Neither of us have either the patience or energy small children require, any more.

I don't think anybody has that patience or energy until they actually have to deal with small children.

For Hec and others wondering about being an older parent: Although I deeply regret my Dad no longer being here, I never regretted that he was already 45 when I was born. Ever.

Excellent good news! I'd better get to work on my ice rink making skills, though.

I had Emmett when I was 35. I was probably emotionally prepared to have kids by the time I was 30. Fortunately Matilda is proving to be a better sleeper and breast-feeder than Emmett was so she's not as taxing (thus far).

Newborns are so odd. It's difficult to hang onto this fact because they progress so quickly and you're more engaged with them later, and that's what you tend to remember.

Newborns have lots of skeptical and dubious expressions. Also they have trouble coordinating the top half of their face with the bottom half so their eyebrows may be in full Spock mode while they're making a big sour lemon mouth. Sometimes they do the Joey Trebbiana fish-hook in the eyebrow face. There's a lot of Master Thespian in a newborn.

Then there's the issue of their hands which are independent satellites which come in for periodic landings on their head in random gestures of Jack Benny or Willy Ninja. Newborns don't have a lot of happy expressions, except by accident. Their best moods are Doped Up On Milk and quiet zenlike bogglement.

I'd better get to work on my ice rink making skills, though.

Well, global warming isn't helping matters any. The fact that (as a child growing up in Northern CT) my winter memories are things like being able to consistently skate in my backyard (and have my siblings build an igloo for me that lasted for months) is just amazing to me.

Our ice rinks were water sprayed over concrete on the rare days it stayed below freezing. It didn't happen very often. I've never been on ice skates.

After getting myself all worked up about the inherent problems involved in pilling Chumley, I got the go-ahead to add the content of the capsules to his food... and he gobbled down the medicine-laced food without a complaint. Couldn't have been easier....

As a childless person in my late thirties, I understand the concern, but please don't let the "too old" demons have the last word.

Just to be clear, all my "too old" demons belong to already-a-mother-of-three-busy-people me. I wasn't trying to discourage anyone. I tried to make that clear with my "me me me" comment. If I failed, I'm sorry.

Then there's the issue of their hands which are independent satellites

We named Mal's hands "Cora" and "Clarice" because they acted like power-hungry viscious twins, always trying to take over the kingdom by knocking his food away or randomly attacking him when he wasn't looking.

And if there's anybody that might get that Gormenghast reference, it's you people. Our families certainly didn't.

And if there's anybody that might get that Gormenghast reference, it's you people.

Heh. I didn't, until you mentioned it.

ION, when uncooked spaghetti breaks, why does it usually break into many pieces?

Similarly, Feynman also became intrigued by the "breakage question" in spaghetti one night over dinner with supercomputer specialist W. Daniel Hillis. The anecdote appears in Christopher Sykes' No Ordinary Genius, in which Hillis recalls, "We ended up, at the end of a couple of hours, with broken spaghetti all over the kitchen and no real good theory about why spaghetti breaks in three."

So spaghetti's secrets eluded Feynman, who died in 1988; it also eluded another Nobel Laureate, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, who told French TV hat he considered the "spaghetti mystery" to be "one of the very simple, yet unsolved problems of science." Enter Audoly and Neukirch. They experimented with dry spaghetti of varying thicknesses, clamping them at one end before bending the strand to breaking point (see photos at right).

They found that bending the strand "increases the curvature," which produces a sort of shock wave that travels along the length of the pasta. When that curvature exceeds a critical limit, the first break in the strand will occur. This breakage causes other shock waves that travel along the two newly formed pieces of the spaghetti, with the same effects, thereby resulting in a cascade of cracks. Nor are they the only scientists undertaking similar studies. Mathematician Andrew Belmonte (Pennsylvania State University) became intrigued, too, once spending an evening breaking spaghetti strands over his kitchen sink, just like Feynman. "I had always been puzzled by that small piece which flies out of the center," he confessed to Science News last year. Neukirch explained the fascination thusly: "This is really the kind of simple question that you can't help thinking about over and over until you find the answer."

[link]

I was 24 when I had Jake. Probably not completely ready for kids, no, but his infancy was waaaaay easier than Sara's, at 36. But it's hard to say it was entirely due to age -- I had two other children to care for, for one thing.

And while I want to say being older made me more easygoing and roll-with-the-punches with Sara, I don't know if that's entirely true, either. I think having had two kids already had more to do with it.

Then there's the issue of their hands which are independent satellites

My sister was born with a full head of hair, and for several months she'd periodically pull her own hair and then start screaming at the pain. Took her quite a while to figure out the cause and effect there.

Super Priest Can Turn Anything Into Body, Blood Of Christ

TAOS, NM—Father Thomas Mandow appears to be a simple, mild-mannered parish priest, but his remarkable faith and surpassing holiness have bestowed him with the awesome power to transform just about anything into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. "I can state, without indulging myself in the sin of pride, that I have been blessed with the ability to convert anything into a Communion sacrament—which must be used for good—and then be partaken of in remembrance of our Lord and Savior," said Mandow in a press conference where he displayed a transubstantiated 24-piece bucket of chicken, a 64-oz. Mountain Dew bottle, and the September 2 issue of Sports Illustrated. "Although I would not advise eating all of these items for reasons having nothing to do with their intrinsic holiness." Mandow believes he received the dangerous gift of super-consecration after being bitten by a radioactive bishop.

That last sentence had me cracking up....