Inedible Ink

I wrote that when people ask me if we’re done having kids they’re effectively asking about sex. Most would never dare to ask, “So, you gettin’ any?” But, “Are you done?”, somehow, that’s fine.

Not only are they asking about sex, they’re asking details about our health.  So, one of my snottier answers to “Are you done?” is to say that my lovely bride is far far too young for menopause, and that testicular cancer scare was, thankfully, a false alarm.

At best the questioner is suddenly aware that they had actually asked for that, at worst they see it as an insane non sequitur that just might mean “No.”

Is it still paranoid coulrophobia when they really are out to get you?
From The Register (UK):

Clowns attack US nuke missile silo | The Register
Three anti-nuke activists dressed as clowns broke into a Minuteman III facility close to the White Shield, North Dakota

You want to hear me say that we’re done.  Let’s try that out:

I’m done. My private selfish requirements for children in the home were met and overwhelmed with child number one.
I’m so done. My self-assigned value as a parent is also totally overwhelmed. I’m not really cut out for this parenting gig after all. Am I? I am short tempered, I am impatient, I am loud, and I leave Sharpies out where two-year-olds can reach them.

So, if I decide for myself if I’m fit to be a parent to fulfill my own private wishes, I’m done.

Is that what we should all be doing? Should the emotionally needy who underestimate the requirements of parenting and overestimate their own ability to meet those requirements be raising all the kids?

Mario’s Bike

Originally uploaded by André Rabelo.

That photo was made by one of the most famous photographers of the previous century, Henri Cartier Bresson.

This André fellow uploaded it to flickr and entered it into a group called delete-me! Delete Me is a group that works like part popularity contest and part reality TV. Members post criticisms and vote “deleteme” or “saveme”.

“It’s blurry”, they said. “Hold your camera still”, they said. You can read it all here. They panned it. They deleted it.

Imagine that a painters’ club met to show each other their work and share helpful criticism. Next, imagine that you bring Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” to that meeting and a.) No one notices. and b.) They vote you out of the club because sunflowers are yellower than that.

I’m not sure by whom I am the most disappointed.

It is easy to pick on the folks that voted “deleteme”, they didn’t recognize one of the so-called masterpieces of their craft. Should they have?

It’s clear that André was perpetrating what the D.A.’s office calls “entrapment” and what might also be called “fraud”. But it was so funny.

The people with whom I first sympathized are the superior-sounding snickerers who knew it was a famous picture. But boiled down their logic works like this: “It’s famous, therefore it’s good, you fool.”
Me? I’m not much better at explaining why I like it or don’t. I do understand that this image is like a greatgrandfather to the artform called “snapshot”, where blurry action captured in a way painters never dreamed to capture it is the norm. Somewhere along the way photographs started being different from automatic paintings and snapshots started piling up in shoeboxes. Somewhere along the way Henri Cartier Bresson got himself kicked out of Delete Me!

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.
Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)

Hat tip to: The Online Photographer who is very funny.

DSC_0054

Originally uploaded by Captoe.

“Cameraman at twelve o’clock, shhh, they’re very skittish”

Folks find out we’ve got four kids and the conversation goes straight to “Are you done?” Never fails.
Parents with one or two kids get the question too, of course, but trust me, it’s not the eyes-bugged aghast “Are you done?” I’m talking about.

It’s easy to think that having more kids than the national average is some kind of crazy, that our rational faculties must have been completely off the hook on the fateful day that we became the parents of a third or fourth person.
One answer I’ve tried on occasion is meant to deflect this attitude among the parents of fewer kids:

Maybe we are crazy to have four kids, but it’s the exact same kind of crazy as the parents of only children. Everybody knows that babies make dirty diapers, yet they make that baby anyway. You don’t start a family for solely earthly reasons.Some crazy kind of hope, faith and love overpowers the desire we have to be ‘not it’ when diaper changing time comes around.

It has come to my attention that Quebec, or Québec (as they prefer to be called), has a national holiday this week. The Fête nationale du Québec is celebrated on the 23rd and 24th of June.

