Ultrasound

Face, hands, and a very small foot (click for larger).

Girls and science

I stated it already, but probably like any parent (to be), I would love it if one day Daughter becomes a scientist, engineer, doctor, or something like that. This is not a case of putting the cart before the horse, because last I checked the cart is still four or so months from delivery. Besides, I'm not going to have some sissy horse pull my cart; I am a wealthy banker from Boston, dammit, not some loser carpenter from Ohio, or worse yet a farmer from Illinois. I will tear out of here at mach five with six oxen pulling my cart. I just hope I don't get dysentery.


Crap.

What was I talking about? Oh, right - SCIENCE!

Maybe you're saying, "But Luke, you are having a GIRL. Everyone knows that GIRLS are not as good at science and maths as BOYS." First, it's "math" not "maths." I don't appreciate when Britons read this, move along now. Second, you're wrong. Here's a look at the issue in depth, but it boils down to "If the girls take the courses that the boys do, there's no real difference between them." Basically, if you tell them they can, they can. After nine years of undergraduate and graduate level studies in chemical engineering, let me say that the last statement sums up my experiences quite accurately, some of the best and smartest students I've worked with were women (plus they were way better organized than I have ever been).

I'll gladly steer Girl towards the sciences. That's where the coolest jobs are (and they're the most interesting). Hey, if I liked My Little Pony, why can't my daughter love Tyrannosaurus Rex?*

Topical edit made before this was published: Premier commenter Not Alice notes in the comments that a.) she was once a little girl and b.) she loved Legos as a child and therefore advises that c.) I should get Girl into Legos at a young age. I think this is a super-fantastic idea that I may not have actually considered for some time, probably because I guess I generally consider Legos to be boy toys, which is kind of stupid if you think about it. Although if you look at the products it's kind of clear that's who they're marketing to. It's probably a great toy to get kids thinking in ways that would promote the kind of thinking that would lead to interest in math and sciences, i.e. how things work. Plus there is this. And here's the best part: Legos are mostly not made in China. I consider this suggestion win of the epic variety.


As an aside, when searching for Lego info I found this website which provides an extensive list of non-Chinese made toys. Remember: trust, but verify. It's a good place to start.

*The correct answer is: Because T. Rex is boring. "Oh, your favorite dinosaur is T. Rex? Let me introduce you to literally everyone else in the world, because they all think T. Rex is cool, too." Everyone knows that the Ankylosaurus was secretly the coolest dinosaur.

Maybe "Lead" is Chinese for "Exercise"

Why does China have to screw everything up? Every. Single. Thing. Seriously, can they do one f'ing thing without cheating? China is like the person who volunteers to be the Monopoly banker, and then nearly three hours into the game you see him making himself incorrect change and the whole game has been tainted and you've wasted a lot of time and why on earth does anyone play Monopoly?

Not only do they pirate intellectual property, not only do they undervalue their currency by pegging it to the dollar, not only do they have virtually no environmental regulation, not only do they do business with Sudan and Iran (not that the western world is much better with Saudi Arabia and the like), not only do they crush dissent and any movement toward individual rights, but the toys with the lead I mean COME ON. It just doesn't stop. This really grinds my gears. At Babies R Us and Target every single toy - every single toy - was made in China.

Dear China,

I'm not going to buy your shitty, lead-laced toys. Please stop sending them.

Sincerely,
Kinderbloggen

P.S. At least try to keep the beef and broccoli free of toxic materials.

And then their state media issues the cry-me-a-river sob story that OH NOES their toy exports only increased 2.5% last year, as opposed to 20.3% the year before. Sorry, I don't think I can type any more with these tears streaming down my face. Thank the FSM that compassionate conservative George W. Bush made big cuts at the CPSC and FDA, in between committing war crimes, of course. I'm sure it won't be long before China deals with this the way China always deals with things that cause them international embarassment.

Now India may permanently ban Chinese toys. India. India. Permanently. Not the U.S. - the wealthiest country in the world, which could do this to protect our kids and create some jobs - but India. I feel like I am taking crazy pills.

