Lemon-Scented Bivouac

2004-05-10T21:15:00.000-07:00

Trying to find my way back here ...

-- While loafing in the outfield of Agren Park here on Vashon, surrounded by woods, I hear one of the players on my crappy new softball team shout out, "Honey, are Ashley's dance shoes on the front seat of the Subaru?" On the other hand, our opponents and their many Parking Lot Friends are some weird, mossy mixture of jocks and stoners, who reach second base on a screaming line drive, stick out their tongues and flip odd signs at each other. Welcome to the Island.

-- Among the 12,340 thoughts about teaching that I haven't posted because I didn't post the first one and felt behind: You don't get to have the magic conversation. That one that cools off the student who sobs uncontrollably when stressed out, or the one who wants to be a Leader Man but instead gets caught shooting rubber bands, or the one whose parents are just divorced or may have a disease or are lonely -- you don't get to put your arms around them and say the magic thing that heals all wounds. In fact, you barely register. You just try to shine steadily, all day all year long, so the kids can see their footing as they go past you.

-- It's hard not to believe that even if we are not perfect our vocations are, or at least that some vocation is. I feel that way, without realizing it, about teaching. If you master the greater goals of teaching you are headed towards a place of completion, a natural culmination for a Mind Forever Voyaging. In fact, public school teaching may be a mostly-random assemblage of unrelated skills, most of which are bureaucratic in nature. That is if public school teaching is not, as John Taylor Gatto would have it, wrongdoing.

-- Elliott is drawing, talking and cracking jokes now. He's ticking off major milestones and he has a real personality of his own, albeit one that gets fixated sometimes. He looks like this:

2004-03-25T16:09:00.000-08:00

Odd times.

Have begun student teaching without putting much pressure on myself (and, thank my cooperating teacher, without much pressure from her). The first four days have been fun. I try something, listen to the students' responses to it, think about it, come up with an idea during breakfast or in the shower, then try out that idea that day. I was going to say it reminds me of what Bernardo Bertolucci (I think) said: That his ideal state would be to dream something, then get up and film it the next day. Only I would like it to be the students' dream and not my own.

But I'm also reading John Taylor Gatto, who not only speaks the truth but also speaks the kind that I feel in my guts that I should have known all along (or did without realizing it). This is terrible and wonderful stuff for a beginning teacher. Listen:

No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders...Teachers do care and do work very hard, but the institution they work for is psychopathic; it has no conscience."

Which sums up my waning experiences in teaching school. It's a painful, constricted, non-experiential training in how to be a junior bureaucrat; and most of my classmates (this is awful to say, I suppose) are impressively compliant with the whole project. They're scared now, completely incapable of asserting their own ideas; they'll make perfect lower-level functionaries later on. They'll tell kids what to do; they'll try to force one tiny, pointless, overdetermined context-free activity after another on their kids, who will undoubtedly grow up to feel tiny, pointless, overdetermined and context-free.

And so it goes.

In other news, we now live on Vashon and watch great blue heron. I saw the moon and Jupiter in one gulp of the binoculars last night; they were a thumb's width apart. Elliott is one year old and has such a roster of new skills they'd be outdated by the time I finished typing this. He's ... oh, I won't try. He's a little blast of a boy.

And here's a photo (thanks to friend Susan for taking this):

2004-02-20T22:21:00.000-08:00

The house is stacked, boxed (mostly) and ready (mostly) to be fed into the mouth of tomorrow's large moving truck. Lotsa old memories for this cat of feeding households into giant trucks (what'd he say? I think he's saying he moved a lot when he was young.) My parents had actually-old antique furniture that wasn't held together by hex bolts and therefore couldn't be taken apart in a trice or at all. We, with our Ikea life, can flatten down to the point of only wafers of air among our belongings.

Anyway, the thought of jamming yet another truck's piehole gives me a sigh and that's about all. Onward.

A few days ago I threw out everything, just about. All my paperwork, just about. At one point years ago I read or heard that designers are supposed to save ten of everything they've done, so downstairs I trundled boxes full of ten of every stinkin newspaper I ever designed. Now I don't design newspapers and don't mean to ever again, so away into the recycling bin they all went. Away went the old report cards, and the postcards. Into the bin with every school newspaper I was part of or mentioned in, away with old letters and company newsletters. So nice. The recycling bin declares a limit of 200 pounds and I think I may have crossed that limit. Just tons, it feels like, of dead memories -- or not quite dead, but only exactly as meaningful as they can be on their own power.

I think I used to suspect that my biographer or curator would want all these artifacts. I didn't think it that literally, but it felt like that -- that someone would watch and weep to find out that I threw out the diary in which I wrote four entries when I was 10. Then the biographer became me, much older, in the autumn of years paging through the find the names of coworkers or classmates I didn't much care about to begin with; or looking for insights into my juvenile psyche. Then I told my older self he was free not to care. In fact, I encouraged him to get out of the house and go talk to people, even strangers, rather than read about banalities just because they were old banalities that happened to me. I think my older self is grateful.

So goodbye to all that. Elliott is about to speak, or about to walk, or about to walk speaking and speak walking, the way he already has in my dreams. We're about to occupy Vashon Island and I'm about to start student teaching. Dana got bit on the finger by a cat and we need a screen and some wood for our new stove and spring is coming. Up and down the scale, from large to trivial, there are things to do, perhaps even to do well.

So goodbye to the past. Also goodbye to this blog for a while -- probably summer, at least. I can't hear back from you anymore (comments dead) this way, so call me when you can. The new number is (206) 567-5817 so call us. Sleep in our spare room or camp in our backyard. Do well yourself.

2004-01-30T22:58:00.000-08:00

If I'm under cover and out of sight lately, it's because I'm contemplating an imminent period in which I won't have five seconds' space to misplace a task. Strangely, I think these soon-to-be-busy periods are when I'm most out of the world; substitute whichever theory you'd like to make that make sense.

Of course, out of it these days, what with Baby sleeping on my chest and Baby demanding concentrated watching when I'm not in school, involves a ton of wasted motion. Hence I have no time to waste on frivolities yet somehow today I re-watched Finding Nemo and cut a path through several chapters of a book I'd already read.

Oh and, while you're here -- John Kerry? Oh cripes, oy gevalt, etc. I don't have the words -- not because the words would be incredibly angry but because they'd be just deflated. Kerry's an opaque dork, a clumsy Northeasterner, a guy whose words nullify each other as they drift out his mouth -- which reminds me -- look what can happen (scroll down) 16 years after you bungle being a presidential candidate:

Michael is the Director of “Amtrac” and is passionate about trains. He is very strongly in favor of expanding our train system, and points out that the technology is already here and gave us examples of Japan and Europe’s success with their “Bullet Trains”. He feels that with a little public investment in capital and use of existing routes, we could make a real improvement in our transportation system.

Perhaps he also would like to see more involvement in the local senior center, and should be congratulated for his fine work organizing "Stamp Out Litter September."

Of course, I'll vote for Kerry, but Edwards is the one who can win. Blogger won't let me take down poor Howard Dean from my sidebar. I still like a lot of Howie's statements, but the bulldoggy-doctor thing doesn't jibe with the fact that voters hire likeable inoffensive candidates (just you stop looking at Richard Nixon when I say that).

I just can't stand that mysterious cramp in the Democratic nominating process that gives us these lachrymose oafs to represent us. Clinton aside (and Clinton continues to seem like the space alien in this storyline), it's been a parade of them going back to McGovern (or maybe Humphrey; I don't know). Just give us one guy that doesn't do that pitiful-looking two-thumbs-up thing. Maybe in 2008, okay?

2004-01-20T20:12:00.000-08:00

Hello. Let me introduce myself to you. I am Mr. Bob Abplanalp, CEO of Precision Valve and your guest blog editor for today. Here are some of the things I wish to share from today's modern Interweb:

Poop Jokes
The Valve Manufacturers of America: History of the Valve Industry
The results of my Google search for "Yngwie Malmsteen nachos"

I thank you for your time and appreciate your continued support of the valve industry.

2004-01-16T08:53:00.000-08:00

Just found, on this page, a fine sentence for starting a novel of your choosing. Adapt at will; just thank me sometime:

While she was working on the painting, the wind became so strong that it blew the painting into a crevice 100 feet deep.

2004-01-14T22:00:00.000-08:00

34 today. If I haven't yet come to feel like an adult -- and I haven't really -- it may not happen. Just to make everything easier, I assume that no one else really feels like an adult either; they're just not telling anyone.

I don't really think that's true -- I know some extremely controlled people with day planners who have clearly put childish things very far from their minds. I don't actually take any particular pride in not being one of those people. I just don't understand them very well. I still feel basically wiggly and unpolished. But sometimes I notice: damn, that's an adult face in the mirror.

2004-01-06T20:45:00.000-08:00

The snow in this photo, taken at noon today, is already melting in the rain. That pattering sound is a heartbreaker, so I'm staying inside:

Also, even this far after Christmas, Elliott has been working on a present for you:

2004-01-03T06:53:00.000-08:00

Last night we were passed on the highway by a bigass white limo whose license plate read:

ELSLIMO

I know that probably stands for "Emerald Limousine Service Limo" and that, but I can only read it as:

El Slimo

2004-01-01T21:17:00.000-08:00

Not to become tenderhearted on all of you here, but I have to say that packing books gives me the jitters. I've packed so god-damned many books in my life, and lifted so many boxes -- but it isn't the physical exertion that bugs me.

In my latter-day moves, i.e., as an adult, my moving has consisted of chasing the same, 40%-unread books from one abode to another. Each time the decisions involved in stacking-em-up and sorting-em-around and very faintly weeding out the bulk open up a series of little queries. Will I ever really work through Max Euwe's Judgement and Planning in Chess and, if I did, what sort of person would I be? Should I just lie and say I've read Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers or should I stop showing its big quality title to our houseguests? How many insane number of times would you have to read books of record reviews to actually break their spines? And why would I pack the two halves of a book with a broken spine?

Honestly, the only compensatory therapy would be the soft whumping sound that would follow from throwing 90% of my books in a gully. But if by 33 years old I haven't shown the spirit needed to do that, it may be a bit late in the day now.

