Month: August 2005

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Sentential Links #14

Bumper crop of good stuff this week. Click for Context!

:: The Bard is loved for many reasons, none of which I would ever seek to contradict, and yet I’m most drawn to his ability to find grace and beauty in imperfections, in flaws. (Gotta read this blog more; wonderful post.)

:: This argument of universal sin, then, is an argument almost built entirely for cynical use. It has very little to do with morality as such. Instead, it has everything to do with power, with legitimating one’s own power and right to debate and trying to strip that way from others.

:: The family was held up at airport security when something in
Madge’s hatbox started vibrating. (The picture that this sentence captions is the joke. Click through and scroll down to the post dated August 26th — I couldn’t find a direct permalink.)

:: What the Presbyterian Church (USA) Has in Common With al-Qaida (That’s a headline to an article by James Lileks that made my jaw literally thud to the floor. My God, that man is insane.)

:: My father was forty-one when he died. His death was utterly unexpected. He was there one day. The next, he was not. He was survived by a wife and three daughters. (Read the post preceding this one, too. This is really a good blog, the kind of blog that, in a just world, would have a million hits a day while InstaPundit struggled to get a hundred.)

:: Revere of Effect Measure agreed to be both subject and part of my learning curve to present e-mail blog interviews – bloggerviews. (This seems like a neat idea — a direct exchange between bloggers, taking place on a blog. Whoa!)

:: Teaching 5-year-olds, I have discovered, is hard. (NOOOOO! Seriously, I think folks who voluntarily teach Kindergarten should either be awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom, or tossed into the asylum with the guy who thinks he’s Batman.)

:: The problem with ID is that, unlike real revolutionary science, it doesn’t lead to any normal science. There are no ID-based research programs. Nothing has never been accomplished by applying the ID paradigm to a question in biology. All ID’s scholarly (and “scholarly”) proponents do is try to offer half-assed refutations of Darwin. You can quote Kuhn all you like, but you’re not doing revolutionary science unless your purported revolution leads to some normal science. Intelligent design does not.

:: What is fucking her up is the desperation, and the fact that she worked herself to death for over a month, and she still didn’t really save anyone. Now that she’s gone, it’s like she was never there. Even the ones she helped keep alive, she didn’t save. You try dealing with that reality. (Swearing in the original)

:: It’s getting down to the wire, and Mark and I are pretty excited as we face this big, huge, gaping unknown. (Sometimes you don’t know just how much that unknown is gaping.)

:: A couple of things I’ve learned, that I offer up, free of charge, to anyone parenting a teenager, or about to parent a teenager: (There follows, after this point, a list of things that really could also apply to a six-year-old. Trust me. I know.)

:: Just today, I was notified that I’ve gotten a sweet job clerking for a presitigious Camden County judge. (Congratulations to Drew!)

:: Is a virgin still a virgin if its hyphen is not intact? (As of this writing, this sentence is from the lead entry on this permalink-less blog headquartered at RogerEbert.com, but written by Jim Emerson, the editor of RogerEbert.com. It’s a confusing and counterintuitive set-up, as are most attempts by major news organizations to harness the power of blogs while still maintaining their distance from down-and-dirty Blogistan, but it’s still an interesting blog. And you wouldn’t know it was even there if you didn’t scroll all the way to the bottom of the RogerEbert.com front page. Come on, guys.)

:: For me, the working definition of a chickenhawk is–a chickenhawk is a cheerleader. A cheerleader for war. And not necessarily just the war in Iraq, or regional war in the Mideast, but war in general. A chickenhawk glorifies war as an enterprise, enjoying the heroics inside his or her head, mocking those less enthusiastic military aggression as pacifists, appeasers (Michael Ledeen’s pet word), even traitors.

Tune in next week for more good stuff. (Well, and tune in before next week for good stuff. Uh…yeah.)

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Look at all them zebras!

I never watch much preseason NFL football, because the games don’t count and the second halves tend to be excruciating as I watch sixth or seventh round picks try to beat out undrafted free agents for the bottom of the team’s depth chart. But another reason that I’d forgotten about is the officiating. You can almost read the refs’ lips every time a flag is thrown: “So, how does that new rule for this situation work again? Is it a five-yard penalty or a ten-yarder? Anybody got the rule book with them?”

Hoo-boy.

Oh, and this is the first time I’ve ever watched a game at the Bears’ new Soldier Field. Nice stadium, but it gleams a little too much to be called Soldier Field. I look at this facility on TV, and I just don’t see the spirits of Dick Butkus or Walter Payton. I wish some NFL team would, in the course of building a new stadium, construct a good, old fashioned rock pile.

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Axl Rose, Axel Foley, and other great Axles….

Michele at ASV writes in detail about the evolution of her relationship with Guns-n-Roses:

It was then I realized that GnR was the equivalent of the girl who teases you with her perky breasts for years and when you finally manage to get under the hood, you grab hold of three inches of padded bra. All that music before Use Your Illusion II was just a ruse to get us to this point. They gave us the good stuff first so they could later on sit back and make this pretentious, melodramatic drivel that they called art. There was nothing left to them. Empty D cups.

I never held a grudge against the rest of the band like I do Axl. He was – and is – a self indulgent monster whose posturing bravado could never hide the fact that he was really nothing more than a wimp, a nancy boy, a withered soul of a human being who couldn’t handle criticism or competition

I’m starting to think that Michele is the Lester Bangs of Blogistan. But anyway, I never liked GNR in the first place, for one big reason: Axl Rose’s voice is just plain awful. He’s got this screechy whine of a voice that in my ears has all the musicality of that super-loud girl in your fifth-grade chorus. You know the one I mean. Ugh. I liked GNR when it was just the band playing, but sooner or later Axl would step up to the mike, and there I went. To this day I’ve never owned a single GNR album.

