A little disturbing, even from a 4 year old.

Ryan and Ethan were eating a snack this afternoon and I stepped into the other room for something. When I came back into the kitchen there was an unfortunate scent floating about. You know the one I am referring to.

"Smells like someone pooped his pants," I said as I sat down.

Ryan looks at me, wide eyed with surprise. "Wasn't me! I didn't do it. It was probably Ethan!"

"I know who is was, Ryan," I said, picking up Ethan. "No need to think that I am blaming you for this olfactory offense."

He calmed down a bit and looked distinctly relieved. "Oh, good. Well, just so you know, it could have been me. I don't wipe well and sometimes it gets all crusty."

Did you know this about elves?

Just the other day we were talking about what he wanted for Christmas. After he had completed his list, he asked me what I wanted from Santa. I told him that I wanted a 52" LCD or Plasma TV. He thought about it for a second and then said, "It is good that you want that, but there is just one slight problem."

This is his new favorite phrase, "one slight problem", so I pressed him on it. "Oh? What is that problem?"

"The Elves don't know how to make cords."

"Really? So they can make the TV, but they can't make the cords that plug into everything?"

"Right. So it looks like you won't be getting your TV this year."

Nuts. I was really counting on those elves to come through for me this year.

I May or May Not Spy

Since the beginning of the year, Jen and I have been working at the same school. This gives us a chance to ride into work with the boys 2 days a week. The rides in the morning are normally not terribly eventful as all of us are barely awake, and the only excitement comes when Mr. Sun comes out from behind the clouds and blinds the driver causing unknown damage to his/her retinas and forcing the rest of the family to scream “Watch the CAR! OHMIGOD You almost hit that car!” This normally doesn’t happen, but when it does, we are wired for a little while, let me tell you.

Anyway, while the trips in the morning are relatively boring, the trips home can be a little more happening. We sometimes play a game called “I Spy” in which the instigator, normally Ryan, starts off by saying “I spy with my monkey eye, something that is…” followed by a descriptor. This descriptor can be anything – color, size, location – and most often they are fairly simple. For example, he might say “I spy with my monkey eye something that is white,” and we have to guess that it is the white stripe on the road. On the other hand, sometimes he tells us that he is going to come up with something really hard in which case what he is spying is normally a single bird in a flock a thousand strong, or an individual blade of grass.

The other night he outdid even himself. He started off with his typical “This one is going to be tough,” and stated that he spied something white. We began guessing.

“Is it the line on the road,” I asked.

“Nope,” he replied, smiling.

“Is it the white car over there,” Jen asked pointing.

“Nope.”

“Is it the bird way over there?”

“Nope. Keep guessing!”

And so we did. After about five minutes of the “Is it the…” followed by laughter and “Nope!” I figure that he is just messing with us and I decided on a different tack.

“Is it a squid?”

He paused for a moment. “Huh? A squid? No…not a squid.”

“How about an albino squirrel?”

“What’s albino mean?”

“It is a genetic mutation that causes animals to be all white. Never mind.” Whoops. I forget that he is only 4 sometimes. “Is it a jellyfish?”

“No jellyfish in this game.”

“Perhaps a white whale?” (Thar she blows!)

“No, dad,” Ryan said with all the contempt a 4 year old could muster. “Nothing from the sea and no weird all-white other animals either.”

Well that kinda killed all of my other guesses. Surely he couldn’t really mean what he just said about things from the sea. I pressed on. “Is it a white starfish?”

I heard a tiny sigh from the backseat. “Yes. It is a white starfish. You win.”

“Yea!” I exclaim, relishing the victory. “But wait. Where do you see a white starfish?”

“I don’t see one. It is imaginary.”

“But this game is supposed to be ‘I Spy’, not ‘I Imagine’,” I said.

“I know, but you were never going to guess my thing anyway.”

“We might have. Give your parents some credit. Tell me your thing and we’ll see if mom and I would have ever guessed it.”

“That flake of snow on the sign back there.”

As it turns out, he was right. We never would have guessed that.

Today is Barack Obama day!

Actually, November 4th was Barack Obama day according to my son Ryan. He went around telling everyone with ears to hear him that the election was going to be won by Barack Obama because he is "awesome" and "not John McCain". I would like to stress the fact that while his mother and I are flaming liberals and were totally behind Obama from the start, we rarely discussed politics when the kids were around. Not because we were trying to hide anything from them, but because any time we try and talk about something other than Ethan's dinner, Ryans trains, Ryan's current level of dissatisfaction with the proximity of his younger brother to said trains, or candy, we get interrupted about every 2.4 seconds with one or the other of the boys interjecting "Mom! Dad!" or "Eeegh! Ake!" depending on the age and vocabulary of the one doing the interrupting. This makes it all the more surprising that Ryan became a huge fan of our president-elect.

I was first made aware of his love for Obama when we accidentally found ourselves at a "NObama" rally held outside the local Barnes and Nobel store. As we drove up to the parking lot of the bookstore, I noticed a bus plastered with pictures of McCain and Palin and a few hundred people surrounding it. A womans voice was clearly audible even from where we parked, and I thought it sounded like the woman herself, Sarah Palin. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to go hear her speak, so I grabbed Ethan in my arms and the three Doyle boys set out to attend our first political rally as a family.

About 50 yards from the stage, the speaker said something, I forget what, that made it clear that it was not actually Sarah Palin speaking. (In hindsight it is obvious that there is no way in hell she would have been out in a parking lot in Illinois that close to the election, but the person speaking really sounded like her.) I decided that if we weren't going to hear Palin speak that we would just head into the bookstore as we had planned. On the way back to the store, Ryan asked some questions.

"What were those people doing there, Dad?"

"They were having a political rally," I said.

Ever the curious one, he asked, "What is a rally?"

"A rally is when people who all believe the same thing get together and cheer each other on."

"Like at the Fire games?" Thats my boy...way to bring it back to soccer!

"Yep, except at this rally the people are not cheering for a team, they are cheering against a person."

A confused look crossed his face. "Who are they cheering against?"

"They don't like Barack Obama and would rather see John McCain elected president. They are cheering against Obama and the things he wants to do as president."

And then, with no prompting whatsoever, he says, "Well that's stupid. Barack Obama is going to win. He is totally awesome."

And with that my son made his first correct political prediction, and election day (and each subsequent day) became "Barack Obama Day".

Let's just hope that Ryan is correct about Obama being "awesome" as well.

The littlest Doyle speaks!

Finally, the littlest Doyle does something worth writing about. After a little over a year of basically just eating, pooping, and sleeping, he is now starting to walk and talk a bit. He has been crawling for quite a while and, believe me, while this starts out being kinda cool it quickly loses its luster when he gets it into his little laser-focused brain that he wants to knock over all the DVD’s, eat his brother’s crayons, or play in the toilet. No amount of picking him up and moving him to another part of the room deters him from his mission. Typically, as soon as you put him down he laughs and turns immediately to head back to continue where he left off. I half expect him to flip me the bird as he crawls away.

Recently he started heading right for the stairs whenever he was given the opportunity. He loved the thrill of the chase, apparently, because he would begin by playing quietly until we became distracted by something else. As soon as our back were turned, he would bolt for the stairs, laughing his little head off and crawling as far up them as he could in the time it would take Jen or I to catch him. Having a four year old in the house makes for fairly distracted parents, so he got plenty of practice. It got to the point where he could make almost to the top of the stairs before we could catch him. The little sucker is quick.

Now he is talking a bit and says things like “Dada”, “Mama”, “Non-non”, and “peaches”. These are all great, and it is wonderful to hear “DADA!” when I come home, but my favorite word of his is “Ake!”

He was sitting in his seat after dinner and Jen and Ryan were having a little cake for dessert. Jen, being a good mom, didn’t want her littlest son to miss out on the experience of chocolate cake, so she gave him a little forkful of the stuff. He seemed to dig it, because after finishing his little bite, he began pounding on the table with his little fists, shouting “Ake! Ake!” and pointing at the rest of the piece on Ryan’s plate.

Thankfully he was satisfied with a few more bites from Jen's piece because, as you are all probably aware, 4 year olds do not share cake well.

I was right!

I was chatting with my brother the other day when the topic of conversation switched, as it inevitably does, to sports. We were both bemoaning the terrible status of our schools respective football teams, both of which are having a difficult time this season. My school is having such a tough time that we joked about the idea that the soccer team has scored more goals this season than the football team has points. I even went so far as to say that I thought that this was actually the case, but I’d have to look into it.

I did, and unfortunately I was right. The football team has scored a total of 24 points this season after 5 games, while the soccer team has scored 27 goals in 15 games.

I was right, and I rule.

It begins...

As it turns out, there are a lot of words in the French language. And, as you may or may not be aware, they are often different from the words in English, which makes the learning process that much more difficult. If other languages would simply use the same words with a slightly different accent, learning another language would be so much simpler. Plus, it would certainly cut down on the misunderstandings that crop up from time to time in international relations.

I have spent some time with several books, podcasts, and websites in my attempt to learn French, and each of these things is helpful in its own way. For some reason though, the thing that works the best for me is listening to music. Maybe it is the beat in the background, the voice of the singer, or the fact that music tends to get lodged in my brain and won’t go away for days at a time so I end up with phrases repeating over and over again until I forget it, replace it with a new phrase, or go gradually insane. I can’t tell you how many times I have had “Hot Potato” by the damn Wiggles, the theme song for Thomas the Tank Engine, or something by Laurie Berkner running through my head all the live long day. Thankfully Ryan is getting away from “kids” music and moving into other genres.

