Sophia’s baptism was on Sunday and since we had almost the whole of my family there, we decided to celebrate Isabella’s second birthday a week early. Add to it the fact that it was both Pentecost and Mother’s Day and we had a real party.

The selection of Pentecost/Mother’s Day was just a happy accident. We needed a Sunday that Melanie’s sister Theresa could fly up from Dallas to be the godmother and in which the majority of my family could be there. (My dad couldn’t come and Melanie’s family had been up for the birth and couldn’t come back again so quickly.)

We’d spent the previous few days cleaning and cooking. Melanie made a whole mess of great food, including mango salsa, pasta salad, and pulled-pork barbecue. Not to mention the cake for Isabella.

Everything went without a hitch, it was a beautiful day, and the nice weather encouraged the kids to spend most of their time running around outside.

Okay there may have been one hitch, but it was easily fixed: my pastor forgot about the baptism. When we arrived at the church especially early, I saw nothing had been set up. I know how prepared he usually is, so I went over to the rectory and when he opened the door, I asked him, “Are you ready for the baptism?” He got a shocked look and said, “Oh, is that today?” Not to worry. He’s been doing this long enough that he was able to get everything together in short order. Plus Melanie and I are so laid back, we don’t worry about everything being perfect.

In addition to Melanie’s sister being godmother, we asked my 15-year-old nephew to be godfather. I know it’s unusual, especially since he’s not yet confirmed, but Father made a special exception, knowing my nephew is a sober young man who takes his faith seriously. As evidence, he took a few days to think about it when we asked him to be godfather, just to be sure he was prepared for the responsibility.

Of course, I am my nephew’s godfather, so does that make me Sophia’s god-grandfather?

Isabella’s birthday party was fun too. She blew out her candle and opened much-too-generous presents and marveled at all these kids running around in her house, playing with her toys. She was generally fine with it most of the time, but you could tell a few times she was uneasy.

It was lots of fun and I wish we could have the whole family over more often. Maybe when we get a house we will.

I’ve been away from blogging for a few days and he may already be home, but I’d still like to send out my prayers and you for your prayers for Dale Price who’s having a bit of a health scare. Obviously, we include in our prayers his wife Heather and their kids. I’ve seen my dad have heart attacks and my brother too, and I’m paranoid about it, so kudos to Dale and Heather for taking no chances and going to the doctor at the first sign of trouble. Better to be “embarrassed” (although there’s no shame in it) than to ignore it.

They’re doing regular blood draws to check things; those keep coming back with good results. His spirits are good despite being on bedrest—I remember that from last year!

The kids and I saw him and they’re okay. Madeleine told him she’d rather he be in the hospital and get better than home sick, so she’s a smart girl. He encouraged us to go to dance class, even.

The cardiologist has said he expects Dale to get released by 5 PM Tuesday. Not a moment too soon.

On a related note: it’s a LOT easier for me to blog about it than talk about it, so if I don’t return your call, don’t take it personally. It’s a blogging disconnect, you know? These are just words I type on the screen. I completely forget that other people actually read them. People like my sister-in-law, my parents-in-law, other members of our homeschool support group, neighbors, friends…

God bless and Godspeed, Dale. We entrust you to the loving intercession of the Blessed Mother and St. Joseph.

Apparently there is a movement afoot of milk connoisseurs, people who like to live on the edge and who believe that pasteurization—the heating process that destroys all those nasty bacteria and germs—also destroys the flavor of milk. And so, despite the fact that it’s illegal in half the US states, there is still a brisk underground trade in the lactic hootch.

Harper’s Magazine looks at the trade in raw milk as well the over-the-top enforcement of laws against it.

In October 2006, Michigan officials destroyed a truckload of Richard Hebron’s unpasteurized dairy. The previous month, the Ohio Department of Agriculture shut down Carol Schmitmeyer’s farm for selling raw milk. Cincinnati cops also swooped in to stop Gary Oaks in March 2006 as he unloaded raw milk in the parking lot of a local church. When bewildered residents gathered around, an officer told them to step away from “the white liquid substance.”

