The Republic of T.

This post at The Best Article Every Day reminded me of a meme I launched years and years ago, on USENET. (I told you it was years ago.)

Let’s say you get your hands on a brand new Time Machine. Whether it’s the old-school H.G. Wells chair model, or a tricked-out DeLorean, you’ve now got to decide what you’re going to do with your new toy. But before you run off and start messing up your life, sleeping with your grandmother, and investing in Google stock before the Internet was invented, we’ve got a few ideas for you. Here are 15 moments in time, both past and future, that you may want to just witness before you go and do what you’re inevitably going to do, and ruin everyone’s universe.

I can’t claim to have invented it, since I got it the idea from a book (and apparently plenty other people have thought of it). But I thought it might be fun to launch again. (If anybody’s out there.)

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It’s almost Oscar time again. I have to admit, when Oscar night rolls around again, it makes me nostalgic for some aspects of my pre-parenting life. (Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t take anything in the world for stuff like Parker handing me a birthday card me made himself yesterday, or playing on the floor with Dylan and hearing him laugh.) Time was, by the time the awards rolled around, I would usually have seem most or all of the nominated performances and films. If I went to an Oscar party and joined the Oscar pool, I’d make a decent score and even win on occasion.

Now, if I’ve seen one or two nominated films or performances, I count myself lucky. That’s because getting to a movie nowadays requires slightly less planning than the Normandy invasion. Maybe more. If it isn’t available on Netflix, chances are I won’t see it.

But I have seen lots of movies over the years. And after seeing this list of the 10 best Oscar Best Pictures of all time, I thought it might be fun to compile a list of my own.
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This Friday, I had something anyone who’s ever lived through the first few months of parenting a newborn will understand is something to be treasured: a day off. The rest of the family left the house in the morning, and I went back to bed. But, of course, we never take a day off from being parents. Not that I want to, mind you, but those few extra hours of sleep Friday morning (I went back to bed. Surprised?) were sweet.

I’d taken the day off, because Parker’s pre-school was having a special performance, and of course we were going to be there to see it. Parker had been talking about it for the past month. At first he decided he was going to dance, and after he picked a song I burned it to CD so that he could take it to school with him and practice. But I know my son. He’s very stage shy. At home, with us as an audience, he sings, dances and puts on quite a show. But he generally prefers not to be in the spotlight and not to be the center a big audience’s attention.

So I wasn’t surprised when he announced that he’d volunteered (with one other child) for the job of handing out tickets. (Pieces of construction paper colored by Parkers class served as “tickets.”) I told him, “That’s a very important job. If nobody handed out tickets, there’d be no audience to see the show,” and that Daddy and Papa would be there so he could give us our tickets. And he did, as well as handing tickets to other parents as they arrived. He even helped with some of the props for the other students performances.

We were very proud and we told him so.
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Saw this over at Kip’s and couldn’t resist chiming in.

The inevitable, even clichéd, response on the part of theists to this litany of woes is to ask: what about Hitler and Stalin? Yes, the question resorts to the hackneyed rhetorical ploy of et tu quoque (Latin for “So’s your old man”). But at least the question’s inevitability forces the atheist to show his hand. Thus Dawkins lamely avers that Hitler did believe in God (of sorts) and, hey, Stalin attended an Orthodox seminary in his youth! If that retort seems a tad desperate, England’s most pious unbeliever concludes with this wan distinction: “Stalin was an atheist and Hitler probably wasn’t, but even if he was, the bottom line of the Stalin/Hitler debating point is very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism.” So it’s not atheism that’s the problem, only atheists!

Once and for all, can we put this in the same category of ridiculousness as Kirk Cameron calling the banana an “atheist’s nightmare,” or that the human eye could not possibly have evolved?

Here again we approach something akin to the mental blockage otherwise known as irreducible complexity, which—when boiled down to gravy—isn’t all that complex. It’s tempting here to apply one of the common corollaries to Godwin’s law: that, in any debate or discourse, whoever mentions the Nazis or Hitler first “loses” the argument.

But that seems almost too easy. Especially when it’s even easier to debunk this with just a little thought.
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I’m at home with Dylan today and working from home. (Dylan’s doing very well, by the way. He’s nearing 2 months old and has gotten so much bigger! He was just under six pounds when he was born, and he’s just over 11 now; and he’s got a few extra chins, chubbier cheeks, and chubbier legs. He likes watching Parker play, and likes to be held upright and walked around the house.)

So between taking care of him and getting some work done, there may not be much posting here today, except for this post—which I stayed up last night to complete after getting Dylan to sleep—and possibly one more that I’ve been working on for a bit. (That’s if I can finish it.)

I haven’t been able to do as much writing as I’d like to lately, but I’ve been doing a lot of reading. (It’s relatively easy to read news & blogs online while rocking Dylan in my office chair. And there’s a lot out there I’d blog about if I could manage to find the time and the energy, and get them to synch up. In lieu of that, today seems like a good day for a roundup.
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Is there anybody still out there listening? Just thought I’d ask. It’s been four days or so since I’ve done any actual writing, or at least what I’d call doing my own writing, and it’s been making me a little crazy. That’s partly because I’m always a little concerned that falling silent in the blogosphere for too long is the same as disappearing altogether.

Granted, with a new baby in the house, I might be forgiven for blogging less than I usually do. It’s definitely not easy. I suppose I could take a leave of absence for a while, at least until Dylan starts sleeping through the night, because it’s mighty difficult to keep yo with what’s going on and to string together even a coherent thought or two when you’re suffering from lack of sleep.

And when I do get around to writing, I’m just catching up and writing about stuff that was news four days earlier. I’ve got about three posts in various stages of completion, and as I sit writing this post on Sunday night, to be posted on Monday, Dylan is here in the office with me, sleeping. Before to long, I’ll “top him off” with a diaper change and a bottle before heading to bed myself, in hopes that he’ll sleep a little longer before it’s time for another bottle, etc. In the meantime, I’m sitting here trying to decide which of my unfinished posts is even worth finishing. All the while, I’m trying to keep from nodding off.

And it’s brought to a realization that kind of alluded to in an earlier post.
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Jon Swift has posted the best blog posts of 2007, from his blogroll. There are enough fantastic posts there to keep you reading until next year, including “The Queer Thing About School Shooters, Pt. 2″ from this blog. Check them out!

Before I got Jon’s invite to send in what I thought was my best blog post, I hadn’t really given the question much thought. After I picked one to send Jon for his post, I starting going through my 2007 archives. It was a little strange to step back and take a look at what I was writing about at the beginning of the year. I’d no idea I’d written so much, and pleased to find some of it I actually liked.

So, these are my favorites from the past year. I don’t know if they’re my “best of 2007″ or not, but at least some of them are my “personal best,” and represent the kind of writing I most enjoy doing. If you’ve been reading the blog this year, I invite you to share in the comments your favorite posts from this blog (or another, since I’m always looking for interesting reading) in the comments.
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