I suppose it should go on record that my wife and I walked out of Peter Jackson's The Two Towers. We walked out at about two hours twenty minutes, by mutual consent. In our opinion, too much violence had been done to the story at that point for it to be possibly redeemed. As my wife puts it: "When my only reaction to every scene was to scoff, it was time to leave."
BUT. Here's a long post (some spoilers!) by a Tolkien fanboy which is all about how wonderful the movies are (hat tip: Lileks) And this guy is serious -- and a serious fanboy, too. He speaks Elvish -- at least one flavor. He can write runes. He memorized the pseudohistory of Numenor (the other mythical western island).
And he is totally wrong about Peter Jackson's movies. They are a travesty of Tolkien's vision.
Perhaps Jackson is successful in pleasing the "seriously hard-core fans". Perhaps there is a certain kind of "incurable Tolkien purist" who is satisfied when the backdrop of a film is sufficiently near to his imaginings. But the movies fail to capture the essential moral character of Tolkien's story -- which is a Christian story set in a pre-Christian world -- and therfore are nothing more than well-funded action flicks with a Tolkienesque setting.
If you understand why The Scouring of the Shire is the most essential subplot of the trilogy then I believe you will understand what I mean. (It's hardly a subplot, actually; it would be more fair to call it the main plot.)
Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time to go off on my analysis of Lord of the Rings right now because the baby is waking up. I will try to come back to this later. For the moment, think about Faramir.
I saw a strange news story linked at LGF about Sharia in Canada. WorldNetDaily writes:
Canadian judges soon will be enforcing Islamic law, or Sharia, in disputes between Muslims, possibly paving the way to one day administering criminal sentences, such as stoning women caught in adultery.
Pretty impressive, eh? Except that the Law Times article from which the WND article seems to be sourced is much less scary:
Syed explained that until recent changes in the law, Canadian Muslims have been excused from applying Shariah in their legal disputes.
Arbitration was not deemed to be practical because there was no way to enforce the decisions. Syed said the laws have recently changed with amendments to the Arbitration Act.
"Now, once an arbitrator decides cases, it is final and binding. The parties can go to the local secular Canadian court asking that it be enforced. The court has no discretion in the matter.
"So, the concession given by Shariah is no longer available to us because the impracticality has been removed. In settling civil disputes, there is no choice indeed but to have an arbitration board."
The article is confusing because the same language is used to describe religious obligations as legal obligations; and in fact the issue is precisely about the difference between those obligations. I think I can summarize it like this: according to a particular interpretation of Islam, a Muslim living in a Muslim country is obliged to follow Sharia, but a Muslim in a non-Muslim country is only obliged to follow Sharia as closely as possible. So far so good.
In Canada, before recent changes to federal contract law, it was not possible to have truly binding arbitration. Therefore there was no means by which Muslims could use Sharia to resolve their disputes: if a Sharia arbitrator was asked to decide a case, the losing party was under no obligation to accept the decision.
Now, with the introduction of binding arbitration where the courts enforce the arbitrator's decision, it is possible for a civil dispute between Muslims to be resolved under Sharia: the two parties sign a binding arbitration agreement to take the matter to the Sharia arbitrator (not truly a court -- just an arbitrator), the arbitrator decides the case, and then the decision can be enforced (if necessary) by the normal police power of the state, including seizing property, garnishing wages, etc.
So under the interpration of Islam that obliges Muslims to live under Sharia as much as possible, since it is now possible for Muslims in Canada to settle civil disputes with other Muslims under Sharia, they must now do so.
Note that there is no legal recognition of Sharia by Canadian courts; this whole thing (including the overwrought lead-in about stoning) is merely a result of the new existence of binding arbitration as an option in Canada. Similarly there is no reason that you couldn't choose to have your case resolved in the Court of Rock-Paper-Scissors, if such a thing existed and both parties agreed. It looks like WorldNetDaily is deliberately scaremongering.
(Predictably, Eugene Volokh is all over this, in fewer words and more sense.)
The important question is: is there a reasonable argument for a slippery slope from optional Sharia for civil cases between Muslims to mandatory Sharia in criminal cases? This is the question that WND ducks; they just assume the slippery slope and slide right to the end.