(I have the distinct feeling I wrote this same post a couple of months ago, but I don’t feel like searching for it.)

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A body blow, avoid’d

According to a sketchy news item run as a hasty crawl across the top of the screen during a Bills preseason game, the Air Reserve Station in Niagara Falls is remaining open, albeit with a few changes.

In an economically troubled place like Western New York, the closure of a large military base would have been a body blow, so color me happy.

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Ann Coulter is a revolting piece of human shit.

Yeah, that’s a bold statement, but I can’t think of any other way to phrase it. Ann Coulter is completely without worth as a human being. Were she to walk into Buffalo’s Botanical Gardens, I have a feeling that the plants therein would choose to suffocate rather than breathe in the carbon dioxide that she exhales.

hy do I say this? Because of what the lovely Ms. Coulter said here, on that FOX News show Hannity and Colmes:

COLMES: Is that what that is? You certainly don’t feel that New Yorkers are cowards?

COULTER: I think they would immediately surrender [to terrorists if attacked].

God, what a sickening person Coulter is, and how black her heart must be. New Yorkers would surrender? Upon what does Ann Coulter base this statement? Certainly not on how New Yorkers responded when they actually were attacked.

New Yorkers ran into fire and smoke and dust and debris to save others, and many New Yorkers died doing so. New Yorkers stood in the upper floors of those burning towers, knowing that they were doomed, and many of them called home to say goodbye before choosing their deaths rather than having their deaths forced upon them by jumping from those heights. New Yorkers didn’t surrender; they faced it head-on while the rest of America looked on, horrified and amazed, via television screens and radios and computer monitors.

In Casablanca, Rick Blaine responded to Major Strasser’s speculation on a German invasion of New York thusly: “Major, there are certain sections of New York I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.” That’s still true today — but not for Ann Coulter, who wants to be able to use 9-11-01 to justify all of her insane right-wing hatred but who also wants to curl up with her hatred of everyone to her left like a warm blanket.

There are few persons in American public life of whom I can honestly claim to feel hatred. Ann Coulter is one of them.

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One year ago (minus one day)

I probably won’t be posting tomorrow, because it’s Friday and the family wants to go out and it’s Little Quinn’s birthday and all, which is why I’m posting so much about him today.

This is what he looked like the night he was born. Even though his birthday is the 26th, we didn’t get to see him until after midnight on the 27th, which explains the datestamp on the photo. (Our doula, bless her, brought a digital camera for the taking of post-birth photos. She didn’t have this kind of thing in mind, obviously.)

Happy Birthday, kiddo….

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G-tube feedings, revisited

I wrote some time ago on the details of performing Little Quinn’s G-tube feedings. This process has been aided recently by our acquisition of an electric pump which takes the bulk of the work out of it and frees us up to do other things while Little Quinn is eating.

Here is a Flickr photoset where I perform one of his feedings from last night, using the pump. The prep work is mostly the same, as is the completion; the main change is that we no longer hold him and pour the milk/formula into his belly by hand, little by little.

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Strollers

For the vast majority of parents, buying a stroller is a one-time thing — you pick one that fits the “baby bucket” car seat at first, and then you remove that when the kid is old enough. To pick one out, you look in the Consumer Reports magazine, or you do some searching through online testimonials, or you talk to other parents; and then you go to Target or Toys-R-Us and find one in the right color. And then you’re on your way, no fuss, no muss. And when you have your second child, unless you do this while the first one is still in the stroller, you get to re-use the first one.

For us, though, it’s a bit different.

I’m sure most of us have been in public somewhere — a mall, a grocery store, a park, wherever — when we’ve seen a stroller that looked a bit different, somehow. At first it looks just like a normal stroller, but then we realize that the thing is quite a bit larger than usual for a kid that size. We notice that the child within is buckled in much more securely, perhaps with ankle harnesses and a chest harness and we see that his head nestles into this fabric-covered head-brace. And we see that this stroller’s wheels are much larger, and that it looks like not so much a stroller but a stroller/wheelchair hybrid.

That’s exactly what it is.

It’s exactly what we have for Little Quinn. Currently we have a loaner from a local medical supply company while the insurance approvals and such go through for our own, and that medical supply company has the word “wheelchair” in its title. (What we currently have is pictured in the first photo in this post.) It’s big and heavy and it takes up a lot more of the back of the car than a normal stroller.

Little Quinn turns one year old tomorrow.

It’s been quite a year. Parts of it have been amazing and I wouldn’t change them for all the world; other parts of this past year I’d jump at the chance to have never have happened at all. Problem is, I’m not sure which parts fall into which category. Things which seemed hellish then feel OK now, while others that felt OK at the time fill me with sadness to think of them today. And there are the hellish moments that stayed hellish, and the good moments — all too few — that still feel good. It’s sort of like that scene in City Slickers, when the three guys are describing the best days of their lives, and one of them describes the day he finally stood up, as a teenager, to his abusive father (if memory serves). One of the other guys then says, “That’s your best day? What’s your worst day?” And the first guy, says, “The same day.”

Well, that’s what I think about when I think about strollers these days.

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Get with the program, fellas!

A local Buffalo magazine, Buffalo Spree, has launched a new blog, called SpreeBlog. It’s very new, so I’ll go easy on them for now, but come on, guys — this is the real Buffalo blog. Right here. And it’s been that way for ages. Sheesh.

Do I not write enough about Buffalo, or something? What constitutes a “Buffalo blog”, anyway — is it a blog like mine, where I live in Buffalo and blog about whatever I want, or is it a blog like Alan’s, where he mostly blogs about Buffalo? What gives, here? I don’t want to fall through the cracks of Buffalo Blogistan!

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