2003-12-21T21:56:00.000-08:00

I believe some rudimentary updates are due prior to the lot of us shoving off for the Xmas Xebrations and Xtivations:

-- Our 5-day sojourn in Central Valley California (a.k.a., Sacramento and environs) demonstrated that California is a very strange place. In all directions the "city" is sprawling over farmland, and it sprawls in only two forms: massive residential sectors of identical houses, and vast canyons of strip malls. The baby tour was perfectly fine and Elliott performed his necessary duties of waving a curlicue of hair off the center of his forehead and excitedly chanting out variations on his favorite phoneme: "dodtj."

-- I met the class I'll be student teaching. They're Vashon nerds, very affectionate with one another and very zany. They crowded around me and told me jokes or hammed it up. At one point my future supervising teacher briefly left the room, and I said to one of the clamoring kids: "Well, we're in charge now; what should we do?" He put his finger to his chin, then said: "I think we should jump UP AND DOWN 14 MILLION TIMES!" Later, I found out that he like to listen to Weird Al CDs.

-- Elliott's new transition into being able to express opinions yields mixed results. Sometimes he can't be satisfied one little bit and he's back in his earliest grinding, wailing days. Sometimes it feels like he's born, reborn, reborn, etc.

-- We're moving to Vashon by March. Lawd help us. Or, rather, can you help us?

2003-12-09T22:46:00.000-08:00

I have my student teaching assignment (for those of you who love long URL's, try a "view source" on that link). The moving parties are going to be tough -- there's a ferry involved. How about two beers and two pizzas for everyone involved?

In the meantime, I just finished a few nonsequential weeks in a third-grade classroom. I wanted to note that one student who wanted me to read her story handed me seven tinily-written newsprint pages with a BOOGER on the back page. (I know because my finger landed on something tiny and soft.)

Even without the boogers, the storywriting ability of third-graders is just astounding. Let me try to simulate:

It was a bright day in summer [They were told to put a setting in the story -- Ed.] Me and my cousin and my mom and my brother were going to the Mall! Then we went to the food court. Then we saw the Foot Locker. I wanted to go in but my mom said No I couldnt. Then we saw some people they were talking. Then we ate. I ate two tacos and my brother ate three tacos. My sister and her friends wanted to go to another part of the mall they said they would come back. Then ... [excerpted for the sanity of the reader -- Ed.] Then we went home. I ate a Dominos pizza for dinner and played Sonic DMX then played another game. Then I went to bed.
THE END

The awful thing is that these students were asked, by terms of a particular gawdawful writing program the district had bought to flog their miserable little stories over the landscape of two and a half months of daily writing classes. By the time I had seen them they were so worn out by their stories they became instantly cataleptic and pointless at the moment Writing Workshop began at about 10:45. The teacher I worked with thought it was her problem. Lord help us, could you write a story after instruction to write a "setting lead" followed by a "set up lead" that hinted at your "hot spot."

Just a complaint. The kids were quite sweet and generally fun to work with.

Elliott is crawling as of Sunday at 7:45 p.m.

2003-12-09T22:28:00.000-08:00

Correspondent Eric points out that in the photo below Elliott bears a striking resemblance to Jonathan Winters:

2003-11-28T07:45:00.000-08:00

This just in:

2003-11-25T00:14:00.000-08:00

I try not to post movie reviews, so I'll just use my scant leverage to try to get you, yes you personally, to see To Be and To Have, which is no more than a documentary of one very, very good teacher at work in a one-room schoolhouse in rural French. After a semester or so of "learning" that teaching is some ungainly amalgam of extremely formal positions on issues of classroom management, educational theory and anal-retentive lesson planning, it felt wonderful to watch someone whose teaching is just an extension of being a good person.

And it leaves Seattle on Thursday. Try to make it.

2003-11-19T20:43:00.000-08:00

It's entirely possible that we have heard Elliott's first word. Lately he's been hollering a sharp "GUG!" whenever one of the dogs walks through the room. Yesterday we showed him a book of gugs, er, dogs and he trembled and shouted "GOG! GUG! GUG!" at the photographs.

So, "gug" it is. And gug to you too.

And I have, by writing, proven to myself that I am a stinkin hippie when it comes down to classroom management. I'm ready to pitch just about everything that other teachers do out the window and let the kids do what interests them. No, no, don't tell me that I'll turn into a realist real fast once I start teaching, heh heh. That's just going to make me more of a hippie.

2003-11-15T14:38:00.000-08:00

The wisdom of Elliott's hand-me-down letter blocks:

I have pages to write on classroom management, a subject that, by the terms of my program, was supposed to be in the center of my attention this past week in the third-grade classroom. Amusing that they have to ask -- I get the feeling that classroom management, or discipline, or behavior issues, or whatever you want to call it, preoccupies teachers and teaching candidates. It preoccupies many of them their entire careers, I bet, and many of them into retirement, which they enter with the nagging question: Why wouldn't they do what I wanted them to?.

It's such an odd question, so perverse. When you get into the classroom it becomes both more and less perverse. I don't think that most teachers enter into a role of power comfortably. The intelligent and humane ones distrust their power the more they try to exercise it, but they also come to long for what their power could accomplish -- theoretically. They don't want to bully their students, but if they could they could get some peace -- and maybe be liked! They wind up wanting control. Decency would request that they look for self-control, but they distort their target and wind up trying to control their students.

There are good, cogent explanations of these central issues by Alfie Kohn, who seems to serve two roles in the educational industry: Token Hippie (in the roll call of dozens of coercive discipline methods, he's tacked on at the end as a novelty item) and, closely related, Straw Man (teachers routinely assure each other that he isn't Realistic, then they get up and drag themselves back to their miserable classrooms). I recommend, oh let's see, this essay.

Now I'm off to bake all that into a standard academic essay. See you around, misbehavers.

2003-11-10T21:49:00.000-08:00

Two months ago Elliott was a gaping mouth. Everything went into his brain through his mouth. He was so intensely oral he couldn't even use his hands to get things into his mouth -- he'd just open his maw as wide as he could and lunge it at whatever had to be gummed.

The orality faded and now, at 7 1/2 months, he's suddenly relentlessly exploratory. He's desperate to stand up, and when he's standing propped against something he tries somehow to stand up further, or wider, or stand down, or crawl on your arm, or just grope and grab and pull. He's wearing himself out, breathing hard, and sleeping in exhaustion until he can wake up and start over. This isn't the residue of us teaching him; it's a call that's been suddenly switched on from the inside. He got a lust fo life.

2003-11-06T06:26:00.000-08:00

For those of you who know what this means, Grandpa is coming. Yes, our Super 8 galleria is returning on Saturday and we're up to our eyeteeth in celluloid. We have the limited results of five films so far (six more are on the way) and, as usual, we're overwhelmed with better movies than you'll see at 95% of the film festivals out there. Unreal.

The point is, you are invited, so drop me a line if your invitation is missing.

2003-11-03T07:38:00.000-08:00

Let us all thank cunning reader Mr. G for pointing out this link to the worst album covers of all time.

2003-10-23T16:41:00.000-07:00

Notes from my school observations:
-- I was told today that I am the "King of Kicking." This came after I was supervising recess and, inadvisably, was goaded into drop-kicking a playground ball over the art portable, over the music portable, and into an unused playground.

-- I watched the class at music today, sitting in a circle and singing along to a CD about "Best Friends." Halfway through the song, the students began putting their arms around each other and, without any prompting or even approval, they started swaying back and forth, so that the whole circle swayed in a giant ripple. After a very brief time, the music teacher yelled: "HANDS IN YOUR LAPS!"

-- I walked past a classroom of 20 students looking at an overhead and, in a chair that clearly had been separated from the rest of the class by a good 20 feet, one brown-skinned boy who was sitting alone. Obviously, this was Time Out. He caught my eye and gave me the look that most of us imagine the animals at the pound are giving us when we visit. As a sort of backwards echo, I heard what I was supposed to say in response: You are a very Bad Boy.

-- I think something is very wrong with our schools, and I'm at a good school. Schools may be a place where insane adults prepare children for adult insanity.

2003-10-22T07:15:00.000-07:00

Sheesh. How many professions are there in which the people for whom you work every day stand a small-but-important chance of being entirely against you?

-- commission salesman
-- debt collector
-- IRS auditor
-- policeman
-- public school teacher

The last is the most personal: A kid can tell you "no," smile at you, head-butt another kid "accidentally," smile, stop smiling, tell you "I don't have to listen to you," etc. The adult world has an implied loop that if you work very hard for someone that they carry a minimal debt of gratitude for that work. Young students don't carry that debt at all -- they just see you as a fact of nature, and the lessons as existing with or without you.

Part of my teacher training is going to amount to erasing my ego. If I can do it, that will be worth doing. It doesn't help, at the moment, to have come bursting out of a program that asks us to examine, in endless detail, the teacher's contribution to the classroom. Better to get it outside of myself, I think.

And yesterday, a student came up to me at the end of art class and said: "Mr. James, what does turtle eat?"

2003-10-20T21:07:00.000-07:00

Two post-its I found on the floor of a 3rd-grade classroom today:

2003-10-18T09:28:00.000-07:00

For those who share even a bit of my hatred for PowerPoint, I give you: The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation. And, for a more coherent argument than I can muster, I give you Edward Tufte.

2003-10-16T21:25:00.000-07:00

Watching baseball in this postseason has taught me that, in real life as opposed to movies, not only do the rich, powerful and many-times-victorious humiliate and defeat the underdogs, but they wait do so after the underdogs have managed to stagger to their feet and nearly defeat the rich, powerful and many-times-victorious. In other words, the right shall fail, the wrong prevail.

God-damned Yankees. I'm not normally a fundamentalist, but I'll say this: If you're a Yankees fan, there is something, even if just a little something, wrong with you.

2003-10-15T22:27:00.000-07:00

Whew. It's amazing how much time I still have to consume in not really meeting ideal academic standards. Not that I'm flunking; I actually think I'm just a few points shy of perfection in the grade book. But in doing that I happily leave 80% of the subjects I'm supposed to be considering with great care as undifferentiated sludge in my head. Besides, most of Ed school as I know it is reflection, reflection, reflection. That doesn't take a lot of research or factual manipulation.