And Jesus Christ now there's lead in vitamins? Why not just give my daughter a big piece of lead to eat as her first solid food, and then she can enjoy a nice sundae topped with cadmium and mercury for dessert?

So what can we do? Try as we might, it's going to be tough to find toys made in North America or Europe. We've got some tips from Consumer Reports and a public interest group that uses XRF to do their own testing, but that and home testing kits are more or less it. Guess we'll try to buy local. If not, guess Baby's getting a Bag O' Broken Glass.

The scariest thing I have ever seen

That is scariest picture I have ever seen. Absolutely horrifying. There's pee dribbling down my leg.

Seriously, look at that little pink dress and her little bare feet. How am I ever going to be able to tell something like that "No"?

Terrifying.

Bonus Barely Related Tidbit: Two of the movies that scared the absolute piss out of me were Legend (still scares the living daylights out of me) and, to a much lesser extent, It. It wasn't until last week that I discovered that the bad guy in each of those movies was played by the same person. You guessed it: Tim Curry? Really? Yes, that Tim Curry. I had no idea.

I don't ask for much. Just six movies, please.

If this is what the majority of girls know about Star Wars, the second best movie trilogy ever, then this is going to be harder than I imagined.


How do you make it through life without seeing Star Wars? I shouldn't be surprised, though; the first time Ariane watched it was with me. She was 21. Fortunately, I am pretty sure Ariane liked Star Wars, but she said she has no real interest in watching it again. I am doomed.

On to more serious matters

The mailbag is overflowing with message upon nothing. Let's dip in and see what we find, shall we?

"[W]hat is your take on the
impending transition from Leno to Conan on the tonight show? How much is
Leno's new primetime show going to make my grandparents laugh? Does Jimmy
Fallon stand a chance taking over Conan's spot? And will Carson Daly
finally disappear in the transition from analog to digital TV?" -- Christian in Chicago

Impending? I thought that was years off. As far as I am concerned, however, this is full of win. Leno is fail, Conan used to write for and produce the Simpsons (back when it was the Most. TV show. Evar.) Leno won't even make your grandparents laugh. He's actually too edgy for them. Why would Jimmy Fallon get Conan's gig? Is Carson Daly still on TV? I suspect I don't stay up late enough to answer those questions.

And there you have it: the least informative mailbag ever. You now know my limitations on issues of pop culture. Don't dare ever ask a question about a song that you heard on the radio, it would be embarrassing for both of us when I would have no idea who you were talking about. I'd say radio makes me feel older than anything else. Partially because they play Nirvana on classic rock stations (Nirvana for chrissakes! Kurt Cobain's body is still warm!), partially because a wise man once told me, "You don't become old when you don't know the name of the person singing on the radio, you become old when you don't care that you don't know the name of the person singing on the radio," and I do not at all care.



Update (10:37 PM 24 Jan): I would like to add that I just learned who Lil Wayne was like three months ago, and I constantly get his songs mixed up with TI, who I just learned about like four months ago.

What you are actually clammoring for

I give you the original intent of this blogge (click for full size).

Our purchases this week:




And Ariane's rapidly growing belly:



Is it getting real yet?

Where's Ariane

I am retiring the "Luke" tag as of this moment. My original intent was to tag each post as either by me or Ariane, but she hasn't posted one thing yet. Can you believe it? I mean, when I started this and I told her I think it would be fun for each of us to post, she was totally into it, excited even. I remember specifically that her response was "Um, OK whatever." Where has that enthusiasm gone?

Considering the time she is saving from not posting, allow me to be the first to suggest that we fill that time up for her by getting a dog. Problem solved, I'll take my commission now, please.

Shameless self-congratulatory post

Four and a half years in and manuscript number two has been accepted for publication. It's only a letter, not a full article, but it will be published in Electrochemical and Solid-State Letters. By my count, I need to publish two more full articles to graduate. I'll be out of here by the end of August.