It's hard to construct such an argument. I will think about for a while and see what I come up with. Here's what I have so far: it describes how non-Muslims could find themselves in Sharia court:
Starting with Sharia via binding arbitration between Muslims, we can easily extend to Sharia via binding arbitration between a Muslim and a non-Muslim in those cases where the Muslim gets to dictate the contract. It's common for a contract to be dictated by the more powerful party in some circumstances: a e.g., by the landlord in a tenancy agreement, by the vendor for a software license -- in such a circumstance if the vendor or landlord so chose, they could include a binding arbitration clause referring to the Sharia court. The odds are good that the consumer would not notice until actually pursuing a claim, which would then be conducted in the Sharia court. So non-Muslims can find themselves in the Sharia court merely as a result of buying certain services or products from Muslims.
Just a quick post - we still have a guest staying with us, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the computer.
It's been wonderful having friends come to visit -- especially with the new baby. Two extra pairs of hands to hold the baby makes everything better, and since we're taking these weeks off, we have all the time in the world to just hang out and solve the world's problems.
Last night, for example, we reformed Social Security, Medicare, and the income tax system in general.
Also last night we hooked up our friend's DVD-playing laptop to the borrowed LCD projector and watched a couple of movies: very nice. There may be a DVD player in our future... no TV, just a DVD player. We'll see.
Also I went for a run, after two weeks of no running, and it was fine, -7 temperatures and all. So life, at least at this moment, is going exceptionally well.
Baby blog at http://sindadel.com/kaija. It hasn't been updated since last week, but that's where the baby's home page will be from now on.
A couple of college friends came over to visit us and the new baby, so blogging will continue to be light till the middle of next week -- just in time for American Thanksgiving.
Woke up this morning to heavy (for Edmonton) snow: at least an inch had fallen all over when I went out to the car. Naturally traffic was horribly tied up, but in this one situation, Edmonton drivers do better than LA drivers. Although they're still all over the road, Edmonton drivers do not get so enthralled by the sight of falling snow that they drive right off the road, as has been known to happen in the 405 pass by the new Getty Center.
Yes, and the "splittist agenda"? Comes right out of a commie press release:
Zhu Weidong, assistant director of the Institute of Taiwan Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the US gesture has been played up by Chen to his self-interest.
"The election-minded Chen is cannily taking advantage of the US behaviour to campaign for his splittist agenda,'' he said.
Wanna hear it again? Here it is from The Financial Times:
Chinese state media on Wednesday quoted Wang Zaixi, vice-minister of the cabinet's Taiwan Affairs Office, as saying a referendum on constitutional reform would be "an extremely dangerous move".
"If the Taiwan authorities collude with all splittist forces to openly engage in pro-independence activities and challenge the mainland and the one-China principle, the use of force may become unavoidable," the official China Daily quoted Mr Wang as saying.
There's something unique about Communist rhetoric that creates these bizarre neologisms. The "revanchist" Germans; the running-dog capitalists; the pig-dogs, etc. I don't think the Nazis ever matched it (but perhaps I'm just not familiar enough with the oeuvre). The Islamists come close but they're too repetitive: "freeze the blood in their veins, etc. etc." -- you'd think we'd be suffering some ill effects from all the ice cubes in our aortas, but apparently we infidel just keep toolin' along.
Apparently I have nothing on the EU:
The European Court of Auditors refused to certify EU accounts for the ninth successive year, saying Brussels has failed to match reform rhetoric with a genuine change of culture. Abuse is said to be endemic in the Common Agricultural Policy, which still consumes almost half the £65 billion budget.
I had no idea that the last year the EU's accounts were certified for was 1993.
The baby has a weblog now, and I'll be posting that link shortly, so it's back to politics and complaining about the lack of good old American consumer products here in the barren wastes of Alberta.
I loved this quote from Mark Steyn's latest column:
The fanatical Muslims despise America because it's all lapdancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it's all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it's controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too Godless, America is also too isolationist, except when it's too imperialist.
Yup. And there are no Chili Lime Picante Corn Nuts here, either, though that may be remedied soon.