This would not merit notice but for one distracting little detail. Québec is not a nation. Not last I checked.

If I could get over the whole nationhood hurdle, I might find the time to get riled about the misappropriation of St. John the Baptist’s birthday for an occasion for eating things that are neither locusts nor honey and for lighting other things on fire.

That the province of Québec has a national holiday reminds me very much of some advice I once gave to the fledgling nation-state of Macedonia.

At the time, Yugoslavia was coming apart at the seams and they found that they needed to invent a new country. Since all the good country names were already taken, they decided to blow the dust off of an old one: “Macedonia”. That way they could point to a proud and ancient heritage including the likes of Philip II of Macedon (He was the father of Alexander the Great).

“Yugoslavia” sounds like the Soviet satellite that somebody’s penniless grandfather barely escaped from with his life. “Macedonia” sounds like the kind of place you take the family on vacation to see old stuff. It had cachet, it had branding, it had the heritage, it had the history and it didn’t even rhyme with “Yugoslavia”. It even came with a logo, a sixteen-pointed star came as a freebie with the name.

It was a great choice of a name for a baby country, except for one thing: Greece was already using all of that heritage, history, the tourist draw, the branding, that nifty sixteen pointed star and even the name “Macedonia” was in use describing that region of Greece that borders Macedonia (the former Yugoslav republic). Ooops.

They took things a little too far. The printed money with the White Tower of Thessaloniki on it:

To me, the problem with printing that scene which hearkens to the pride of ancient civilization on money was not immediately apparent. It turns out that the tower depicted is in Greece. Ooops.

This little baby country had done the Mediterranean equivalent of setting up shop on the south side of the Rio Grande, naming itself “Texas”, flying a “Lone Star” flag, and printing paper money with an image of The Alamo on it. Greece was checking its wallet to see if it still had its credit cards.

They posed the question: How do we negotiate with Greece?
I answered: Don’t. Don’t negotiate, don’t even blink. You don’t have to. If you pull the currency, make up an excuse. Use the name. Use the star. Be Macedonia. Declare a National holiday on Old King Philip’s birthday. Lay claim to this heritage and don’t look back.

In the end, they blinked. They pulled the currency as a friendly concession to Greece and now they’re known as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). Yuck. That’s worse than “The Artist Formerly known as Prince”.
Could my school paper on Diplomatic negotiations have made a difference had I gotten them a copy in time? I like to think so.

So to Québec : celebrate your Fête nationale du Québec, burn stuff and eat well, but don’t blink.

If you were an obscure little town in Manitoba and you had the choice of being the capital of absolutely nothing or to be the Pea Soup Capital of Canada. What would you do?

George Carlin said the seven words you can’t say on TV are just words. He’s right, they are just words.

Prayer: just words. Law: just words. That letter from the IRS: just words. Chanting: just words. Incantation, poetry, and the recipe for Napalm: words words words.

Mark Cuban owns the NBA Mavericks and blogs at Blog Maverick. In his shoes, I just might use similar language. He currently owes the NBA $250,000 some of which might be due to his choice of words words words.
Cursing - Blog Maverick - www.blogmaverick.com

I like to curse. I like to curse because I enjoy how it gets everyone in an uproar. I wont curse in an environment where I have accepted an invitation or am a guest of someone else. I will play by their rules.But if you come on my home turf and want something from me. Its my rules.

There are two ways to be profane. One, take something that is set apart as pristine and holy and drag it out into the ordinary. False oaths and some sexual language work that way. Two, take something which is ordinary and sully it with that which is set aside as dirty. Excretory talk works this way.

Either way you do it, there’s still a turd in the punchbowl. You can fish it out, but that punch will never be the same.
If we are still shocked by profanity, we must still have a sense of what is holy and how to keep it holy. We must have some remaining sense of decency, or else Cuban and Carlin wouldn’t get reactions.

On the other hand, when someone in traffic really needs to be told that they are insane, the best way to do that can’t be said on TV.

From SportsPickle.com:

Ghana About to Discover that Beating U.S. Means No More AIDS Funding

SportsPickle is to the Sporting News as The Onion is to USA Today.