One Man Band

Caught interesting act at Calgary's Children Fesitval last weekend: Dan the one man band; website's worth a look. I'd book him as my company's Christmas entertainment, if I worked for a company.

Ella Enchantged

Took my six year old to Ella Enchanted this afternoon, and she rated it a 10/10. I give it 8.5. One part Cinderella, one part Lizzy McGuire, one part Mean Girls, one part Monty Python. Much more enjoyable than I would have predicted, this retelling of Cinderella is premised on Ella being blessed /cursed by her fairy god mother at birth with an enchantment that makes her obey any order she is given. So she ends up taking directions like "Bite me" literally. What makes the movie funny for adults is the Pythonesque bits which transpose modern institutions (malls, valley girls, etc) into fairy tale terms. Nice twists on the evil step sisters (Mean Girls) and the Cinderella fable (now its clear why she had to put up with all those stupid orders) and nice anti-racism undercurrent. All in all, a painless outing for parents and a good movie for kids.

I also lend my seal of approval to Shrek II, which similarly transposes modern elements (police pepper spray, union activities, organized crime, etc.) into a fairy tale setting. In this case my six year old only got about 1/4 of the jokes/references, but that was still enough to allow her to enjoy the movie; I suspect even most teenagers won't get everything since many of the in-jokes are references to scenes from movies they will never have seen.

Star Trek, Flames, & the Election

Here's a fascinating eBay link passed on from Randy Reichardt:

Star Trek Apartment

In other stupid fan phenomenon, I find the "Flames Fever" currently manifest in Alberta slightly embarrassing. I would understand all of the flag flying and hype were the Flames in anyway related to Calgary. I mean, if the guys on the team were my local butcher and the high school principal and the cable guy, then okay, I'd get out and cheer them on. I could even see putting the $14.95 flame flag on my car had any of the players been born and raised and learned to play in Calgary. I might even be able to get it if the players like, you know, lived in Calgary once the seasons was over. But as far as I can make it out, its just a bunch of mercenaries hired by some guy in Calgary to play against a bunch of other guys who aren't from and don't live in their city either, and I'm having trouble seeing a connection to me and mine. I mean, I love listening to a bunch of guys who make me look athletic running out of a bar where they have just consumed their own body weight in alcohol screaming "We won, we won!" Someone explain to me where the "We" comes from. You paid $14.95 for the flag ($30.00 for the pair) for your car, and suddenly you're a team member with an equal share of the glory of winning?

It's even more embarrassing living here in Lethbridge, which is not, last I checked, a Calgary suburb...every times the Flames win another game, the number of Flame banners and car flags in Lethbridge doubles. If the couch potatoes who think "they won" because they watched a game in a sports bar are pathetic, then what can you say about somebody who 'joins the team" two games short of the end of the series. The stampede to join the winning team defines 'loser' in my book.

Which brings us to election signs. It depresses me to think that more Canadians vote in Canadian Idol than in the national election, but it depresses me even more to see people voting who are too stupid to figure out where they stand on any of the issues, but simply try to find out which candiate is ahead so they can vote for, and so be part of, the winning side. I mean, what is the point of putting up election signs, if not simply to demonstrate how many supporters one has, in hopes of convincing others to vote on the winning side? Its not like the election posters actually say anything or have any information on them; just the candidate's name and party affiliation. I just need one of those per candidate to figure out whose running, and the rest serve no purpose, but the intensity of campaigning to get more signs out reveals that the numbers game is life and death, especially in a close race as the Lethbridge riding is rumoured to be. But who are these voters who wait to see who has the most signs, and then signs on with that party? Are these the people we want chosing our government?

The CBC ran a skit the other morning where a reporter pretends to do a man in the street interview, and asks, "Who are you going to vote for" and the woman answers, "I just wait until I see which side has the most signs, and then I vote for that side."
"Oh, who did you vote for last time, then?"
"Re/Max"

Two Best Lines

Two best lines I've read this week:

"The part of my brain that processes poetry was stolen by gypsies who left a universal remote in its place." --Den Valeron


"Time Travel is so last year." --David Kirkpatrick

Two links

Couple of amusing links, this time.

