I guess they don't fall far from the tree.

Rumor has it that Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin's new baby was conceived in Fuji, while Chris was making a Cameo at a Gala celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Macintosh. Can anyone confirm?

Mr. Pronunciation Wanker Goes to Washington.

Less than three hours into the senate hearings on the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and I can bring you this completely trivial note: I have already heard nine ways to pronounce the prison's name:

1. aboo greb
2. aboo gah-reb
3. aboo gobb
4. aboo gah-rabe
5. aboo gah-reeb
6. aboo gabe
7. aboo grabe
8. aboo grob
   
   And my personal favorite:
   
   
9. aboo gobby

For the record, the correct way to pronounce it (as best as I can surmise) is version number one above.

Your Pentagon at work.

For all the media punditry filled with accusations about politicians and our government (no matter who is currently in office), it's still amazing when someone gets caught red-handed. One of those moments happened for me over the weekend when, while packing glassware for our move, I watched the April 23rd edition of NOW with Bill Moyers I had TiVo'd.

The subject was the current administration's rather embarrassing record on the environment -- admittedly an easy and frequent target, and one of those many issues where both sides can battle back and forth with their own version of the facts. But this time, Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, caught the Pentagon in a bald-faced lie.

It's so deliciously evil that I just had to share it with you. Enjoy.

(I've edited the relevant portion of the original transcript for brevity but did not change any of the original context, and added my own emphasis in italics at the end.)

DAVID BRANCACCIO: ... I was just seeing a press release on Earth Day from the military, the Department of Defense, calling itself a good steward of America's environmental heritage. I was surprised that the department said they've dedicated nearly $4 billion a year to environmental programs. They talk about their work on the Red-cockaded Woodpecker preservation....

CARL POPE: ... The Red-cockaded Woodpecker is a very interesting story. Oh, in March, a month before we went into Iraq, the Defense Department, the Pentagon, went up on Capitol Hill and insisted that the military needed an exemption from the Endangered Species Act. And they got one. And the explanation they gave was they handed a fact sheet to Congress which said that at Fort Stewart, Georgia, where five percent of the world's remaining Red-cockaded Woodpeckers nest, protecting those nesting sites had interfered with training realism. Shortly after they got this exemption, the Third Army, which trains at Fort Stewart, went into Najaf and Karbala and was given instructions to not damage the Tomb of Ali, not damage the Tomb of Hussein, not damage any of the oil fields, not damage any of the villages. The Third Army fought superbly. It looked like training that way in Fort Stewart had helped them. And I went online and I found a peer-reviewed Army study which talked about the Red-cockaded Woodpecker and training realism at Fort Stewart, Georgia. It was the study on which the fact sheet was based, except the crucial paragraph in the study said protecting the Red-cockaded Woodpecker had enhanced training realism. And the Pentagon Congressional Relations Office just took the word "enhanced," substituted the word "impaired" and gave it to members of Congress as an argument for getting an exemption. The fact is, the Pentagon knows how to live like a good environmental steward. This administration doesn't want to let the Pentagon do that.

Beautiful, eh? And of course, here's one little TV show -- already dismissed by any conservative wing as being insanely liberal ... and God knows that the Sierra Club is no friend to the Bush administration ... and of course, absolutely nothing will be done.

It's enough to make me want to give up, but instead I decided to try to spread the word a little bit more through my small megaphone.

Life with Piper II

(Originally written back in February; edited today)

One of the most amazing things about being the father of an almost-two-year-old is the opportunity to see how the developing mind works. Um, Piper's, not mine.

Last night, she was having a hard time falling asleep. It was past 10:00, and she was still calling out and making noise from her crib in her dark room. Laura finally headed back there and spent some more time with her.

Piper said, "Martan." This is not unusual these days. She's talking a lot, introducing several new words every day, and she's not very good at pronouncing a lot of them. But we always give a good yeoman's effort to understand what she said. So Laura tried:

"Mittens?" she asked.

Piper shook her head, concentrated hard, and said the word again: "Mar .. tan."

"Marta?" asked Laura, referring to the woman who babysits Piper twice a week.

Again, a shake of her head indicated this wasn't correct. So Piper thought for a minute, and then locked eyes on her mom and said: "Gorilla."

"Gorilla?" asked Laura, and this time she got a nod. Perplexing at first. But then Laura traced back through the evening, and remembered the book that Piper and I were reading together before bedtime. There were lots of pictures of animals, and I was pointing at them and asking Piper what they were. At one point, I pointed at a red-haired primate. "What's that?" I asked. She thought for a moment, and then said: "Gorilla." To which I pointed, and said: "Orangutan." To which Piper repeated: "Ran ... tan."

So Mom said to Piper: "Are you saying 'orangutan?'" Piper enthusiastically nodded: "Yes!"

A dumb story, perhaps, but it amazed us. In her desperation to be understood, she asked us to recall something from earlier. By saying "gorilla" to Laura, she was really saying: "Do you remember earlier when I thought something was a gorilla, but it wasn't? That's the word I'm trying to say."

The resourcefulness of a toddler is practically the eighth wonder of the world.

Okay. Break's Over.

or, What I did on my Blog Vacation. By Me.

1. Bought a house. Well, I'd already mentioned that here, but we signed the contract on it after I stopped writing. All systems go for a June 17th closing, looking especially good since we ...

2. Sold our condo. In only a week, too! That was nice. A bizarre series of circumstances led us to get less for it than we probably deserved, but it's a long story and SO two months ago that it's not worth sharing here -- and consider yourself fortunate that I wasn't blogging at the time so that you didn't have to suffer through the minutiae of selling a home.

3. Made great advancements in Piper's potty training. You're thanking yourself for my lack of writing again, aren't you?

4. Ran again. Once. I felt like a 60-year-old. I was sore for three days. But the girl loved it. Of course, she was all snug in her jogging stroller. Tough life. And best of all ...

5. The Cubs are back in action. Good god, it's a wonderful thing. This is a subject you will not get to escape. Please remove me from your bookmarks now -- or trust that I'll make it as interesting as possible. The worst part of these three months off? Just before I stopped, I had finally caught up on reading Scandal's entire journal ... and now I'm three months behind again. *sigh* Time to dig in again ... Ahhhhh. It's nice to be back.