As I mentioned in previous posts, he has been groomed to enjoy Metallica (“Enter Sandman” is still one of his favorite requests), and he, with the help of his dad, is now a fan of French pop music (although to be more accurate, he is a fan of French pop music circa 2001, with a few newer tunes thrown in). His personal favorite (and for the time being mine as well) is one called “Mademoiselle Juliette” by Alizee. You can catch him singing it from time to time. It's adorable.

We often have dance parties in the basement in which we play music loudly and “dance” around, (basically jumping and running and flopping on the couch), while “singing” at the top of our lungs. I know the words to the song because I have looked them up and translated them for practice, but he has no real idea what he is saying so it comes out something like this:

“MADEMOISELLE JULIETTE-AH, la, la la la TÊTE-AH, la, la, la, la, la, something - CAPULET!”

All things considered, this isn’t bad for a 4 year old. He has the rhythm of the song and he apparently can hear the main emphasis words, so I’d say he is doing fairly well. With Uncle Justin speaking Spanish with him and dad attempting French around him, he might well turn out to understand a little of both languages, which would be fairly cool.

The other day we were hanging out during his resting time (i.e. naptime on days when he simply WON’T nap) watching The Incredibles and Toy Story videos on the Disney site when Ryan asked to hear his favorite song. Since we were in a video state of mind, I asked if he would rather watch the video that goes along with it and he readily agreed. So we went to a website with music videos on it and in a few moments we were watching. He sang along and enjoyed it, asking questions about what the boy is doing, what she said, and why she didn’t like the girl in black. When it was over, he asked if there were more music videos he could see.

So I made a deal with him in which we would put the videos on the TV while we played baseball. It wasn’t terribly difficult to get him to agree to this since both were things he wanted to do, and I set up a little queue to play a few videos and we found his squishy ball and bat.

He wanted to be the pitcher first and I totally cranked his first offering into the far wall. I am unbelievably good at basement baseball when he pitches the ball exactly where my bat happens to be. He glanced at the TV for a few seconds and tossed the ball again. The next pitch didn’t go as well, and I hit the ball off the end of the bat causing it to spin erratically off and hit the TV. My boy has a different feeling regarding my abilities. “You are terrible at this, Dad,” he said.

He pitched it again and I hit this one off the top of the bat which gave the ball a little spin. This caused it to whiz toward the ceiling where it ricocheted off an exposed beam and smacked into a picture frame on the wall. The picture frame wobbled for a second and then righted itself without falling off the shelf. The ball then fell through the net of his basketball hoop and came to rest right at his feet. Surprised at what just happened, I looked at Ryan and said, “Wow! That was rather exotic, don’t you think?”

He looked at me with confusion all over his face. “Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“What does ‘exotic’ mean?”

Nuts. While I feel like I have a decent vocabulary, I am not often very good at actually defining words. I gave it a shot anyway. “Well, it means different or unusual,” I said.

“Oh. Like when Ethan poops and it gets out of his diaper and into his pants. That is exotic?”

“No, that’s gross," I said, making a face. "But it’s a start. Most of the time ‘exotic’ is used to refer to something that is out of the ordinary. Often we use it to mean far away, or interesting, or something that we haven’t really had much experience with.”

“Like the island where Dash runs on water in the Incredibles! It’s far away and very pretty.” Everything comes back to the Incredibles.

“Yeah. Just like the island in the Incredibles.”

He smiled. “Dad?” he said, eyes moving between me and the TV.

“Yep?”

He pointed at the TV which is still showing Alizee music videos. “She’s exotic.”

There wasn’t much to say after that.

"Will their skin come back on?"

This summer has been a bear. Lots of things to do and such a short time to accomplish any of them. You'd think that with both Jen and I working in schools and thus getting almost three months off during the summer that we could easily make a list of things to do and knock them off one by one. You could think that, but if you did it would be evidence that you clearly don't know who we are and how ridiculously good we are at procrastinating. For example, I have been putting off getting my brother David a college graduation present for about 11 years now.

One of the things that we have had on our list since late May is to take a family trip to the Field Museum in Chicago so Ryan could see the dinosaurs. We read a lot of books, and many of them have dinosaurs as the main characters. With all the counting, playing, chasing other dinosaurs, and learning their alphabet, the dinosaurs in his books lead very active lives. They also, without exception, all have skin. Muscles, bones, blood, and other connective tissues are assumed, but they all have skin.

He is very interested in animals and people that have skin. He is also very interested in what happens to the skin of the people and animals that shuffle off this mortal coil. We can be having a conversation about anything, and this subject will almost invariably crop up.

"Dad," he says.

"Yep," I respond.

"Why does Dash run so fast?" Dash is from the movie "The Incredibles" and is his new favorite person in the whole world. He talks about him and his movie almost nonstop.

"Well, Dash is a superhero, so he has powers that normal people don't have."

"Oh. Can I be a superhero?"

"No, not in real life. You can pretend to be a superhero if you like, though."

"Ok. Watch how fast I can run!" With this, he takes off around the living room making "VROOOM!" noises and running into things like chairs, his little brother Ethan, and the occasional wall.

"That is really fast," I exclaim. "Now, say sorry to your brother."

"Are you sure I'm not a superhero?"

"Yep. Pretty sure."

"Your dad died," he says, tactfully switching the subject.

Thankfully this is not news to me, as he has been dead for a few years now. "Yep. He did."

"His skin will come off and he will get all hard," says the four year old medical examiner. Apparently this is what you get when you make the mistake of answering a few questions truthfully. A few months ago he learned that the cat which lives at Nonnie's house was probably going to die soon, so he asked Jen and I a few questions about that. In order to answer his questions, we told him about the concepts of decomposition, rigor mortis, other facts of death which went into the little cement mixer that is his 4 year old brain and came out "skin off/hard body". Leave it to a little boy to break things down to their bare essence.

"This is true," I told him. I try not to elaborate or encourage more questions when he talks like this. Not yet, anyway.

"Lets go play soccer," he says, changing the subject yet again.

"Yes. Let's."

So on the way to the museum our little interrogator starts in with the questions about dinosaurs. "Are they all dead? Do they have skin? Why did they die? How old are they? Was the meteor that killed them alive? I'm four years old. Are they really 200 million years old? I'm not 200 million years old. Your dad is dead. Am I 200 million years old? How old is Ethan in millions of years? Who is bigger, me or a dinosaur? Why am I smaller than a dinosaur? Can a dinosaur run faster than Dash? Will their skin come back on?..." and so on. Never a dull moment in the car with that little one.

We cruised through the museum, eventually hitting the "Evolving Planet" exhibit where the dinosaurs are kept. He is too little to be really interested in the really cool stuff, like transitional fossils of tetrapod evolution, or the entire room dedicated to the evolution of humans and other hominids, but he did dig the large dinosaurs. He also loved the giant ground sloth and the other large mammals, and was even able to point out a red eyed tree frog and a macaw in their amazing picture gallery at the end of the exhibit. Overall, he seemed to get a kick out of the entire place which is exactly what we wanted to hear. Learning should be fun, and it appears that for him, at least for now and in this place, it was.

Now, if Jen and I would only learn to stop procrastinating we might be able to get to the zoo and Botanic Gardens in the few weeks we have left.

J'apprends le Français

Since my foray a few weeks ago into the world of pop culture as presented by France, I have found myself more and more enamored with the French language. The sounds, phrases, and accent of French have totally captivated me. Even when you are saying something completely banal like "I am doing fine, thanks," the language is beautiful, and I decided that I would like to be able to speak and understand it.



I do this from time to time. By "this" I mean take on projects that are completely useless to me. When am I ever going to need to speak French? I live in the Chicago area, for crying out loud - it is more likely that I will need to know how to say "please put me down - I don't like you that way" in Klingon. However, with drive times that reach into the 2 hour mark on some days due to my multiple teaching jobs, I have some free time in the car that needs filling, so why not learn a new language? I already speak spanish well enough to hold parent teacher conferences in that language if necessary, although I do have to refrain from throwing the words "pinche" ("fucking", as in "la pinche burro me golpeó con el pie en mi pinche cabeza" - "the fucking donkey kicked me in my fucking head") and "guey" (which translates into many things, depending on who is saying it and to whom it is being said, but most of them are not polite) into the conversation. (I learned much of what I know from students and players on my soccer teams.) I want a new language.



So I downloaded some podcasts from "Coffee Break French" to start the process. These podcasts are about 20 minutes in length - the length of a coffee break, hence the name - and are hosted by Mark (the teacher) and Anna (the student). In each podcast they pick a topic, like "greetings", and teach you words and phrases that fall under that heading. Obviously, the "greetings" podcast covered things like "Good morning", "How are you?", and "I'm fine, thanks," along with a variety of other things including "good-bye". There are two things I love about this podcast. First, Mark spends quite a bit of time making sure Anna is pronouncing words correctly, which is very helpful to a newbie like me. Second, they both are from Scotland, so I get to brush up on my Scottish accent while I learn French. I have been pleasantly surprised by how much I have been able to pick up in the 2 weeks since I started listening. I can now have the following conversation:

"Bonjour. ça va?"

"Je suis en forme. Et tu?"

"Ca va bien, merci. Je m'appelle Jed. Comment
t'appelle-tu?

"Je m'appelle Bob. Qu'est-ce que tu faites dans la vie?"

"Je suis professeur de biology."

I can keep going from there, asking where they are from, where they live now, etc., but after a few more sentences I have to throw in something like "Le singe est sur la branche. C'est tout que je sais," which translates to " The monkey is on the branch. That is all I know." I suppose I could also follow it up with the French equivalent of "Well, see ya later!", but I don't think lines from the movie "Dumb and Dumber" translate properly.