It's precisely for this reason that I sent my parents the URL when I started this blog.
Apart from certain ex-girlfriends, I think my worst-case readership scenario already exists.
I am starting to believe that I personally provide a large fraction of Home Depot's revenue stream. Whenever I'm in Home Depot to buy something simple (like sandpaper) I suddenly think of another small improvement or repair that I could carry out in five minutes. For example: caulking the crack in the fireplace wall. Or gluing the kitchen tabletop panel back down. Or replacing an ethernet wire with a plugin so we can use variable lengths of cable.
So I buy the supplies I need for that. Then I come home, put the bag of supplies on a shelf in the basement, next to 1,000 identical bags each containing a small quantity of home improvement supplies. I take the sandpaper (or whatever it was I went to Home Depot to buy in the first place) and use a 3" by 3" square to sand the one thing in the house that needs sanding. And then I repeat the whole process a week later.
Yesterday I decided to actually execute a few of these projects. In the process, I learned several valuable things about caulk:
That was about it from the Caulking project. I am pleased to report that the draft coming from the crack between the masonry wall and the wood wall is greatly reduced. I have now discovered that the primary source of the draft was the crack between the concrete/asbestos tile floor and the masonry wall. This crack is too big to caulk (I know: I tried), so I will have to jam some weatherstripping into it before caulking. And buy another tube of caulk. And perhaps another caulk gun -- though I think I got enough of the caulk off the moving parts.
And then there was the project that I was actually buying parts for -- repairing the humidifier duct. There are two furnaces in our house, one for upstairs and one for downstairs. The upstairs furnace has a humidifier, controlled by a humidistat, and it routes hot dry air through the humidifier before blowing it upstairs. Unfortunately the duct between the humidifier and the main vent is an old vinyl piece of crap, and therefore it fell off sometime during the summer.
Several months ago, I went to Home Depot to buy a replacement duct. 4" vinyl duct, 20 feet long. Great. Thanks. That and these clamps, caulk, caulk gun.
I brought it home. Too small.
Thursday I went to Home Depot to exchange the 4" duct for a 5" duct. 5" aluminum duct, 10 feet long. Probably long enough. Thanks. That and this caulk, these boxes, these ethernet jacks. Thanks.
This morning I got up early to go replace the duct, while my wife and our daughter slept upstairs. Then I started reading back articles of instapundit. Bad idea: after an hour of that, my wife called me upstairs: "Are you done with the duct yet?"
No.
"The baby hasn't slept the entire time. You take her and let me get some sleep."
So we went downstairs, the baby, me, and my 5" duct. You know what happens next, right?
Too small.
Apparently that's a 6" duct. But that's OK -- that's what duct tape is for.
Included in the package of forms the midwife left us, between the vital statistics registration ("Registration of Live or Still Birth" -- how cheerful!) and a birth announcement form for the local homebirth wacko magazine, was a funny packet labeled "Canada Child Tax Benefit".
Apparently if you have a child, the government sends you a "baby bonus" of about $100 per month. They'll even direct deposit it into your bank account.
I was like, Mr. Jaw, meet Mr. Floor. Whoah, Socialism.
As far as I can tell, this is not a means-tested benefit. (There are additional supplemental benefits, beyond the basic one, that you can get if your income is sufficiently low.) All that is required is for the child and (at least) one of the parents to be Canadian citizens or permanent residents, and for the family to reside in Canada.
By my estimate, there are about 7 million people in Canada under age 18. (I'm not paying $3 to StatsCan for a detailed breakdown, so I added all 0-14's to 3/5 of the 15-19's -- a three-fifths compromise (!).) So the whole program is in the small-number billions of dollars -- say 5 billion dollars to maybe 15 billion depending on how many people qualify for the supplemental benefit.
I can't find out how much money Canada spends on social programs from the incredibly bad budget site but I estimated it at about 140 billion (based on this site which notes that an 11.5% increase in "program spending" is 14.3 billion). So maybe 5-10 percent of all social spending is this ridiculous benefit.