So much pink

Going out and shopping for a baby girl immediately after finding out that you are having a baby girl is inadvisable. I could have used a little bit of time to process what had just happened and how different everything was going to be (I'm talking for me personally here). All of a sudden, gone are my days of rock star-esque partying. (You can laugh at that comment, it was a joke.) Here come my days spent shopping for things like this:


That is a real jolt to the system. It's weirder when you juxtapose the sight of me standing there holding these little things, blank look on my face, trying to digest what the next twenty years are going to be like, against that of Ariane happily sorting through racks upon racks of oh-so-tiny and ♥CUTE♥* things.

I put myself still about a day away from getting used to this idea, but nowhere near getting over the nervousness that I feel when trying to mentally play out every possible scenario from now until 2034. What's nice is that I find it reasonable to assume that a daughter is far less likely to break as many laws as I have broken or do as many stupid things as I have done. I'll count that one as a major plus, and one that is helping take a little bit of the edge off of these thought experiments. But if you see me in mid to late June, don't sneak up on me. I'll be likely to jump through the roof.

It's a shame, though. I guess all rock stars have to grow up, chill out, and lose their edge.**


*not my description
**if you need the tune

Well, this is new

I can now pinpoint the exact hour when I feel like I permanently grew up: between 1:00 and 2:00 PM CST on 21 January 2009. I honestly feel like being informed that I would be having a daughter did that. I think having a son would have been different. Why? For one, I don't think it's socially acceptable to teach little girls that farts are funny (hint: they are!). Also, I would love to spend the next ten years playing with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures - literally, love. The Ninja Turtles are awesome, and if your favorite is anyone but Donatello you suck. If your favorite is actually Leonardo we can't ever be friends because you are obviously an incredibly boring person. Go back to eating your plain oatmeal and drinking pulp-free orange juice from concentrate. It would be dangerously, dangerously, dangerously easy to revert back to being an actual boy if I were going to spend the next ten years surrounded by dinosaurs, Transformers, and whatever today's equivalent of He-Man is. Mostly having a boy would be all the justification I needed to buy a Wii or Xbox, but not for myself, oh no! For the improved hand-eye coordination and educational opportunities it presents to a son.


Sadly (luckily?) this is not my fate. I won't easily get sucked into little girl things. There's going to be lots of pretending going on. I mean, how am I supposed to enjoy these tea parties when we aren't even going to have actual tea. It's all make believe. Nope. I'm going to be staying all growed up over here, because little girls are a totally different creature. I can't imagine what it's like to be a child who doesn't want to memorize dinosaur names, kick bad guys' faces in, and blow up aliens on your NES. Instead it's going to be Barbies and playing house and whatever things little girls like doing... maybe gambling, like I said I don't know the first thing about what little girls enjoy.


One very promising development follows, though: I know for a fact that little girls love to play with other people's hair because little girls are scary social. Maybe - just maybe - this is all the justification I need to be allowed to grow the sweet afro and stupidly long beard I've been hoping to grow for the lulz. Everything is OK if done for lulz. Ariane can't deny me that when it's for lulz and our little girl's benefit, right? Right?



Update (5:28 PM): I just realized that this is the second post already in which I have stressed the hilarity of farts and the importance of understanding that. God, I am such a hack. A month in and I already am reusing material. Expect straight up suckage from here on out (not that this blogge hasn't been bogged down with an extreme amount of suck already).

The shock is over

I know I was the only person who was saying (out loud, at least) that the baby was going to be a girl, but that didn't make the news any less shocking. It hit me like something that hits you really hard, perhaps bricks in large quantities, as much as a ton, say. I still am nervous. I still feel like I am completely clueless. These feelings are not going anywhere for years. Girl newborns turn into to girl toddlers, into girl preteens, into girl teenagers, into girl young women. Looking at that, it is infinitely clear to me that my nervousness and fear will only grow for decades to come, until finally simmering down. I've renamed Ariane's pregnancy as "Operation Make Luke Nervous for the Next 25 Years At Least." I'm past the initial shock, but the more I think about it, the less I know. Right now my major concern is hoping that this baby looks not like me, but like her mother. I don't want this poor girl looking like me. Only bad things come of women looking too much like men (and the opposite is true, of course). Conan O'Brien and Tarja Halonen prove this.