Anyway, I have found myself totally digging the process of learning a language again. I forgot how much fun it can be to go from having no clue what is going on to suddenly having a tiny clue. A REALLY tiny clue. I don't claim to be able to speak, read, or write with anything near that of a first year french student, much less fluency, but I am starting the process. Perhaps I'll keep going, or perhaps I'll drop this new hobby like it was something that gets dropped quickly - a bag of flaming dog poo, for example, or an angry cat that hasn't been declawed. If the next podcasts continue to be as entertaining and helpful as the first 10, I'm sure I'll have no problem continuing.

Wow, that's a lot of blood.

It pays to be healthy. I know from experience that carrying around a few extra (20 or so) pounds can suck the energy out of you faster than a fat man can suck down a triple thick milkshake from McDonalds. I have been running fairly regularly for about 2 years now and, in an attempt to maintain some sort of interest in an activity that has become, for me, something comparable to waterboarding, I have changed things up a bit. I no longer run on the road since that was WAY too time consuming and rather painful at times. To find scenery that I have not seen a million times already required longer and longer runs which, unless you are able to speed up at the same time that increase distance, take more and more time. Now I bike up to my local Cardinal Fitness and spend about 15 minutes or so on the treadmill trying to go faster and faster until eventually I break the world record for the mile. Right now, if I push it, I am at about 7 minutes per mile so I don't think the world record is going to need rewriting for some time to come. This seems to have done the trick as I am now much more interested in keeping in shape than I have ever been, mostly because I can go in, knock out 2 miles or so, and then move on to the elliptical machine for a while where I can watch old episodes of Family Guy or my accumulated video podcasts of "The Onion News Network."

Jen, my wife, recently decided that she wanted to work our more regularly, and since we have two young sons we have been alternating who goes to exercise and who stays home with the little ones. The whole workout process can take up to 12 hours a day if we are not careful. Then one day she had a brilliant idea: bring the boys to the playplace at the gym so we could work out together! Surprisingly, our oldest son, Ryan, didn't have a problem with this despite the fact that when he was young he would routinely scream as though he were being eaten by tigers the minute we tried to leave him in any kind of daycare situation. Our youngest son, Ethan, also had no problems with this idea. He loved being in the playroom with his older brother and all the new toys and gizmos to which 10 month-olds are attracted. We were able to have a nice workout without incident, and even decided that we would buy a card that would allow us to bring these two little princes to the playroom whenever we came to work out.

The next time Jen brought them in was a different story, however. Ryan was still fine with it, but Ethan hadn't napped well in the morning and so was a little more on the cranky side than the last time he came in. He cried, much the way his brother had years before, like he had been stung by jellyfish. Mean ones. Lots of them. Jen had to cut her workout short and take the two boys home and wait for me to return from school before she could go back.

We tried this process again last Saturday afternoon. Again, Ryan was fine and again, Ethan cried. To ensure that at least Jen was able to complete a work out, I volunteered to take the boys to the local park to play for 40 minutes or so, vowing to return to pick her up when she was finished. So off we went, the Doyle boys, to what we call the wooden park.

This park is an amazing place. It has the typical park fare - swings, sandbox and slides - but it also has baby swings for little Ethan and what appears from outside the park to be a castle made of wood. In this castle there are small passageways for little people that wind and turn every which way. These passages often lead to dead ends but just as often they end at a staircase or ladder which will take you up a level. There are several levels to be explored in this castle and at the highest level, or battlements, the kids have access to the entire top of the structure which contains 3 different slides and several poles which can be used to slide down safely or, if we are talking about little boys playing, unsafely to the ground. There are numerous ways to have fun and just as many ways to get hurt while playing at this park. Ryan loves it and so do I.

We played on the baby swings for a while to calm Ethan down a bit, and once we had accomplished that task, Ryan set out to patrol the castle. He made it to the top with no problems and even struck up one of those 5 minute best-friendships that are so common a this age. The new BFF's were two slightly older boys who looked to be about 6. They were playing tag and invited Ryan to be part of the game. He was more than happy to play the part of the tagger due to the fact that he has seen "The Incredibles" about 700 times in the past week and is now convinced that he can run as fast as one of the little superheroes from the movie, Dash. Watching the boys take off on their initial runs I was surprised at how fast he actually was. Clearly we are not in the superhero speed range, but for a 4 year old he is fairly spry. The older boys even commented on his speed as well which made Ryan all the more likely to throw caution to the wind and put all his energy into moving faster.

After a few laps around the park almost being caught by my boy, the older kids decided that they needed a new tactic. Being slightly older made them slightly smarter, which allowed them to work out the fact that if they cruised into the castle passageways, Ryan's speed wouldn't trouble them so much. That little tactic worked like a charm, and Ryan immediately fell behind in the chase. He would get halfway up the ladders inside and would look down to see the two older boys running away. With an audible sound of disgust, he'd climb back down and begin the chase again only to have the other boys employ the same passages to evade him. This lasted for a few minutes with everyone enjoying themselves when Ryan ran around the back of the castle where I couldn't see him. He was only behind there for a few seconds when I heard a THUD followed loud screams.

I came down from my perch with Ethan in my arms and made my way to where Ryan was. One of the little boys who had been playing with Ryan came out from the passages and said to me, nonchalantly, "Wow, that's a lot of blood." Ryan came out next holding his mouth and face which was, and I must give the other little boy credit here, covered with a lot of blood. I grabbed his hand and quickly took him to the car where we used the last of Ethan's baby wipes to clean up most of the blood from his face and clothes. The two boys brought a bottle of water for us to use to help clean up and said that they hoped he'd be ok, which was actually really nice to hear. He got blood all over his shirt and his Manchester United shorts, so he wasn't thrilled with that, but by the time we got back to Cardinal, he had stopped bleeding.

Jen had to cut her workout short because Ryan kept asking for his mom, but she was more than happy to do it, not because it got her off the treadmill, but because she is a great mom and does a wonderful job of taking care of her little boys. Eventually we will figure out a work-out schedule that doesn't involve crying or bleeding children, but until that day comes, I'm gonna make sure that the baby wipes and pacifiers are kept well stocked in the diaper bag.

There are other worlds than these...

I discovered something yesterday which will forever change the way I look at the world. This thing that I discovered is so innocuous as to make me a little ashamed that I didn't know about it before, but it is, nevertheless, an important piece of information that has eluded me until now. I am probably building this up too much, but it is too late now. Best to just forge on and reveal my new piece of information and let the world think of me what it will.

Ready?

French people have different TV shows than we do.

I know. It blew my mind too.

Who knew that there are shows in French both hosted and watched by actual French people? Well, I assume that the actual French people who watch the shows knew this, and to continue on with my impeccable logic, the hosts themselves probably were made aware of this at some point in their careers, but did anyone outside of France know this? Why was I kept in the dark on this?

I guess I should clear something up a bit. It is not like I didn't know that French people had TV. I didn't assume that they all sat around all day eating baguettes and writing poetry while wearing berets under the Eiffel Tower. That would be hell on the digestive system. I was aware, at least on some level, that other countries have their own singers, actors, TV shows, etc, it is just that I had never really seen any of it aside from Monty Python, Dr. Who, the occasional nature documentary on the BBC, and a smattering of other things. Now I have seen actual snips from some actual French shows and I am a new person.

Let me back up a bit.

I am a member of a Tottenham Hotspur message board where people from England and many other countries post information regarding the team, possible player transfers, and basically anything that the members decide to post to take their minds off of the impending loss of key players to other teams. It is a great site and has become invaluable to me in keeping up with a sport and team that gets basically zero coverage here in the states. After learning that one of everyone's favorite players was probably going to be sold this summer, a poster started one such escapist thread and invited people to post pictures of their favorite European pop singers. On this thread someone posted a picture of this French singer, Alizee, and a link to one of her music videos. Like most men I know I have a thing for the French accent, and she was totally cute so I clicked to check it out. Turns out that not only is she cute, she can sing as well. I didn't understand anything she was singing, but I dug the voice and the beat to the song so I watched the whole thing.

I then jumped on Rhapsody to see if her catalog was online. It was, and I found myself enjoying the heck out of music which contained lyrics that I couldn't understand. It turns out that she has been around since she got her first record contract at the age of 16 in the year 2000, has released 3 albums, and was the top selling French female singer for 2001 (thanks, Wikipedia!). Also, just so you all don't think I am some sicko, the picture on the message board was of her 23 year old self, not the 16 year old version. Young is fine, jailbait not so much.

So here was this singer who has apparently been popular in Europe for about the last 8 years and I had never heard of her. That didn't bother me at first because, as I found out, her fan base here in this country is fairly limited. This is primarily due to the fact that roughly 0.61% of the population herein the good ol' USA speak French (thanks, National Virtual Translation Center!), and most of the rest of the population basically can't be bothered to care about anything not American made. However, it did start to bother me a bit. What else was I missing? I didn't want to close myself off to the rest of the pop culture in the world just because I lived in America. Granted, we make some kick ass movies and we do kinda rule when it comes to pop culture, but obviously there is more out there.

Thus did I begin the process of attempting to find more pop culture from different countries. Since I had already found a singer I liked, I thought I'd check out the TV side of things. I figured I'd start with France because I dig the accent and, to be honest, I was hoping to find more videos of Alizee. As it turns out, this is not a difficult thing to do. I quickly found one website that fit the bill perfectly in that it not only had music videos for the singles she had released, but also MANY videos of her being interviewed on French TV. Jackpot.

