Yesterday, my second cousins Hendrik and Andreanna came over, Hendrik with his girlfriend Lisa, and Andreanna with her husband Sean and their kids Nellie and Juliana. Aidan and Nellie and Juliana are third cousins, which is to say, they are the children of second cousins, who are children of first cousins, who are children of siblings. Got that? Aidan’s great-grandmother and Nellie and Juliana’s great-grandfather were siblings.

We got the party started in the usual way, with wine, Guitar Hero III, and mutual humiliation.

We got down to some serious eating, and managed to squeeze everyone around the table:

Nellie liked Aidan’s doll:

And Aidan and Gwen liked Juliana. Aidan was really quite gentle with his baby cousin.

When Anthony wrote the post about the big boom on Broadway this morning we got one of the weirdest comments ever. Now we are used to the spam we get urging us to buy modern office furniture, or the internet drug of the week (percocet, viagra etc.), but we have never had “Osama the Bomma” make themselves known to us before. The amount of spam comments we get is amazing. It is the reason we moderate all our comments and get them emailed to us first. In fact on Left Coast Mama I am well over 25,000 spam caught. I know that the bigger blogs have their comments break a lot because sometimes the spam filters just can’t keep up with the amount of spam.

Anyway, the comment in question was interesting to say the least. As most of you know, I taught at a Muslim school for three years. If I thought that Muslims were responsible for everything bad in the world, there is no way I could have taught there for so long and made so many friends. I am sure that the person/people who wrote this comment didn’t actually read what Anthony wrote, and really have no idea about our ideologies and practices. We have taken out all the hyperlinks, but we thought you might find the comment itself kind of interesting.

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Beneficent,

Hello!

Yes about that explosion in Vancouver… that was me, silly! Don’t you guys know that we Muslims are responsible for all of the planet’s ills? Forget your sociopathic leaders, retarded political system and botched technology – blame the folks who’ve made it a personal priority to worship God alone (not along with Jesus or the Pope or your dollar bills) and try to live out good lives! We’re an easy target, c’mon bring it!

This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds…

echo OVERLOADING CPU
echo OVERLOADING MEMORY
echo OVERLOADING HEATSINK
echo WARNING! echo CRITICAL TEMPERATURE

Interesting right?

Apparently a Starbucks nearby (4 blocks away) was blown up last night, around 2:30am. As of right now, it seems that someone blew it up, and the Starbucks, and 4 other businesses have been complete destroyed. The medical offices that occupy the higher floors of the building seem to have lost windows, and I bet they have at the very least smoke damage. London Drugs and other businesses facing the explosion have lost windows, and even the Holiday Inn half a block west has lost some windows. The pictures on the TV news are pretty impressive, but I can find too much on the web yet.

As it is, we didn’t hear a thing, and are sufficiently away from the centre of action that the only thing that affects us is that Broadway is closed down for a few blocks and that busses are going to be rerouted until noon. Actually, since Gwen doesn’t need to go down that way, and since I commute by bike, the biggest effect is the swarm of news helicopters circling overhead.

(Image taken from the News1130 site, uncredited there, uncredited here.)

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More links:

• CBC Radio (with links to interviews)
• CBC
• Vancouver Sun
• Global TV

Way back in mid-December, I won a book in a contest by SciFi Dad (blogs here, here, and here). The book was “Dadditude” by Philip Lerman, subtitled “How a Real Man Became a Real Dad”. The dust jacket characterizes it thusly: “With a brain filled with hyperlinks in hyperdrive, Lerman draws parenting lessons from all the wrong places — MAD Magazine, Samsonite commercials, and Sixties song lyrics — but comes up with the right answer: Nothing gets you through the sleeplessness, the mania, and the tears and fears of parenthood like a good laugh.”

Philip Lerman was in his mid-forties when he and his wife had a new baby, Max. Although they already had a pre-teen in their family, this was Mr. Lerman’s first experience with a baby. Mr. Lerman was the producer of FOX’s “America’s Most Wanted” TV program and seems to have seen himself as “a man’s man”.

The book is a 243 page reflection on the first few years of his life with Max, during which he eventually left his job to become a full-time stay at home dad.

Although I’m grateful to SciFi Dad and Philip Lerman for sending me the book, I have to say that it wasn’t my favourite read. I think the main problem I had was that I found it difficult to relate to Mr. Lerman. He was over 10 years older than me in context of the book, pretty much putting us in different generations. His life experiences and mine are clearly quite different. Our backgrounds don’t seem to have anything in common, and I’m willing to bet our political & philosophical leanings — while not quite defining ‘poles apart’ — are pretty divergent.

That aside, the book is written in a very folksy but somewhat unfocused manner.  I don’t mind the folksy, but the unfocused bit made it a difficult to stay focused as a reader.  It details Mr. Lerman’s experiences in roughly chronological order, from having to deal with a fertility clinic right through to his son’s fourth birthday. It is a hither-and-fro combination of vignettes, personal reflections, and social commentary. Many of the passages are funny — or intended to be. While I did have some laugh-out-loud moments, a lot of the book was wry or even droll. There were a number of very personal things, and these came across as very sincere, but as a reader it made me a little uncomfortable — they seemed a little too personal. The best example of these are the “letters to Max” written by the author at each birthday of his son. I’ve seen these on blogs too … where bloggers will discuss a year in review in context of a letter to their at-the-moment illiterate child … and I don’t tend to read them either due to the same feeling of unease.

A testament to how I felt about the book was the length of time it’s taken me to get through it: I received the book on the 10th of January, and didn’t finish it until a few days ago. 245-ish pages in a month. Large type, large spacing, smallish book. Sigh, I just couldn’t get into it. In the same period, I got through two heftier Sara Douglass books.

Now don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a bad read. It just didn’t hook me. Maybe it will hook you? Drop me a line and I’ll send it off to you — but only if you promise to review it.