Lain & Lisby: Weight and Speed

Will Truman 17 Comments

Lain TrumanSo today was Lain’s wellcheck: the periodic visits just to make sure that everything is progressing as it should. Everything came out aces, but only after some real turbulence. Though Clancy is usually the one that takes Lain in for these visits – because it provides me 90-120 minutes of uninterrupted peace and it gives her the opportunity to show the baby off to coworkers – I had to do it this time because she was in the L&D waiting to deliver somebody else’s little sprite.

We were seeing Dr. Gannon, who is the tax-sensitive, part-time physician I have referred to a couple of times who delivered Lain. But first was the nurse (I say “nurse” but it might have been a medical assistant). We weighed Lain and that’s when the trouble started. She was 13.4 pounds, which is significantly lighter than the last time we had her weighed in Umatilla. I immediately expressed some concern about this – anticipating how Clancy would respond after I informed her – but my concerns were hand-waved away. Clancy texted me asking about how the measurements came out while I was waiting for Dr. G.

I was foolishly hoping I would get this past her so that she would avoid freaking out while she was over in L&D and could do nothing about it. So I just threw a whole bunch of numbers at her: Head to rump measurement, height, head circumference, and weight.

“13.4?!?!” I hadn’t succeeded. This was followed by a couple other very, very anxious texts. She was not happy when, in Umatilla, she hadn’t gained any weight over the previous visit. Losing weight was a big deal. And if even I was concerned, she would be doubly so.

When Dr. Gannon entered, he very briefly glanced over the measurements and then we started talking about other development milestones (Is she responding to your tone of voice? Has she displayed curiosity?). All good, but then I brought up the weight again. He looked closer and immediately came to the conclusion that Clancy and I had: something was wrong. Not just that our baby wasn’t growing like she should, but that the measurement had to be off. Had to be! She’d slimmed up a little bit, but she’d also grown taller. Losing over a pound? Couldn’t be.

And, fortunately, wasn’t. I asked that she be weighed again, this time with the assistance of Clancy’s former MA, and it came out at 15 pounds, which is almost exactly where she should be according to the growth curve.

So, after some panic, it turns out that we are not starving our child.

—-

It’s actually quite interesting to me how much dogs can understand our language. I mean, it’s tone of voice mostly, but still.

The other day I was out with Lisby and there was a rabbit in the yard. There are often rabbits in the yard. Lisby has very strong opinions about rabbits and what should be done with them. Unfortunately, since our yard isn’t fenced in, this poses a danger. I’m trying to teach her that it’s okay to chase the rabbit, but that she can’t leave the yard. This would be our compromise (the hard line didn’t, at all).

Anyway, so there was the dog looking at the rabbit, for whatever reason not bursting after it this time. I told her to stay. I told her to stay. I wanted to give myself the illusion of control here. She obeyed. Then I said, quite calmly, “Okay, Lisby, go get the rabbit.”

She was suddenly a white blur (seriously, that dog is a rocket). The rabbit, not knowing the rules, would run back and forth across the yard rather than across the street. But, to Lisby’s credit, when I told her to stop as she was about to leave the yard with the rabbit, she stopped.

Out behind our house is a shed for the parks department. I have learned that Lisby can, with some effort, fit under the shed.

There was a rabbit in there. And Lisby has very strong opinions about rabbits.

The Text Is All We Have

Burt Likko 67 Comments

Today’s story about the Justice Department obtaining two months’ worth of telephone records from the Associated Press, apparently without a warrant and without any sort of prior notice to the people or entity thus searched, gives me a good platform to respond (as promised) to fellow Ordinary Gentleman Tim Kowal’s cogent argument for “original public meaning” originalism as a mode of interpreting the Constitution.

I’m not yet passing judgment about the subpoenas, but I think my analysis frames a discussion that needs to be had as a foundation for eventually doing so. It’s not a discussion that’s really been had before in our nation’s history, which turns out to be kind of important on a lot of levels.

Continue Reading →

Monday Trivia No. 114 [Mo wins! Assist to Mark Thompson]

Burt Likko 15 Comments

The top twenty are:

France (44); Canada (40); Germany (33); Mexico (32); United Kingdom (30); Italy (28); Russia and the Holy See (tied at 19 each); Japan (18); Egypt and South Korea (tied at 16 each); Belgium (14); Brazil (13); Poland (11); Panama and the People’s Republic of China (tied at 10 each); Ireland, Israel, Spain, and Switzerland (tied at 9 each).