First, a news item on a robot race in the desert. The results were not, at this stage, particularly impressive! (Thanks to Sara J. Gottlieb for sending this one.)

Second, from Daniel J. Simons at the University of Illinois, a video clips demonstrating that people do not pay much attention to each other; may not even know to whom they are speaking, in fact. This is a nice mixture of social science research and candid camera. See a second clip, too. (Thanks to the Sidebar newsletter for these!)

Iraq Photos

Guest editorial by Den Valdron

I feel compelled to make a comment or two about the pictures and reports of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

Very, very, very important things are being missed here. Think about it: *Who took these photos?* *Why were these photos taken?* *What were the people who took these photos thinking?*

All we are doing is looking at and reacting to the photos, and assuming that the photos are the single accurate barometer of what is going on. This is like looking at an arrow, instead of the direction it points.

One observation I have to make about these photos is the humour and the complete lack of shame to be found in them. The Americans and the jailers, when appearing, are grinning, laughing, giving thumbs up. They are completely unaware and innocent of any idea that what they are doing is wrong or offensive.

Think about that. There is a bunch of people whose moral compass has broken down so completely, that they have no concept that scenes like the ones they're capturing are wrong. Instead, its cool, its funny, its great, they've got to take a picture. Its a kodak moment!

The depiction of prisoners is also fascinating. There's a recurrent theme of sexual degradation here. Forced nudity, forced poses of homosexual coupling. Hooded nudity. Arrangement of bodies. This is serial killer pathology, presented without a trace of self consciousness or guilt and played for laughs. There is a very weird kind of distancing going on, the prisoners are being visually emasculated and dehumanized, hooding them, posing them suggests that on critical levels the jailers are not regarding them as human beings. Now, its played for fun in the pictures, but it suggests that underneath the 'fun' there is a real pathology going on, a fundamental inhumanity.

The electrodes picture is heavily laden with bizarre religious subtext - overtones of both Christian martydrom and the KKK. Given the religious and racial issues at work in Iraq, the apparent subtexts cannot possibly be accidental. Either they were deliberately imposed, or they were accidental but so powerful and easily perceived that the picture had to be taken and kept. Nobody takes pictures that aren't meaningful to them on some level, and if they do, they don't keep them. This one seems to have circulated.

But just because their moral compass has broken down, doesn't mean they don't have one. Now, if they're completely cool with this... what about the parts of their job, of what they do, that they think are not so funny. That they think are unpleasant or morally questionable... but still part of their duty. What about the parts that they would never take a picture of, and would never want to be in a picture of? Do you see where I am going?

These pictures are of the 'happy, wacky aspect of torture.' They are pictures by people who clearly think that there is a 'happy wacky aspect of torture.' Which suggests that they're also comfortable with other aspects of torture. Does this create any crushing sense of visceral horror?

What we've got here is a heady mixture of symbolic dehumanization with nudity and hoods, sexual emasculation and castration pathologies apparent in the posing of bodies, a complete lack of any sense or perception of humanity, and images of racial and religious derangement, all accompanied by images of laughing, happy, thumbs up jailers.

I keep coming back to this: They had no concept that their conduct was unacceptable. In fact, this was the fun part. This was the part that they were willing and happy to record with pictures, willing and happy to be in those pictures. This is the ceiling... after this, we go down.

So ask yourselves: What would they have found unacceptable to photograph? What acts would they have said 'wow, we can't take a picture of this, or we'll get in trouble some day.' What acts would provoke a moral recognition? What acts would provoke guilt? What acts would provoke a reluctance to record, or be recorded as a part of?

It strikes me that people will do unpleasant things for a while before they quit and say 'this is not acceptable. This is immoral and offensive, and I just can't do it.'
Think of it as the rule that: 'There's only so much shit a person will take.'

