Sometimes I feel like a very large librarian who is hosting a very small professional wrestler. Who was bitten by a radioactive termite and keeps trying to eat all my papers. Everyone's papers. Any last scrap of paper. In the mouth it goes.... Well, that and electric cords. Isn't that a rabbit thing, chewing cables?

Anyway, at least we both love books. For different reasons.

The pediatrician was very impressed with his foreskin. I'm not making that up. Because, I'm told, it moves easily. This foreskin was the subject... more

Funny, the day after I write about Steven Curtis Chapman, my favorite mp3 blog has a thing on Christian rock. Interview with an author, mp3s, and, you know, fun.

It took me too long to do this, and I'm still not sure the syntax is right.

I swear, if my friend gets these characters tattooed on her finger, I'll buy her dinner.

Dear Mr. Putin,

Hey! How's it going? I saw your picture in the paper today, and you're looking OK. A little pale, maybe.

But dude, OK. What the [expletive deleted]?

In his annual address to the nation, the Russian president said the country's population was falling by about 700,000 a year. He proposed financial incentives to nudge up the birth rate.

...Mr Putin proposed more than doubling monthly payouts to families for their first baby to 1,500 roubles... more

I didn't notice that one of the sites linked to in my prior post on Maoist propaganda and Chinese pop art actually offered the following amazing service: For $149, an artist will actually insert your face into a Maoist propaganda poster image.

This is possibly the most bizarre gift idea I've ever heard of.

Things that have occurred to me this morning:

I've been using the (amazing) Chinese dictionary at Zhongwen.com for years, and it wasn't until this morning that I found their simple, concise overview of the proper way to write Chinese characters. I'm getting that feeling again that I could actually figure this stuff out, eventually. Remember how I made some comment about how hazy China was -- how no matter where we went, there was smoke,... more

I have no idea how to react to this thing:

http://wiki.ehow.com/Adopt-a-Baby-from-China

It seems to have swept the internet while I was away, judging from the number of times it appeared in my email inbox from various correspondents.

I suppose we all need how-tos on everything. I haven't looked -- do they have "survive a shark attack" or "build a hut from palm fronds and coconut shells" in there?

What a strange way I've chosen to build a family....

The cable in our hotel room here on our last night in Beijing has been kind of fun -- there's an Indian music video channel which is a lot of fun -- but we just hit some cable entertainment news thing that went straight from the release of Oliver Twist in China (and why Roman Polanski couldn't come to do promotion for its premiere) and the heartwarming orphans into Tom Cruise, whose Mission Impossible 3 is getting huge promotion on TV, talking about how he has to fly out from the location in Rome back home to Katie and the emotional rush of being a first time father and we're sitting here thinking, "Wait a minute, you [expletive deleted]... didn't you adopt two kids with Nicole... more

The internet in China is not like the internet at home.

The internet in hotels isn't like it is at home either.

So, it's going to be spotty for the rest of my family's trip, it looks like.

I've only prewritten a few more posts for later publication. Stick around, though. It should get better in a week or so.

Sorry, that's a totally misleading headline for this entry. It's really just a quick note on a recent study, which shows that:

Racial Diversity Improves Group Decision Making In Unexpected Ways, According To Tufts University Research

New research from Tufts University indicates that diverse groups perform better than homogenous groups when it comes to decision making and that this is due largely to dramatic differences in the way whites behave in diverse groups--changes... more