I don’t feel strongly about the “right” to have and consume raw milk, but does law enforcement have to deploy the same tactics they use with drug smugglers and terrorists? It’s an effect of the militarization of police, I think.

One interesting aspect of the argument of the milk purists is that people who live on farms develop fewer autoimmune disorders than those who don’t and they believe this is because they are being exposed to bacteria that their bodies learn to fight off from an early age. Many microbiologists and immunologists have made similar arguments about First World urbanites living in super-clean, antiseptic environments weakening themselves in preparation for being laid low by diseases our ancestors would have shrugged off without notice.

For our part, Melanie and I have never been the type of parent who freaks out about our kids touching “unclean” surfaces. If food falls to the floor, we pick it up, wipe it off, and pop it in her mouth. (Obviously not in places like hospitals or high-traffic areas such as malls or restaurants.) And I will point out that Isabella has hardly been sick at all her entire life, perhaps a few days total of sniffles and raised temperatures, which is a far cry from the horror stories I hear from other parents. Is it because we aren’t afraid to expose her to the bacteria found in the wild? Maybe, maybe not.

So maybe there is something to this unpasteurization movement. For the moment, I’ll stick to the organic, BGH-free milk we drink now, mainly because the taste is so good. But if it’s better for us too, that’s even better.

[Catching up on some older items I’ve been meaning to blog.]

Harry Forbes catches the Boston Globe drumming up sources who will confirm the conclusions that reporters have already drawn.

Ever wonder how Globe reporters get in touch with the dodgy folks who often end up as sad sack poster children for Globe stories? For example last month, the Globe ran a “tough economy” story that featured a family who had moved to Maine and were suffering from high gas prices. But both mom and dad still commuted to work from Maine all the way to Massachusetts. I asked how does the Boston Globe always find “poster children” such as this? Here is one way. The Globe’s main web page solicits people to get in touch with reporters who are working on future stories.

Five of the six solicitations on the front page of the Globe’s site when he wrote the blog entry were looking for people who are suffering in hard economic times, although “suffering” may be a bit of a stretch since one story focused on people who couldn’t go to Disney World for vacation. Oh the humanity! Here’s another one: “As gas prices rise, the value of SUVs is dropping. We’re looking for SUV owners who’ve found the trade-in value of their SUV is less than expected.” In other words, the reporter has concluded that the high gas prices are negatively affecting the trade-in value of SUVs and are looking for people who will support that point of view.

The problem with this approach is that the people who are still going to Disney World or who are able to sell their SUVs for a good price are not going to respond to the request. They don’t fit the profile and thus the story will only reflect the points of view of those who do, even if they are the one in a hundred or a thousand for whom they do.

This is shoddy journalism.

Here’s yet another example of an article that confuses correlation with causation. The Associated Press released a story last week on a study that says that in locales with bans on smoking restaurants there are fewer teens who smoke. Most headlines said something to the effect of “Restaurant tobacco ban influences teen smoking.” [Emphasis added] Does it really? Not according to what I read in the article.

All the article shows is that two facts show up in many towns: smoking ban and fewer smoking teens. But nothing in the study, at least in what was printed, claimed that there was any evidence to show they were connected. That’s like saying that because my town has both a high church attendance rate and a high auto theft rate, that it proves that high church attendance causes more auto theft.

In fact, why couldn’t the reverse the be true? Couldn’t it be true that towns where there are fewer teens who smoke, which perhaps is evidence that parents and town leaders are doing a good job educating kids about the evils of smoking, are also towns more likely to pass smoking bans? Thus if no smoking ban was in place, the teens would still be getting vigilant oversight from authority.

After all, are kids hanging out in restaurants and bars so much that what happens in them influences their decision-making? I think not.