Well, these people have established a moral barometer for what they think is acceptable and fun. We're looking at it in the pictures. Somewhere further along, there is a hellscape that they find intolerable, a line that they won't or wouldn't cross. If what is in these pictures is just fine, then where the hell is the line they won't cross, if there is one?

What frightens me is that potentialy vast horrible ground between the line where they think pictures are fine, and the line they won't cross. What were they prepared to do? How far were they prepared to go? Consider the pathological subtexts, the dehumanization, sexual attack and emasculation, the contempt for religious standards, the invoking of a Klan image.

We cannot assume that just because there are no pictures or records of summary execution, or of electricity running through wired genitals, or of women being raped by dogs, or of men being doused with gasoline and burned alive that these things are not happening or not out of the question. We can only assume that the jailers would not find these things funny enough to take pictures of, and would not want to be held accountable and responsible. We can no longer assume that it is not happening, and we certainly cannot assume that it is beyond the boundaries of possibility. We cannot assume that it cannot happen in the future. What we see in the pictures is a culture of pathological thinking and inhumanity.

The quotes from jailers are just as disturbing if you read between the lines. People seldom acknowledge guilt or wrongdoing. What people mostly do is minimize guilt or accountability, they admit to minor things but deny the big ones, they seek to externalize responsibility. All of these things are on display here.

If a man says, "I accidentally broke a few tables putting the fear into someone... but I didn't really hurt anyone," what we are seeing is a pattern of confession/evasion recognizeable to any seasoned police officer. What we have here is a confession of violent assault, in which the speaker is displacing the acknowledgement of violence into objects, which he sees as acceptable, and away from humans, which he knows is not acceptable. He's playing a game with himself and with us. The reality is that we may be looking at a man who has repeatedly beaten people halfway to death. Who may have actually beaten people to death. A man who is engaged in minimizing and evading his conduct.

Another jailer notes that they were not given 'geneva convention' protocols or information. Essentially, he has committed horrible acts, he tells us, because no one has told him that he should not. Yet this is insupportable. If no one told him that he couldn't, then surely, he wouldn't have known he was doing anything wrong, could not have concealed or minimized his actions, and he would have been caught and nipped in the bud. So either he's lying and he is simply evading blame. Or he was swimming in a culture where his conduct was completely acceptable to everyone around him, including his superiors and supervisors. Again, any seasoned police officer interrogating a suspect has heard this kind of thing many times before. Frightening?

Another jailer, or possibly the same one, notes that he believed he had the tacit approval of intelligence or interrogation agencies. 'Military intelligence loves us, they let us watch.' What he is saying is that his actions and activities were perfectly acceptable to the establishment, his culture of torture was condoned and accepted, even encouraged.

Finally, consider the gloating involved. "We broke them in a few hours," one jailer brags. This is very close to the culture of bragging one found in Nazi camp guards. When dealing with profoundly immoral acts, the Nazi's engaged in emotional transference. They refused to deal with the morality or humanity of their acts, rather they shifted the emotional focus of their acts to aspects in which they could take pride in... such as efficiency. Thus, you could have bureaucrats congratulating themselves on the assembly line speed of the gas chambers, or camp guards bragging about their ability to keep prisoners in line with hideous brutality. They were refusing to think about what they were doing... there was a physical refusal here that is almost on the level of repressed memory... rather they were choosing to think very hard instead about the quality or the efficiency with which they were doing it. "I'm doing horrible things, yes. But that's not important. The important part is that I am doing it extremely well!"

What does it take to break a prisoner in a few hours? How far will you go to break a prisoner in a few hours? How offensive, how much of a challenge, how much of a threat to ones own efficiency and competence is a prisoner who refuses to break in a few hours? And what's the outer limit that you'll go to get that job done right, to make sure that prisoner is broken in a few hours?

What we are seeing with this quote is evidence of a classic and very dangerous pathology.