I don't understand the reasoning behind this at all. If the government wants to give $100/child/month to people who pay no taxes, well, do that and call it welfare -- don't pretend it's some sort of a "tax benefit". Conversely, if this is supposed to be a benefit for people who pay taxes, why can't they just give me a deduction on my friggin' taxes? Why do I have to register for this ridiculous direct-deposit scheme?
Of course I registered for it. But it felt dirty.
In The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding there are two index entries under "Alcohol":
Alcohol, effects on nursing mother
Alcohol, avoid using on nipples
Duly noted! I wonder if there are similar entries for "Gasoline: avoid using on nipples" and "Sulfuric acid: avoid using on nipples".
We are having houseguests: old friends from college. (If this explains to you why we are researching alcohol and breastfeeding, then you have a nasty suspicious mind. And you are correct.)
Sadly, the last batch of beer I brewed spoiled. The top blew off under high pressure early in the fermentation, and I'm not sure if I realized that for a day or so. In any case, some bacteria got in and colonized the batch. I deep-sixed it a couple of weeks ago. So we will be drinking off-the-shelf beer instead of homebrew.
And that is all on a personal level for now.
In passing, David Bernstein of The Volokh Conspiracy neatly summarizes life in Canada:
By 2003, Robert Martin, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Western Ontario, commented that he increasingly thinks that "Canada now is a totalitarian theocracy. I see this as a country ruled today by what I would describe as a secular state religion [of political correctness]. Anything that is regarded as heresy or blasphemy is not tolerated."
I find that characterization basically accurate.
Tomorrow is Remembrance Day, what we call Veterans' Day in the States. World War I was a national trauma and transformative experience for Canadians (as Colby Cosh writes in his National Post column) and the Great War still has an influence on Canada that it's hard for me, as an American, to understand.
Canada lost 65,000 killed in WWI (as many as 15,000 from a single action-- Passchendaele) from a total population of around 8 million people (7.2 in 1911 and 8.7 in 1921). Which is to say that 1.6% of Canadian men died in WWI. Somehow Canada suffered that and still remained friendly with England; Australia, suffering similar losses in the Gallipoli campaign, become more estranged. (I'll never understand the Commonwealth.)
Remembrance Day is one of the times that I truly feel foreign in Canada. The first remembrance day I spent here, I saw a man wearing one of the poppies in his lapel and commented to my wife, "What an ugly flower!" She was shocked.
Although many current commentaries tie Remembrance Day with Canadian involvement in UN peackeeping missions and peace in general, I like to think that most people who wear the poppies wear them in the original spirit of John McCrae's poem:
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep...
She's a funny country, Canada, but there's still some fight left in her.
She has dreams. Or at least, so I infer, because sometimes while sleeping she starts having rapid eye movements and organized facial twitch movements, like cats do when they go into REM sleep. (I haven't watched any grown-up people's REM sleep, so I can't compare.)
Sometimes she has nightmares. In the middle of her REM sleep, she'll cry out and if I'm quick I can comfort her back to sleep.
Sometimes she has falling dreams, where out of the middle of nowhere she has the startle reflex and flings out her hands and legs to the side. When she's awake I can trigger this by holding her in my extended arms and dropping them quickly through about 2-3 inches; the reflex is a response to a partial sensation of freefall. I can only assume that she's feeling a falling sensation in her sleep.
I'm dreaming more too: since I am sleeping with her most of the time, my sleep is pretty heavily interrupted but as a compensation it's very rich in remembered dreams. Last night I had a dream about being at a dilapidated villa-type resort in Hawaii (or a Hawaii-like place) where the most congenial other guests were a couple of insectivoral vampires. Then the hotel was raided by superheroes... but I digress.
Total eclipse of the moon tonight. Went outside: yup, total eclipse. Moon all red, except for a little white part around 5 o'clock. I called it a "cervical lip". Apparently I'm still obsessing about my wife's pregnancy.
We've been busy taking care of Kaija and visiting with friends and family. I don't make a lot of time to post because I have to be in the work room to have a machine that I'm sure to be able to use, and furthermore posting is much easier with two-handed typing... often not available to me.
I just figured out that I can pick up the keyboard and balance it on my knees while still holding the baby's head up with my arm. I am sitting with my legs up on the desk and the keyboard up and the baby on my lap right now. It works OK.
