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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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