Jk started cooing recently; I got some video this morning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vHmfCu9br4

I'm curious. :)

Poll #1421640 Flighty of the Concord
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

According to my knowledge, the word "flighty":

It means/could mean (check all that apply):

I have lived more than five years of my life in (check all that apply):

Boss: Ms Henderson, we can't act on this initiative until you've sent a copy to the Directors of Emery Corporation.
Secretary: Yes, sir, I'll file it with the Emery Board right away.

Of course, after sleeping through the window-shaking thunderclap last night, Jk gets roused when we're out and about today by a cash register tinging on the other side of a store.

Luckily, it was only momentarily. Heh.

A benefit of babies this age:

Last night, we had a huge thunderstorm. V and I were both awakened by a clap that shook the entire house. Car alarms went off, and at least one house alarm did (not ours). I was concerned that it wasn't in fact a thunderclap but rather a gas main explosion or something equally sinister. It took us about half an hour to fall back asleep, making sure that the thunder was indeed moving away from us.

The baby slept right through it. He probably had his Moro reflex and kept on sleeping.

Ah, savor these moments, for in but a few short months a similar storm will result in terrified crying, and then later in "Can I sleep in your bed tonight?"

Controversy #1: Sarah Palin was in New York with her daughter, and went to see a Yankees game, among other things. David Letterman joked that there was awkwardness when A-Rod knocked up Palin's daughter during the seventh inning stretch, and also that Eliot Spitzer had to be kept away. Okay, tacky, but not over the top jokes about Bristol Palin, an adult single mother. Problem is, the daughter with Sarah Palin wasn't Bristol but rather Willow, who's 14.

Oops.

Now, both sides of the debate are digging in with their positions. The Letterman camp insists that he was joking about Bristol, that he'd never make jokes that amounted to statutory rape, and so on. So far, okay, I agree, I believe him, someone on his writing team goofed bigtime. But the appropriate response beyond that is to just own up to it already. Someone goofed. This isn't about Sarah Palin's sense of humor (i.e., lack thereof), this is about a sincere goof.

For her part, Sarah Palin suggested that Obama's "side" wasn't holding up their side of the "don't attack families" position, apparently because of Letterman's jokes. That's so far detached from reality it hardly bears discussion. So there's that. Even so, Letterman's jokes were inappropriate and apparently based on an error, and he ought to own up not just to the inappropriateness (which he has) but to the error (which, as far as I can tell, he hasn't).

=====

Controversy #2: Obama's DOJ has written a brief defending DOMA, allegedly comparing same-sex marriage to incest and child marriage.

Reality: Suggesting that the DOJ is comparing same sex marriage to cases that everyone would consider incest or child marriage is highly misleading. I disagree with the DOJ's position, but it's also appropriate to present them fairly.

The brief starts the argument on page 26 of the document (page number 16). In a nutshell, it argues that the Federal Government has a long tradition of allowing State A to reject marriages from State B that violate their own standards. For instance, legal ages for marriage vary between states; in Wilkins v Zelichowski, it was decided that New Jersey had the right to ignore a marriage between 16-year-olds that was legally performed in Indiana. Also, state definitions of "incest" vary; in re Mortenson's Estate held that a marriage of first cousins, legally performed in New Mexico, could be ignored in Arizona (where that's incest).

The important issue in both cases is that they are only "child marriage" and "incest" in the states wanting to disregard the marriages. In Indiana and New Mexico, the marriages were perfectly legal.

As I say, I don't entirely agree with the DOJ's position. However, I feel that the invocation of "incest and child marriage" is meant to equate Obama's DOJ position with that of those conservatives who warned that legalizing same sex marriage would open the door for incest, pedophilia, and bestiality. The DOJ isn't suggesting any such thing at all; they're not talking about future possibilities but rather past situations in which state-level opinions on what constituted "child marriage" and "incest" differed.

By popular demand, more pics: http://www.flickr.com/photos/45122802@N00/

I think my favorite so far is the one where he's staring at the ceiling, which is from tonight.

I can now tell the strippers who have children from those who don't. When I make rooting motions at the women, the ones without children get creeped out and make motions towards the bouncers, but the ones with children roll their eyes and try to latch me to their nipples.

Baby pictures :D

Baby's here. Parents exhausted. More later.

Reading in French today, two interesting articles:

1. Le Monde reports that WHO is very close to raising H1N1 (pka Swine Flu) to level 6, following an outbreak in Japan. This would make it officially the century's first pandemic, although it continues to be most present in North America. All told, it has been linked to 72 deaths (far less than the seasonal average for ordinary flu). Hopefully it will continue to be a pandemic in scary-sounding-name only.

2. Le Monde also reports that two gay cops in Cannes have turned to legal channels after their repeated complaints to their superiors concerning on-the-job harassment have gone ignored. One has been particularly harassed when, following a prolonged absence due to illness, the false rumor spread that he has AIDS. In the "things are the same all over" file is Cannes city hall, which claims not to have heard anything at all until now (despite one officer's claim of having written five letters over the last two years), and will now provide the officers with all the assistance they may need. Behold the power of lawyers. :) Also, it amuses me that the French word for "city hall" is, basically, "mayory." We go to the bakery to get baked goods, and the mayory to get a mayor. :D

So the house next door has a PVC pipe that regularly dumps water from inside the house directly onto the ground. It doesn't seem to be connected to rain, nor does it seem to be anything other than water (it doesn't suds up, it's clear, it doesn't appear to leave a residue, etc.). I've noticed some of the other newish houses in the neighborhood have these.

