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.