendo GameCube, as it turned out) was the harbinger of great doom.

For me, the answer to that question is, heck yea (or it was until it got struck by lightning and died.) Will it help you get fit? It might but there are a lot of things to consider before you shell out the money for the game (or the system if you don't already have a Wii.) One of the first things I think you should consider before buying the Wii Fit is how you'll feel about the weigh in and the BMI components of the game. I'm anti-scale in general and I take issue with being "forced" to use the scale and/or BMI tools in order to do the regular check ins.

A word game makes the news in the New York Times. Does that sound plausible to you? It's not just plausible, it's real. The wildly popular Facebook game Scrabulous, an obvious knockoff of the board game Scrabble, hit the news when Hasbro and Mattel declared Scrabulous "piracy." According to the NYTimes article,

What do you do when you have five minutes to kill, or an hour or two in the evening? If your answer is "I blow stuff up," or "I build little pixilated cities," then you and I have something in common. My development as a child went as follows: crawl, walk, kindergarten, Nintendo thumb, damn!