To simply look at the pictures and the quotes and say 'okay, this is really bad. But it's not as bad as it could be or as bad as other things we've heard about...' really misses the point.

There will never be pictures of men and women being tortured to death. There will never be pictures of women raped by dogs in torture chambers, of bodies mutilated, genitals removed, of electric needles, strangulation, suffocation or savage beatings. Saddam's own security forces, safe in their private prisons and torture chambers never took those pictures. No one takes those pictures. No one ever admits to doing those things, at least not in public. There are things that are not talked about, that are concealed, hidden, evaded. There are acts and the potentials and capacities to act that are buried...

...except through occasional glimpses, where the perpetrators have so completely lost their moral compass that they reveal themselves or reveal their pathology without understanding or admitting what they are slipping out.

This is one of those revelations. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now officially in free fall.

Den Valdron is a lawyer, author, and frequent commentator on social and policing issues.

Family Photo

Assuming picture is worth a thousand words, here is a current family photo

and a close up of 5 month old daughter Kasia:

Instinctive Fear of...

My wife and I were big fans of the original Baby Einstein video with our first child, both because it was one of the few ways to calm our colicky child, and because we liked the premise that playing recorded speeches in different languages might help our child retain the full range of phonemes that are usually lost as babies hardwire their brains strictly for the limited subset of sounds they hear in their mother tongue...only time will tell if the brief taped speech samples contained on the Baby Einstein tape are sufficient to help our daughter's generation hear and so learn other languages more easily.


[I remember only too well the trauma of my own school experiences with a French instructor screaming at me, "Not 'r' you imbecile, 'r'!", with neither of us knowing (because the research came 20 years later) that there really was no way for me to 'hear' a French phoneme to which my developing brain had not been exposed in the first six months of life. The difference may have been painfully obvious to the instructor, just as the Chinese inability to distinguish between 'l' and 'r' seems impossibly odd to Anglophones, but it?s fundamentally a hardware problem, and no amount of shouting and repetition is capable of fixing it.]


So, even before the arrival of our new baby we had purchased the boxed set of Baby Einstein videos, including our current favorite, Baby Bach. The tape displays a series of wonderful toys (I have spent many hours on the internet trying to track down some of them for our own purchase) more or less synchronized with various pieces of classical or other music. The 20 minute tape, in combination with her vibrating bouncy chair, helps Kasia fall asleep when she is otherwise too tired and unusually fussy.


Early on, however, we noticed an inexplicable phenomenon?although our Kasia was turning into a Baby Bach junky, she always exploded into terrified tears during one particular sequence. At first we thought that it was simply a matter that she had reached the limit of her attention span, since no newborn can watch a 20 minute tape all the way through. But this turned out not to be the case, because we would get the same reaction even if we happened to start the tape with that sequence; and as Kasia grew older, she can watch for much longer, even watching attentively as the tape cycles through more than once, provided we hit "skip" on the DVD whenever that particular sequence appears. Then my wife insisted it was the particular musical selection that our daughter was reacting to, but no; when just playing the music track (the DVD has a music only option) there is no reaction. No, as unlikely as it seems, it is demonstrably this one set of visuals that fills our baby with terror.


The sequence in question simply shows three tin toy robots marching peacefully, if somewhat stiffly, to a selection of Bach music. So someone please explain to me how a newborn can have an instinctual fear of robots? I mean, lizards and snakes I can get ? the collective unconscious might well have evolved a very sensible collection of innate fears with which to protect babies. Babies that failed to fear spiders and rats and snakes might well be deprived of the subsequent opportunity to contribute genes to the next generation. But robots? I mean, can you be reincarnated from the future into the present?


Makes my brain hurt.

Spaghetti Harvest

Ooh, ooh, ooh! J. Brian Clarke brought this one to my attention: log on to the
BBC's history site at http://news.bbc.co.uk/aboutbbcnews/spl/hi/history/html/default.stm
click on the 1950's, then click on Panorama's sample video of a 'Spaghetti Harvest'.