So cross your fingers for this little girl.

It's a....

Girl!

Uh-oh. Talk about clueless. Now what am I going to do?

By the way, all of you were wrong, which had to be the case.

Name suggestions are welcome in the comments, but they are going to be filtered through RK, whom I have appointed "Name Czar."

Shameful!

Using your baby to pull pranks on people can only be described in one word: Shameful. Zack tried to pull this off as a legit screenshot.


Apparently he fooled some of you. For those of you who were fooled, I give you the following jpeg to frequently refer to.



I can't think of anything meaner to do to your kid than to use them in this way. Okay, except maybe for this.


Shame on you, Zack. When your daughter is old enough to understand, I will link her this. Then we'll see who gets season tickets.

Pregnancy: Completely bizarre, kind of yucky

This is the absolute most important book I have flipped through in a looooooooong time. Every time we have a question, it is answered in this book. Certainly that is to be expected, because 1000 questions is a lot, obviously. However, even in some cases when we don't have a question, but there is something that's just a little bit off from normal, well we look the topic up in the index and sure enough it is covered, in exactly the form the question would have been phrased had we actually bothered to phrase it. It just does not miss. Honestly, it answers too much. I had never heard the word "episiotomy" before I cracked this open, and now I can never unhear it. Have I mentioned I have issues with medical procedures that aren't pills or shots? I cannot stress enough how eerily accurate this book is. It would give Nostradamus a boner, except he would take an entire quatrain to describe it, and it wouldn't be clear what he was talking about, maybe his boner, maybe space travel, maybe Yahtzee.


Honestly, I don't know why the History Channel doesn't devote as much programming as they do to Dr. Thurston as they do to Nostradamus. If not him, can we at least get rid of the Nostradamus garbage and replace it with some more "Universe" programming with Michio Kaku, author of such head-scratchers as Hyperspace, Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of such uplifting spirituals as Death by Black Hole, and Stephen Hawking, who (as we all know) is made of Legos?


There are obvious changes, morning sickness early on, being extremely tired for a few weeks, aches and pains and so forth. Some things have been bizarre. For example, Ariane never really snored. Once every couple of weeks I'd have to nudge her, but then it would end. Now? Every night, almost every way she can lie. This is normal for pregnant women, according to the book. I never would have guessed that. Never. The most bizarre, I think, is that her gums bleed. Every time she flosses. Severely. The first time it happened, she asked me if I had any idea what happened, which I naturally didn't, so she went and opened her book. Initially, I scoffed, said there's no way that the two are related, and it's not going to be in that book. And of course I was wrong. Pregnancy increases blood flow to soft tissue, which makes gums bleed more.

It's not like I needed more to add to the list of "Reasons I am happy to be a guy." Severely bloody gums ranks somewhere above being able to scratch my balls in public without thinking twice. But I mention this now because it nicely sets up this story from last night. I was in the shower, minding my own bidness, carefully doing my weekly shave, when Ariane walked in to floss and brush. (On a side note, she flosses after she brushes which I am opposed to 100%.) As she was flossing she mentioned that she was amazed how much blood there was. It went exactly like this (which actually happened):

Ariane: There is so much blood it's unbelievable!
Me: I know.
Ariane: You should look at this.
Me: That's OK. I've seen it before. It's a lot. I know.
Ariane: [pulls back shower curtain, spits heaping mouthful of blood and saliva onto the bottom of the tub] See what I mean?
Me: Thanks for that.

How many more months?

Edit (8:58 PM): Ariane spazzed and corrected me on her floss/brush order. That's right, spazzed. She gets one correction per post, so the claim of spazzing out will forever stand.