All this reflecting does, however, tap my blogging energies, as I've generally reflected myself into a miasma by the time it's time to update.

Anyway, I find it's easy to watch baseball games or pour water into a giant bowl for Elliott to look at rather than read textbooks. I don't feel guilty a-tall.

Anyway, since I last reflected on this page I possibly found a student-teaching gig on Vashon Island, Dana got a job on Vashon Island and we began seriously considering sticking a kit craftsman cottage on the damp clay soil of Vashon Island.

Also, Elliott was fed prunes in a public place:

2003-09-14T20:03:00.000-07:00

So after a week of readings, group discussions, long class sessions and reflection papers; and a week of observing a school-which-cannot-be-named (confidentiality issues), I have left but one minor note behind on the proceedings.

So here's the big note. For the first and (almost certainly last) time, I'm posting a poem I wrote to this site. The major class assignment in this first unit was to create, gulp, an artwork that summarized all the feelings and reasonings and such in response to this class. After considering an ambitious video project and writing half a (gulp) song, I whipped out a bit of the old ottava rima.

The only thing I think I have to explain is that one of the videos shown in a class session documented a very poor school with leaky ceilings, broken light bulbs and constant smoke from a coal-fired furnace. The rest either works or it doesn't.

First Students

In his dream (as he lies in his bed with the feeling
of plastic impressed on his skin) he wades
through hallways as flooded as oceans, the ceilings
streaming with water. He climbs to a light bulb and fades
into the room where my son sleeps beside me. Kneeling,
he lifts him upward through several steep grades
to a plateau. He lifts my son high in the air,
points his face to the lower ground. “There,”

he says, “is the building where a battle took place,
and as a battleground, you can see where smoke
rises. My people, they know to turn their faces
from the smoke of a windblown fire. Look:
All around, the doors of the peoples’ houses
turn away from that place, and the safes are locked.
Most of those people fought so long ago
they are once again children, and do not want to know

what goes on there,” he says, and lowers my son
to his side and tells him: “My people believe
that those who have fought in battle and won
must teach the young.” Then he rolls up his sleeve
and shows a tattoo of copier ink, a run
of rows and circles. Near the end it still bleeds.
“Now I will tell you,” he says to my son (still
too young to speak, swaying on the high hill).

“I will tell you about a creature, not a man.
It has standard eyes. It says: Great minds
think alike. It can count ability as it scans.
It has thirteen ears, and one mark behind
each ear. Each mark, if it fails you, can
turn you old as a man at the end of his time,
whose friends have all passed.” He freezes.
“Worse than all punishment, this creature seizes

Your tongue. Your crooked words are corrected
straight as a ruler, flat as a mark on a screen.
Words that had traveled through mouths would infect it!
Words that have been sealed in books are clean.
It has no tongue of its own; it selects its
speech by instruction of a machine.
It is a machine. You must understand
a collection of rules is a machine, not a man.

It is a creature so large that men can walk through it.
Some men have been so deceived by its size
that they went hunting for it and never knew it
was all around. Some men looked for its eyes
to destroy them, but wound up staring through its
eyes instead, and became what they said they despised.
It is a creature, a machine, but men, all the same,
form it. And your father has its name.”

Then he wakes, and his dream is my dream. I know
I must find my son, in the hallway still flooded.
I climb along a fallen stair, and go
to the hall, corroded, the lockers muddied
and lightbulb broken. My passage is slow
through this vessel, which runs as if with blood.
I find my son safe, sleeping soundly
in a paper boat, the water all around.

2003-09-04T07:12:00.000-07:00

I am a student again. Scrambling to write one-page papers in the morning before class; evaluating which textbooks I have to buy and which I can afford to sneak a look at in the bookstore; it's all there.

My "cohort" (my classmates; everyone outside of Education programs just blinks at me when I use that word) seems very decent, has a bit of personality, has some real intelligence, and is white. Well, I should say there's a fair number of Asians and a sprinkling of Else, but for the most part we are very white. And today we discuss race, which never works among white people. We don't know how to do it and we get all crossed up and defensive.

Yesterday I had the great good fortune to wind up in a group with a woman who grew up in a Mexican immigrant farmworkers' family, an Native woman of mixed Ojibwe-somethingelse blood, and an entomologist (not a race, but it will do). They told me a lot. If you come from a community of large, close families; if you feel born with the duty to greet everyone, even strangers; if you're used to talking and learning not to get ahead but just to talk and learn; if you assume physical closeness and emotions are not dangerous -- then the world of white people looks awfully strange. There was lots else to say. Good conversation; we talked for a long time; couldn't tell how long.

Then some dude joined our group, listening for about ten seconds, and said: "HEY! You guys hear about the JOCK that, I guess on this campus they have like these STEAM VENTS, and this was like a year and a HALF ago, the guy FELL IN, I don't know how, and it took like a WEEK before they found him and pulled his body out -- HE WAS JUST SKIN AND BONES and nothing else. He weighed like FORTY POUNDS."

Conversation over.

2003-08-29T23:32:00.000-07:00

That was a ridiculous, almost sad way for the Mariners to win tonight. John Olerud, who has spent the season looking like a man trying to crank his wheelchair uphill, dunked a double-play ball at Oriole second-baseman Brian Roberts, who just sort of sat down, let the ball run under his glove, and watched the tying and winning runs score. Unlike those decisive smacks that win the games of childhood dreams, this is one I can replay and imagine turning out horribly: Double play, lost 9 out of 10, season all but over, funeral music playing quietly in the clubhouse.

Still; the M's win, the M's win. This after 8 innings of being utterly hamstrung by yet another utterly mediocre pitcher. Our boys look like they're swinging at the voices in their head lately -- scared of fat fastballs down the middle, panic-swinging at soft stuff in the dirt. This latest game gives the merest sliver of hope that they'll get all confident and juicy again, which is beyond necessary when Oakland takes off on its annual run.

I've still written them out of the postseason, but I'll let them back in my little storyline if they can club me over the head a bit. They have to start by sweeping the Orioles and taking at least 2 of 3 from Oakland. Go to it, lads.

2003-08-27T22:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday in the North Cascades:

And someone experienced camping and hiking for the first time (mostly by sleeping):

2003-08-23T19:06:00.000-07:00

Elliott's song list
So I have one of these:

and a banjo on loan from our friend the Professor. On these I play the following songs for my sonny boy (the ones he never enjoyed, e.g., "El Condor Pasa," have been weeded from my list):

"Singing in the Bathtub," R. Crumb and His Cheap Suit Serenaders (apparently originally a Gracie Fields number, but this is how I know it);
"Settin' the Woods on Fire," Hank Williams;
"Roly Poly," Bob Nolan (every Western swing band did this one; chorus: "Roly-Poly, daddy's little fatty/guess he's gonna be a man some day")
"Make My Cot Where the Cot-Cot-Cotton Grows," Red Nichols' Stompers;
"Over the Mountain," "Uncle" Dave Macon (pictured above, middle);
"That's Where I Meet My Gal," Hoosier Hot Shots (also, sometimes, "I Like Bananas Because They Have No Bones," ibid);
"Tonight You Belong To Me," better known as the song Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters sing on the beach in The Jerk;
"Sweet Sue," by many singers of "Sweet Sue" (just you);
"Beaver Creek," Patsy Montana and the Prairie Ramblers;
"Sleepy-Eyed John," Ole Rasmussen and His Nebraska Cornhusker;'

and usually all finished off with:

"Pedal Your Blues Away," Earl Rouse and Brothers.

Also various stomps and whistles and improvs, none of them terribly notable yet. I have many more to learn.

Just so you know. Suggestions for an expanded playlist are very welcome. All songs will be tested on Babylips himself.

2003-08-20T21:23:00.000-07:00

But I can't stop there. Oh no. (Yes, I know the posts read from the bottom up, so it's as if I'm continuing a thought that hasn't happened yet. Please read upsidedown chronologically, thanks.) I also wanted to explain why I've been on hiatus without resorting to talking about summer classes and Dear Baby. Turns out, see, that posting Every Stinking Day seems to involved being born with either an interesting persona or the kind of will that can lead to creating an interesting persona.

Mr. Monkeydisaster, for instance, has a really funny persona and blurts things that are funnier than the products of my hardest work. Mrs. Kennedy (hi Mrs. Kennedy) has an earthy still-slightly-punk no-bullshit-mother sort of view. Hell -- this guy even made a Flash intro of himself and it's actually funny. He sat up for many hours animating himself in a self-deprecating way!

You get the idea. I've greatly preferred in my own life to not consider what my own personality might be, and have grown content (if not to say bovine) in my belief that I hardly have one.

But it's strange. I started out wanting to post random clips on education as they came up so I'd have them in one place, and maybe within, say, seven years I'd find that 1.23 other people found them of marginal interest. Then Mr. Baby came and I made this place a photo album.

But then Google found me and the actor's nightmare set in. Well, be fair -- more like the actor's annoyance; it's hard to get a genuine nightmare out of blogging. But there I was in Seattle Weblogs! Then I imagined a questionnaire that asked of what general interest I was and I preferred to leave that particular questionnaire unfilled thanks.

So I'll just go back to posts of interest to friends, family and the very occasional visitor who bounced off a search-engine typo. For instance, baby pictures. And have I mentioned that everyone with the stomach for it should read Please Kill Me? 9 out of 10 dads recommend it.

2003-08-20T21:02:00.000-07:00

I had halfway intended to mark my return to the bloglife by linking to an article in Harper's explaining that compulsory public schooling is, like, a way of keeping the working classes from organizing, man, and should be overthrown -- but then found that the working classes at Harper's are too oppressed to be able to put their articles on the web.

So then I tried to find some kind of sound clip from The Young Ones, with Rick shouting something about fascists and the like, but no linkable sound clips are to be found. So now I have to content myself with mentioning that D and I have not only watched all The Young Ones recently but bought the DVD set.

Such is my life. On the other hand, there is the life of Mr. Baby:

Eyeing the horses at the track:

Popping out of a giant colon:

And, nearly all of the time, jamming his hands in his mouth:

2003-07-29T09:43:00.000-07:00

Fans in Seattle are heartbroked, This makes manager have headache.

(Scroll down to elizabeth wang's entry in this fascinating baseball discussion.)