What is it?

ETA: Googling seems to suggest it's a sump pump dump, although that would mean our neighbors have severe problems with flooding given how often it dumps. It's a Habitat house, though, so maybe it's of sub-par construction. We only get noticeable water puddles in the basement after the spring thaw and virtual monsoons.

Curtis Granderson has a post about his catch the other night.

For those who missed it: One out in the bottom of the ninth, score was 1-0 Tigers, the Indians had a man on first. Grady Sizemore hits a ball deep; Curtis Granderson times his jump perfectly enough to lean over a nine foot fence and pull in what would have been a game-winning home run. The Indians announcer even calls it a home run before correcting himself. The only thing that would have made it more perfect is if he'd either completed the double play or if there'd been two outs, because despite the play the Tigers still needed to get one more out (which they did).

Schafentzug ist eine von der CIA vielpraktizierte Verhörmethode.

Sheep deprivation is one of the CIA's most often used interrogation methods.

-- Der Spiegel

I do believe they meant Schlafentzug (sleep deprivation).

On a more serious note, it's impressively interesting that Der Spiegel uses "Folterer" ("torturer") several times to refer to CIA interrogators:

Schliefen die Gefangenen ein, spritzten Folterer des US-Geheimdienstes CIA ihnen Wasser ins Gesicht. Drohte ein Terrorverdächtiger vor Erschöpfung zusammenzubrechen, ketteten ihn seine Folterer im Liegen fest, in einer verdrehten, unbequemen Position, die das Einschlafen erschwert.

If prisoners fall asleep, torturers of the CIA, the US secret service organization, spritz water in their face. If a terrorism suspect is on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion, his torturers chain him up lying down, in a twisted uncomfortable position, making sleep difficult.

Dunno why I noticed this....

Of the eight Star Trek: TOS non-extra actors who were in more than 30 episodes, there were two each born in three different years, and the other two were born within a year of each other (although not in the same calendar year):

1920: DeForrest Kelley (McCoy) (Jan 20) and James Doohan (Scotty) (Mar 3)
1931: William Shatner (Kirk) (Mar 22) and Leonard Nimoy (Spock) (Mar 26)
1932: Majel Barrett (Nurse Chappell) (Feb 23) and Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) (Dec 28)
1936: Walter Koenig (Chekov) (Sep 14)
1937: George Takei (Sulu) (Apr 20)

Perhaps not surprisingly, they pair up by year as they might be "paired up" on the show: The two stars, the expert support, the logistics support, and the two women.

Quite surprising to me, Grace Lee Whitney (Yeoman Rand) is the oldest surviving* member of the high profile cast (even though she was only in 8 episodes, she was quite memorable). I'd've thunk she'd be younger than most of the cast, but IMDB lists her birthday as April 1, 1930.

(And yes, I saw Nimoy on SNL. It wasn't to my taste.)

* Kelley and Doohan, as well as Barrett, have passed on.

Detroit has its own scrip. "Scrip" is local currency that often pops up during economic depressions, usually for some combination of three reasons: (1) To allay anxiety about the stability of the national dollar, (2) To encourage local shopping (once you have some scrips, you'll want to spend them), (3) To bolster community pride.* In Detroit's case, it appears to be mostly the latter two reasons. The value of a Cheers is set at US$3.

Due mostly to the languishing national economy, scrips have been increasingly appearing around the country for a few years now.

* There are more nefarious reasons for scrip as well, such as tying a worker base to a closed local economy to prevent them from easily leaving the situation.

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are suggesting that Souter's replacement be someone from outside the Federal Appeals system; Arlen Specter has even said a successful candidate need not even be a lawyer. "We need more people to express a woman's point of view or a minority point of view, Hispanic or African American," he said.

How about a non-lawyer, a female, an African American, AND a Hispanic, whose career speaks to a variety of people (including, recently, country music fans)?

Sheila E for SCOTUS! :D

I've changed my handle from symposiarch to bernmarx.

I'm unclear why it took me this long to embrace the reference. :)

Fun stuff from last night's Bones...

( Argh! There be spoilers! )

According to Mental Floss, a phase 6 pandemic has the capacity to kill up to 7 million people ("But with globalization having exploded in the years since the last one, a flu pandemic now has to the potential to kill 2 to 7.4 million people worldwide, according to WHO").

It sounds like a lot of people, because it is. But for perspective: The current world population is just shy of 7 billion. That means, at WHO's worst number, the swine flu would kill just over 1 out of 1000 people worldwide. That's a 99.9% survival rate. In contrast, Captain Trips, the fictional virus in The Stand, had a 99.4% mortality rate (994 of 1000 people dead from the disease). I've seen two comparisons already to Captain Trips, but the evidence just isn't there.

Of course, it's possible that WHO's estimate is wrong and that the swine flu will do much more damage than that. Right now, we're in phase 4, inching towards phase 5. It's possible that we'll never even reach phase 6. The death toll could be much less than 2 million people worldwide. It could be in the thousands. It could last a few months. It could last years. It could... well, you get the idea.

For now, what you can do is what you ought to be doing anyway: Do what you can to keep your immune system up, by getting sleep, eating citrus, getting exercise, and so on. Oh, and keep your stress level low, such as by resisting the urge to panic. ;)