According to IDC, a mere six percent of households in the US own portable digital music players. This seems inordinately low; according to my eyeballs, 90% of people riding the DC Metro on a given weekday own iPods. (Five percent have old CD players with cheap foam headphones that leak like the Exxon Valdez, and the remaining five percent are too busy fingering their M16s and looking steely-eyed to listen to anything.)

The same survey says that six percent of households have satellite radio receivers, though I know scarcely anyone else who owns one. Is this a red state/blue state thing? It would explain the eighteen channels of country music they transmit on Sirius.

Contributor Shannon Hettler wrote us this touching note:

These were taken at a sagging, sorry desert convenience store not far from the Utah border.

We thought of Rob.

So sweet.






While I think the true aficionado prefers toilet signs whose humor is unintentional, these have an appealing folksy quality.

You can write about the Iraq war from the perspective of ten years of experience in the Middle East; you can document visits to Africa, Iraq, and Afghanistan; you can use your cell phone to send photos of your newborn child to the web directly from the hospital nursery. But ultimately what sticks in people's heads is that you look like Newt Gingrich and you collect toilet signs.

Keep 'em coming!

Like all parents in the United States, we have our statutorally-mandated copy of What to Expect The First Year, by the authors of the equally ubiquitous What to Expect When You're Expecting. Both volumes are written for dopes, which we flatter ourselves not to be. Witness the following question from the chapter on the eight month-olds:

I always said that a baby wasn't going to change the way we live. But with our daughter's crawling around, many of the valuable things we've collected over the years are at risk. Should I pack them away or try to teach her to stay away from them?

The book doesn't even give the correct answer, which is: "put either the Hummels or the kid on eBay, lady, and here's some information on Norplant." Nevertheless, until today I had not seriously entertained the possibility that these books may have also been written by dopes. Witness the following advice, and I emphasize that this is in the chapter on eight month-olds:

Auto safety. Be certain that your baby not only becomes accustomed to sitting in a car seat, but understands the reason why it's essential. Also explain other auto safety rules, such as no throwing toys around, no grabbing the steering wheel, and no playing with door locks or window buttons.

Isabel has begun to understand the word "Daddy", but I think "inertia", "horrifying crash", and "mass of crumpled steel" may still be beyond her.

I am told that some parents feel their intellectual lives are stunted by the need to continually live in the world of their children. We have not found this to be the case. Julie is still working on her Ph.D., and I have made a bold foray into the world of literary criticism.

Julie, Isabel and I were running for the train with two friends in the dim light of a Metro station this afternoon. Julie, carrying Isabel, was in the lead, and I was well behind, pushing the stroller. As we passed the driver, leaning out of the open window, I thanked her for waiting for us. She nodded in reply, and said, "that baby looks just like you."

Isabel gets haughty at a recent society wedding.

Similar pose, different mood.

Looking contemplative about the prospects soon to be offered by walking.

Finally, a color-coded alert system that provides some useful information.

I've written before about robots who blog (or is it robots that blog? Get Asimov on the phone). Now there's one blogging poetry, and its output is better than anything ever produced by a former American Idol contestant.