2003-06-27T16:05:00.000-07:00

This is one fine review of The Hulk. I haven't seen the movie, but this is one review I can judge on its extrafilmic merits.

2003-06-27T15:12:00.000-07:00

Lotsa work these days. Putting together work for correspondence courses so I'll be "qualified" to "teach" subjects like life science, geography, economics, physical education (yes, physical education by correspondence -- make sense?).

Anyway, here are some pages of photographs I noticed while looking for geography images:

Some guy dressed as Darth Maul for Halloween.
Google Image results for "Darth Maul Halloween"
Google Image results for "businesspeople"
Ugh.

2003-06-23T21:23:00.000-07:00

Three months old today. And this is three months ago.

2003-06-20T21:33:00.000-07:00

I realize that, with this post, the proportion of my entries that are taken from Mariners radio broadcasts is dangerously high, but -- the text of one of the in-game ads that Dave Neihaus has to read is: "The only thing cooler than prescription sunglasses is not paying for them." It follows that the list of Cool Things begins this way:

1) Not paying for prescription sunglasses;
2) Prescription sunglasses.

2003-06-20T14:24:00.000-07:00

Joining a second soccer team, Thursday nights, as a full-time goalkeeper got me a bit skeert of the whole I'm-a-goalkeeper-now idea. I went running, on a tip, to Fine soccer, which isn't as mellow as it sounds (the guy's name is Lawrence Fine). It's all a bit eye-of-the-tiger and Vince-Lombardi for me. Every Common Error I See Goalkeepers Making turns out to ultimately relate to laziness and lack of training on the goalkeeper's part. In other words, every athletic error reveals a moral fault. This is my least favorite aspect of sports, and the one that dominated P.E., ugh, in school. (I would have loved if, when Mr. Lawrence Fine was putting together his first web page and went asking for HTML help, someone had told him: "The problem is you're not closing your tags, which is due to laziness and a lack of proper training.")

Anyway, that's not what I wanted to bring up. It's this cover of Mr. Lawrence Fine's book on Moralistic Athletic Training:

Here we have a fictional gallery of great and notable people who have scored! in life because, presumably, of scrotum-tightening agonized toughness. The question: Who the hell are they? My guesses:

Top row: El Debarge, Surfin' Albert Einstein (he seems to have dyed his hair blonde)
Middle, from left: John F. Kennedy, Wallace Shawn, Jimmie "JJ" "Dy-no-mite" Walker
Bottom, from left: Alex Rodriguez, Emo Phillips (or Crispin Glover), Kristin Hersh, Nelson Mandela balancing the head of Abraham Lincoln on his head.

Any better guesses?

2003-06-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

Mercy on me, was ever man before so be-pelted with a child's talk as I am! It is his desire of sympathy that lies at the bottom of the great heap of his babblement. He wants to enrich all his enjoyments by steeping them in the heart of some friend. I do not think him in danger of living so solitary a life as much of mine has been.

From a extract from Nathaniel Hawthorne's diaries about his son (sorry -- New York Times, registration required; sign up).

2003-06-13T20:43:00.000-07:00

I listen to most Mariners games on the radio -- no cable TV -- so most nights I get to listen to at least one inning of Ron Fairly painting a word-picture. The effect, for me, is something like having a gamey old glob of prime rib jammed in my ear canal. The man is awful.

However, there are some benefits. A while ago, when Jamie Moyer was the starting pitcher, Fairly said: "Moyer pitched on Wednesday, and he was a dandy." I wish I'd had cable on the day Jamie Moyer pitched as a dandy. I imagine him balancing on satiny slippered feet, his lightly powdered face floating on a swan-like neck rising from an elaborate ruff. Perhaps the unseemly scent of peanuts wafts onto the field, and he lifts a perfumed kerchief to his nostrils. Sometimes he sneaks a nibble of a forbidden madeleine he keeps in his coin-purse. Between innings the camera captures him playing with a tiny songbird. Then he goes out to the mound and, using his arsenal of off-speed junk, just hogties the opposing offense.

2003-06-10T21:15:00.000-07:00

We were over at the home of some friends of ours when Mr. Baby for the FIRST TIME EVER plopped a plastic toy DIRECTLY INTO HIS MOUTH and WAS VERY EXCITED and we were VERY EXCITED and our friends simply waited for us to get on with setting up the board game we were trying to play. It reminded me of how vaguely I have regarded the babies of friends in the past -- just checked to see if they were able to smile; if not, I left them alone, if so, I smiled at them. But I certainly did not have their parents' detailed Development Schedule in mind.

So, a study guide on Mr. Baby:
-- He can stick a plastic ring into his mouth, provided it is suspended right in front of his face, and can gain noisy satisfaction from drooling on it.
-- He will seek out our faces even when we're not looking directly at him. It's hard to concentrate on eating a boiled artichoke while you know that your son is looking at you with infinite wonder. Think of it: He prefers me to some mechanical entertainment, but I, in order to eat, must prefer a boiled artichoke to him. Of such mundane tragedies is my life now built.
-- He continues to withhold his bowel functions for up to four days at a time. By the fourth day he is so poo-obsessed that he barely recognizes the world going on around him. When he is working hard on the problem he makes the rookie mistake of squeezing everything, which puts him in lockdown. The complex balance of squeezing and relaxing is far, far beyond him at the moment. I'll leave it to you to infer how this problem gets resolved (hint: the irresistable force wins).

2003-06-05T22:33:00.000-07:00

A while ago I sent my seven readers to the website of my diabolically talented brother-in-law. So now some updates: He has a new painting, for which I bear some indirect responsibility, and he has organized a new show in Santa Cruz; it's all about Law and Order and its many sub-shows. Dana and I contributed something flippant then were stunned to find how seriously and brilliantly the other participants actually engaged the topic of the show. Please be sure the read the coloring book, created by none other than ... my brother-in-law.

2003-06-05T12:17:00.000-07:00

This just in: Elliott is almost certainly right-handed. We've gleaned this from his habit, in moments of extended tactile stimulation, of balling up his left hand and sticking it in the air while his right hand tenderly strokes, waves, flaps, points, touches, whatever. He also rolls to his right side during this. The stuffed animals suspended from his Arch of Stimulation have been migrating to the right side, where they can be battered instead of ignored. I must admit I've felt like it's almost unjust, as if I should be balancing him out. But what do I want to do, make him into a switch hitter? Let him list to starboard all he wants.

2003-06-02T13:38:00.000-07:00

Mass insanity alert:
Says UBS PaineWebber's Art Cashin: "This is kind of the Peter Pan rally. If you want to believe, you can fly." (Source)

2003-05-31T11:25:00.000-07:00

Someone in Ballard has taken on this thankless task:

In unrelated news:

2003-05-29T10:26:00.000-07:00

Mr. Defective Yeti has logged one of the funniest anecdotes I've read in a while. Yes, read all seven paragraphs.

2003-05-27T23:16:00.000-07:00

Elliott is beginning to develop in that middle arrange of emotions between screaming and, um, sleep, and I managed to get some of it on video. Enjoy. (And yes, when he was becoming miserable I put the camera down before he got to real misery.)

2003-05-26T11:52:00.000-07:00

I'm worried that the Internet Web! doesn't have enough reviews of X2: X-Men United floating around on it, so I'll note that it was really outstanding -- actually exciting, as opposed to smashing around with jumpy edits and throwaway special effects. The first movie gave you a chance to study the comic-book world in crisp, natural detail and still thrive on the page-flipping energy that gets you through most comics in ten minutes. That is, Wolverine's blades looked very real, but instead of giving off sickening feeling of real blades pressing against real skin they gave off the iconic energy of lines about to cut open a flood of color. Costume design, special effects, fine, but you only get that perfect effect when the direction is perfect. For all that I've heard about movies having only "comic-book violence," X-Men was one of the few movies that actually had it (I couldn't remember, after seeing it, if it had anything that would upset my parents).

This sequel translates that iconic power over to the characters. They're very clear, so that the moments when they visually match what we know about them -- and I'm thinking about that beautiful liquid blue puff that Nightcrawler leaves behind when he transports, or the demolition Magneto enacts with three tiny iron pellets -- it's so perfect it feels hilarious. The way they're set in the movie, there's a right distance from the Angst of these characters. It's iconic and comic-book sharp, but it's perfectly focused. It's a movie that hold you in a good, observant, delighted state for two hours and somehow has the politeness not to overwhelm you.

I'd always heard, but never actually experience, the promise that the ludicrous, outsized action of comic books could actually grow out of the characters' emotions in an interesting way (as opposed to a token gesture). I think it happens here, and it's a treat to watch. Two or three more of these movies would be fine by me.

2003-05-26T11:27:00.000-07:00

This archaic piece from the Globe and Mail -- good lord it's three weeks old -- does a nice job of the narrow passage our present-day economy has come to. As much as my mundane authority problem makes me tend to believe that the people in charge are insane, I do think the Fed has a good grasp on the problem and its urgency. I just doubt they can do much about it, for reasons this article explains very nicely.

2003-05-23T11:49:00.000-07:00

Elliott is two months old today. I celebrated it with him by scooping up, going out to the porch and drinking coffee while I watched his fontanel throb. Other, more voluntary accomplishments I haven't yet recorded on this journal:
--He coos. This is devastating. It's guaranteed to turn Dana and I into little puddles. Sometimes he actually says "coo," and sometimes he says it sotto voce with a little tremble of excitement, the way an actor might choose to voice his character looking at, say, the light of eternal paradise and whispering "wow." I want so much for him to coo that I repeat any word that ever worked, and most of them have to be delivered in a high-pitch voice: "whoopee," "wow," "yipyipyip" and the ever-present "hello." Much of our conversation with Mr. Baby reminds me of the scene very early in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure in which Pee-Wee, during his morning bathroom ritual, scotch-tapes his face and, looking in the mirror, yells "HELLO."
-- He follows us around the room with his eyes, just like the spooky busts at the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland! Only it's not spooky, it's *cute*.
-- He shows remarkable and inexplicable restraint in evacuating his bowels. It's now a once-every-two-days event (although I think it's longer, Dana corrects me on this point) and then it's, well, quite a production. This, as with every other appaling development of infancy, is just fine by the pediatricians.
-- His hollering, which I now realize was never far out of bounds by baby standards, is diminished. He still rarely knows what to do with himself, and there's always that perfect way to hold him at any given moment that is slightly different from the way you're holding him. But he gets through the day and our nerves aren't shot.
-- He still greatly appreciates the chance to be nude outdoors, and he likes to have his garments inflated with the air from a hair dryer. You see what my life has come to?
-- He's becoming fairly jolly. He has moments of levity. Then, quite often, he farts.