Often the interviews were in French with no subtitles, but every now and then someone had gone to the trouble of placing either English or Spanish subtitles on the videos. Since I can read Spanish fairly well and I have at least a passing understanding of the English language, this worked well for me. It was, however, most often more fun to watch the videos without subtitles because then I could concentrate on the sets and hosts of the shows rather than reading the words. I must say that I was rarely disappointed.

When I mentioned earlier that France had its own TV shows and how this changed me, I neglected to mention that some of them are, without a doubt, hilarious. In one of the video clips Alizee performs a song and then comes down to the interview section, much like a performer would on the Tonight Show or Letterman. However, it is there where the similarities end. The hosts of the show are a man and a woman, both of whom appear old enough to have been around when music was first invented, and they are sitting on a GIANT red couch that was probably 15 to 20 feet in length. Across the stage sits Alizee, on a similar GIANT red couch about 15 yards from the hosts. In the middle of the stage is this elaborate coffee table with all kinds of crap strewn about on it. The hosts spend much of the time sort of bickering with one another about who gets to ask the next question while the guest sits patiently and answers when they finally get around to acknowledging her. Not exactly a great interview, but how often do we get to see bickering hosts here? I loved every minute of it.

There is a second video which shows a German TV host interviewing Alizee in which he attempts to speak French with her. If the subtitles are to be believed, after complimenting her shoes he ends up accidentally asking her a variety of seemingly provocative questions including whether or not she enjoys "hot water bags". Clearly puzzled, she responds "Hot water bags?" He realizes his mistake and then offers, "Wanderlust?". When this is met with another confused look, he quickly segues into a commercial. Along with this awkward interview, which can be forgiven due to the fact that this is a German program with a host who is attempting to make his guest feel comfortable by speaking a language in which he is not fluent, the actual performance is interesting due to the fact that there is a large, muscular man in a security t-shirt prowling the stage protecting the young singer, flexing and seemingly inviting someone, anyone, to try and get at her. Not something that would fly here on American TV.

Another show was what appeared to be similar to TRL in which artists come on and are interviewed by a young, hip, host who asks them about their lives and music. Its title is "Wassup, Pluggers!", and is clearly one of the most awesome things I have ever seen. The set appears to have been designed and decorated by someone with ADD, a lot of different materials, and a mandate to use every possible color at least once. The host is dressed in clashing colors and patterns that seem to indicate that he's so cool, he's lucky not to have freezer burn. He throws around the "W" hand sign many times during the interview and says "Wassup!" a lot. I wish I had thought to name a show "Wassup, Pluggers!".

There were other clips from different shows, most of them of much higher quality and therefore not nearly as much fun to write about. As it turns out, from my brief foray into it, the TV side of French pop culture is pretty much the same as it is here, the only difference being the people performing it and the language in which it is performed. I assume that the same holds true for pop culture from other countries as well and maybe one day I might take the time to find out, but one of the other things I was reminded of in my search is that there is a reason why we don't have cable. American TV is bad enough most of the time, did I really expect it to get any better just because it is in a foreign language? Music is one thing, and I'll freely admit that part of the attraction to these songs is that they are in French which sounds so much cooler than English, but TV seems to be the same the world over.

Thus did my quest end, or at least take a sabbatical. My eyes have been opened to the fact that I can enjoy music in languages other than English, and I look forward to finding more international artists. Who knows? Perhaps I'll be into some Polish funk band next month.

Home Grown Goodness

I have discovered that I enojoy the work that goes into gardening. It is a pain in the butt, to be sure, but the results are wonderful and the work is rewarding. I suppose I should temper that a little bit by saying that I imagine that the results are wonderful due to the fact that I haven't actually tasted any of the results, and more to the point, nothing is technically growing in the garden yet. I have sprouts of corn, a few onions that have poked their heads up through the soil, and sundry other little green things that seem to be on the verge of becoming something interesting, but nothing in the way of actual vegetables yet. Each of these tiny green shoots will hopefully blossom into larger plants which will then produce a variety of produce.

I have never really been that interested in gardening. This is a difficult thing to admit for a biology geek like myself, but I am not really that fond of being outside. I do enjoy the occasional foray into a forest preserve where well manicured paths allow one to indulge in what could loosely be called a nature walk, but aside from that I rarely go out of my own backyard. And if the temperature is above 85, I tend to stick to my own living room due to the fact that I really don't like to be hot. We often have the air conditioning set at 68 so I can use a blanket in the middle of August. Not terribly energy efficient, but TOTALLY comfy.

So when the little 10 x 10 trial garden we had last year was deemed too small by both my wife and myself, I tore out a large, overgrown bush and proceeded to work the soil and remove all traces of weeds from a patch of land that effectively doubled the space available. This was done in preparation of planting any number of things - tomatoes, onions, carrots, pineapples, sugar cane - whatever! We were footloose and fancy free when it came to gardening. Rows of cotton? Sure, why not!

Ryan helped with this part of the garden creation. His job - because he had to have one - was to look after worms. After I uncovered several large earthworms with my pick, Ryan became really concerned for their well being. Mind you, this is the same kid that upon first seeing the long, slimy looking things, was so disgusted by them that he literally gagged and looked like he would throw up. Now, however, whenever I would uncover a worm, or part of a worm that was still wriggling, he would rush over and grab it and then run back and chuck the creature into a hole he had dug as a sort of worm hospital. He would then quickly cover the worm with dirt so it wouldn't dry out in the sun, and then pat the soil down gently like he was tucking it in for the night. This lasted for about half an hour, which is an eternity for a four year old. After that he got bored and went inside to have a snack. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, does it?

Over the next week or two, the process of making this little fantasy garden a reality took a little break while other things with higher priority came along. Cleaning out the garage, installing air conditioners, fixing the bike, cleaning gutters, taking out the garbage, organizing the recycling, fluffing pillows, and knitting a pair of wool underpants for the dog all took precedence over the garden. Weeds grew like small, rapidly growing unwanted plants and quickly took up most of the soil space so that when, after several weeks of procrastination, I decided to ready the garden for planting (again), I had to spend several hours tilling and readying the soil (again). This time, however, Jen went out to pick up seeds while I tilled, and when she came home all was ready for the imminent harvest! All we had to do was plant, weed, water, weed some more, water some more, and wait a few months until our seeds grew into actual fruit bearing plants.

We are still in the process of waiting for that harvest. I went out today to weed the garden and had a grand old time picking out unwanted flora. Perhaps too good a time. I was halfway through "weeding" the onions when I realized that weeds tend to grow in a more haphazard fashion and don't normally form a nice, straight line. The corn is coming in nicely, and the pumpkins look well. Some fool animal - probably our fool animal - decided to dig up one tomato plant, but that is the only casualty thus far. So that means that, if my calculations are correct, we should be able to have the first meal with home grown veggies sometime in November.

Hindsight being 20/20, we probably should have started the seeds earlier.

Blog clean-up

I spent some time this morning cleaning up the ol' blog. I went back and re-read old posts and deleted those that seemed a bit too snarky. I am having much more fun writing things about my family, with the occasional science geek post, and I wanted my blog to reflect that. I still stand by most of what I wrote in those posts, but for the stuff I don't stand by, I have either changed my mind or changed my attitude, both of which for the better, I hope! Anyway, if you are visiting this site and are looking for something I wrote earlier and it is not here, now you know why.

My son doesn't need me anymore...

In every fathers life a little independence must fall. I have noticed over the last few weeks that Ryan doesn't seem to need me for as many things as he used to. There was a time when he couldn't roll over, sit up, or feed himself without my help. This eventually changed, and he gradually came to be able to do all of those things - he can even "help" make his sandwich for lunch, and he knows where all his fruit snacks, raisins, and yogurts are located even if his dad is clueless.

I love the fact that he is growing up, because along with this independence comes greater vocabulary, balance, speed, and sense of humor. He loves telling me jokes, most of which have no detectable punchline, but they are funny anyway because of his facial expressions. His taste in music is getting to be a little better (see previous post for evidence of this), and he is able to pick out his own clothes and get dressed with little or no guidance from me. This can result in some interesting clothing combinations including this gem from the other day: pajama pants, black socks, button down shirt complete with tie, and water wings. He is the kid from Big Daddy. Mostly, though, he picks out good combinations and we have no issues.

I have heard the phrase "No, dad! I can do it myself!" about 10 times today alone, and I hear things like "Don't worry dad, I can do it" fairly often as well. The list of things he can do himself is growing every day, but unfortunately that list also includes things like:

• He can climb into the refrigerator and get his own pudding. This sounds harmless, except that our refrigerator is a bottom freezer model and the pudding he wants is 5 1/2 feet up in the air.
• He can get into the tub, turn on the water, and put his toys in there all by himself. A good thing if someone is in there watching him, but feed your 9 month old son at the wrong time and you are likely to have a very wet, fully clothed 4 year old on your hands.
• He can get out his own toothbrush and toothpaste and brush his teeth on his own. This is often very handy, but he also can get out MY toothbrush and clean the toilet with it. Trust me - this is something that you allow to happen once and only once. We now have a supply of extra toothbrushes in a separate closet in case the current one looks a bit more frayed than it did the last time it was used.
• He can also wipe his own butt (YEA!) and wash his own hands after going to the bathroom. Along with these skills comes the fact that he can get himself onto the counter and spread lotion all over our giant mirror because the mirror looked like it was too dry.

Never mind. He does need me. Possibly now more than ever!

Ok. Now where is he...

The stuff dreams are made of

I am a prime example of the idea that just because someone CAN have children does not mean that they SHOULD have children. Given the fact that I have two boys I can safely assume, barring any unfortunate confessions from my wife in the near or distant future, that I CAN have kids. The question now becomes SHOULD I have kids. I'll leave the following item as evidence that the answer is probably "no".