This is one of my all time favorite hoaxes, but I had no idea this gem was available on the net...well worth viewing.

Typical Day of Parental Leave

Being on parental leave, my primary responsibility these days is to take care of my three month old. I nevertheless find myself on campus quite frequently because my wife Mary is still teaching, and since Kasia refuses to take a bottle -- hysterical screaming at the mere sight of a plastic nipple or sippy cup -- I can't be more than two hours away from Mom. Mary nurses Kasia just before teaching a class, and I hang around so she can do another feed on break, if necessary, or immediately after class. If Kasia is sleeping, I can run up to my office and do email; if, as is more commonly the case, Kasia is awake, I struggle to keep her entertained with the small number of toys that are suitable for this age. (Of course, Mom, Dad, and big sister are the primary play objects.) On occasion, however, Kasia begins to cry and I end up walking the corridors to calm her.

The UofL is a great location for walking babies.

First, the aptly-named University Hall has the longest continuous hallways in North America (approximately 1/4 mile). I have now paced these corridors so often that I can describe the cartoons posted on each professor's door from one end of the hallway to the other, on all 8 floors. (Note to colleagues: time to cycle those cartoons! Once the paper turns yellow, it has been up long enough! Get some new material, for pity's sake.)

Second, there are large number of colleagues and alumni to stop me in the hallways to admire Kasia. Walking with a new baby garners far more glances, smiles, and interactions than one would normally experience taking the same route. Talk about positive reinforcement for an exercise routine. And of course, all those smiling adults engaging Kasia significantly adds to my supply of "toys".

Third, I have discovered the game of "Who is a keeper?", a marvelous voyeuristic pastime. One merely carries a baby through a crowd of adolescent couples, as found on campus, and observe the reactions. As Kasia is carried past crowds of female students, three quarters respond with, "Oh, look at the baby! Isn't she adorable?", while approximately a quarter turn away, or cross to the other side of the hallway, apparently fearful that having babies is contagious. Carrying Kasia through crowds of males leads to the same response, but in reverse proportions. What is highly fascinating, however, is watching how couples respond. Given the base statistics reported above, it should not be surprising that three quarters of couples respond with the female at least smiling at the baby, while the male ignores her or looks away. Often the exchange involves the female trying to stop to interact with the baby, while the male exhibits obvious resentment at the delay-- or worse yet-- at the interruption in his date's attention, should he have been talking at the point we come into view. On the other hand, there are about a quarter of the couples where the female goes, "Ooooh, look at the baby!" and the male actually smiles and interacts with the baby with equal interest, then looks at said female with a certain look that tempts me to tell her, "Hey, this one's a keeper!"

Bored with the hallways today, however, I wandered into the Fine Arts Center and the campus art gallery. UofL boasts an art collection far superior to what one would expect on any other similarly sized campus, and whoever runs the gallery actually has some taste ? I usually really enjoy the shows. Wandering around the gallery exhibits today was fun, because having Kasia in my arms gave me an opportunity to muse aloud about the art without looking completely crazy. Okay, commenting on art to a three month old may seem a bit redundant, but babies like to hear the sound of your voice, and it doesn't really matter what you're saying, so might as well be stream of consciousness about art appreciation.

But as I carried Kasia about, it became obvious that some works attracted and held her attention far more than others, and these were usually also the works to which I was drawn. The basis for this selection was not immediately obvious to me, since Kasia seemed equally drawn to abstract and representational works, bright and subtle compositions, and so on. So you have to wonder, is there something deep in our hardwiring or collective unconscious that these more successful works were triggering in both Kasia and I, or do daughters inherit their Dad's tastes, or was I simply unconsciously directing Kasia's attention? Well, there were a few pieces she liked more than me (or at least attended to more than I ? I suppose she might have been looking at them and thinking, "gee, what is it about that one I hate so much", but somehow that seems less likely with babies), so her taste was not identical to mine, but still. So I was thinking, there's probably a research project or two there? Bring babies into a gallery, watch what they look at, identify archetypes?