2003-05-23T11:19:00.000-07:00

Economists. Enjoy.

2003-05-18T18:49:00.000-07:00

More in a dear-diary mode, I had me one weak game on the soccer pitch today, then weakly carped about the whole thing to a couple of teammates. No one would blame them for punching me right in the kisser, but instead they forebore (were forebearant?). In goal I valiantly called for a ball that was sailing across the goal, reached out and watched it drop under my arms and onto the head of an opponent, who popped it into the goal. Later I played out of goal and slackly hummed along passing to no one. I let balls drop around me instead of trapping them. Where I was I cannot say. Inside I could hear all the right decisions calling out as if from behind styrofoam. On the outside I must have looked like one of the players in this game:

If you don't remember that game, the board vibrates and the "players" just meander around in Brownian motion until someone scores.

Half my life ago the circle of behaviors in which I was sure everyone but me was competent was large enough to include talking to people, walking around and doing things. Now I've long since narrowed the list only to athletics, and even there I'll be competent enough to toss nice soft balls at Elliott without hurting him or myself. But ... yikes. In fact, if there were a punctuation mark for "yikes," I'd just tack it onto the end of this sentence and finish that way.

2003-05-18T18:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my grandmother, whom I do not see often, got to meet Elliott. During her visit, she told me a story. It must have been the late '40s. She was still newly married to my late grandfather, with two young daughters, neither one my mother (she was next in line). They lived in Pennsylvania. They had all just finished eating lunch when the sun came out, lighting up the rain that had fallen earlier. She said: "It's so beautiful, we have to go for a walk." The whole family went walking, my grandmother in her long dress. They came to a spring of cold clear water, and around the spring she saw countless morel mushrooms. They all started picking them and, having no basket, my grandmother lifted up the hem of her dress to make a pouch to hold them in. They weren't hungry; they'd just eaten. But they kept picking and picking and filled up the dress. So they went to her mother's, where she had just made bread. They fried the mushrooms in butter her mother had made and ate it with the bread.

My point is: Blur was right. Modern life is rubbish.

2003-05-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

My local convenience store has always creeped me out. The inventory is low, with, for example, five loaves of bread distributed across four feet of shelf space. One guy who works there (the owner?) seems always drunk and "banters" about how he's trapped in the store and wishes he could be outside. Then there's this mural on the back wall:

That reads "Grocery Store Boot Hill" on the tree(?) in the extreme background. Three goon-headed allegorical minimart figures are lowering Mr. Bill into its grave. The other tombstones read "Lucky's," "A&P" and (indistinguishable). (Wasn't life great when we had that local Lucky's?)

Notice that they are lowering the entire store -- so that Mr. Bill gets represented by a brick building while Mr. J's Deli Mart (those fuckers) get to be humanoid. Perhaps this trauma explains why Mr. Bill can't even muster up his trademark "Oh Nooo!" but instead comes up with the more plaintive "HELP OOOOOOOOO"

I'm mystified. I suppose I can understand the beef against the Corporate Pig 7-11, but what is Mr. J's Deli Mart and why is it a problem? Is there a mural on Mr. J's Deli Mart wall of a wrecking ball labeled "Mr. Bill's" threatening to demolish the lovely Mr. J's building?

Should I take sides?

2003-05-15T00:19:00.000-07:00

Thanks, all, for the patience. I know I should keep feeding this 'blog with too-cute stories about Mr. Baby and topping them off with too-cute photographs, but my last post got eaten when my browser crashed and now I'm feeling just a bit too tender to commit myself to big posts (it was a great post, something about a virtual dancing Ben Franklin; I can't recreate it.) Mr. Baby is coming along, slowly adding such marginal skills as seeing things and responding to stimuli to his bag of tricks. He had one freaky-screeching night this week but otherwise has slept, and he doesn't seem to be always on the verge of an immediate breakdown as he sometimes has.

I wish I could tell you more but I'm spending many of my days creating intricate 3-D models of fatal accidents. That's not a lie; it's freelance work. I'm sworn to not telling you any more than that.

Hope everyone is fine. Check in, shout out please. (See below.)

Oh, and doesn't this economy look like poop? More later, if you can handle the excitement. But I'll just note: The word "deflation" has actually been brought up in a non-derisive way -- and even hinted at by the Fed. All with the disclaimer that it's extreeeeeemely unlikely, however. Couldn't happen here.

2003-05-10T08:46:00.000-07:00

I really thought I was pissed off and jaded about how much of America looks (i.e., ugly and depressing). Then I took a tour of architect James Howard Kunstler's Eyesore of the Month archive and realized someone is more acid than I am. His summation: "American space is generally chaotic, illegible, and disorienting." Some of the highlights:

Here we see the nearly complete metamorphosis of the two-family house into an industrial loading dock.

Yes, this is the kind of country we have become.

Have all the homebuilders in America come down with ARDS (Acquired Retarded Designer Syndrome)?

Notice that Sonny's costume is what used to be considered appropriate for children age six and under.

Is this what happens when you give a Doric temple fertility shots?

Under this icon of narcotized complacancy, a population of TV zombies plods like a herd of cows to the hamburger factory.

Think of it as the gateway to a new Dark Age.

Is every child in this city a serial killer requiring maximum security incarceration during school hours?

2003-05-07T09:39:00.000-07:00

The other night Dana and I had the chance to talk about what it means to be a parent. Specifically, what is our purpose? Our mission? We decided this: We provide multiplatform, client-oriented parenting solutions to address the needs of a rapidly changing global marketplace.

Also, while walking around Greenlake yesterday we saw a very Symbolic Black Duck:

2003-05-01T17:08:00.000-07:00

About three years ago if I'da had a weblog I'da invited everyone to go explore infiltration.org. I only just remembered it: Many detailed stories of people just walking where they're not supposed to walk, usually starting at doors marked "No Admittance" or "Employees Only." The results are spooky and a little thrilling -- whole abandoned wings of hospitals, shut-down schools, layers under the street. Everywhere I've worked or gone to school I've been fairly relentless about walking over every inch available to me, but I haven't taken up the habit in other people's buildings.

2003-05-01T14:42:00.000-07:00

Oh, sufferin Jaysus. Our President has declared May 1 of every year to be Loyalty Day. Make this stop, someone. Make it stop.

2003-04-30T17:29:00.000-07:00

I know it's been a while since I updated the world about the little squirt we call Mr. Baby. Perhaps you'll understand why when we publish what passes for his regular schedule (note: All times subject to change without notice):

7:30 a.m.: Wakes up, feeds, lies in bed next to Mom, growling, wiggling and blindly punching and scratching her chest.
9 a.m.: Dad, pitying Mom, picks up Mr. Baby and changes his diaper. He spends most of the rest of the morning barely staving off Mr. Baby's screaming by carrying, bouncing, hoisting, bobbling, shushing, vibrating and walking Mr. Baby all over the neighborhood.
9:30 a.m.: Eats, gets diaper changed; resumes grunting and arching back, although now he can struggle for a full 2-3 minutes before he starts screaming.
11:10 a.m. Sometimes there is a moment or two of alert quietness while being held by parent. After five minutes or so, grunting, flailing and occasionaly screaming resumes. Also a diaper change somewhere in here.
1:30 p.m.: Eats, gets diaper changed, struggles. Is set down in crib with various vibration and white noise appliances and, after some protestation, often manages to sleep without much assistance.
3:30 p.m.: Lots of sleep, with the occasional squawk.
4:30 p.m.: He can't really still be sleeping, can he?
5:00 p.m.: Should we wake him up?
5:20 p.m.: Awakes and MUST EAT NOW. Over the next 2-3 hours, has 3-4 feedings and diaper changes. Mood variable; usually not stable enough to allow sit-down dinner for both parents.
7:30 p.m. Dad dances with Mr. Baby in the living room, and Mr. Baby replies with a very small hint that he may realize that someone else is in the room. One out of every three days Mr. Baby smiles for four seconds. Still grunts, doubles over and growls most of the time, but is will to make a few exceptions.
8:00 p.m.: Evil vapors enter Mr. Baby through nostrils. For the next 3-4 hours he screams as soon as he is not actively being swaddled, bobbled, shushed very loudly and held in someone's arms. If whoever is holding him reaches for the remote control to the VCR and thus removes his hand from Mr. Baby, Mr. Baby often screams as if he is being stabbed. If Mr. Baby is being walked in his sling and whoever is walking him stops to tie his shoe, Mr. Baby screams as if he is being stabbed. Often Mr. Baby can be kept from screaming but he instead makes sounds as if he is trying to pass a balled-up porcupine through his intestines. Sometimes 45 minutes or more of walking Mr. Baby will encourage him to sleep, which is scary because he's supposed to save his sleep for tonight.
10 p.m.: Mr. Baby sleeps for a few minutes, leading his parents to think that maybe it's bedtime. His parents set him down and, a few minutes later, Mr. Baby lets them know that it isn't bedtime yet.
11:30 p.m.: Having eaten, Mr. Baby is swaddled and bounced on his father's jiggly leg while the radio, set between stations, blasts static in Mr. Baby's ear. After 10-15 minutes of a stunned expression, Mr. Baby verry gradually closes his eyes, first for a few seconds at a time and finally they just close. Mr. Baby is set in his bassinet and sleeps until about 4:15 a.m.
4:15 a.m. Mr. Baby wakes and wants to eat. He also gets the dogs very excited to be alive and maybe eat, so that they jog, whine and bark until they are dealt with. Mr. Baby eats then, his face sodden with milk, he passes out and sleeps again until next morning.