And in the end, this study doesn’t even tell us as much as it claims:

Siegel and his colleagues tracked 2,791 children between ages 12 and 17 who lived throughout Massachusetts. … Overall, about 9 percent became smokers — defined as smoking more than 100 cigarettes. In towns without bans or where smoking was restricted to a designated area, that rate was nearly 10 percent. But in places with tough bans prohibiting smoking in restaurants, just under 8 percent of the teens became smokers.

So the difference—based on a study of just 2,700 teens in Massachusetts—is just 2 percent. What’s the margin of error here?

If you wish to delve into the statistics, you can get the original study here. But in my layman’s reading of it, I don’t see any attempt to address why these two facts are connected other than wishing to construct ever more reasons to ban smoking.

To paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, who was himself quoting the Bhagavad Ghiti: “I am become death, destroyer of consumer electronics.” An exaggeration perhaps, but not my much.

As Melanie points out, I am tough on my gadgets. In the time that she has known me, I have left in my wake one broken videocamera, two still cameras, two iPods, a TiVo, along with keyboards and mice and other lesser products that I haven’t bothered to enumerate. The latest casualty was the Canon point-and-shoot camera that my in-laws kindly gave us for Christmas 2006 after I broke the display on our previous point-and-shoot. New cameras of comparable quality are not expensive—about $150 on Amazon.com—but with an impending move and my recent purchase of an iPod touch (to replace the dying iPod mini I gave to Melanie for her birthday 3 years ago and co-opted for my commute when my iPod starting dying last summer) we couldn’t justify even that.

Incidentally, the videocamera died during our wedding ceremony, reception, and honeymoon, rendering the footage unwatchable. And the TiVo, which was admittedly six years old, started rebooting on its own, messing up the recording schedules.

So on Wednesday I was taking a cute video of Isabella playing with bubbles in the kitchen sink when I turned away and lost control of it, dropping it onto the kitchen floor and breaking it so the lens would no longer move in and out. And with Sophia’s baptism this weekend, the timing couldn’t be worse.

Fortunately, my friend George, a professional photographer with more than 25 years experience, lent me a spare camera for the weekend. It’s such a nice camera, a Canon digital SLR, and I was able to take some great shots of Melanie, Isabella and Sophia this afternoon. Oh I wish I had one of these. But through the generosity of a friend, I do for the weekend. I promise him I will be extra careful.

But eventually I will have to select my next victim, er, camera. I’m buying the service plan next time.

It’s a bit of a commercial for Telstra, the Australian government communications monopoly, but it’s still good information on the cool mobile phone and Web 2.0 social networking plans that the World Youth Day organizers in Sydney have planned for this July.

I’ve always said that if I ever build my own home, it must have a secret passageway, like you see in old movies. I think it would lend an air of mystery and fun to the house, especially for kids. Now I’ve found just the company to do it: HiddenPassageway.com. For a price—a pretty penny too—they will build a sliding bookcase or spinning fireplace or whatever else you desire.

This is no slapdash fake door, but real working bookcases and cabinets and staircases and cabinets and more, built to extremely tight tolerance, even using the latest technology like biometric scanners and pinhole cameras. It’s so cool!

Go to the site (sorry for the auto-play music; I hate that) and click on “Media”. Then click on “Videos” to see demonstrations of some of their products at work, as well as how one of their hidden doors was used in a house in “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.”

I think what I want is similar to what you find in Salem’s famed House of Seven Gables—a secret passage with several entrances throughout the house and leading to secret room in the attic with a window seat and fun places to hang out and read and be private. Awesome.

With an obvious nod to the hilarious and popular blog Stuff White People Like, Jeff Miller, Ian Rutherford, and several others have started the equally hilarious Stuff Catholics Like.

