Electric Josh

TV
Even after reading about it in the Post, I have trouble believing that this event actually took place, and that the friggin president took part. Geez.
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Spam?
Someone called "lady2004@hotmail.com" just posted a comment to an entry on this site that's over six months old. The comment's text was meaningless, but the way it was posted creates a link (using common words) to a spamming service's web site. This is some pretty sneaky spam. (It was posted from a Malaysian ISP! I don't know anyone in Malaysia.) I've removed it.

I'm guessing that folks who run sites with lots of comments (and links) don't have the comments automatically emailed to them, which means that lady2004 and her ilk are free to use this trick to try to fool Google into ranking their spam site highly. Hopefully the Google folks are cleverer than that...
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Kid
There's nothing more heartbreaking than a crying baby, except when it's your own baby and there's nothing you can do but wait it out until she calms down enough to eat something, feel better and pass out. Holy crap. To calm your shaken host, we (shallowly) read from Chapter 16 of White Noise:

This was the day Wilder started crying at two in the afternoon. At six he was still crying, sitting on the kitchen floor and looking through the oven window, and we ate dinner quickly, moving around him or stepping over him to reach the stove and refrigerator. Babette watched him as she ate. She had a class to teach in sitting, standing and walking. It would start in an hour and a half. She looked at me in a drained and supplicating way. She'd spoken soothingly to him, hefted and caressed him, checked his teeth, given him a bath, examined him, tickled him, fed him, tried to get him to crawl into his vinyl play tunnel. Her old people would be waiting in the church basement.

It was rhythmic crying, a measured statement of short urgent pulses. At times it seemed he would break off into a whimper, an animal complaint, irregular and exhausted, but the rhythm held, the heightened beat, the washed pink sorrow in his face.

"We'll take him to the doctor," I said. "Then I'll drop you at the church."

"Would the doctor see a crying child? Besides, his doctor doesn't have hours now."

"What about your doctor?"

"I think he does. But a crying child, Jack. What can I say to the man? 'My child is crying.' "

"Is there a condition more basic?"

...

As I started the car I realized his crying had changed in pitch and quality. The rhythmic urgency had given way to a sustained, inarticulate and mournful sound. He was keening now. These were expressions of Mideastern lament, of an anguish so accessible that it rushes to overwhelm whatever immediately caused it. There was something permanent and soul-struck in this crying. It was a sound of inbred desolation.

...

I picked him up and set him against the steering wheel, facing me, his feet on my thighs. The huge lament continued, wave on wave. It was a sound so large and pure I could almost listen to it, try consciously to apprehend it, as one sets up a mental register in a concert hall or theater. He was not sniveling or blubbering. He was crying out, saying nameless things in a way that touched me with its depth and richness. This was an ancient dirge all the more impressive for its resolute monotony. Ululation. I held him upright with a hand under each arm. ... We looked at each other. Behind that dopey countenance, a complex intelligence operated. I held him with one hand, using the other to count his fingers inside the mittens, alound, in German. The inconsolable crying went on. I let it wash over me, like rain in sheets.

Except that your gentle narrator has been thinking more about SD's digestive tract, and less about death, than Don DeLillo probably was when he wrote that. Nevertheless, by this point she's soundly sleeping on her side, squeaking as newborns do. It's very cute.
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