By CJ Tiernan You ever stop and look around the English-language landscape? It’s wild out there. We have words that sound the same but are spelled differently. We have words that mean multiple, palpably different things. We, the denizens of the melting pot, have words inherited from seemingly every other language under the stars. It can be a lot to handle. Worse yet, we often ignore the available words with imbued pizazz and lean on the rudimentary and familiar words (unfor

By CJ Tiernan Magic Kingdom (or at least Disney World as a whole) is known as "The Happiest Place on Earth" (step aside DMV). It is a magical wonderland full of child-like awe and impossible thrills. You get to enter a piece of history and nostalgia, a world from various Disney properties, and have an uncompromising blast with friends and family. I have everlasting memories of spending time in Disney World, as I was fortunate enough to return over and over again as a kid. The

By CJ Tiernan Adages, Idioms, Axioms and Proverbs. These are phrases that we use, some almost daily, to convey our thoughts and our meanings. They're often things we've heard from others over and over again and they serve as a shortcut (our brain is always down to clown with a shortcut) to deliver our message, or an opportunity to avoid answering the truly daunting questions like "How are you" and "How have you been?" I am always positively smitten when I encounter a characte

By CJ Tiernan Disney World has four distinct theme parks in Orlando, Florida: Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Animal Kingdom, and one that keeps getting renamed but I think is currently called Hollywood Studios. EPCOT was the second of these four parks to open and stands as my favorite one. EPCOT is an acronym for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow and was a land of the future in Walt Disney's eyes. It came to fruition well after his death, but was designed to honor the spiri

By CJ Tiernan I love a good game night. Just hanging out at home, gaming with the fam, is one of my very favorite things in the world. I accumulated a list of my 11 favorite games I've ever played. As a disclaimer, the term "board game" is used a little loosely as several of the games on the list do not have "boards." This term is used in part to distinguish them from games that just use a deck of cards, video games, and the games the Backstreet Boys sang about in the song "Q

By CJ Tiernan When you first hurdle the childhood benchmark of learning to read, it opens up a world of possibilities. Suddenly, you can pick up a book and read it all on your own (Awesome!). You can both explore a new world, and learn and grow doing it. It creates your first real moment of autonomy as a human being and sends your squishy little brain into overdrive. Below is a list of my 11 favorite books that I read as a child. I read these books over and over and over agai

By CJ Tiernan The song that kicks off an animated show is often the baited hook that brings you into the episode. Back in the day of live television, a show would attempt to ensnare you (or, as it the case on this list: an unsuspecting child) immediately after whatever previous show you just watched, so you didn't change the channel. They come on loud and strong and typically offer an extremely abbreviated sense of the plot and/or characters. I love the energy of a TV show th

By CJ Tiernan Whether written for adults or kids, there are certain movies and stories that follow groups of children as their main characters. It can be difficult for a film production to thrust children in to the center of the stage for several reasons. One is simply that there are child labor laws that limit how much a child actor can work in a day, limiting your window to film a scene (ah, the good old days. When you could send a child into the mines and have them work a