The Case of the Shattered Bowl

Middle of the night, there's a "pop", followed by a crash, from the kitchen. My wife and I investigate and discover that my wife's favorite glass bowl (about 10 inches across) has apparently shattered spontaneously. What we find is half the bowl (a literal, precise half) sitting on top of the counter, as if it had been sliced by a lazer. The other half has dropped off the counter and shattered into two dozen large fragments; a couple of hundred tiny shards; and a quarter million nearly microscopic dust flakes. I have seen glasses shatter into 'a million pieces' before, but I have never seen anything like these dust flakes. Instead of the usual random shards in a variety of jagged shapes, this dust consists of nearly flat, impossibly thin flakes of glass that are nearly impossible to see. The kitchen floor consists of a pattern of square tiles, so I use the grid to systematically clear each tile, and the surrounding grout so as not to miss anything. It takes four passes to wipe each tile: first a wet cloth to pull up glass, then a dry towel to wipe up the water and remaining glass fragments; then repeat because there are still a hundred flakes glinting up at me; then repeat again because while I can no longer see anything on the floor, I can hear and feel the grit under the wet towel, and see the glass glinting off the dry towel, even though I have already cleaned this individual title twice; and a fourth pass to make sure, which comes up with more glass more often than not. Working methodically, it takes me an hour and a half to clean the kitchen floor, and another 20 minutes to clean the counter just to be sure, though I only see a single shard on the counter other than the surviving half. (My conclusion is that the bowl broke cleanly in half, and the single minute shard has splashed back up onto the counter from the floor when the other half fell and shattered.) I have to discard my socks because they have picked up glass flakes even though I am only walking on the 'clean' tiles; I elect to wash my pants in the laundry room sink, and wash the sink, then run the pants throw the washer on their own, followed by an empty cycle, rather than throw those out, but I admit to being a bit nervous about the glass contamination spreading. I am keenly aware that if any of these flakes make it into our food, they would slowly slice one open as the piece traveled through the digestive system and be essentially undetectable. (The perfect murder weapon, I'm thinking.) Or if a piece sticks to my hands and I pick up my baby… I spend a long time washing up.

So can someone explain the physics of this to me? I have to admit that it has shaken my faith in the universe to have a glass bowl we have used for years suddenly up and explode. There was no one in the kitchen, and while I can imagine a scenario where an improperly stacked bowl could fall unexpectedly after everyone had left the room, this was clearly not the case here: My wife had left the bowl sitting empty by itself on the counter, where half of it remained perfectly preserved – nothing I know of could slice it so evenly in half, and there was nothing within a meter of the bowl anyway. It is just bizarre and unsettling.

Kasia

The baby is now ten weeks old, and smiling regularly, and clearly working her way up to a laugh. This is excellent timing, as it coincides with the worst of colic and the start of extended awake times, so without the reward of the occasional smile, a lot of parents might find babies sufficiently annoying that not smiling became a significant factor in natural selection… But for us Kasia is a pure joy, and worth the total disruption of our lives. Were Kasia our first child, I would no doubt be complaining here about the horrors of colic, but compared to Tigana's constant 24/7 screaming at that age, Kasia's colic seems pretty mild. Indeed, we were starting to worry that Kasia is too lethargic, since she seems to sleep quite a bit and lie around quietly a lot of the time she is awake, until we actually kept track and were able to reassure ourselves that she was falling within normal parameters. But even when Kasia does cry, we can often settle her fairly quickly, once the initial problem (hungry, wet, bored, sleepy) has been dealt with – she has an "off" switch, which Tigana lacked. With Tigana, once she started crying it would just keep escalating until she passed out. With Kasia, if she doesn't get fed immediately when she starts crying, she will often stop, look around, and not seeing mom, say "okay, I'll call back in 15 minutes." The call backs become increasingly desperate on those rare occasions I haven't been able to come up with an appropriate response, but the fact that a baby could pause at all between requests was a major revelation to us.