Let me just say that yes, he has been checked out for medical disorders thank you very much, and no, nothing is physiologically wrong with him. Whether it's colic or not hardly matters since our response is basically the same. On his worst days our life feels like there's a huge fire-alarm bell in our living room that may go off without warning at any given moment and often does. Given that I rarely have my hands free, I have developed new hobbies of looking at the floor and listening to cars go outside.

Oops. Must go now.

2003-04-29T15:02:00.000-07:00

No, you're not looking at Elliott. That's one of the many gems from the Thrift Store Art Gallery. I don't have time for a comprehensive list of the best of the best (there are 12 packed galleries), but Girl In Shorts Sliding Down Wooden Banister has to be one of the greats. I also enjoy this silicon couple and The Red Headed Jesus are also particularly great.

2003-04-22T15:16:00.000-07:00

WARNING:
Since I remade this 'blog into Babyland I've kept the politics out. It has been a bit of a relief (the tone of debates in this country has become very nasty, and I expect the 2004 campaign will be among the nastiest ever), but sometimes I feel like giving up relief.

Anyway, the Bush administration's attempt to wear Adult Faces and assure us of their commitment to something more difficult than bombing-and-invading, i.e., worthwhile reconstruction in Iraq, seems to be already crumbling. The usual suspects of "senior officials" have begun floating the new spin, that the U.S. should just get out of Iraq quickly before it gets into trouble:

"I don't think it has to be expensive, and I don't think it has to be lengthy," a senior administration official said of the postwar plan. "Americans do everything fairly quickly."

Personally, I'm shocked. Imagine! And here I thought that the defining characteristic of this administration was its gravity, its reasoned follow-through, and its persistent, patient application of diplomacy.

That's sarcasm, people.

The truth is, if the U.S. abandons Iraq and lets it devolve into a chaos of warring factions with a crumbling infrastructure (see: Afghanistan), the same 70% that supported the war in the first place will still view George W. Bush as the guy who got Saddam Hussein. Which will be good enough. Anything more subtle than that is probably too complicated for Fox News.

And these snippets from one of the stories in today's New York Times say a lot, I think:

President Bush's advisers have drafted a re-election strategy built around staging the latest nominating convention in the party's history, allowing Mr. Bush to begin his formal campaign near the third anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks and to enhance his fund-raising advantage, Republicans close to the White House say...

The convention, to be held in New York City, will be the latest since the Republican Party was founded in 1856, and Mr. Bush's advisers said they chose the date so the event would flow into the commemorations of the third anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

The back-to-back events would complete the framework for a general election campaign that is being built around national security and Mr. Bush's role in combatting terrorism, Republicans said. Not incidentally, they said they hoped it would deprive the Democratic nominee of critical news coverage during the opening weeks of the general election campaign.

So: What are you going to do about it?

2003-04-22T11:32:00.000-07:00

Don't think we didn't consider the possibility that Elliott would have his name croaked at him for much of his life. He had it happen to him, in fact, in the operating room in which he was delivered, by the surgeon who delivered him. She followed it up the same way as everyone does after saying that thing that everyone says: "I'm sure he'll hear that all the time."

I remember standing in line for the bettor's window at the track (yes, really) in front of a very tall man. Two girls, maybe nine or ten years old, dared each other to approach him and asked: "How tall are you?" "sixfootseven" he said in a monotone. "Do you play basketball?" "noiplayedfootballinhighschool" he said. They went away. He saw me watching the whole thing and I made accidental eye contact. He said to me: "Every time I go to the store it's a press conference."

This amazes me. I assume that adults ask this guy all these questions, the same few over and over. I got a taste of this when travelling in Indonesia. Everyone who has travelled there will be able to rattle off the six or seven Sentences of Interaction with Indonesians, which begin with: Hello Meester. Everywhere, everywhere, Hello Meester. (Apparently women get it too.) On one mountain path I heard unseen children screeching it from the jungle high above: "Helloo meeester!" Then, if it's long enough for a conversation, the Questions: "Where are you going?" "Where do you live?" "Do you have children?" "What is your religion?" "Have you eaten yet?" "Have you bathed yet?" I'm telling the truth: Those questions began 97% of the casual conversations I had.

None of them meant what they literally meant. No one really wanted to know where I was going ("Oh, I'm going back to my hotel room to stash my camera in my big backpack, because it's heavy and I've taken enough photographs of fish stands and pedicabs for one day"). The correct stock response was "jalan jalan," meaning "travel travel" or, more correctly, "eh, not much." Just using that response would get a broad smile and a nod: "jalan jalan," they'd say back in appreciation.

It wasn't bad after a while. If it had been -- if I'd snapped finally and told some poor guy I was going to his mother's house to have children -- I wouldn't have given Elliott the name Elliott. As it is, I figure he can handle the croaking.

Oh, and many thanks to Jana for Elliott's mechanical future friend, and to brotha Ryan for the onesie.

2003-04-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

I have changed the name of my blog. Please alter your to-do lists accordingly.

Kazuhiro Sasaki (I can't just call him "Kaz," I just can't) had another dire night on the mound last night, with another flub from McLemore at third base for punctuation (and when I say punctuation, I'm thinking ee cummings). All of Mr. Sasaki's secondary numbers are fine -- 10 Ks in 7.1 innings, 3 walks a little high but tolerable -- but he's getting hit: 9 hits in that same time. It's hard for me to hear over the radio if his fastball is on a nice straight line, but it sure sounds like it is, and it has lost some speed. That's a rough combination.

I seem to have given several people the impression that I think Mr. Sasaki is a poor closer, partly because I thought it was foolish to pay him a big-fat deferred-money contract. To clarify: I don't think any closer is worth $8 million a year (okay, no baseball player should earn that much -- thank you, but remember we're in the baseball funhouse here and "worth" is not "should"). An inning pitched is an inning pitched, and if that same money could get you 200+ innings of an ERA near 3, that's a better use than 60 innings of the same quality.

The counter-argument is that outs in the 9th inning are worth more than in any other inning, or at least harder to get. This makes no sense. They may be the last ones we see, and thus the ones we remember the most, but they're three outs, period. If a middle-relief pitcher allows four runs in the 6th inning, the team rallies to a one-run lead anyway, then the closer gives up two runs in the 9th to lose the game, the fans go home cursing the closer. The middle-relief guy's performance is esoteric -- the fifth caller to the sports-radio show will bring him up after the first four have called to bitch about the closer.

This is a well-trodden argument and I can't quite make it interesting (not without more effort than I have in me now). But I'm sure that Mr. Sasaki is a lovable rogue and does nothing in his life to counter the deferent, cute-as-the-dickens impression he gives with that little smile-and-a-bow finale of his. Why, he's almost as plucky and cute as that Jessica Lynch, that little dickens. He should wear a too-large camoflauge cap and an aw-gosh expression for this year's team portrait -- wouldn't that be just too cute? Maybe Kazuhiro could get trapped under a tarpaulin and John Rocker and Mark McGwire could rescue him on live TV.

2003-04-18T13:28:00.000-07:00

Mr. Baby has had recurrent bouts of grunt-n-struggle fussiness (well, gosh) and I'm currently dealing with it as I know how to deal with everything -- by making a mix CD. The two kinds of music I can imagine sending Elliott into a drooling trance are: Hawaiian slack-key guitar and Indonesian gamelan music. I think the latter comes to my mind because I spent an early evening in Bali falling into a very deep and slightly disconcerting sleep to an evening of gamelan music under some particularly fat blue stars. There were dancers acting out some obscure bit of the Ramayana -- which as far as I can tell, consists of tens of thousands of obscure bits -- but about all I remember is those metallic bells flashing and flashing in overlapping circles. That, and the smell of the jungle loosing steam into the night air (something we can't duplicate in Elliott's nursery), was a definite narcotic.

Anyway, Elliott is currently wrapped to my chest (more on that device later) and this music is playing -- yes, it's that old standard "Kucap-Kicup" -- and he's fast asleep. See if the same thing happens to you.

And any other suggestions for narcotic music are greatly welcomed.

2003-04-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

Since I intend to become an educator -- sort of an edutainer, or entercator if you will -- I thought I would begin entercating my 'blog audience. Today: fun with optical illusions: Big or little?

Notice that in this photograph of Dana there seems to be giant mule and rider bearing down on her:

And yet in this next image:

That's a tiny mule! And yet, in both photographs, the image of the mule and rider is the same size! (Use your thumb or other digit for measurement if you don't believe me.)
How can this be true? Well, perhaps this will explain what is going on. On the other hand, it may not.

2003-04-14T18:16:00.000-07:00

Elliott and the Stim Mobile.

2003-04-14T15:05:00.000-07:00

Elliott had his public debut yesterday, when we took him to a party populated with Dana's former coworkers and their children. He aced the whole thing by sleeping through it (like good parents, we praised him for his accomplishment). This was my first parent-intensive gathering, and as a result my first practice at the baby-baby-baby talk I'd always heard from a distance. Grown adults like myself, it turns out, can talk in unlimited detail about the rudimentary accomplishments of our children -- holding their heads up, sleeping, sticking their hands in their mouths, miming to music, playing by themselves, latching on to the breast, not refusing clothing. Many of us talked to each other out of a haze of sleeplessness; everyone had that larger-scale disorientation that parents have. It comes when you have traded your commitment to setting and acheiving your own rational goals for the patience to sit and wait for someone else's basic life functions to fall into place.

We do wait, and watch, and take minor notes. It's what Dana and I do all day and much of the night, but even if we had working lives I bet the waiting and watching and minor notes and babyface and fluids and breathing patterns would take over. Reasonable adults with orderly lives get reduced to a primitive biological level. I like that -- I've always liked seeing "adults" reduced (as opposed to reducing themselves, which most of the adults with any responsibilities have done in recent years). The dignity and propriety of most adults' lives is ridiculous -- it deserves a kick in the nuts, and that is what a baby is. (It's worth listening to Tom Waits on this issue.)

2003-04-14T14:46:00.000-07:00

If you're a Mariners fan who likes baseball discussion, until recently you were limited to either a huge volume of moronic talk or intelligent discussion with the occasional mention of the Mariners. Now there's U.S.S. Mariner, which has a sense of humor, a nice background in statistics and history, and no shame about getting ridiculously detailed in its baseball talk. Good stuff.

