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During the day, he wears the cheapest disposables we could find (Target brand). During the night, the extra cash towards sleep diapers are well worth the expense. Those things could hold a gallon of pee and still manage to keep the poop contained. I’m not sure how much they are, but I’d wrap his butt in cash money if it meant a little extra sleep.
I really enjoyed it, but I couldn’t help watching with a critical eye. I think most people have just been so wowed by the spectacle and technology that they’re calling this a great movie when it definitely has some plot holes and/or character flaws. The 3D was quite awesome. It’s by far the best movie I’ve ever seen done in 3D. The glasses were somewhat annoying but tolerable. What makes this special is that absolutely everything was shot in 3D… live action, CGI, all in 3D. It’s not a gimmick (or *just* a gimmick). That said, it’s still not going to be the Next Big Thing in movies (as 3D has been hyped to be – in the 50s, before in my life, and now again with this movie). It’s beautiful, interesting, but it’s not really helping the storytelling. Given the expense, it doesn’t seem likely that anyone is going to go through such an effort to do this again anytime soon… anyone that isn’t named Jim Cameron, at least. I loved the Colonel. Great bad ass. Sigourney also fit her role well. Spoilers Below So my complaints with the plot: - They never explain how the link is made between the human and the avatar. One presumes some sort of electromagnetism (since there’s no other option in our current universe). Yet when they went to the Magic Floating Mountains, the link still works? Of course this had to be done, else it would have been a trivial matter to find the humans after they went rogue; if the avatar and human can link, then that human is emitting something that would be easy for the other humans to find. The whole thing was a little bit of hand-waving that I’m prepared to accept, though. - Michelle Rodriquez’s character is essentially a marine pilot. She trained with the people she flies with and fights with. She depends on her comrades with her life, and they depend on her. War historians have shown time and time again that the reason people give when they fight in horrible battlefield conditions is “for the man next to me”. Not for country, not for honor… but for the men they fight with. That man is your brother, and you are his. You will give you life to save his, and vice versa. She may have thought what was going on was bullshit, and maybe she wouldn’t pull the trigger on innocent natives. Maybe even she’d bust out the Good Guys to go help the Space Elves. However, no way do I see her actually opening fire and killing her own people. It could happen, but Cameron didn’t give us a reason to believe it. - How is it that in the first half of the movie, all the arrows bounced off the ships, but then started to penetrate in the final battle scene. Did they get armor piercing arrows? - Why in the fuck would the armor battle suit (a la Aliens) have a huge armor battle suit knife in its holster? If a knife was ever actually necessary, the gun ALREADY HAD ONE. - So the Space Elves have a ceremony where the spirit of a human can be transformed into the body of a human engineered half-breed creature by Gaia (or whatever the Pandora mother spirit was called)? This has come up before? - Clearly the Space Elves were patterned off the modern myth of the Native American in harmony with mother nature. This is a myth, as it turns out that Native Americans were pretty brutal to the local ecology… they just moved on when an area was decimated, and they simply didn’t have the numbers to do any serious damage to such a vast area. I’m just sayin’. - The Space Elves were pretty fucking stupid. Hey, huge war machines are rolling into your house. You’re going to wait until it’s ON FIRE and FALLING before you get the fuck out? Makes you wonder if Darwin’s rules don’t apply on Pandora. Again, it was a fun movie, it was interesting. It was done extremely well. It was pretty. It’s just not a *good* movie; it’s not going to stand the test of time.
Oh sure, I’ve been spit up on dozens of times, sure, that’s nothing. But never this. The boy wasn’t eating dinner. We knew he was out of sorts, and not eating is certainly out of the ordinary for him. When we’d finished our meal, and decided he wasn’t going to eat any more, I picked him up out of his high chair and into my arms. With no warning, a fire hose unleashed a column of white milk from his face, splashing against my chest and ricocheting from there all over the table, the floor, my shoes. It was violent, noisy, and shocking. Then after a few seconds, all was silent, except the drip, drip, drip from my clothes to the ground. Stunned into silence and unable to do anything to ameliorate the situation, Suz and I looked at the boy, the mess. Just as my brain began to process the situation, the world exploded violently again in milk. After it was done, Augie acted as if nothing abnormal at all had happened, cheerfully sitting in my arms, despite the fact that we were covered almost completely in fluid he’d just ejected. While I’m still not sure what, if anything, I could have done to make the mess less… at least I didn’t drop him.
Susanna is beginning to attempt to train me to not swear in front of the boy. She is concerned his first word is going to be “fuck”. Instead I think it will be (in a scolding tone) “Joohhhhnnnn!”