We're actually doing a little work right now (yes, at 7:30 PM on a Saturday night) so I'm off now.
How do you pronounce "Kaija"?
Well, you probably pronounce it correctly, but there are some people out there who insist on mispronouncing it.
If you speak Finnish, it is easy. Just pronounce it as written.
Otherwise, if you are from Boston, it's easy. "Kaija" rhymes with "fire."
Otherwise, if you are from Southern California, it's easy. "Kaija" rhymes with "Playa" as in Playa del Rey.
Otherwise, if you know the international phonetic alphabet (IPA), it's easy. Kaija = /kaja/.
Otherwise, you can rhyme it with "Maya" as in the ancient Mayan civilization. More on that here, a particularly fatheaded response from a Dr. Joseph F. Foster to an "Ask the Linguist" question.
Do not say /keja/ (rhymes with "Freya") or /ki:ya/ (like the car manufacturer, Kia). In Finnish those would be Keija and Kiija, and we didn't name her either of those names.
PS. I get a kick out of the double meanings of the phrase "Modified Czech IPA" used by Dr. Joseph F (Fathead?) Foster. Google's never heard of such a thing, so it finds pages which include all three words. Linguistic: a map of the phonemes of Czech (IPA = international phonetic alphabet) is here. Brewing: the Czechs don't make IPA's (India pale ales) because, I don't know, maybe something to do with the limited maritime tradition of a landlocked nation. But "IPA" "Czech" and "modified" are words used in brewing so there are lots of brewing hits too. Brewing and linguistics, together at last.
The true meaning of love is being willing to handle another person's feces. In our culture at least. Yes, I am talking about diapering, and I did warn that this would be all-baby-all-the-time.
I now understand how people can say that breastfed babies "wet" diapers are "not offensive," but anyone who thinks the smell is pleasant needs to have his head examined. Sure, it can be associated with pleasant memories. But "pleasant" in its own right? These are the people scratch-n-sniff manure was invented for.
Anyway, my wife and I made this deal: while Kaija is exclusively nursing, I'll take care of the output as long as my wife provides the input. Once she starts eating solid foods as well as nursing (usually around 6 months) then we'll refigure the diapering.
On Sunday it occurred to me that there is a discrete, finite number of diapers that my girl will wear in her life, and that number is an upper bound on the number of her diapers I will have to change. We did some quick figuring and came up with between 4,000 and 7,000 depending on when she toilet-trains. It's a lot of diapers but it helps to know that there is an end.
Sitting on the couch in the living room window of our house, looking at the snow gently falling outside, with my 3-day-old daughter sleeping on my lap -- priceless.
I'm thinking about starting a new blog just for Kaija. For now, though, this one is pretty much going to be all baby all the time.
Yesterday my wife's milk started coming in. The baby was a bit taken aback by it -- she would nurse, take a gulp, and then pull back from the breast and make a face like a wet cat trying to get a nasty taste out of its mouth. She's decided she likes the milk after all, which is to her benefit.
Yes, that was me on the radio on Friday. Randomly, the Rutherford Show (morning issues and call-in on the local right-wing talk station) did an hour on midwifery. I phoned in and got a screener: "This is the Rutherford show. What do you want to say on the air?"
"I just wanted to say that my wife and I had our first baby at home two days ago." Apparently this is an excellent way to get on the radio.
"Oh!"
Then there was a pause, while the producer got Rutherford's attention. I heard a little hiccup in the conversation then he got rid of the other caller and then it was "Hi Sam!"
Oh my God I'm on the air. I suddenly understood why people sound so stupid on the radio. "Hi Dave!"
I talked about Kaija's birth, and got a short plug in about it being frustrating that Alberta Health Care is willing to spend basically thousands on a baby's birth in the hospital but none on a home birth.
Night before last, that would be Thursday night, I guess, I brought a bottle of beer up to bed. I opened it and was about to take a swig when my wife said, "Oh my God I want some BEER!" So I gave it to her, and she drank half of it in one long pull. She's not much of a drinker at all nor a beer drinker in particular but I guess it's nice to shake off nine months of abstinence.