Warning: This post contains gratuitous baby swooning and poop.
Josephine is three weeks old today. I held her last night, her butt on my chest and my hands under her arms, while I spun slowly around the room. I named this hold the "Requiem for a Dream", but that was a bit morbid. Jason dubbed it "The Aronofsky". I had just changed her. As I rolled around the room I made up a little song:
someone pooped her pants
it didn't smell too bad
when momma saw what had occurred
she yelled downstairs for dad.
I leaned my head back and let out a long raspberry at the end of the verse. She smiled. She hadn't really smiled or laughed yet. She had, up to this point, managed to produce goofy contortions of the mouth and face, but only expressions that would briefly resemble a smile. I tooted again, and this time she smiled, and then laughed. I tooted. She laughed again. My heart swelled three sizes.
When that video ended I half expected the Land of the Lost intro...or at least a "Hey Kool-Aid" commercial...
I had in interesting conversation this weekend about the new wave of video web sites/services that are popping up everywhere. We talked a bit about the viability of web video, and what people are willing to do on the internet besides read. It seems to me that anything longer than a minute or two of embedded video is too long, as I'm hesitant to sit through anything that's longer than a few moments (except porn, I'll slog through hours of low quality web porn. Don't let them fool you, the Arpanet was initially developed to create a robust network for science geeks to move porn around the globe).
All that said, what I enjoy about services like YouTube is the view into the lives and ideas others. It becomes a strange portal into the human condition. Truth is stranger than fiction, and it becomes evident when watching low grade video clips on the web. Web video tends to lean towards oddity more than anything, and there is something both interesting and disturbing about much of what can been seen out there.
Ok, enough banter, this was all just an excuse to show Shatner "performing" Rocket Man. If you have never seen this, well, you are in for a strange little treat (Mind you, Tam has never been able to watch this all the way through, something about how she becomes too embarrassed for Shatner, and has to look away).
Dungeon Majesty is a cable-access TV show in which four young women play Dungeons and Dragons -- the show is intercut with Z-grade green-screen masks of them staging D&D fights in front of fakey caves or deep in spooky woods, and illustrated with flip-book animations fo D&D monsters drawn in pen on lined paper. This is really fantastic stuff -- it's got nerd pride to burn, and production values that make MST3K look slick.
This revealing documentary chronicles Senator John Kerry's tour of duty (as the skipper of a Swift Boat) in Vietnam, his controversial contributions to the peace movement that followed and, ultimately, the shape his political career took after the turbulent 1960s.
A sound clip where twenty seven year old John Kerry testifies before the senate relations committee regarding the war in Vietnam - Thursday, April 22, 1971:
...when, in 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.
A sneak preview of tonights George W. Bush campaign film, subtitled Bin Laden is a really good hider, from the wonderful Jon Stewart and the best news program anywhere.
-via peter - This would be funnier, if it weren't so true.