Basically, you chew it up so it covers your tongue for a while, then for the next half hour to and hour or so, everything that was previously sour is now sweet! Suz and I cut up a bunch of different fruit to try in this state. Of course, limes and lemons are the stars since their flavor is such a contrast from their initial state. Basically, they taste like super-sweet candy. Really! Here’s a rundown of the things we tried and our impressions: Lime – Like candy. Lemon - Super sweet, but you can still feel the twinge of the acid sour on your tongue (with only the sweet flavor). Grapefruit - Not much different. The main flavor component is bitterness, not sour, which was unchanged by the miracle fruit. Kiwi - I thought much better tasting due to the sweetness, but it wasn’t overly sweet or cloying. Orange - Very sweet, but a strange flavor difference I couldn’t put my finger on. Tomato - I thought they tasted exactly the same, but Susanna said they were like super-sweet tomatoes. It may be, however, just good tomatoes (they were freshly picked, ripe from our garden). Granny Smith Apple – Much sweeter, although the flavor change was not as extreme as I expected. Just tasted like a firm, sweet, apple. Wine - Super sugary (and pretty much awful). Red Wine Vinegar – Super sweet, like sugar water. Balsamic Vinegar – Ditto, just a different flavor of sugar water. Cherry – Not much different, just no sour note to it. Cantaloupe – Basically the same, perhaps mildly sweeter. Altoids - Exactly the same. I regret not getting pineapple for our first session; it’s supposed to be excellent and definitely something I want to try next time. We were left slightly queasy after the experience. I’m not sure if it was a side effect of the miracle fruit itself, or a side effect of so much sour fruit in our stomachs (how often do you EAT a bunch of lime slices?). Definitely a fun experience. So far none of the people we’ve told about this have wanted to try it, though! This past weekend, we crammed bikes, a trailer for the boy, and camping gear into our station wagon and headed to Peninsula State Park for three nights in Door County. Here’s the photo album: And some video: A slew of pictures from the last couple of months of the spawn, who decided that Father’s Day would be a good day to start to crawl.
Somehow the molecules of water you have left "resonate" with the chemical you originally put in, and cause an effect the opposite of what the original chemical did. Really. It makes no sense on so many levels. It’s total, utterly quackery and bunk. Unfortunately, it seems to resonate with the hippy-dippy crowd in Madison. Whole Foods fucking sells this stuff! I’m all for the free market, but when something is openly a fraud, I think that should be illegal. Some I’ve discussed this with in the past have felt that while it may be true that homeopathic "medicine" is no better than a placebo, at least it causes no harm I think that’s true, in the literal sense. You’re never going to get sick drinking a bottle of homeopathic solution because it’s just water! However, if you’re one of the idiots who is fooled into thinking that it’s the best thing you can do to heal your children, then your child may die. Sadly, this has has happened:
It is not always a victimless crime to believe in stupid things, from tarot to homeopathy to god.
Right off the bat, the shell-shocked parents get hit dealing with meconium. It is unbelievable stuff… a tiny drop could tar a roof. As the breast milk diet takes hold, though, the poop gets better. Doesn’t smell so bad at all and easy to clean up. Augie just started solid food in the last couple of weeks… and now the poop has taken a turn for the worse. It smells like the inside of a porta potty in August after a Phish concert, is solid, and has quite an affinity for sticking to his ass cheeks. Can you teach a six month old child how to use a toilet?
It is also the end of an era for me. For fourteeen years I have worked for the same company, in the same IT department. I and the people I have worked with have built and maintained the Madison data center for this past decade and a half. Things have changed so, so much in that time. By now of course, people around the globe, across the US, Europe, and Asia, depend on those applications and servers to get their jobs done. Now the end has come. Over the past two weeks we have planned and toiled towards delivering the entirety of the Madison data center to a new home. We did it with a scant day and half of downtime, as those servers, coccooned in expanding foam packaging, flew across the country in a chartered jet. We kicked ass… just as we kicked ass in everything. As with all the tasks given to us, we treated it as just another job to do. But it wasn’t, really, just another job to do. It was a job with a goal to make the Madison office obsolete. Now, in June, we can shut the doors and turn off the lights, and the services that we built will still keep humming along. The only people that will care that Madison is dark is those of us who lived there. I have given my entire professional life to that place, and now that is done. Last week, I officially rejected relocation to the Arizona office. There are many good reasons for this, professionally and personally. The end result, though, is the servers and applications that I have built and cared for for so long will soon be someone else’s responsibility. It is both a relief and a sadness. Since the announcement about the Madison close, I’ve been so busy trying to make this thing happen that I’ve not had time to take proper stock of what it means to me. Of course I’m sad. I’m angry at the people and reasons this decision was made. I’m relieved I’m not going to get a 3am call that a server is down. I’m frightened about looking for a job in this economy. I’m excited at the prospects of finding something new. At any rate, it is the end of a long journey. I will miss the people I have worked with. I have a lot of respect for a lot of people I have known through the years, and although it really stinks we’re in this situation, I think most of us will be okay. I certainly hope so. So, if you know of a good IT position in the Madison area, please let me know. My resume is up at MadisonComputerGeek.com. It may sound arrogant, but I’m really good. I don’t know it all, but I know a lot about a really wide range of technologies (one of the advantages of being the Head Nerd for so long). I’d be lucky to find a place where I get to do half of the things I’ve gotten to do with Heurikon/Artesyn/Emerson over the years. Good-bye Emerson, and good-bye Phoenix. Take good care of my babies. |
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I read about this stuff a while back, but finally picked up some (extract of it, actually). Weird, wild, fascinating shit. 
Homeopathy
I sit now in next to Gate 26 in the Sky Harbor airport. It is the end of a long couple of weeks.