As mentioned in another post, I have recently introduced my oldest son, Ryan, to one of my favorite rock bands, Metallica. Not exactly children's music by any stretch of the imagination, but his favorite new song is potentially scary even for adults. The lyrics in "Enter Sandman" consist of the lead singer espousing the little boys and girls of the world to say their prayers every evening so that they will be protected from the nameless evil that lurks in the room after the lights go out. Additionally, there is reference to the idea that kids should sleep with one of their eyes open so as to ward off the "things that bite" and the "beasts under your bed, in your closet and in your head". Also, these things might take them to a place called "Never Never Land". Just writing this stuff down makes my bladder weak.

Now every time we get in the car he asks if he can listen to Metallica. I was all for this at first because he seemed to dig the song and I thought it was cool when we would sit at a stoplight with the windows down jamming out to what is arguably one of the best rock songs ever. Then, the other day, I hear a little voice in the backseat.

"something...something...little one don't forget my son...something...something"

Uh oh. I turn the music down from ear bleeding to barely audible. "Ryan?"

"Yeah?"

"Are you singing along?"

He laughs. "No!" He's a little shy when it comes to this sort of thing. He never cops to it when we catch him singing along to something.

"Ok..." Crap. He is singing along and appears to know some of the words. My wife is not going to be happy.

So I turn it back up loud so we can get the whole business of hearing damage out of the way before he hits puberty, and pretty soon I hear "...and of things that will bite..." from his high pitched voice. He is singing more loudly now and appears to be getting his whole body into it with the head banging and his little fists pumping. I can tell because I am secretly watching in the rear view mirror - he'd never do that if he knew I was paying attention.

When the song is over, he wants it played again, and of course I oblige. We both like it, and after all, it's just a song, isn't it?

Jen has already told me that the first time he wakes up in the middle of the night complaining that there is something under his bed or in the closet, I get to deal with it.

Gay Marriage

I feel fairly strongly that gays should be able to marry their significant other. Whether they can participate in the sacrament of marriage is something for the religious leaders to determine, but they certainly should have the same legal rights and privileges that heterosexuals do. To claim otherwise is to basically wish to be back in the days when it was illegal for people of different races to marry. Thankfully that was overturned, and now we are called on to continue the march for civil rights that started so long ago. California, thankfully, has decided to make it legal for gays to marry, which means that we have taken one more step on that march.

There are, of course, detractors who are not fans of gay marriage. One of my favorite blogs has written a nice piece in which the author has been kind enough to deliver a bit of a verbal bitch slap to Dinesh D'souza who has taken offense at the very idea that gays should have this right.

Read and enjoy.

To homeschool, or not to homeschool...

There is an interesting debate that is going on all around us whether we are aware of it or not. It is the debate about homeschooling kids and it can get a little heated at times. My first reaction to the idea of homeschooling is one of derision and scorn. “Great,” I think. “Religious nuts who want to shelter their kids from the real world.” There are a number of those in the homeschool movement, and if you watch the movie “Bible Camp”, you will get an idea of exactly what I am talking about. These people are fucking nuts and should not be allowed to HAVE children much less hole them up at home and “educate” them.

But then there are those parents who would like to be able to send their kids to public schools and yet don’t feel they can because of the fact that, in general, the public school system kinda sucks. With the overemphasis on testing and the almost complete lack of emphasis on thinking skills, the public school system runs kids through a prescribed curriculum – often written by state administrators and not by educators – which is basically designed around a single test. This means that the entire high school science experience is boiled down to about 40 questions which, in Illinois at least, rely on memorization rather than critical analysis. The schools are then judged based on their test scores, and if the scores don’t measure up the school gets put on probation, or after a few years of not measuring up, taken over by the state.

Private schools don’t seem to do any better. The latest comparisons between private and public schools showed little to no difference in performance between the two groups of students. In some areas the public schools performed marginally better, and in other areas the privates performed marginally better. It was basically a wash.

So with the issues facing both public and private institutions, parents are rightly going to have problems determining how to best educate their kids. But is homeschooling the answer? I contend that it is not. Lets consider me as an example homeschool teacher. I have a 3 degrees – a B.S. in biological research, a B.A. in secondary education, and a M.S. in biology. I love to read and will pick up a book on almost any subject if I am slightly intrigued by it, I have played sports in high school, college, and on adult teams, and in general, I consider myself to be a fairly well rounded, well educated guy. I don’t, however, think I would be a good person to be the sole source of education for my kids. I know they would learn a bunch about nature, conservation, bugs, and other science things (my 4 year old son already knows that he is a tetrapod, a hominid, and that bugs are really swell) but they would probably not get a great exposure to art of literature as I don’t really know anything about that. Sure, I could learn, but I am not passionate about it like some of my friends in the English and Art departments. Their music education would consist of things like “Metallica is meant to be cranked with the windows down, and when we get up to the stoplight, you have to extend your pinky and index finger to make the horns and bang your head fiercely along with the beat…Oh, and here is Beethoven’s 9th.” Art would be almost non-existent, not because I don’t value it but because I know next to nothing about it and in my experience it is not something that can be learned from a book.

So basically here I am, a certified high school teacher with 10 years of experience teaching freshman biology, Advanced Placement Biology, and introductory college biology and I don’t think I am qualified to educate my own kids on many of the subjects they might be interested in. Sure, if all they want to do is science, I can certainly fulfill that requirement, but if they are interested in something else I would rather that they learn from someone passionate about that area.

I have heard many reasons for why parents homeschool their kids, and each of them needs to be considered individually. Quality of education is not a compelling argument in my mind. An involved parent who cares about the education of their kids can participate in the process, contact teachers, discuss options with administrators, and in general, be an advocate for their children. Make sure the kids do their homework and ask questions when they don’t understand. Train them not to be passive in their education and kids can achieve remarkable things no matter how bad you think the school might be. Most importantly, parents and kids both need to realize that education isn’t something done to them but something that they have to do for themselves. Teachers are guides, not the cause of education.

Parents are right to be on the lookout for the best way to educate their kids, but they need to realize that it is a very rare instance where they can provide a better education than the trained professionals in the school systems. They are, of course, free to homeschool if they wish (unless it is illegal in their particular neck of the woods), but I have a better idea. Put your energy toward fixing the problems found in the educational system rather than simply opting out and you will not only be helping your own kid, but all future children who attend public schools.

For my mom

Here it is, Mothers Day, and I am reminded once again that I don’t have one. Well, I did have one, but she died when I was 12 of a massive heart attack brought on in no small part by the way she smoked and drank excessively for most of her adult life. I say this not so you will get the impression that my mom was a bad or weak person, because at least in my memory she was one of the greatest people I have had the pleasure of knowing. I say that so you will simply know a small fact about her to help round out the picture of this amazing person.

I can talk about these things with my wife, family members, and friends, and I do as often as the memories come to mind, but for some reason I just decided that I wanted to write this out as a tribute to my mom. She was something else.

There are many gaps in my memory regarding the first 10 years or so of my life, but when I think of my mom the first thing that comes to mind is that she never met a stranger. She was always able to make a “5 minute Best Friend” wherever she went. These were people who took our order at McDonalds, bagged groceries, or happened to be standing too close when she wondered out loud where the hell the mayonnaise was in this godforsaken store. I have this ability too – more than one helpful soul has helped me locate the goddamn mayonnaise - but I keep it turned off unless I am either really in need of something or really bored. She was always on.

I also remember that she had a mouth like a sailor on shore leave and never hesitated to throw out some expletive laded diatribe when something didn’t go right. “SHITFUCKPISSCUNTWHORE!” was the poetic cry of this damsel in distress, and it would come out for a wide variety of reasons - when she dropped a lit cigarette on her lap and was now slightly on fire, burnt dinner, cut her finger, or simply had enough of the noise my sister and I were generating. I even asked her about it one time when I was around 10.

“Mom, I know what shit, fuck, and piss are, but what’s a ‘cuntwhore’?”

These might be the first things that jump to mind, but they are by no means the most meaningful. There are obviously many meaningful things that I can remember – she was my mom and I would have to write for days to do justice to all the little things – but the thing that sticks out most was her total love for her kids. She used to bring my sister and I little things from the trips she had to take every now and then for work. She’d cheer me on when I was up to bat at little league games (and there was one memorable time when she got the whole crowd to chant my name when I had the chance to knock in the winning run, which I promptly did on the first pitch. That’s right - I was awesome.) She took care of my when I was sick.

There was a time in my life when I was taking medication for asthma which was, for all intents and purposes, adrenaline in a pill form. I had it pretty bad for a while and my doctor had prescribed that I take two of these pills a day, one in the morning (which was no problem – I needed a little pick me up many days as you will soon see) and one at night. The night pill was the worst. I would take it as directed around 7 pm and then proceed to spend the next five or six hours completely wired. Bedtime was around 8, so I’d spend a few hours staring at the ceiling, trying to go to sleep.

Did you ever try to go to sleep? Everyone knows how on Christmas Eve Santa doesn’t come until you fall asleep, and that the sooner you fall asleep the sooner Christmas morning comes. Kids around the world (at least those who believe in Santa and Christmas) spend hours on Christmas Eve, eyes closed, willing themselves to sleep. It never works. These kids spend most of the night worried that they won’t get to sleep in time and that Santa won’t come and that Christmas will be cancelled all because they can’t get to sleep and oh god it is now 11 o’clock and Santa was spotted by the local airport a few hours ago and he’s got to have moved on by now because he has to get to the ENTIRE world in one night and I’ll never get that Transformers toy that I so desperately want and I’ll have to wait another whole year which is really WAY too long and I might just have to go insane because by next year I might not even WANT the Optimus Prime and the milk and cookies and carrots will all be left out and the milk will sour and smell bad in the morning which will be just a GREAT thing to go downstairs to…etc.