Fat Man for President!

Will Truman 23 Comments

Chris Christie

“I hope that if Chris Christie some day runs for the Republican nomination, that he doesn’t lose any weight. I mean that because the United States culture continues to be replete with negative images of heavy men and heavy women especially. […] I’m not saying we need another William Howard Taft, but I actually think it would be healthy for the United States. I mean, we live in a country where Bill Clinton was talked about as a fat man, which was absurd. […] I hope that, in the future, if Haley Barbour or Chris Christie, they run, and they run as geniunely heavy men.” –Robert Farley, Bloggingheads.tv.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has been in the news lately with his disclosure that he had weight-loss surgery. Marc Ambinder, who has gone through it himself, gives some good background on the whole thing in The Atlantic.

To their credit, more of Christie’s critics than I would have expected – particularly his critics on the left – have expressed support or indifference. Which is, to my mind, as it should be. A fair number of people, however, are holding on to some pretty ugly prejudices.

My primary objection to this has little to do with Chris Christie, and more to do with fat people in general. The thing is, if you mock Chris Christie for being fat, you’re not just mocking Chris Christie, you’re mocking fat people. The vast majority of it comes back to the notion that fatness is a mockable trait. Acting as though his obesity makes him inherently weak, or simply judging him as a lesser person – and less deserving of the office of governorship or the presidency – simply reinforces it. Other than the broad “I do not want an aesthetically displeasing person to run as president, the criticism often attempts to turn on a number of factors, all problematic.

It’s not about appearance, it’s about health. Is it? Would you have truly voted against Jed Bartlett’s re-election campaign? Beyond which, contrary to what Connie Mariano says, we really don’t know what Christie’s health is. The loss in life-expectency of an obese person compared to a non-obese person is 3-12 years. Hillary Clinton is fifteen years older than he is and Joe Biden is twenty years older. Statistically speaking, there isn’t much reason to be confident that Clinton and (particularly) Biden will outlive him. A larger concern tends to be health while alive. Christie could end up in a wheelchair. Are we prepared to say that we can’t have a president in a wheelchair? He could end up faced with fatigue. Old people have been known to get fatigue, too. And leaving all of this aside, Christie isn’t some statistic. He’s a person whose body may be dealing with the obesity well or may not be. If he runs for president, we will get more information about Christie’s actual state-of-health.

It’s not about appearance, it’s about discipline. Who wants a weak president? Am I truly supposed to believe that Bill Clinton’s inability to control his sexual urges was a puritanical non-issue, but Christie’s inability to control his food take is somehow relevant? This assumes, of course, that Christie’s food intake is occurring in a vacuum. Weight is a complicated thing. We don’t know how much he eats. Chances are it’s more than most, but even then you end up in a situation where one guy eats whenever he’s hungry and ends up looking like Barack Obama and another person eats whenever he’s hungry and ends up looking like Chris Christie. It’s… dicey, to actually attach a greater degree of moral worth and strength to the first person, for simply having less of an appetite? You’re still knee-deep in a lot of genetics here.

It’s not about appearance, it’s about how he’s handled the issue. The primary criticism being that Christie’s temper has been known to flare with this issue. Or that he’s uneven, between downplaying and laughing one minute to being angry the next. Well, how he responds to an issue that isn’t an issue shouldn’t be an issue, really. Our relationship with our body is a complicated thing. The expectation of some – explicit or implicit – is that he damn well better feel a healthy dose of self-loathing over this. But there is no appropriate response, ultimately. Self-loathing is deeply unattractive. Laughing it off is laughing off “a health crisis.” And getting angry at Mariano? Well, it wasn’t dignified, but neither is the “Fatty McFatterson gonna die” that he responded to. To which someone might respond “But this is part of a pattern with Christie.” Fair enough, and I’ll touch on this later, but find a better example than this one.

It’s not about appearance, it’s the hypocrisy (he’s a bully). Except that tying this to his weight only really works if weight should be considered a vulnerability that someone should be bullied over. Otherwise, he’s a bully or not whether he’s fat or thin and that’s condemnable or not on that basis. That Christie couldn’t lose the weight without surgical help is actuall par for the course for overweight people generally, only a sad few of which will ever permanently lose weight and most of those through surgery.