I have to remark on the day

It's kind of cool to think that my kid will never wonder, "Will there be a black President in my lifetime?" Of course, my kid will be born into a world where I am wondering, "How can we ever undo all the damage George Bush has done?" An unnecessary war, war crimes, loss of world credibility, climate change, a recession that is teetering on the verge of depression, a huge disparity in wealth, inaccessible health care, dangerous nativism, aging infrastructure... There's a lot of work to do. Here's hoping for the greatest success possible for President Obama's administration.

D-Day

You can see I have added a countdown clock. It's counting to D-Day, where the D stands for "ding-dong" as in, "does the baby have one?" Wednesday at 1:00 we'll find out. Seems like we've been waiting for this for a long time already. Maybe - just maybe - it's actually just a burrito.



Edit (10:46 AM 1/18/09): Deleted the clock, apparently it didn't work so well. You can keep your own countdown. It's fun and informative.

The name problem

We are not yet arguing about names yet, not until we know the gender, but we do have some general outlines. I'll get to all of that later, but I must say that "Data" would make a pretty good name. And I would especially get a kick out of it.


That anonymous commenter, I like the way he (or she) thinks.

My strategy fails

Hmmmm, I was feeling cold (because I am a huge weenie now), so I tried to cheer myself up not five minutes ago and found this:



What the...? It's January 16, by criminy!

Well, luckily, as Christian reminded me in the comments, there are other options:


Win.

Game over

Our first poll is closed. You, the readers, have collectively predicted... CENTAUR! Wait, what? Really? There are six (six!) people who voted centaur. Six of you had the chance to click either boy or girl - a guessing game people have been playing for time immemorial - and instead voted that my baby is going to be some kind of fictional throw away joke. [Keith Olbermann voice:] How dare you, sir!

The following image is an artit's rendition of what my child will look like, factoring in ultrasound pictures and reader predictions.


Yeah! Yeah! Kill that dirty, Artemis worshipping Ephesian!* No centaur (or centauride, if it's a girl, not eliminating that possibility) of mine is going to worship any moon goddess! Oh no, not while Hephaestus is still the god of technology. I'm so proud. He really has his father's beard and bloodlust, doesn't he? I see so much similarity, maybe I'll just name him Λυκασ.

----

The other votes were four for boy, and zero for girl. Zero?!?? Facepalm.


Is the thought of a cute little baby girl that offensive to you? Well then my apologies to my brother and his wife for the recent birth of their offensive little baby girl. You should be ashamed of yourselves, six anonymous people. Ashamed, I say! This is what you have voted against:


Doesn't that just make you go DDAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ariane is also now convinced it's a boy (for some reason only known to her). I think we can all agree that it is clearly now going to actually be a girl. We'll find out next Wednesday, and I'll post it ASAP, complete with the Drudge Siren, assuming I am smart enough to figure out how to upload an animated gif (unlikely).

*I have no idea if that is supposed to be an Ephesian. I just think "Ephesus" is one of the funnier names from classical Greek civilization.

Ewwwwwwwwwww.

People: we are all aware that website owners/operators can determine how you came across their site, right? If you came through Google, or something like that, we can see what you searched to get here, yes? Oh, and you know we can get a lot of identifying information, and probably notify someone if something is fishy, mmmm hmm? Then you might want to not do this (click for larger image):


Can't see it? Try this.


That's right, Mr. Ohio NAMBLA person [Ed. note: if you don't know what NAMBLA means, don't Google it, it's North American Man-Boy Lovers' Association, so you and I don't want to know anything beyond that], I have some IP information and could very easily send this off to someone who might be more interested in coming a-knockin', but the fact that you were searching on the Comcast website instead of The Google (which I am going to assume you were doing to be sneakier) likely means you are too dumb to use anything to hide your real IP and that you actually do reside in or near Columbiana, Ohio. Being that you are so stupid, I'm pretty sure they're onto you, you moron.