I had several months straight of Christmas Eve’s in which I spent many hours each night with nothing much to do except lay in bed. I couldn’t play because my sister’s room was right next door and she’d wake up and tell mom and dad. I couldn’t go watch TV because the only set was downstairs in the basement and I’ll be damned if I was going to go down there all by myself, finished basement or not. Monsters don’t care if the floor is carpeted – in fact it is probably easier for them to sneak up on people because their footsteps are muffled.

Anyway, every now and then it would get to be too much for me and I’d venture into my parents room to tell them I couldn’t sleep. Surprisingly enough, my dad’s response didn’t help much. “You’ll never fall asleep wandering around the house – go back to bed!”

My mom, however, always took the time to give me a hug and walk me back upstairs where she would tuck me in and run her fingers through my hair or rub my back until I was relaxed enough to finally fall asleep. Some nights this was a short process, but other nights it would take 20 minutes or half an hour of this before I was able to sleep. She never seemed put out by this either. No matter how often it happened, she was always willing and able to get up out of her bed to take care of me.

I am now the proud father of 2 young boys who are wonderful in every way. (The littlest one, Ethan, has the ability to make these mind blowing poops that are so big they have their own gravitational pull, so that isn’t very wonderful, but aside from that, I have perfect kids.) It is the memory of my mom, waking up on a regular basis to deal with my insomnia problem, that comes to mind whenever I have to get up in the middle of the night to take care of one of my boys. I am not as willing to get up in the middle of the night as I remember my mom being, but I always try to put on a happy face when either of them calls so that whether I enjoy getting up at 3 am or not, my boys will always feel loved and cared for the same way I did when I was young.

She was great, and while I am sure I learned some bad things from her as well, I gained quite a few positive attributes from watching her over the years. Her memory lives on in my actions. I am who I am today in no small part because of her.

Does "organic" mean better?

A few months ago my brother asked a very simple question that I didn't really have an answer for. This happens from time to time because, despite what my son thinks (and bless his little heart), I don't know everything. Apparently there was a rather heated discussion in which some were advocating the obvious health benefits of organic foods and the general idiocy of those who disagreed, while others disagreed and so exposed their own idiocy. At least that is how the organic proponents saw it.

As with most things, there are many ways to view a particular issue, and as with most things environmental, emotion is often more of a driving force than logic and data. This is fine in the sense that emotion is often what pushes people to act on their convictions, and without emotion the current environmental movement wouldn't be where it is today. It is tough to sit by and watch the world in which we live being completely messed up and not get emotional.

With that said, there are times when emotion gets the better of us and actions, even those done with good intentions, get us nowhere nearer our goals. Jumping on the organic foods bandwagon might be one of those times. It sure seems as though anything with the word "organic" in it would almost have to be better for both human consumption and the environment than the way food is currently produced, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. Lets take a look at what the research can show us on the subject.

Are organic foods better for us?

The answer is an resounding "maybe". Current studies have shown that some organic foods can contain much higher quantities of of things like vitamin C and iron, which doesn't really affect most of the people who would be able to afford organic foods. Getting enough vitamin C from a typical diet has not traditionally been a problem for most people, and given the fact that it is water soluble and excess is just peed out at the end of the day, more doesn't mean better.

Due to the methods used for organic farming, there is definitely less of the bad stuff that can come with traditionally farmed foods, like pesticides and herbicides, but these are typically found in very low concentrations, if at all, in most regular foods.

There do appear to be more of what are called "secondary metabolites" in organically farmed foods. These are molecules produced by plants as a result of everyday plant operation like photosynthesis, growth, and avoiding getting eaten by bugs. Some of these secondary metabolites are thought to be useful in the prevention of cancer, but some have also been shown to cause cancer in high doses. So while plants do produce more of these molecules, most haven't been studied properly and to arbitrarily decide that these crops are healthier just because they make more secondary metabolites is a little premature. The possibility of better health is there, but further studies need to be conducted to be sure.

Are organics better for the environment?

Again, the answer is maybe, but this one is much more complicated. Organically farmed foods do not use any pesticides or herbicides, nor do they use any of the synthetic fertilizers, so one would think that this would be better. Additionally, they are much better at promoting biodiversity in the farmland which is great. However, there are many more things to consider before we give it the thumbs up on environmental friendliness.

With no chemicals used in the growth of these crops, farmers must find other ways to ensure adequate yields each year. Studies show that most organic crops can expect to produce less per year than conventional farms, and some studies have shown that under normal conditions organic farms produce as much as 20% less than typical crops.

Since there are no synthetic fertilizers used, a natural nitrogen source is required. Most organic farms require either crop rotation in which a legume (plant that contains nitrogen producing bacteria in the roots) is planted in the fields every few years, or manure is used for fertilizer. Crop rotation makes fields basically useless every few years which reduces yields even further. If manure is used as a fertilizer, cows are often used. On organic farms, no chemicals are allowed which means the cows aren't given growth hormone which means they don't get as big. This might seem like a good thing, and in some ways it is, but with smaller cows come smaller manure piles. So more cows are needed to produce the milk and manure for the farms. More cows means more methane released into the atmosphere which means faster global warming. Global warming leads to possible lower crop yields and starvation, which further complicates things because organic farms can't produce enough to feed people as it is.

Additionally, since most organic farming is done in Asia, Australia and Latin America, and most consumption of those foods happens in the US and Europe, there is the problem of the pollution and carbon dioxide emissions from the transport of these organic foods. Of course the same problem holds for traditional crops.

See? I told you it was complicated.

So what is the verdict?

Tough to say. Most people who are eating organic foods do it because they say it makes them feel better. They feel like they are getting healthier products when they buy and eat organic. If people are willing to pay the extra cash to pick up something that says "organic" on the label, who am I to say they shouldn't do it?

The evidence seems to suggest that there may be a marginal health benefit due to the reduced exposure to herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers, but research shows that the risks associated with those things are low to begin with. Environmentally, it appears that there are problems with both types of farming. It does appear that organically grown foods could be better for the environment as long as farmers are aware that the environment consists of the entire planet, not just the local streams and grasslands. Limiting fertilizer runoff is an admirable thing, but not at the expense of increased greenhouse emissions. There must be a way to do both or we are simply exchanging one evil for another.

So, basically, do what floats your boat. Until there is more conclusive evidence to support the idea that organic is healthier or better for the planet, I'll continue to eat the cheaper, traditional version.

Also, remember the E. coli in the spinach thing? Organic spinach.

In case you are curious, I got most of my data from two places, a review article in Nature which has links to primary articles, and this article at the Mayo Clinic website.

Being a hominid is bad. Who knew?

I was out walking the dog with Ryan the other day in the glorious 50+ degree weather we are having. After finding out that, at preschool, he has been playing with his friends, learning about clouds, and that the toy cash register needs batteries, we started talking about Daisy, our dog.

“Daisy is a good girl,” he says, forgetting that she nipped him the other day and that at the time he asked if he could put her in the garbage.

“Yep. She is normally a good girl,” I reply.

“She is so cute.”

“Yep. Cute as a button,” I say. “Just like you.”

“I’m not like a dog, Dad.”

“Sure you are. You have 4 feet, right?”

“Nope. Two hands and 2 feet. Not four feet.”

“Well, you are both tetrapods, aren’t you?” I ask this trying to refresh his memory of earlier conversations.

“Oh. Yep. We’re both tetrapods. 1-2-3-4.”

“See? You are just like a dog.” Now I am just messing with him. “Soon you’ll be barking and eating your food out of a bowl.”

“I am not a dog!” he says, sort of laughing.

“Sure. You are not just LIKE a dog, you are a dog.”

“NO,” he yells, “You are a DOG!”

“I am not a dog,” I say, reaching down and tickling his belly, “you are!” This goes on, back and forth, for a while.

So I managed to take what was an enlightening conversation with my son in which I was learning about his time at preschool and his friends, and turn it into a “You’re a dog!”, “No, YOU ARE!” back and forth. Yep, I am a great dad.

This morning after Ryan woke up and had his breakfast, I started with the “You’re a dog” thing and he returned with “No, you’re a squirrel!”

What? That’s not the game. He apparently forgot the rules during the night.

“No, you are a dog!” I say, hoping to get it back on track.

“You’re a jellyfish!” Now he is really off track. Oh well. When in Rome…

“You are an elephant!”

“No. You are a rabbit,” he says, laughing.

“Well you’re a hominid!”

“No I’m not! Wait…what?” Now he is confused.

“I said, ‘you are a hominid’. And you are.”

“No! I’m not a hominid!” Now he has switched from joking to being pissed.

“Yeah, you really are. All humans are hominids.”

“Not a hominid!” He is adamant that he is not a hominid. This is sort of reminiscent of the “It’s NOT DIGITAL!” argument I had with him when he was 2. Poor kid. But, I can’t back down because it is true. He is a hominid, as are all humans.

Now Jen gets involved. “What are you telling the boy now?”

Crap. Now I am busted for messing with the kid. “Just that he is a hominid,” I say.

“What is a hominid?” she asks.

“You know… humans, Neanderthals, and other human ancestors. It really isn’t anything bad.”

“No, I don’t know, and neither does he. Quit messing with him.”

So I had to stop for that day.

