Funny Face

My daughter is fucking hilarious.

She is starting to exhibit a wicked sense of humour.

Somewhat lacking in verbal skills, she has yet to hone her sparkling repartee. Equally her motor skills are limited. I'm chuffed if she can lift her own head even for a second - so physical comedy is mostly out.

Instead she is concentrating on scatological humour. 

Take for example the earlier today. I changed her nappy (diaper - keep up) which also included a complete outfit change on account of a little shit seepage. She waited until she was completely clean and dry and we were sitting back on the sofa. As I was telling her what a lovely, clean little girl she was she looked me straight in the eye, gave me a big smile (which the husband still insists is wind), and shat herself accompanied by a massive bubbling fart sound.

How we laughed as I got up to change her yet again.

But this isn't her only trick. The "shart" (shitting fart) is just one element in her repertoire.

My sister's told me that having a girl I'd avoid the hose-pipe urine spray from a tiny penis freed from a nappy. True, but what they forgot is I can still get caught by a projectile poo and pee. By simultaneously combining these activities she can force excrement from her changing mat a good 50cm onto one of my clean tops (it is always the clean ones).

They say the secret of good comedy is timing and she has this down to a fine art. She saves the noisiest farts for moments when I am whispering soothing sweet nothings into her ear. Or takes a piss just as I have removed her old nappy and put a fresh one under her - often not even waiting for it to be done up. 

There might not be any discernible physical resemblance between my daughter and I but maybe, just maybe, she has inherited my sense of humour.

Poor kid. 

About that 38-year-old woman extracting egg-freezing money as her husband disentangles himself from the marriage that didn't get her pregant.

Robert Stacy McCain took issue with my use of the phrase "best fertility years":

Professor Althouse, “the best fertility years of a woman’s life,” from a strictly scientific view, are ages 18-24. After age 27, fertility begins to decline and, in your 30s, that decline accelerates. So by the time Lieberman’s client married at 30, she was past her prime.

I responded:

So, I should have said her last good fertility years. When a woman marries at age 30, she's right if she thinks she's comfortably on track for childbearing. But if she turns out to have difficulty getting pregnant, as this woman did, what seemed like plenty of time can turn into an anxious struggle. I don't know what led to this particular divorce, but needing fertility treatments and enduring them without success must create pressure that some people don't handle very well. There's something very sad about a woman's desire to continue her struggle by extracting support from the husband who failed to make her pregnant. I recommend handling divorce with grace and realism, but a lot of economic advantage-taking can ensue, and you rarely know the whole story of who did what to whom and why a stepped-up legal attack seemed like a good idea. This is, above all, a failed relationship, and you can never see the ground level of that failure.

"They think they know where the targets are, they think they know how to hit it with enough force but not too much force, they think they know how the Russian and the Iranians will react."

"We cannot determine all this. On some level, we’re assuming the reaction from Russia and Iraq and Syria will be zero: We’ll carry out this attacks, and there’ll be no response. This is a bit of a sensitive subject, but the administration has been honest that they have no smoking gun that the attack was ordered by Assad. The evidence of his involvement is circumstantial. We’re two years into a civil war that he’s winning. The Russians and Iranians have told him not to use chemical weapons. Hezbollah has told him not to use chemical weapons because their fighters are at risk. So he’s winning, there’s scant and circumstantial evidence that he ordered the attack. Why are we gaming out his incentives when we don’t know he ordered it?"

Says Alan Grayson, a Democratic congressman from Florida, in an interview with Ezra Klein (who's been doing some excellent interviews lately).

Bloomberg says mayoral candidate de Blasio's campaign is not just "class warfare," it's "racist."

This comes in a New York Magazine interview. The interviewer immediately asks the simple question "Racist?" and Bloomberg says:

Well, no, no, I mean*...

The asterisk goes to a footnote that says they've inserted these words which they can't hear on their audiotape because the mayor's office asked them to.

... he’s making an appeal using his family to gain support. 

De Blasio has a black wife and mixed-race offspring, and he uses his family in photo ops and ads.

I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone watching what he’s been doing. I do not think he himself is racist. It’s comparable to me pointing out I’m Jewish in attracting the Jewish vote. You tailor messages to your audiences and address issues you think your audience cares about.

That doesn't make the campaign "racist"! He could have said "racial" or "race conscious."

But his whole campaign is that there are two different cities here. And I’ve never liked that kind of division. The way to help those who are less fortunate is, number one, to attract more very fortunate people. They are the ones that pay the bills. The people that would get very badly hurt here if you drive out the very wealthy are the people he professes to try to help. Tearing people apart with this “two cities” thing doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s a destructive strategy for those you want to help the most. He’s a very populist, very left-wing guy, but this city is not two groups, and if to some extent it is, it’s one group paying for services for the other.

It’s a shame, because I’ve always thought he was a very smart guy.

And it's a shame that Bloomberg said "racist" and dragged in the man's wife and kids, because he's got an important message here — warning New Yorkers away from excessive leftism. What a gift to de Blasio!

At an appearance in Brooklyn on Saturday with his wife and their 18-year-old daughter, Chiara, Mr. de Blasio called Mr. Bloomberg’s remarks “very, very unfortunate and inappropriate.”