Just in case, let me state this for your convenience Mr. Ohio NAMBLA person, we won't be posting pictures of "nudes, kids, boy, penis" on this here blog. You'll have to go elsewhere. Plus, I have asked my associate Mr. Williams (below) to hang around here more often.


Please, take a seat next to him and have an iced tea. He just has some questions.

EDIT (11:07 AM): I should probably note that the click through went to the post about toilet seats injuring little boys' penises. As for the "nudes" term? Can't explain that. Maybe we were on like page ten of the search results. At least I hope so.

The great debate

While some people are debating the ins and outs of an economic stimulus plan, we here have been debating something much more important: Which collegiate sports football team will our baby be indoctrinated into emotionally attaching itself? This is the only sport over which there is a debate, and the one that elicits the strongest emotional response in me. There are 119 I-A teams, and I can find some way to justify an irrational hatred for everybody but the doormats. I love the doormats, especially New Mexico State (mainly because they have a guy who does radio broadcasts in Navajo, which kicks so much ass it's unbelievable), but being passionate about a doormat is a curse.



But of course it's going to come down to Mizzou or Texas. Sorry Dr. Krugman, you can offer PE Obama all the advice you want, but your fancy-schmantzy book-learnin' and Nobel Prize for Economics is no good around these parts. As they say, "You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, but you can't really pick your favorite sports team because your dad is insane enough about one team that even when your poopy diaper leaked on him he sat there for four extra minutes because WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE PLAY IS UNDER REVIEW? THAT WAS CLEARLY A CATCH, YOU IDIOT!"

Sports loyalties are things you are indoctrinated into. It's like religion. Someone usually chooses it for you, and you just kind of go with it. That is, unless you are one of the few who converts, but that just makes for uncomfortable holidays. Conversions need to be done with care, though. You don't want to be like the guy we met on our "religions of the world" field trip in middle school, the pasty redhead named Ibrahim O'Donnell, who led us around the mosque. And you don't want to be the kid who grows up a Michigan fan only to attend Ohio State. It's best to let sleeping dogs lie. Really, don't we actually all know that Tim Tebow is God?


Natch, Ariane wants kid to be a Texas fan. This is the logical choice. We're here. We both attend Texas. Texas is a Program with a capital "P." It would not be cruel to cultivate UT fandom in Kid. And, at least to my perspective, you can be a UT fan in Austin and still not be like one of those moronic yahoos who are convinced Texas is the only place on Earth.


But... but... MIZ! ZOU! No, we're not in Columbia. Yes, only one of us attended it. Yes, they are likely to hit the skids and go back to suckdom while Nebraska goes back to owning the North [teeth clenching, vein in forehead popping]. But... but... MIZ! ZOU! Besides, I would love to see Kid become a scientist, and pulling for Ol' Mizzou provides a natural route, a "Gateway" if you will, to a degree in chemistry. And in Missouri, it appears you can do correspondence online and get that degree at home.


I wasn't planning on this debate being settled for some time, but the die has now been cast by none other than my mom. The deciding vote came in the form of a bib.

Oh well. Kid will be a Longhorn. No sense in denying it. But I will not budge on teaching my child proper capitalization, bib be damned.

It's a post... about nothing!

Consider yourself warned: This post has nothing to do with anything. Jerry, you tell them.


Still here? OK. You might find these pictures helpful here.






Why give you maps of Alaska, Yukon, and the Northwest Territories? It's winter. Winter sucks, but in the interest of cheering myself up the schadenfreude I get from looking at the weather up there is indescribable. I mean, you just know it's going to be cold in Anchorage.


Goodness, that's cold. How about Whitehorse?


Oh boy! That sucks! Yellowknife now!


It can't get worse than that... can it, Fairbanks?


Can that be real? Let's go to Dawson City!

-53°F. Repeat that to yourself. Minus fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit. That cannot be outdone. No way.

Oh god. Old Crow, Yukon, is right now eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit below freezing.


Yeah, I think I'll stop complaining about being cold. Think about this, we are 102°F warmer than Old Crow... but I'm keeping my socks on.