Tue. Nov 01, 2005
Caroli and Tuesday Miscellany
It’s another busy week, so I thought I’d dump a few links and pictures on you to keep you busy. Content may be a bit lacking this week.
LeeAnn and Danny’s Journey to Caroli continues. In addition to smiling pictures of Caroli, you can read about how Danny almost had to sleep in the lobby.
But their long journey home from China is about to begin (today’s entry is not up yet, but will be here): “This is a long flight for grown-ups. It will be even longer with a baby. And not just one baby either. There will be many babies on board. All adopted, all heading home with their new parents to a life they never could have expected. And they will all cry at some point. Their parents will cry too, but these will not be tears of joy — they will be tears of sheer exhaustion.”
And they also said earlier, “Uncle Pooter will meet us at the airport to take pictures. Caroli has a special surprise for her Uncle Pooter so he had better be ready.”
Coming from Danny, that sounds a bit ominous. You better change that girl’s diapers before you get to Atlanta. Other surprises, I can handle.
Between the above, and a welcome load of work, I’ve been pretty scattered otherwise. But I have managed to notice a few other things going on in the world. News? Let’s see, a new Supreme Court nominee on Monday, an avian flu plan announcement on Tuesday … Scooter who? Tomorrow, expect a pony!
(Update, 3:15pm: The dog and pony show has been temporarily upstaged by a secret session of the Senate called by Harry Reid. Neither side seems aware of the transparency of these moves, so expect Cheney to go down with a heart attack tomorrow while grunting “there, let ‘em try and knock that out of the news cycle”)
Moving on … it’s almost … almost ... embarrassing that I’ve had a Flickr account as long as I have without uploading a thing. It just doesn’t fit my long established flow. But in response to a forum thread requesting a look at our desktops, I posted a couple. One clean, one working. “Two operating systems, three monitors, and One Mouse to Rule Them All.”
One of the funnier things I’ve read of late is a fatwa on football: “Do not follow the heretics, the Jews, the Christians and especially evil America regarding the number of players. Do not play with 11 people. Add to this number or decrease it … Do not play in two halves. Rather, play in one half or three halves in order to completely differentiate yourselves from the heretics, the corrupted and the disobedient.”
I think this was written by the same guys who wrote the bit about British Muslims being religiously offended by piggy banks. Those guys are just too funny, like The Muslim Onion.
What do you mean they’re serious?
Of course, they weren’t talking about real football, they were talking about soccer. In the NFL, this past weekend saw a fan steal a ball from Brett Favre during a game, and further signs the NFL will steal the Saints from New Orleans, in the form of an outburst by the Saints owner, Tom Benson.
I got all over NBA players for going into the stands and fighting with fans, but if you go onto the field of play as a fan, you deserve whatever you get. And I’m hoping it’s nearly 300 pounds in pads and helmet welcoming you to the NFL in the traditional way … by hitting you so hard your whole family falls down.
And as for Benson and the NFL, if they want to abandon decades in New Orleans and move to a fickle market that has killed many professional sports teams, well, you deserve what you get as well. When you suck, as Saints often do, do you think fans in LA will still pay to show up wearing bags on their heads and call themselves the Aints? No, you’re going to have a lot of Sundays when you’ll think you’ve moved from the Big Easy to the Big Empty.
To say nothing of the traditional rivalry between the Atlanta Falcons and the New Orleans Saints, one I’ve witnessed firsthand for decades. It’s purely a Southern Thang. But now the neatly configured NFC South Division will soon include … Southern California? Tradition gets no respect. And neither does football in LA. If the Saints move, I give them eight years before they’ll be muttering about moving again.
Here in America, we’re developing a new Halloween tradition. Pet torture. People do terrible and humiliating things to their pets. It’s enough to make you mad as a hornet. And sometimes you end up with what looks like Barney the Dinosaur swallowing a Chihuahua.
Here at Bunker PD, for the tenth year in a row, we had not one Halloween visitor. It might have something to do with the 42 steps.
Published 11:58AM, Tue, Nov 01 2005
Category: My Life Random Thoughts
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But now the neatly configured NFC South Division will soon include … Southern California? Tradition gets no respect. And neither does football in LA.
Hey, if the NFC West can include the last team to leave L.A. (notably our St. Louis Rams), the South can encompass both coasts. Just think of it as a Right Coast/Left Coast thing, and you’ll get into the spirit of it.
OK I admit it, I like the Caroli posts better than your usual fare.
Lady Niniane: “Surprisingly, there was not all that much crying”
Nearly every photo I’ve seen of these babies taking their first plane flight ever … they’re passed out. I know it’s not a 100% thing, but such photos would be encouraging … and facing a double digit number of hours in a long tube, any encouragement is good.
Lady Niniane: “Hey, if the NFC West can include the last team to leave L.A. (notably our St. Louis Rams), the South can encompass both coasts”
But see, that’s just it! We just fixed that oxymoron known as the “NFC West.” It used to include Atlanta. And New Orleans. And Saint Louis. And, oh yeah, one team on the West Coast, the 49ers. At least now they’re all west of the Mississippi River.
Showing uncommon good sense for a professional sports league, the NFL created the NFC South. Geographic sports rivalries are a Good Thing. Now they’re gonna bust it up for bucks.
Zack: “I like the Caroli posts better than your usual fare”
Oh, and you’re not biased by that little girl of your own, are you?
It’s been fun for me, and I’m going to the airport in a couple of hours to meet them on their return, so there will be another update later today.
Perversely, traffic has dropped 50% since this started. I don’t know for sure if it is related. But I’m thinking of coverting this to a baby blog, just to find out.
You know how I love driving people away!
Traffic has dropped a lot for me as well recently. And I haven’t been doing any baby blogging. Are people getting tired of blogs?
“Are people getting tired of blogs?”
We can only hope so. But I have a different theory.
The number of blogs has been doubling every five months for about three years now.
The audience for them has not. Not even close.
I’m not sure what’s going on, though, as it seems something more than that recently. I’m kind of perverse in that I revel in lessening traffic when I see what ever-increasing traffic has done to other sites I’ve followed for years. I used to track my traffic a lot closer, but after having a site for so long, it’s just not something I obsess over anymore. But it’s hard not to notice that traffic dropped in half from September to October, and appears to have halved again in the past week or two.
But I just realized … it’s not Caroli at all. It’s the music I’ve been putting up here since August! I must find time to finish and add some more, quickly!
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This is a long flight for grown-ups. It will be even longer with a baby. And not just one baby either. There will be many babies on board.
Boy does that bring back some memories. My first trip to Japan – on the flight home, we had 25 or so teachers from our group and 25 sets of new parents with babies from China. That was the first year with the SARS scare, and these folks had to endure a mini-quarantine when they flew from the mainland to Japan before they could board the plane for the U.S.; the plane was almost a relief since they could move around a bit more.
Surprisingly, there was not all that much crying – just dribs and drabs here and there. Quite a few of our group spent some time getting to know some of the parents (it’s a teacher-thing – we always talk to parents), and the little ones were passed from arm to arm all during the flight; that may have contributed to the lack of continual crying.