It’s not about the appearance, it’s about access to health care. Okay, now we’re at least dealing with relevant issues. Tread carefully here, though. It only works if you’re treating it the way you would treat a run-of-the-mill heart attack or somesuch.

It remains to be seen the extent to which weight will hurt Christie. Oddly, it could actually help him with women. Which would seriously drive some people nuts. Not unlike those conservatives who argue that Obama got a free ride because he was black. I am, ultimately, skeptical that it will. I think there’s a difference when it comes to a governor (or senator) and a president. This is a case where I really think our biases will get the best of us.

Now, I titled this piece “Fat Man For President!” But I have no strong attachment to Chris Christie. Merely that I agree with Mr. Farley on the prospect of a fat president than this guy or that one. And, while I wish Christie the best with his goal of weight loss (regardless of why he wants to lose the weight), I have to confess that a little part of me would be disappointed if he pulled a Mike Huckabee.

That I view him as one of the better candidates on the Republican side says more about the Republican field than it does about Christie. And while I wouldn’t hesitate to vote for him for governor or senator, I think there are a lot of legitimate questions about whether or not he is temperamentally suited for the presidency. And for the more liberal, of course, I understand that there are a lot of concerns about him that have absolutely nothing to do with his weight. I am not saying that there aren’t a lot of legitimate reasons to oppose Christie’s candidacy. There are. Stick with those.

The Everyman Goes To NYU

Will Truman 37 Comments

NBC News has a piece asking whether the cost of private schooling (K-12) is worth the cost. This part jumped out at me:

Despite a strong résumé that included solid grades and entrance exam scores, and an enviable list of extracurricular activities, Assaf — who attended the private, $29,800-a-year Branson School outside of San Francisco — failed to get accepted to Brown. {…}

“Not getting into Brown was the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” said Assaf, a vice president of sales at S.W. Basics of Brooklyn who ultimately ended up studying at NYU and has been accepted to the Harvard Business School.

The private school environment, according to Assaf, too often tended to engender in her and her classmates “an entitlement mentality.”

“At NYU, in a city like New York, nothing happens for you,” she said. “You have to earn every opportunity.”

When I think of a scrappy, nothing-is-free school, I can’t say that NYU is exactly what comes to mind. Later in the article:

Smith often advises his students to make nontraditional college choices — such as one student he encouraged to attend USC over an Ivy League school. However, he says he’s concerned with the dejection that students like Assaf experience, when the substantial investment in a high-priced secondary school education doesn’t yield the return they expected.

I suppose in one way, any non-Ivy school is a “nontraditional college choice” over any Ivy League school, and while USC is a private school, it’s larger than most state schools. Even so, I can’t help but find it interesting that in an article about the virtues of public versus private, it basically focuses on people looking at top-flight private schools for college.

As for the content of the article, given my aversion to private college, I have a stronger aversion to private school for K-12. At least, sending a kid to private school for the sake of “eliteness” (getting into the best college). I would consider a private school if there was something wrong with the local public school. Ideally, there’d be some measure of school choice where we end up and there would be an alternative public option, or a statewide math & science school as mentioned in the article (and like the one my wife went to).

1,776 Feet

Burt Likko

NewWTCConstruction workers bolted a communications spire atop the New World Trade Center in Manhattan today, bringing the still-under-construction skyscraper to its final height of 1,776 feet. Rightly: New York has rebuilt, and are taller and better than before. The new building is 49 feet taller than the taller spire on the old ones. It’s a proud day.

It’ll be a proud day next year, too, when the building opens for business, and then all we’ll need to do to demonstrate our complete triumph from that awful day in 2001 will be to shed the wars and wartime mentality that came afterwards. Violence was done to our people and our iconic infrastructure by those who wished America harm for their own purposes, which failed to manifest. The violence we’ve done to our Constitution in their wake was self-inflicted, and the purposes for which we’ve done it have failed to manifest as well.

Time to move on. Time to move forward. Time to move up. Let’s get back to business as usual, America. [Comments will redirect to front page post.]

Linky Friday #24

Will Truman 52 Comments

Flash Gordon

Future:

[F2] A green building that eats smog.

[F3] Glenn Reynolds wants to know who has the mineral rites… on an asteroid?

[F4] Science fiction notoriously gets it wrong much of the time, so it’s noteworthy when science fiction gets it right.

[F5] How driverless cars will affect our cities. The first one – increased expansion and sprawl – was not what I expect from such articles.