Kasia's biggest problems currently are gas pains (forcing Mary to stop eating 90% of her favorite foods, since everything apparently causes gas in babies –e.g., chocolate) and a second case of the sniffles. She seems to breath normally all day, but between 4AM and 6AM she is so sniffly that she has trouble breathing and we have to stand in the shower with her. It is fascinating how excited one gets from finally pulling a load of mucus out of a baby's nose. "Hey, I got more snot!" is now a commonly shouted joyous exclamation in our house.

I fortunately am on parental leave until late March, so it is relatively easy for me to cope. Mary is finding it harder, having to continue to teach, though she is down to teaching a single course a couple of times a week. Tigana, (coming up on her 6th birthday), is taking the intrusion of her younger sister into her previously self-centered universe far better than we could have hoped. Tigana never complains about Kasia's screaming, is gentle and caring with Kasia, and seems genuinely pleased to have a little sister.

Baby Back in Hospital

My newborn has been sick with a cold. This is significantly worse than it sounds. Babies under two months old don't know they can breath through their mouths, so when their noses block up, they simply stop breathing. I thought Mary and I were coping reasonably well by taking the baby in shifts and pumping saline solution up her nose as required, but when we took her in for her six week checkup, the doctor immediately sent Kasia to hospital.

Seeing one's infant connected to various monitors is unsettling, even when the doctors confirm that the RSV virus (a more serious condition that often masquerades as a cold) is not present. My daughter is so tiny, she seems completely dwarfed by the monitors. The pulse/oxygen level reader, for example, that normally hooks over the end of an adult's finger, completely covers my daughter's foot. And the readings themselves are both more reassuring (when the readings are what they should be) and more terrifying (whenever they aren't) than simply watching the baby snuffling at home. The monitors are alarmed to go off if the levels reach scary highs or lows, summoning the nurses, but the parent's are supposed to stay with their baby to keep track of pre-alarm trends and to administer the saline drops as appropriate. Naturally, my wife ended up with the more brutal night shift, since she had to breast feed every two hours, while I got to go home with my older daughter to a more or less normal night's sleep; but I did what I could with a single bottle feed to give my wife at least one four hour complete break mid-day.

So here I am on shift one afternoon, pacing with Kasia in my arms, when Kasia's readings start to show distress: her breathing starts to be too rapid, indicating a problem getting air in, and her pulse rate starts to shoot up, indicating either panic over oxygen deprivation, or a reaction to the drug they were giving her to open her airways. The trend is slow enough, and common enough, that at first I do not react, beyond trying to calm Kasia by pacing a bit faster, adding a bit of a jiggle to my hold on her, and patting her on her back, all of which usually sends her back to sleep. Instead, she starts to cry louder, and the monitors reveal a rapidly worsening trend. I redouble my efforts, but within seconds Kasia reaches crisis levels – the alarms go off, the nurse rushes in, and my heart stops in sudden dread as my daughter's pulse exceeds 220/minute.

The nurse takes one look at me, and starts to leave. I sputter something incoherent about the readings along the lines of "Do something!" and thrust my dying baby in her general direction. The nurse pauses, and with professional politeness says, "I take it your wife didn't explain to you that the monitors work by detecting sound and movement – your baby's reading's are fine; you're just making them go off the scale by pacing, jiggling and patting…"

Well, duh!

But for a minute there, I was one panicked Dad as my daughter's life flashed before my eyes.

Asked for Christmas...

...but didn't get it:
world's largest book

Mr. Picasso Head

Too preoccupied with new baby to keep blog current, though that should change once my grades are in later this week. In the meantime, check this out, courtesy of Holly Gunn: Mr. Picasso Head

Best of Hubble

Hey, check this out (From Holly Gunn):

http://wires.news.com.au/special/mm/030811-hubble.htm