2003-04-11T21:24:00.000-07:00

One Mr. Wiley Wiggins created this story of trailer park life in despair out of The Sims.

2003-04-11T14:06:00.000-07:00

The BBC has a marvelous website called Video Nation, for which very ordinary citizens around England and elsewhere have sent in very ordinary videos, mostly of themselves talking to the camera for a minute or two, or showing a few details from their lives. Of course these ordinary journal entries are tremendously fun -- and addictive viewing.

You should especially watch the short films of Annis Tomkinson. She and her husband Gordon run a small Shropshire farm and she shoots some little vignettes of the livestock life, including birthing a calf, explaining to her grandson why his favorite sheep must be "sent to market", and explaining that she still loves Gordon.

2003-04-10T21:34:00.000-07:00

2003-04-09T10:59:00.000-07:00

Please don't miss John Moe's Amazon lists (the link is to someone else's best-of, but he really did get the best of them.) And now John Moe has a blog, which is where I'll pilfer material for a while.

2003-04-08T17:39:00.000-07:00

And this bit of overheard conversation is pilfered from Dana, who heard it at her C-section follow-up appointment today. Apparently another patient was showing her daughter to a nurse. Her daughter had hair as wispy and newbornish as Elliott's:

Nurse: I just want to know how you got that bow to stay in her hair.
Mother: Corn syrup.

2003-04-08T17:09:00.000-07:00

Yhhhewww. Just came down from an intense little screaming fit from Mr. Baby, who had to be swaddled about as tight as in this illustration. Something about those arms waving free gets Mr. Baby intensely upset -- grunting and squeaking and then, suddenly, blaring, then blaring in extremis then left just with that white-hot scream in which he's screaming so hard no sound comes out (and his face is purple). A friend loaned me a book on colic -- she was probably eager to dump it for the same reason I was eager to ignore it; namely, that it features an infomercial style and features testimonials from Michelle Pfeiffer and name-drops Madonna.
It does seem to work, though. The Holy Way involves swaddling him tighter than an athlete tapes a sore ankle; jiggling his head even faster than a nervous guy like me bounces his leg; and saying "SHHH" louder than he screams. (There's also a pacifier involved, but we're going without that for the time being.)
Somehow this all seems to tap a nerve deep down that drops him right into a deep sleep, one of those uninterruptable sleeps that he gets a few times a day anyway. Then you can dance him around the house and play They Might Be Giants at top volume and he'll sleep through the whole thing. Strange.
So now we have this dilemma: We can make him sleep at will. We can't make him enjoy being awake. Sometimes he does, but he always seems just a touch uncomfortable. (Actually he has a pure, enraptured awake time at 4:10 a.m. and I, last night, stopped finding it so rare and valuable that I would stay awake for it; I put him in his bassinet with some guilt.)
The conclusion is that our awake, interested, comfortable baby is still unavailable for more than just guest appearances. I would guess he's due to arrive in, like the ads say, 6-8 weeks.

2003-04-03T11:34:00.000-08:00

For your further delectation:

That's our dog Val in the background, and up front is Elliott, taking cavalier to a whole 'nother level.

2003-04-03T10:33:00.000-08:00

Earlier on I slandered Elliott by saying he was -- let's see here -- "a bit of a screamer." Well, he still is, but now only when he's been stripped nekkid and is having a new diaper slapped on him. Aside from that he has a range of emotions that range from mellow to sleep to squirmy to sleep to sleep to the occasional squeaky blast. He has the feeding thing worked out, aside from a bit of a nibble-and-sleep problem. So that's good.

I've been trying to take advantage of his alert-and-active phases to look in his eyes and see what he sees. Sometimes I can see my face looking tiny in his pupils and I'm sure that he's looking back, searchingly, trying to figure out my face. But then I see him give the same look to some unidentifiable bit of aether around the ceiling, and then he transforms both looks into intense concentration over a bowel movement. So I remain agnostic.

2003-03-30T13:59:00.000-08:00

Elliott is a week old today, and not only is he a touch more mellow about things that frustrate him, but he has experienced his first miracle! Our friends (known to the cyberworld as Elsee and Sonny) brought over a bag of cookies, among other marvelous goods, for us last night. In that bag we found the Remarkable Cookie.

I submit the following for your evidence:

And, just in case anyone was going to call Child Protective Services because of this photo, we have given him a bath since this photo was taken this morning, and that included wiping his eyes clean.

Oh, and Dana also wants the world to know that, in all the photos posted below, she was really really swollen from the huge, almost unregulated, amount of fluids she was administered in the hospital after her C-section. Why they gave her so many fluids that she became all but incapacitated, I'm not sure. But just in case you haven't seen her in a while: no, she did not put on that much weight during pregnancy.

2003-03-27T12:03:00.000-08:00

I have to come back after that last post. I've already discovered it's all but impossible to write or say something about how hard parenting can be without an immediate follow-up comment of "but his little smile makes it all worthwhile" or "but I can't imagine anything better." If you're a parent and you don't make those little disclaimers, people will make them for you. They'll point out that you love your baby. They'll tell you.

Elliott is lovely, and strange. I'll use a story from (perhaps? it's foggy) his second night to illustrate. He was struggling with, get this, breastfeeding, and had come down from screeching agony to mere exhausted sorrow. He was sort of nuzzling around, bubbling with his lips. Then, in some lucky combination of natural sounds and bubbling, he said, in a high-pitched, perfectly clear voice: "Goop." Just perfectly, almost with quotes around it. "Goop." We both heard it, Dana and I, and we both still laugh about it. Someday he'll say gooplike things and laugh along with us. Until then, we're like camels in the desert; we can subsist on that one draught for days.

2003-03-27T11:29:00.000-08:00

We're home now, and the drastic mood swings, along with the every-2-to-3-hour feeding schedule, are, um, a challenge. Some moments feel perfectly content, such as Elliott's 3 a.m. superwakefulness last night, when we both looked over him as his eyes slowly scanned and he clumsily searched our faces.

But let's face it -- Elliott's a bit of a screamer so far, and that screaming, which started late on day two, has been tough to take at first. Nothing is so naturally hair-raising as your own son's crying, and Elliott gets right to that stage of screaming from every cell of his body, to the point where you think he'll just have to pass out. He doesn't, but by the time he's calmed down (how? don't remember) my hair is saturated with sweat and I'm trying to recall which magazine article convinced me that this child-rearing thing would all be a good idea. (I already sweat less, though; crying, it turns out, doesn't destroy him.)

Most of Elliott's problems center around feeding. He has to feed 10 minutes ago, and he's so upset about it that he screams so loud that he makes himself so upset that he can't feed. He has mechanical issues with breastfeeding, as he does with everything at least as difficult as emptying his bowels, and mechanical issues are, to him, as frustrating as the worst punishments from Dante's Inferno. He also insulted the entire family by happily gulping down our conciliatory bottle of formula (he had to have something in his stomach) and becoming the Blissful Baby of the nutritional-supplement ads when we popped a pacifier into his mouth for a moment.

So here's the solution. Back in the hospital, the lactation consultants just shoved him, over and over, onto Dana as he screamed. I, being a warm, thoughtful man, didn't want him associating stressful thoughts with food and wanted him to come to Dana in a spirit of peace. Then, last night, after quite a while (probably only fifteen minutes, really) of screeching during what should have been (had to be) a feeding session I lost my warm thoughfulness and just helped Dana push him, over and over again, onto her. At a certain point, while he was shuddering with exhaustion from yelling, he took a mouthful of food, thought it was pretty good and, after a few tearful moments, was feeding. My conclusion now is that my son is not capable of making associations and that food by any means necessary is a good thing.

And for those who like breakthroughs, let me point out that the same drama happened again this morning, and probably will for at least two weeks.

If there are any great shows going on in clubs around town, or movies that you think we have to see, I think we can't make it.

2003-03-25T10:00:00.000-08:00

I'm just taking a morning break from the hospital, where this was the scene:

We may come home today or it may be tomorrow -- it depends on the surgeon's assessment of Dana's recovery. Right now she likes the nurses and the adjustable bed. But really all is well -- food and fluids going in and out, family happy. It's a little frustrating when communicating is so inconvenient, but thanks so much to everyone for the good thoughts, and we'll be in touch soon.

2003-03-24T09:26:00.000-08:00

Baby!

Yesterday, Sunday, March 23, at a quarter to three, Elliott Allen James was hauled into this world, healthy and keening. I'll tell the whole birth story after some photos:

This is the first photo taken of Elliott. Note the saucy expression and Purple Hand (nothing to worry about).

One feature we've enjoyed is that Elliott's head can be detached and easily nestled in, say, a shoulder, which Dana has done here. Sometimes the Purple Hand comes with it, though.

That's a big hand, but it isn't purple anymore. Actually, it's a tiny hand, but photography lies sometimes. And those aren't tears -- those are the state-mandated dabs of eye ointment. I'm not sure Elliott has actually produced tears yet.

Me, Elliott and Ballard.

Yes, it's the final shot of 2001: A Space Odyssey, only that baby had a bit better focus. And was much spookier.

And in a final fit of digital multimedia overkill, you can view this little movie I filmed of Elliott while Dana talked on the phone.

As for the birth: Dana slept through her early labor, knew she meant business by mid-morning, and had to go to the hospital by just before 11. She slammed through all the stages of labor with ferocious hard work and no epidural (no time, didn't want one anyway). Man, was she great, all focus without a bit of wasted work. I was amazed.
By 1 p.m. she was pushing. Soon she was crowning. Soon after the doctor discovered that what was crowning was, in fact, the baby's butt. Breech. (We now guess that he turned the night before labor, although we'll never know.) Dana went right to C-section and everything went great. She's recovering now, and I took a little break to get to the computer and spread the word.
Elliott is quiet so far, except when he has issues, at which point he announces a need for help. I've cleaned up several of Elliott's big issues and discovered that reserving clean spots on the wipe takes some real planning. He sleeps with little chirruping noises, which would be cute if we weren't lying awake irrationally wondering if he'll stop breathing. He's a good guy, and hopefully not a potential ne'er-do-well.
Anyway -- back to the hospital. Send us a word, either by e-mail or by clicking on "Shout Out" (or "(x) Shout Outs") below. We'll arrange for Baby Displays soon.