“I’m exceedingly proud of my family,” he added. “I hope the mayor will reconsider what he said. I hope he realizes it was inappropriate.”

In her response to the mayor’s comments about her husband’s campaign, Ms. McCray said, “Do I look like an inanimate object? Or a tool? I walk, I talk and make my own decisions.”

Obama submits to 6 interrogations on Syria — by Diane Sawyer (ABC), Scott Pelley (CBS), Wolf Blitzer (CNN), Chris Wallace (Fox), Brian Williams (NBC), and Gwen Ifill (PBS).

Why is he doing this?

1. It gives each network something unique of its own to show on the night before Obama does his live address, so maybe this was part of a deal to insure that they'd all preempt regular programming for the live address.

2. It acknowledges our skepticism not only about Syria but about the journalists who have coddled and promoted him to us for so many years. Putting them in competition with each other creates an incentive for somebody not to be a lackey. 

3. It makes him look strong, alert, and vital in the midst of many observations that Obama looks tired and weak.

4. If he's so vigorous and ready to go to war, maybe Americans who say we're tired of war will rouse ourselves.

5. We're not just tired of war, we're tired of those damned journalists, but isn't there one person on that list of 6 that you're not tired of?

6. At least you can't accuse him of dodging the tough questioner on some other network. He's submitting to Fox too. (But Chris Wallace is kind of a sweetheart. Look at him here.)

ADDED: It's also possible that Obama, knowing the vote on Syria is already lost, is using the occasion to set up the congressional vote so that it will work to the best advantage of Democrats in the 2014 elections.

There's "a line between rhetorical hyperbole and defamation."

Said the court that let the climate scientist Michael Mann — he of the "hockey stick" — to continue with his lawsuit against the National Review. 

The court...  pointed to terminology such as “whitewashed,” “intellectually bogus,” “ringmaster of the [tree]-ring circus” and “cover-up” as “more than rhetorical hyperbole.”

The linked article miscorrects the joke "tree-ring circus" to "three-ring circus." Here's the blog post  that drove Mann to file a lawsuit — Mark Steyn calling attention to some football-and-hockey bad-taste humor.

"[T]he more exquisitely gender-sensitive the school environment became, the less resemblance it bore to the real business world."

"'Are we trying to change the world 900 students at a time, or are we preparing students for the world in which they are about to go?' a female professor asked."

"So I see the genius of our Constitution, and of our society, is how much more embracive we have become than we were at the beginning."

Said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, embracing a word I can't remember ever noticing before and a constitutional theory I've seen 1,000s of times.

"Embracive" is listed in the OED. It means, first, "Given to or fond of embracing; embracing demonstratively," but this is a "nonce-use." The quote, from 1855, from Thackeray, is "Not less kind..though less expansive and embracive, was Madame de Montcontour to my wife." The second meaning, going back to 1897, is "Embracing or tending to embrace all." Examples:

1897 Academy 18 Sept. (Fiction Suppl.) 70/1 ‘George Du Maurier in three volumes’ would be a fair embracive title....

1902 Edinb. Rev. Oct. 357 Important deities have been omitted from this brief catalogue, which is much more representative than embracive....

I take it Ginsburg is deploying the word to mean inclusive, perhaps with more love/empathy/enthusiasm.

A divorcing woman seeks "$20,000 to cover her egg-freezing procedure, medication costs and several years of egg storage."

She put the last 8 years into a marriage, within which she expected to have babies and did not. Now, she's 38, and her window of fertility is almost closed.

Actually, in this particular case, the couple had used in vitro fertilization to attempt pregnancy, so there's some of this argument that she should be maintained in the style she'd become accustomed to. It's not just a matter of a man taking up the best fertility years of a woman's life and somehow owing her the nearest thing to giving back her youth.

ADDED: Robert Stacy McCain takes issue with my use of the phrase "best fertility years":

Professor Althouse, “the best fertility years of a woman’s life,” from a strictly scientific view, are ages 18-24. After age 27, fertility begins to decline and, in your 30s, that decline accelerates. So by the time Lieberman’s client married at 30, she was past her prime.

So, I should have said her last good fertility years. When a woman marries at age 30, she's right if she thinks she's comfortably on track for childbearing. But if she turns out to have difficulty getting pregnant, as this woman did, what seemed like plenty of time can turn into an anxious struggle. I don't know what led to this particular divorce, but needing fertility treatments and enduring them without success must create pressure that some people don't handle very well. There's something very sad about a woman's desire to continue her struggle by extracting support from the husband who failed to make her pregnant. I recommend handling divorce with grace and realism, but a lot of economic advantage-taking can ensue, and you rarely know the whole story of who did what to whom and why a stepped-up legal attack seemed like a good idea. This is, above all, a failed relationship, and you can never see the ground level of that failure.

"What are you pretending not to know?"

The first of Jason Nazar's "35 Questions That Will Change Your Life."

That's a great question. Nazar is 35 years old, and I remember becoming aware, when I was about that age, that I had many perceptions that felt as as if they belonged to another person. This other entity had a different vantage point, seemingly from above, looking on at everything, including at me, and the me that felt like me, the character who participated in life, somehow did not know all these things.