Stuff White People Like is a satirical take on explaining the crazy things that people of European descent do and value. For example, recent entries have looked at the weird circumstances in which white people wear scarves—often not for warmth but for fashion; their propensity for New Balance shoes; rugby; free healthcare; and music piracy. It’s not that these are peculiarly “white” topics, but the entries explain how white folk—i.e. upper middle class Euro-Americans—put them to unusual use or approach them in a funny manner. What makes it funny is how it turns the normal attitude upside, turning the behavior of people in the minority into the norm by which the behavior of the majority is judged.

Anyway, Stuff Catholics Like also takes a satirical and light-hearted look at all things Catholic. Some entries extol the things that Catholics love from a timeless perspective, while others examine those peculiar modern inventions that drive some of us crazy. So for example, there are entries on holy water, babies, and rosaries, as well as non-Catholics wearing Catholic stuff (think the recent sighting of Clinton wearing a “Brazilian Mary bracelet”), clapping in church, and felt banners.

While it is fun—and it is important that those of you without a sense of humor, and you know who you are, should not go to the blog—it is also an opportunity to learn a thing or two. So go there, and enjoy it, and when your non-Catholic relatives, friends, and co-workers ask you “Why do Catholics…?” you’ll have a place to send them to have a laugh and understand.

Leon Suprenant looks at an article that claims that Catholics prefer Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. The author of the piece he’s dissecting is Melidna Henneberger, and she says that while it would seem that Catholic should prefer Obama—a dubious claim in itself— Hillary is getting the majority of the “white Catholic” vote. As Leon points out, since Clinton is winning the white vote by a landslide anyway, this is hardly revelatory.

Looking even deeper, Leon discovers that the definition of “Catholic” is pretty muddy, especially since Henneberger calls out “devout Catholics” in her figures, naming them as those who attend Mass weekly. That’s not a “devout” Catholic; that’s simply being Catholic.

What we have in this campaign season is an attempt to “win back” the Catholic vote from the Republicans. After all, the GOP has done little lately to endear itself to pro-life, morally conservative Catholics, i.e. those who believe, accept, and put into practice the Church’s teachings in their lives. But is the Democrat Party a serious alternative? Not so long as it tries to advance every moral evil to come along as being the God-given right of those who crave it.

I really do wish the Democrats offered a real alternative, if only to keep the Republicans honest, but as Mark Shea says, our choice is between the “Evil Party” and the “Stupid Party.” Whee!

I wish I could vote “none of the above” and we could all start with a clean slate next November.

An inspiring story of good sportsmanship by two college women’s softball teams competing for a championship.

What might have been. After the Second World War, the country went on a highway-building binge, and Massachusetts was part of that craze. During that time, such major highways as Routes 128, 95, and 93, the Southeast Expressway and the Central Atery were all either expanded to major highway status or built from scratch. Yet the plans were even more ambitious than eventually realized, as transportation czars drew up plans for an extensive highway network that would have included an Inner Belt Expressway, that would have been part of I-95 and the never-built I-695.

In 1948, the Massachusetts Department of Public Works (MassDPW), led by commissioner William F. Callahan, proposed a controlled-access, multi-lane loop route to connect downtown Boston with other radial expressways. By serving crosstown traffic, the “Belt Route” was to relieve a large portion of the 15,000 through trips on Boston’s antiquated street network.

Forming a 7.3-mile-loop around the southern, western and northern edge of downtown Boston, the route of the Inner Belt Expressway was described in the Master Highway Plan for the Boston Metropolitan Area as follows:

The selected route begins at the interchange between the Southeast and Southwest expressways near Massachusetts Avenue and Southampton Street, and extends in a westerly direction via Roxbury Crossing to connect with Huntington Avenue, Jamaica Way and Brookline Avenue. From this point, it extends in a northerly direction to cross Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue paralleling the Cottage Farm (Boston University) Bridge across the Charles River to connect with the Western Expressway (early I-90 alignment). From this point, the Belt Route passes through Cambridge in a northeasterly direction to Somerville, making an interchange connecting with the Northwest Expressway (unbuilt US 3-MA 2) in the vicinity of Washington Street. From this interchange, it travels in an easterly direction paralleling the Boston and Maine Railroad, crossing its main yards to an elevated interchange just west of City Square, where it connects with the Northeast Expressway (US 1).