Now whenever I tell him that he is a hominid, he gets angry. He even is projecting his feelings onto other people. This morning, I told him that not only was he a hominid, but so was Ethan. He got upset and said I shouldn’t say that because “Ethan feels strange about that”.

Apparently my son is a creationist. I’ll need to work on that.

A short digression on soccer...

My beloved Spurs seemed to phone it in today in the second half against Newcastle, which results in an unhappy me and an elated Toon army. 4-1 is no way to go out at home, especially in a game where Tottenham controlled most of the play in the first half. Granted, Newcastle upped the tempo and really took advantage of Tottenham's poor play so they deserved the victory, but I hate to see a team that can beat Arsenal 5-1, beat Chelsea 2-1 in the Carling Cup, and later tie them 4-4 in a great game last week turn in a performance like this. There is really nothing to play for, so I can see them not being up for the game, but come on lads! A little pride out there!

Your Inner Fish

I recently read a book by Neil Shubin called "Your Inner Fish", which is a wonderfully written treatise on the evolution of our body and how we owe many of our features (and problems) to fish, tadpoles, and other distantly related organisms. The book contains many interesting tidbits, such as the idea that hiccups are probably a relic of the reflexive breathing method used by tadpoles - a short breath in, followed by a closing of the glottis (flap of tissue that covers the windpipe). Stupid tadpoles.

I bring this up because I casually tossed the phrase "inner fish" into discussion the other day while talking about mammal evolution in my freshman biology class and it generated quite the response. Many students had never heard that we had had fish parts in us and were fascinated by the idea. We don't really have fish parts in us, but we do have parts that evolved from various fish structures. For example, your inner ear bones which allow you to hear such a wide range of sounds are modifications of the gill arches of bony fish. Some of the students had heard vague stories about how humans might have evolved from monkeys or something, which while technically incorrect (we evolved from apes), is still more than most knew. But the juxtaposition of the words "fish" and "you" seemed to do what other methods of teaching evolution had failed to do, namely elicit an interested response complete with a battery of questions and interesting discussion. At the end of the process, most were asking questions beginning with "so when we were fish..." or "so when our ancestors were reptiles..." rather than questions that begin with "My pastor says...". It was a great experience, and I think I'll probably throw that phrase around a little more often in class from now on.

He was in your WHAT?

The other day, Jen went out shopping with her mother, which left me home with the two boys. This is fine because I am a fairly capable father in that when it comes to Ethan, the 6 month old, I know where the diapers are, what body parts they are supposed to cover, and what to do with them when they become full and/or smelly. Plus, I can put food into his mouth in either bottle OR cereal form. I am that good. I am also more than able to handle Ryan, who can be a bit of a turd sometimes, but more often than not is a great kid.

On this night of nights, when the boys are out on the town hitting hot spots like Bed Bath and Beyond (holy crap are their humidifiers expensive!), Target, and Noodles and Company, the conversation flows like wine. Ryan asks questions, I answer, and Ethan drools. Scintillating. So during dinner in which Ryan had buttered noodles, sat on a booster seat without complaining for the first time in his young life, and, in general, was fairly adventurous food-wise, he looks out the window and notices a large castle next door. This castle is another restaurant whose name escapes me at the moment, and I had been in there exactly one time since we moved out here.

”What is that?” he asks.

“That’s the (insert name here – I could read it at the time, I just don’t know it now). It is actually one of the last places mommy and I ate before you were born.”

“Oh,” says Ryan, unimpressed. “Ethan was in mommy’s uterus.”

“Yes, he was. Now try not to be so loud about that, people don’t always want to hear about internal organs while they are eating.”

“Is a uterus an internal organ,” he asks, louder this time. “What is an internal organ?”

“Internal organs are the bits of you that are inside your tummy,” I say, sensing another science lesson coming on. “They are often squishy and gooey, but they help turn your buttered noodles into energy for you.”

“And poop!” he says laughing.

“Yes. And they turn your buttered noodles into poop.”

He looks at his bowl for a second, then back at me. “I don’t want poop noodles anymore.”

“They aren’t poop now, in the bowl, but they will be later after you have digested them.”

“Ok. Can we still get milkshakes?

“Sure,” I say, thankful that we have moved onto a topic more suited for public discussion.

Later that night, while we are brushing our teeth getting him ready for bed, Ryan tosses out another of his famous non sequiturs. “When I was older, Ethan was in my uterus and he grew to be big and then he is now in his crib.”

What? How are you, as a parent, supposed to handle comments like that? Clearly the kid is high. I opt to start with the part I am most sure of.

“Ethan was never in your uterus,” I say confidently.

“Yes he was. He is my little brother and he was in my uterus for 42 days,” he says, equally confident.

“No, he wasn’t. You want to know how I know this?”

“No. He was.”

“You don’t have a uterus. You are a boy. Boys don’t have uteruses.” I wasn’t even about to get into the whole “uteruses/uteri” discussion with him. If he doesn’t know that he doesn’t have a uterus, enlightening him on latin plurals would be a wasted effort.

“I don’t have a uterus?”

“No.”

“Do you have a uterus?”

“No. I don’t have one. I checked. Only girls have a uterus.”

“Oh. Mommy has a uterus?”

“Yes.”

“Daisy has a uterus too, cuz she is a girl. And a tetrapod. 4 feet. 1-2-3-4.”

“You are amazing, you know that?” He is still a step above some of my AP Bio kids with that tetrapod thing.

“Papa and uncle Justin don’t have a uterus,” he states.

“Nope. Now you are getting it.”

“Ok. Can I have pudding for last call?” Last call is our way of making sure he knows that this is the last food he gets for the night. He became quite adept at staying up WAY past his bedtime by telling us he was hungry and needed food. Now we don’t have that problem.

“Sure,” I say.

I really gotta be more careful what I say around him. He is like a little defective sponge, absorbing everything and then leaking it all back at the wrong time.

If life is this interesting with only one that can walk and talk, imagine what it will be like when Ryan is telling Ethan everything he knows.

Daylight Saving Time already?

Jen and I got rid of our TV again. Just to clarify, that doesn’t mean that we got rid of the actual box that shows moving pictures – that we kept. We got rid of our subscription to DirecTV, which around here is essentially the same thing as getting rid of the box. With no satellite or cable service, the box on the TV stand is essentially a large paperweight due to the fact that it is in our basement and, even more important, I have a total lack of desire to put up any kind of aerial antenna. So no signal can reach the little magic box, which means that that while we can still pass away the hours staring at the tube, we will be basically staring at fuzz. This might interest those who are avid EVP fans (which has something to do with electromagnetic waves and dead people – it is clearly ridiculous and I can’t be bothered with it) but for the average person, fuzz is fuzz, and it isn’t even the good kind of fuzz we used to get when I was younger where there was always the potential of seeing an exposed boob flashing up from the Playboy channel or Skinemax.

So we have no TV. We did this once before when we were first married and went without for about a year. It was a great year in which we spent way more time talking and reading and basically doing things we wouldn’t have done had we still owned a working TV. Even then we didn’t get rid of the box – I love movies too much and we would occasionally rent DVD’s to satiate the hunger for flicks. Eventually we picked up a powered aerial antenna which gave us access to the local channels, and shortly thereafter we decided that a few bucks a month on satellite service wouldn’t be all that bad if we could watch “Alias” on a clear signal. Jennifer Garner in skimpy outfits REQUIRES a clear signal. Can I get an AMEN, brothers?

Unfortunately, that few bucks a month eventually turned into something on the order of $70 a month due to purchases of sports packages and regular increases in rates. The price was too much to pay for the little that we watched. We’d check out a few shows weekly, and I dug having Fox Soccer Channel for weekend soccer matches, but we didn’t think we could justify the cost on a monthly basis. In all honesty, DirecTV was wonderful and their service had nothing to do with our decision – they were even willing to cut the price we were paying in half for an entire year so we would stay as customers. (So note to anyone reading: call your service and tell them you want out to see what they are willing to do for you, price-wise.)

But we still love to watch certain things like “Lost”, “Battlestar Gallactica”, and a few others, so we weren’t really thrilled with giving those up completely. So here is what we did, and you can too if you have the desire and a high speed DSL or cable internet connection. We got a cheap VGA to TV converter box for the computer which cost around $35, and a long RCA cable that would reach from the computer to the TV’s video in port (ours is an old school non-HD set with only a RCA video input). We had the stereo receiver downstairs along with the computer and TV so we hooked up the sound to run through that instead of the speakers that came with the computer. You could easily use the computer speakers instead, but this seemed to work out well for us. So now we have the video signal from our computer sent to the TV and the monitor, and the sound running through the stereo. All of this cost around $75 to set up, including the extra speaker wire needed to place the speakers around the room, and about one afternoon of work.

The beauty of this whole thing is that with the exception of one or two, all of the shows we like to watch are available free through streaming video on the networks websites on a single day delay. Additionally, shows that are not available for free are on iTunes for a low fee. Soccer matches are available sometimes through streaming video on various websites, and other times they can be found on a pay per view basis. The ultimate in a la carte entertainment.

The video quality is as good as what we were getting from the satellite service, although on some movies it is a tad on the dark side, and the sound is actually better due to the fact that we have it running through our stereo receiver.

Anyway, this has worked out wonderfully for us and I recommend it to anyone who has a computer near the TV, some time, and the desire to eliminate one of your monthly bills.

So there are obvious upsides to doing this. One of the downsides is that you are much less likely to learn things like the fact that daylight saving time starts tomorrow, which I just found out about 10 minutes ago. Also, since we can’t watch the evening news, we miss out on all kinds of things. For example, I had no idea that just last week, someone was killed in Chicago, or that gas prices are high, OR that it sure is snowy outside. Valuable information is lost.

