entirely safe and fun

And now I have an inch of polypro in my hand.

I am thirty years old. I have used my time adventurously: whitewater boating, downhill skiing, martial arts, and so on. And through all of these adventures, I have managed to avoid reporting to the emergency room for even a single stitch. This weekend, I managed to slice my hand open on a broken glass while doing the dishes, requiring two stitches. What kind of world do we live in, where a man can spend several years of his life safely engaged in mixed martial arts — no-holds-barred fighting with other full-grown men — but be sent to the hospital while cleaning a water glass? I have jumped off cliffs wearing skis! I have paddled rafts through rapids where people drowned the week before, where rivers break boats over rocks with irresistible force!

And this is where regression to the mean chooses to draw the line — at the sink.

fig. 1: The baby perceives the object of his desire, but discovers that it is out of reach.

fig 2: He raises his rear end as high as possible…

fig 3: …and rolls onto his back, critically, straightening his torso. Here, he is momentarily distracted by his socks.

fig 4: Dante rolls onto his tummy, having moved forward about four inches. He wins the prize.

More pix on Flickr, tagged “protocrawling”.

You got your Yoda in my Cthulhu!

A new batch of pictures is up, covering the last month or so. This is my favorite, as it shows off Dante’s recently acquired “smiling” skill, and also the awesome calamara-cephalic hat that our crafty friend Jenn was kind enough to knit for him… and, as if that weren’t enough, there’s also his Yoda robe. So cute.

For friends and family looking for baby pix, Dante features in a few moblog entries, like this one, featuring Dante wearing an outfit that says “Baby” on it. This is so users know that he is a baby. My dad pointed out an interface problem, though: when you bathe a baby, you almost always remove its clothing. How, then, does such a label enable you to distinguish baby from bathwater?

A week later, we received a bathrobe, also featuring the legend “Baby” on it, which goes about halfway to a solution.

“As you can see, my young apprentice, your friends have failed. Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station!”

Google Maps has just put up Street Level images for Pittsburgh, PA, and my friend Brian discovered evidence that the next-generation weather control laser, which the University of Pittsburgh has been developing for years, has now gone into production mode. Mounted to the 42-story Cathedral of Learning on the Pitt campus, it is the first weapon capable of dispersing Pittsburgh’s persistent (some would say “constant”) cloud cover. It is also capable of vaporizing a human target in orbit, which will be handy when Space Hitler inevitably returns. Critics have complained about the expense of the project, pointing out that there are plenty of other skyscraper-based death rays, but proponents emphasize that none match the Pitt device for energy density, total photon flux, or appetizing pierogie aroma.

And in the Guinness Book for longest elapsed time between birth of twins? Kim Jong-il photo from public domain source, found via Wikipedia.

I’ve been thinking about whose hair Dante really has, lately. His tonsorial resemblance to North Korean head-of-state Kim Jong-il is remarkable.

Transitively, I guess, so is mine.

New photos are up on Flickr, tagged with “day thirtyone”. My parents have joined us for a week, and feature prominently in/took many of the photos you’ll see there.

25 Aug ‘07, 4.59pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

They has a flavr… not so gret, aktully.

28 Aug ‘07, 6.53pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

Thus, let’s battle our pokemans. It makes perfect sense!

28 Aug ‘07, 3:46pm PDT PST by ccreitz

Such mad skillz I have. You may despair at being my equal now.

Update: this post is just a demonstration for phone-to-blog-via-Flickr workflow. In other words, I made the entire thing from my phone, no other technology required. Still fixing the way these posts will look, but the principle is pretty cool.

Why “Dante,” anyway? Punam and I had a big piece of paper stuck to our wall, and we just wrote down names we liked over the course of a month or so, reading combinations out loud until we settled on “Dante Quinn” as being euphonious, pronounceable by everyone, and having appropriate meanings, referents, and connotations — “Axel Wiley,” for instance, sounded like a comic-book supervillain and so got a pass… for this child. Because we didn’t really settle on it until the very last second, I never had an answer for people who asked me what we’d call him, so I came up with a little joke to put it off: “Well, we’re going to wait for an omen at his birth. If the sky opens up, turns red, and rains blood, we’ll name him Joe, just like his uncle!”

I don’t have an Uncle Joe, so there’s a second, Wodehousian, joke in there, so subtle it’s not quite even funny.

Fast forward to today. I went to Safeway to pick up cannelloni makings this afternoon and was greeted by the Sun pictured above, with Dante and his grandma Krupa, prominently featuring what day but Dante’s birthday! It lacks the drama of the Johannine (the Divine-ine) nightmare in my joke, sure, but it has a certain class nonetheless. Cayce and the Dead Sea Scrolls!

Any rate, new pix of the boy are up, tagged with “day thirteen”. There are some really cute ones in there!