Interchanges were to be constructed at the following locations:

• Southeast Expressway (I-93) / Southwest Expressway (unbuilt I-95), Boston
• Washington Street, Boston
• Columbus Avenue, Boston
• Brookline Avenue, Boston
• Worcester Turnpike (MA 9), Brookline
• Beacon Street, Boston
• Commonwealth Avenue, Boston
• Soldiers Field Road, Boston
• Western Expressway (early I-90 alignment), Cambridge
• Massachusetts Avenue (MA 2A), Cambridge
• Northwest Expressway (unbuilt US 3-MA 2), Cambridge
• Northern Artery / Medford Boston, Somerville
• Northeast Expressway (US 1), Somerville

The Inner Belt Expressway was to continue south along the route of the elevated Central Artery, providing connections to downtown Boston and Logan Airport. Note that there was to be no direct connection to the Northern Expressway (I-93), due to its close location between the Northwest and Northeast expressways. (Engineers sought adequate spacing of access points to controlled-access routes.)

You can get a better idea of the unbuilt portions from this map:

The portions in red were never built or remained as smaller city and state roads and routes. The dotted lines represent major highways planned but never built. You can also see the ring road. Remnants of the unrealized portions of this grand plan still exist.

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This interchange at the intersection of I-95 and I-93/Rte 128 in Canton would have been just one waypoint on the way into the city until construction was halted. Now it’s half of a working clovercleaf, while the other half lies fallow, melting back into the forest from which it had been carved fifty years ago.

How would the city’s character have been different had all these roads been built? Would some neighborhoods thus cut off from the downtown have withered or thrived? How would the economy and the rise of the suburb been affected? Would more business have moved to the suburbs or would they have stayed in the city? Would we have been even more of a car culture, a la Southern California, or would the commuter train and subway system have remained? Interesting to speculate.

What’s also interesting speculation is whether the era of such major highways, at least in the densely packed Northeast, are forever part of history, with our major road projects only being envisioned to repair and rebuild what’s in place.

Catholic musician John Michael Talbot and his community of lay monastics suffered a great loss this week:

The home of The Brothers and Sisters of Charity founded by Dove Award-winning musician John Michael Talbot suffered a swift and vicious fire close to midnight on April 29. There was no loss of life, although members of the community, including Talbot, are suffering from the effects of smoke inhalation.

The fire began in the chapel and spread to the community’s Common Center which housed the kitchen, offices, library, classrooms and dining space. All are a total loss. It is unknown how the fire started, but has been declared “no fault” by the fire inspector, says Talbot. Various awards melted in the heat or were burned along with the community archives, inventory and tour equipment. Living areas, studio and instruments were unharmed.

Talbot said that he was up late recording and heard some odd popping noises before noticing a glow in the windows of his hermitage home facing the chapel. He and his wife, Viola, ran to the chapel and found the hoses insufficient to fight the fire, already reaching high into the sky. Talbot said he pounded and screamed at the doors of the other hermitages. Some in the community went into the fire in an attempt to save valuables. Talbot said the smoke was thick and blinding and that all he could see was “black.” When it became clear that the battle was lost, the brothers, sisters and families of the community watched the buildings burn while waiting for the fire department. Talbot says that the fire department put all of their resources into aggressively fighting the fire, but could not save the building. The wood construction contributed to the speed of the fire which burned the chapel to the ground in an hour.

At the wish of the community, Talbot’s Canadian Tour will continue as planned beginning in Great Falls, Montana with a number of stops in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Tour dates and information may be found at his website, http://www.johnmichaeltalbot.com. Founder, Spiritual Father and General Minister of the Brothers and Sisters of Charity since 1980, Talbot credits monastic life in the community as key for the Christian worship songs he writes and records.