That sounds absurd (if not crazy), but once you become aware of this absurdity, you can integrate yourself and become as wise and knowing as you really are and stop playing the somewhat naive character you've allowed yourself to be in your various decisions and interactions.

"The Dung Beetle Is a Climate Change Hero."

Hail, dung beetle.

"To Be or Not to Be."

RLC emails to say that the great old Jack Benny/Carole Lombard movie (directed by Ernst Lubitsch) — which we loved in the 1970s — is out in a Criterion Collection edition. He notes the 97% positive rating by the critics collected at Rotten Tomatoes, and I see that the 3% negativity is accounted for entirely by the one review that comes from 1942, when the movie was released. It's Bosley Crowther in the NYT:

Perhaps there are plenty of persons who can overlook the locale, who can still laugh at Nazi generals with pop-eyes and bungle-some wits. Perhaps they can fancy Jack Benny, disguised be-hind goggles and beard, figuratively tweaking the noses of the best Gestapo sleuths.

Carole Lombard is, Crowther tells us, "very beautiful and comically adroit." Twice, in this short review, he informs us that this is her last movie. He writes the strange phrase "the feelings which one might imagine her presence would impose are never sensed." She's beautiful and dead, so he thought he was going to have feelings, but he's forced to see her there with that big old ham, the "radio comedian," Jack Benny:

Too often does he pout or grow indignant or pull a double-take. Of course, the script en-courages the old Benny legend of "ham." Once a German officer comments, laughing loudy, "What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland." That gives you a couple of ideas about this film.

How dare Jack Benny get the last of the beautiful and adroit Carole Lombard!

Anti-adoption activists.

"This coalition makes bedfellows of people who would ordinarily have nothing to do with each other..."

Mormon and fundamentalist women who feel they were pressured by their churches, progressives who believe adoption is a classist institution that takes the children of the young and poor and gives them to the wealthier and better-educated, and adoptive parents who have had traumatic experiences with corrupt adoption agencies.

"The fact is that Obama is the only president we have."

"We can’t abdicate our position in the world for the next three years. So Republicans will have to resist the temptation to weaken him when the cost is weakening the country. A party that for at least two generations has held high the banner of American leadership and strength should not cast a vote that obviously risks a damaging erosion of this country’s stature and credibility abroad."

 From Bill Kristol's explanation of why "yes" is the correct answer for Republicans.

Are you living a wholesome life?

The video here makes the best argument for living a wholesome life that I've seen in a long time.

"14 Principled Anti-War Celebrities We Fear May Have Been Kidnapped."

"Our government is yet again marching us towards a war of choice in the Middle East and our non-partisan, peace-loving celebrities have gone missing since late 2008. We fear the worst."

ADDED: We were just talking about this 2 days ago: "Where's Bruce Springsteen? He helped Obama get elected. Shouldn't he weigh in on the Syria question?"

Let's really talk about sex

When I was pregnant I wrote a post about finding out the gender of our child. Hilariously, (because that is how I roll) the title was somewhat ambiguous - implying that I was going to write about my sex life. Several people commented expressing disappointment that the post wasn't a full-blown exposé of my bedroom habits.

Perverts.

I didn't write about my pregnancy sex life for three very good reasons:
a) "Zilch" isn't much of a post. (Remember I had terrible morning sickness for the majority of my pregnancy) and I'd already written one post like this.

b) A lot of people who know me in real life read this blog - they don't want to picture the husband and I at it. You know who you are, I mean imagine having the mental image of him on top of me, we are sweating a bit, maybe a few pulsating veins ... see you don't want to think about that, do you?

c) I imagine writing about my intimate relations with my husband could potentially cause untold damage to my relationship.

So obviously I can't write about my sex life after giving birth.

Something I didn't think it'd be an issue.

Just two weeks after giving birth my midwife was keen to stress the importance of contraception. When I told her I was planning on using the coil (less as a contraceptive, because I am not convinced I need one after the difficulties of the last six and a half years, but because this is what was used to treat my womb lining so should keep any nasties at bay until I am ready to pop a frozen embryo or two back in).

The midwife positively beamed at me for my responsible attitude to family planning. But as I can't have a coil put in until at least six weeks after I give birth she cautioned that "breast-feeding isn't an effective contraception, and you can get pregnant as soon as three weeks after birth."

I countered saying that breast feeding might not be effective contraception but stitches certainly were. I couldn't imagine ever being able to have sex again.

How we laughed.

As I said earlier, I can't write about my personal experiences here.

However, six weeks and four days after giving birth hypothetically I can say that sex would be feasible. One needs to think carefully about the position.

I would imagine that the woman being on top would be the best position to enable her to be in control and ensure that if it does start to get a bit painful she can change position or speed.

Of course the slight drawback of that position is I guess that if she is breast feeding she might find that her boobs leak a bit and her partner might find his chest splattered with mother's milk. Which could cause a fit of the giggles that might detract from the romance of the situation somewhat.

Hypothetically, of course, how long do you reckon it'd take you to get back in the saddle?