So we have to go through alternative sources to get news, like the internet, which does have, if you can effectively sift through the approximately 87 billion sites hosting videos like “2 girls, 1 cup”, a few sites that contain actual information, like, for example, that daylight saving time starts tomorrow. That was a long sentence. Sorry.

Unfortunately, now when I get my weather information I don’t get to see a dumbass weather reporter standing in a blizzard or tornado.

That I miss.

So I says to the guy...

My son Ryan. Smart, athletic, good looking, and only 3 1/2 years old.

I have a second little boy, but he is only 6 months old and not that interesting yet. Oh, sure, he does the occasional rolling over, almost crawling thing, and he smiles whenever he sees me, and he farts and makes Ryan and I laugh on a regular basis, but since he is not talking yet it is difficult to relate to the world how cool he is. To give you an idea of how cool he is, after a brief struggle in which he cried for a while to be picked up, he proceeded to sleep through the night last night, which is pretty much the last major hurdle we have until he decides to get married.

My firstborn, Ryan, is another story. When he was about 2 and learning to talk, I tried to teach him my favorite joke, which goes as follows: "So I says to the guy, that's not even my duck!" Not much of a joke per se, but it always makes me laugh, so I thought it would be cute coming from a little dude. And it would have been, if he could have ever gotten it right. After much trial and error, the best I could get out of him was "So I say to the duck...", or "I want a duck!", or "I was talking to a guy about a duck", or "So I says to the guy, hey, lets play TRAINS!" Basically all epic failures.

Well, it has been a long time since we worked on the delivery of that joke - almost 2 years - and the other evening, after a particularly long day of teaching, we were eating dinner together as a family and we have the following conversation.

"Daddy," says Ryan, "want to hear a joke?"

"Sure," I say. I love when he tells jokes. Most of them suck, but there is something about hearing them from my kid that make them funny.

"Knock, Knock." Great. A knock-knock joke. The lowest form of joke.

"Who's there?" I ask, on cue.

"Boo."

"Boo, who?"

"So I says to the guy, thats not even my duck!"

On the one hand, another epic failure, considering that the punch line is supposed to be "Boo-hoo? Don't cry!". On the other hand, however, he finally got the duck joke right, which is all a father ever wants from his sons.

So as I am laughing hysterically, he starts to laugh. "What's funny Daddy?" he asks.

I gave him a big hug. "You are. That was the best joke I have ever heard."

He still screws it up from time to time, but that is ok. He'll learn.

Vaccines and Autism

I just finished reading an article in which John McCain has jumped on the "vaccines cause autism" bandwagon, and I now have yet another reason to think that he is unfit to be president. Not that I needed another reason, it just helps in arguments with people who think it would be nice to have a republican in office for the next 4 years, despite the state our country is in after 8 years of republican control.

Anyway, as everyone knows, if you are a parent, the most precious things in your life are your children. You would quite literally lay down your life to ensure that these little tykes are never seriously harmed. A little semi-serious harm is probably going to happen sometime in their lives: broken bones, broken hearts, etc. These you can deal with.

It is slightly more difficult to deal with a child that has come down with a potentially life threatening disease. Measles, polio, hepatitis, chicken pox – these are all diseases that are avoidable if you take the time to simply allow your doctor to do something that he/she is probably going to do anyway: vaccinate your children.

For those who don’t know, a vaccine is a solution administered either through injection or orally which contains bits and pieces of viruses. A little example of how infections work might be in order.

If a virus tries to get into your body, a variety of things happen. First, your body notices that something is wrong and attempts to rectify the situation by destroying the invader. This will take a while because your body’s defenses – antibodies and white cells – have just learned of this invasion, and with no prior warnings, it does what it can to cope. It begins by churning out antibodies and white cells specifically designed to hunt and kill that particular invader. This process can take several days, during which time you get sick. Once enough of the antibody/white cells have been produced, your body can fight the infection properly and you will begin to feel better. The nice thing is that if you survive this attack, you will probably not get sick from that virus again. It works this way for most viruses and bacteria.

Fortunately, for many viral infections we don’t have to go through this initial attack/sickness phase. Edward Jenner is often credited with the invention of the term “vaccination” because in 1796 he created one of the world’s first vaccines against smallpox. In this process of vaccination, bits and pieces of viruses are administered which act to stimulate your immune systems production of antibodies. You can think of the “bits o’virus” as “Wanted” posters which alert your body’s defenses to the possibility of infection. Once your body is made aware of the possibility of infection by these microscopic terrorists, it will ready its police force (antibodies) to be on the lookout for these infectious agents. This way, when your body actually comes in contact with the hepatitis virus, it already has a plan for how to deal with it. The execution of this plan goes almost unnoticed by you, but the results are amazing in that you don’t get sick.

Today vaccinations exist for many of the worst viruses, including polio, which was all but wiped out when Jonas Salk developed the vaccine against it in 1952. Based on the success of the vaccination program, it would seem that a person would have to be something of a loony to determine that they don’t want to vaccinate their children. (“Protect my child from deadly disease? I think not!”) However, there is an increasingly vocal group of people who not only want to stop vaccinating their own children, they want to stop you from vaccinating yours.

These people are affectionately termed “Anti-vaccination nut jobs” and they are becoming increasingly vocal due to the alleged link between childhood vaccinations and autism. Jenny McCarthy has written a book and went on the Oprah show to help spread this lunacy to as many people as she could. These groups take out full page ads in newspapers listing the allegedly toxic ingredients in the vaccines we administer to our children. They have convinced thousands of people to stop vaccinating. Cases of measles have been on the rise since these anti-vax wingnuts have become more vocal, and England had 971 cases in 2007, up from 740 in 2006.

Considering their case is based almost entirely on distortions, lies, and half-truths, one might imagine that the shelf life of an anti-vaccination group might be fairly short. One also might assume that once these distortions, lies and half-truths are exposed for what they are, these anti-vaccinationists would stop their bitching and go away. Unfortunately, one might just as easily assume that monkeys will fly out of my butt sometime in the next 20 to 30 seconds. We can wait around to see if that happens.

Nope. No flying monkeys.

So why is their message so well received? As I mentioned in an earlier post, this country (and others) suffers from a raging case of scientific illiteracy for which there appears to be no vaccination. Throw the words “vaccines”, “cause”, and “autism” in a sentence, and you get a few peoples attention. Get a pseudo-celebrity to go on Oprah to talk about those three words and you get the attention of millions of people.

So do vaccines cause autism?

In a word – “no”.

In several words, the answer is still the same, but the explanation is a little more detailed. Basically the anti-vax argument goes something like this:

1. Mercury poisoning is bad. So is Autism.
2. Vaccines contain mercury in the form of preservatives like Thimerosol.
3. Vaccines are injected into my baby
4. Too much mercury causes mercury poisoning.
5. Mercury poisoning causes Autism.
6. Repeat A-E again, only louder.

Simple, direct, and to the point. Not correct, but catchy nonetheless. Several problems with this argument jump out immediately.

The main problem is the assumption that vaccines contain mercury. As of 2002, almost all the vaccines used in the United States contain no Thimerosol. Additionally, recent studies have shown that even when Thimerosol was present in the vaccines, the small amount of mercury injected is removed from the body very rapidly (less than 24 hours for most people.)

So given that there is little to no mercury present in vaccines, it seems unlikely that any of the other steps in the argument for “Vaccines = Autism” will hold up, and indeed it is the case. No mercury in the vaccines means no mercury poisoning. Ergo, mercury poisoning is not the cause of Autism.

This seems like a really simple thing, and yet anti-vaccinationists still repeat the same tired argument over and over like the act of repetition will make it true. They then suggest that it is the vaccines themselves that are the cause of Autism, not just the mercury in them. No study to date links any vaccination schedule with the onset of any of the autism spectrum disorders.

So why are diagnoses of Autism on the rise? While there is no one good answer to this, it appears to be linked to special education laws and potentially to the funding of special education programs. A study done by Paul Shattuck in 2006 sheds some light on this phenomenon. . Orac does a great job of summarizing this article and is, in general, a fountain of knowledge on the subject if you are interested in keeping up to date. Autism became a certified diagnostic category for special education in 1990 with the reauthorization of IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). Prior to 1990, autism was not a recognized category of learning disability. So prior to 1990, there is no good data on how many autistic children there were in the education system. From 1994 to 2003 the rates of autism rose from 0.6 to 3.1 per 1000 students, while those labeled mentally retarded declined, which indicates that the “increase” in autism rates might be nothing more than a relabeling of students. Those that had been mislabeled “mentally retarded” were now being properly labeled “autistic”. As an example of how this can affect the numbers, we can look to Wisconsin. In 1992, only 18 children in the entire state were listed as being autistic, but in 2002, the number had risen to 2,739. Again, this jump is most likely due to placing children into different categories, not an actual increase in autism rates.

So why don’t they simply accept the fact that vaccines are not harming our children and have, in fact, been responsible for removing several of the greatest threats found in childhood? I think it is that they need a reason for what has happened to their children, and what better reason than vaccines? They are ubiquitous, and chock full of “toxins” according to anti-vaccinationists. It doesn’t matter that these “toxins” are not toxic at the levels they are being administered at. (At the proper concentration, anything is toxic.)

This brings us back to the concept of scientific illiteracy. The more scientifically illiterate a person is, the more likely that they will buy into one of the many fallacious arguments foisted upon the public by the anti-vax crowd. The more they buy into these arguments, the more likely it is that they will push not to have their children vaccinated. Not only that, but some of these groups are out to stop EVERY child from being vaccinated, which could have huge consequences for the health of everyone.