While the damage is covered by insurance, donations are helping bridge the financial gap as the community awaits, reorganizes and prepares to rebuild, “this time in stone,” says Talbot. Little Portion Hermitage is located in Berryville, in the Ozark Mountains in Northwest Arkansas. For more information about the community, see http://www.littleportion.org .

[From a Christian Newswire press release]

I really admire the folks at 37signals, the Web 2.0 company that you could argue is the original Web 2.0 company and purveyors of some very fine online software, including Basecamp, which I used to coordinate the production of Catholic World Report when I was managing editor and then editor.

One of the reasons I admire them is because of their enlightened, employee-friendly policies. For instance, they’ve instituted a standard four-day workweek because it’s better for everyone and people are more productive. They subsidize not just employee education, but also employee hobbies because they make the employees better people and thus better employees. And, in contrast to many small Internet companies, they see the value in hiring employees with families.

This particular employee points out that Web startups traditionally favor single twentysomethings who will work untold hours with little complaint and the ephemeral promise of venture-capital millions, but that such devotion ends up being a crutch for management to shovel hour after hour of productivity after badly conceived ideas and ill-considered approaches until they uncover that one shining nugget.

That’s why I like working with the family man or woman. They come in as a cold bath of reality. When people have other obligations outside of work that they actually care more about than your probably-not-so-world-changing idea, the crutches are not available as an easy way out, and you’ll have to walk by the power of your good ideas and execution or you’ll fall fast and early. That’s a good thing!

From the experience I’ve had working with family people, I’ve found an amazing ability to get stuff done when the objectives are reasonably clear, the work appears to have meaning, and if it can be done within the scope of what should constitute a work week. When there are real constraints on your time, like you have to pickup the kids or make them dinner or put them to bed, it appears to bring a serenity of focus to the specific hours dedicated to work.

This is what companies need, startups or not. They need constraints and especially constraints on how often you can play the hero card to Get This Very Important Project Done. Most projects are just not that important and most things just shouldn’t be done anyway, despite how good of an idea you feel it is in the heat of the moment.

In most companies what you need is a good mix of mature, older workers with outside responsibilities that ground them, maybe even make them conservative and cautious, combined with young, fire-in-the-belly, go-getters willing to work long hours to make their mark in the world. Each group tempers the weaknesses of the other with their own strengths and become a powerful tool for whatever your company or organization is doing. Something to think about.

Economist Thomas Sowell has some difficult words for those who decry the rising cost of college. Rather than offer a blanket criticism of “greedy” colleges or issue a challenge for Congress to increase grants and funding for student loans, he suggests that maybe fewer people should be going to college. He suggests that sending kids to colleges, especially when you use taxpayer funds to do it, shifts the burden of paying for that college onto the whole of society, diverting limited resources.

How many people would go to college if they had to pay the real cost of all the resources taken from other parts of the economy? Probably a lot fewer people.

Moreover, when paying their own money, there would probably not be nearly as many people parting with hard cash to study feel-good subjects with rap sessions instead of serious study.

There would probably be fewer people lingering on campus for the social scene or as a refuge from adult responsibilities in the real world.

Some may accuse Sowell of elitism, but I think he’s just anti-dilettantism; opposed to the frivolous waste of scarce resources on kids who spend four years partying, copulating, protesting, and taking the equivalent of “basket-weaving” classes. I agree with him.

Job application creep has pushed companies to require bachelor’s degrees for work that a skilled— as in properly educated — high school graduate could do. I’ve mentioned before that our local state college offers a degree in pool management.I’m not kidding. Somebody is getting soaked (pun intended) and among them are the students and their parents paying for this, as well as the Massachusetts taxpayers.

Note: Sowell continues his analysis in Part II and Part III. In Part III, he addresses the argument that because college costs so much we need government subsidies by pointing out that colleges can charge so much because they know the government will subsidize it. It’s a vicious circle.