2003-03-23T20:18:00.000-08:00

audblog audio post

2003-03-21T22:26:00.000-08:00

From today's trip to the zoo:

2003-03-21T07:45:00.000-08:00

This is enjoyable, for those who can handle more stock-related crap.

2003-03-20T20:51:00.000-08:00

Dana was alert with the camera today. In the bathroom of the diner where we had lunch she saw a towel dispenser that looked sort of like this (I'm afraid the photo of it got eaten when the camera software crashed):

Only with a tighter towel loop, and it was hanging directly over a sink. Next to it was this sign which Dana was able to photograph:

I'll mostly let that speak for itself, except to just ask: harmful or injurious? In what way harmful if not injurious?

2003-03-20T19:52:00.000-08:00

Holy crap.

Those who have had to endure my conversations on the matter in recent weeks have had to hear me talk about macroeconomic issues. I'm trying to figure out if our economy is about to collapse or what. (That's economist-speak, "or what.")

Anyway, look at the stock market since 1935 as Yahoo first presents it. Looks rational, right? Now look at the scale on the left: From 43 to 5000 occupies 90% of the scale, and that (apparently inconsequential) remaining 5,000 points from 5000 to 10000 is given a few pixels. The result looks like one steady, irreversible climb with little pits that hardly matter.

Now force Yahoo to use a linear scale -- in other words, ask it to stop lying -- and this is the result. Like I said, holy crap. Look at it for a while and explain what happened in 1995. People now grudgingly admit that the "Internet bubble" popped, but they imply it's of a limited scale, like the little go-go mutual funds of the late Sixties, or the recession or the oil crises of the mid-70s.

But the scale of the entire system exploded beginning in about 1986 and really beginning in 1995 -- it's staggering. The problem is that so much of our economy got sucked into the stock market, and so much of it got vaporized, with so many overlapping debt structures, that we can't imagine we'll feel the end of the crash for at least another few years -- we may not even be halfway through the fall from the top at 11,000. (You'll notice that volume of trading hasn't really dropped since the 2000 peak -- it's just more volatile.)

I may be entirely wrong, but the image itself -- along with a lot of what I've been reading lately -- tells me that we've gone through, and are going through, experiences that are not market norms. These are extraordinary times.

2003-03-19T21:54:00.000-08:00

Today I bought our brand-new first-ever digital camera. You know, for Baby. It's a tiny thing, as Baby will be, so we can carry it everywhere as we will carry Baby. Not only consumerism but any number of other vices can be justified in a cheap manner by saying you do it for your child.

Using it has been so much fun, though, that I've now realized I can take pictures everywhere and share them with you. I envision a new medium -- a photo-journal, if you will. Perhaps we could call it photo-journalism. Anyway, this is what my day was like today.

Dana and I didn't gag on lollies all day -- instead we worked on our labor mechanics. Dana worked on breathing through her eyes, something she'll do during contractions:

Here you can see me working on that consistent + caring look I'll give to Dana while she struggles:

After we were done rehearsing, we went with Dana's mother to La Palma, a nice Mexican restaurant. We had chips:

I cleaned my plate:

A really funny waiter would have asked me if I wanted a box for that. Instead he only asked Dana, who, it turned out, did:

I don't know why, but this made Dana pouty:

On the way out, we were greeted by friends:

Just think of the visual storytelling yet to come!

2003-03-19T09:31:00.000-08:00

A while back I posted a link to Yugo Nakamura's handwritten clock. I can't tell which of the many other online clocks are follow-ups to that original idea and which came first. But some of them, I think, actually address a more interesting design question: What does time look like? Okay, one of them does. But they're all interesting:

I think the scrolling clock is interesting. Interesting, I tell you. I don't know if time is horizontal, and there's something unsatisfying about the past and the future just getting cropped by the edge of the screen (maybe they should fade out of the blue and into the black?), but the more you watch it the more rewarding it gets. I would guess that if we had all been raised with some sort of appliance that works like this our minds would take on this shape.

Barcode clock is amusing.

The Block Clock is also amusing but it should be much smaller -- it barely fits on my 18" screen. It would be cute if it were tiny!

The time stamps for the Human Clockare all in photographs sent in by readers. You have to wait up to a full minute to see the screen change.

There's the ever-scary world population clock, for those who enjoy watching Koyaanisqatsi and feeling like a pest.

Fans of bureaucracy will enjoy

THE OFFICIAL US TIME.

If you have $7,800 you can buy this reproduction of a Napoleon-era clock driven by a ball that endlessly winds its way over a tilting platform (okay, not endlessly -- they don't cotton to such talk at the Patent Office).

More later, perhaps. We're off to our regular doctor's appointment -- our last before delivery?

2003-03-18T14:35:00.000-08:00

I just wanted to point out to people that cockeyed.com is really great. I particularly enjoy the series of How Much Is Inside? experiments, but the whole site is worth visiting for pranks and droll little comments with which to pack long afternoons. And, to excite people like Dana, he lives in Sacramento and writes about it.

2003-03-16T14:22:00.000-08:00

audblog audio post

2003-03-15T09:57:00.000-08:00

On this important day, I wanted to share with you a recent discovery I made while reading pictorial history of the movies. I found this poster for a movie featuring the always-awful Doris Day. Most importantly, this poster features the captivating, tiny, moist blue head of Jimmy Cagney:

I came to believe that every movie poster could be improved with the addition of the Tiny Blue Head of Jimmy Cagney. What do you think?

2003-03-14T14:54:00.000-08:00

audblog audio post

2003-03-13T08:45:00.000-08:00

There's so very little to report; Dana and I are both just waiting for any Big Developments and there are none. Well, Dana's belly is in itself a Big Development, big enough to keep her from getting out of bed or the couch without mighty heaving motions (no, not those mighty heaving motions, just a lot of struggling). I'm trying to fill my time by trying to build a big washout box in which I'll try to spray out the (silk)screens I'll try to build soon. Right now my plans are somewhere in a heap of hex bolts, Simpson Strong-Ties, plastic sheeting and ABS pipe connectors.

Dana's (superb) doctor said we could start telling people that Dana's due date is the 18th, but really she was encouraging us to be a wee bit deceptive. She's probably just not going to give off any warning signals until she actually goes into labor. Which I'm still not convinced will happen. That kind of thing just happens to other people.

In other "news," we watched the original Batman, the 1966 version with the cast from the TV show, last night. Yes, I know it was meant to be silly and fun, but some people's notion of silly and fun ain't so wonderful, and often it's just infurating. Adam West, dressed as Batman in what looks to be a garbage bag with ears glued onto it, gets attacked by an exploding shark, like you do -- and then the brain trust of heroes puzzles out what it meant:
"But wait! It happened at sea. See? C for Catwoman." "An exploding shark ... was pulling my leg." "The Joker! It all led to a sinister riddle. Riddle -er. Riddler?"

You get the idea. Grabass may find it amusing at 7 or 8 years old. I just found it mildly irritating.

2003-03-06T22:06:00.000-08:00

Suddenly we're about nine days from Dana's due date. Nothing in her belly or her demeanor or any other subtle signs seem to say she's about to deliver. It's very, very quiet. I've said little about the whole scene in this blog because I'm pretty quiet about it inside. The bags are packed, the house is (essentially) clean and ready, and now we just wait.

Anyway, to those (at most) two or three of you that want to know about the baby the minute he or she arrives, and wants to see the first picture as soon as I can bring it home, stay tuned here. I'm trying out Blogger's new Audioblog feature, which lets you call a central number and leave a message that the computer converts to an mp3 and then posts to the blog. So I may put in a call within an hour after l'enfant terrible is born.

At the very least, I'll try to give people the word that we're headed to the hospital, and I'll post here and send out e-mails once I can get home (maybe while Dana sleeps?). And then it's possible I'll never write about anything else.

2003-03-06T21:44:00.000-08:00

audblog audio post

2003-03-05T21:33:00.000-08:00

Played tonight as a sub on Eric and JJ's team; lost. I have to say I wound up walking away with a big extra dose of respect for JJ -- he got deliberately flattened by a beligerent hotshot on the other team and JJ just walked away. The guy had both feet off the ground, both forearms out, and he threw himself at JJ's chest and flung him to the ground (I thought the ref was looking but I want to believe he didn't see it). Like I said -- JJ just walked away. I can't say if I would have whined or tried to push back (probably a combination), but I don't think I could have just walked away.

It makes me glad that the only time in my life when I stopped a penalty kick came against this same guy. My fingers actually want to start typing how that happened in numbing detail, but I know if I did that I'd be one sliver above the golf-story stage. Suffice it to say he, a fiery Latino goal-scorer, didn't want to waste his time on a simple easy shot and I read his mind (or just guessed right). He just stood and fumed after I grabbed his shot -- I think just grabbing the ball, beyond merely deflecting it, and holding on was a true insult to his pride. Well, jackass, let that -- ai. You see? I can't just walk away.

2003-03-04T11:00:00.000-08:00

For whatever reason, this morning I came up with a name for my first solo album (once the Phony Huggs -- Jim's idea -- break up): No One Tells Me Anything, featuring the leadoff hit single "No One Tells Me Anything (Around Here)."

2003-03-03T12:10:00.000-08:00

Oh, and today's Daily Nag on Iraq. Zbigniew Brzezinski, late NSC director, was interviewed on CNN in a forum with Henry Kissinger. Asked about the current state of NATO, Brzezinski said:

I think we have to ask ourselves, how have we conducted ourselves? We have in effect said to them, "Line up." We have treated them as if they were the Warsaw Pact. The United States issued orders, and they have to follow.

Now, let me give you one striking example. The president since 9/11 has uttered the phrase "He who is not with us is against us" -- mind you, "He who is not with us is against us," anyone who disagrees with us is against us -- no less than 99 times. We have a concept of the alliance, inherent in this kind of conduct, which involves giving orders and others falling in line.

The issue of Iraq is a complicated issue. It's related to the whole question of proliferation and global stability. Ultimately, it points even to the issue of North Korea, that we haven't talked about at all.

And how we conduct this problem, how we deal with it is essential to the effective exercise of America's global leadership.

We are literally undercutting it right now. We have never been as isolated globally, literally never, since 1945.