Psychology:

[P1] Atheists and their relationship with god.

[P2] Being alone is, apparently, bad for your health. Even if you’re a loner.

Energy:

[E1] An inside look at fracking.

[E2] How much damage did Fukushima do to efforts to combat climate change?

[E3] One of the few reservations I personally have about nuclear power is the amount of time it takes to get a unit up and running. Maybe small reactors will help with that?

[E4] Diana Lind gushes over the possibility of cities without highways. Though I think the “induced demand” argument is not as solid as its proponents suggest, I actually do think that urban highways should be re-evaluated. Highways to get into and around town are good, but once in town, maybe there is a better way.

Multimedia:

[M1] CNet gives you a rundown how to get rid of The Soap Opera Effect. My father’s TV has that. It takes some getting used to, but it’s worth it with how nicely the non-HD stuff comes across on his Samsung compared to my Vizio.

[M2] Is the fourth-wall breakdown in sitcoms a product of – and emblematic of – artistic laziness?

[M3] Somehow, I’m not surprised that the best live-action Wonder Woman outfit is from porn.

[M3] The rationale behind child pornography being illegal is pretty rock-solid, though it’s possible the passive consumers of child pornography are not as dangerous as we thought.. Laws against pixie porn, on the other hand, is harder to justify.

Commerce:

[C1] A look at the folks who have dropped out of the job market.

[C2] When we talk about how much physicians are paid, we also need to talk about the costs they incur.

[C3] A great joke: If we really want to dismantle Al-Qaeda, we need only arrange for Yahoo to buy it. I was reminded of that joke when I read this.

[C4] Google Fiber is causing traditional ISP’s to step up their game. Vermont has a plan. Though I have to say, of all the states for the federal government to throw stimulus money at for this project, Vermont does not strike me as the most worthwhile.

America:

[A1] Trailer parks could save us all, or at least solve the retiring baby boomer problem. It takes a lot to overcome the stigma, though, which creates detrimental cycles of ownership.

[A2] Amy Sullivan of the National Journal writes of the downsizing of the American Dream. James Fallows on why we should believe the illusion anyway.

[A3] I’ve mentioned niche online dating before. Apparently, Alex Jones is getting into the act. I’d love to know what the gender balance on that looks like.

[A4] What do spies read for fun?

[A5] If actual public opinion had its way, instead of interest groups, we would not have more legal immigration. People versus the Powerful, as it were.

[A6] Congressman Steve Pearce thinks congress should be allowed to telecommute. A part of me wonders if we shouldn’t just make’em telecommute. Or, of course, move the capital to Nebraska, and then they’ll want to.

World:

[W1] Thirty-three beautiful places… abandoned.

[W2] Christopher Caldwell takes a look at abortion, national identity, and Ireland.

The least potted of them all?

Vikram Bath 53 Comments

My name is Vikram Bath, and I can’t help myself. It’s been five years since my last post–a dirty rant from a PhD student in the skankiest corner of the Internet on a striving-for-the-D-list blog. Since then I graduated, became a business school professor, and then stopped being a business school professor.

Please accept my voice’s contribution to the cacophony of your Internet.

Philosophy of science and cognition are interests of mine. If I refer to policy or political issues, it will only be as an example to illuminate how we think about things rather than to advocate a specific point of view. I’m a utilitarian; none of my views actually matter, so I don’t want to spend your time on them.

Funny things companies do, investing, and economics will also be topics. I’m arguably an expert when it comes to my academic discipline in the business school, but keep in mind that the whole business school has an “expert problem“: an MIT physics professor can be expected to reliably solve a physics problem for you in a way that a business school professor cannot be expected to solve a stout business problem involving qualitative trade-offs.

So there’s that.

Oddities that I don’t think about too much but might be relevant along the way are that (1) I am Indian-American and (2) my wife is Chinese. It’s a somewhat unusual match, and we stand out in our small New England city though people are usually too taken by our stunningly good-looking dog to bother.

Big News: The Third Not-Potted-Plant

Will Truman 5 Comments

Burt and I are extremely excited to announce that we will have a third voice here at Not a Potted Plant: Vikram Bath.

Vikram has not been a regular at The League or NaPP, but he’s an old voice for some of us. Before The League existed, Burt and I made our initial acquaintance on Vikram’s old, lost blogs. He will do his own introductory post, but wanted wanted to give y’all some notice that we have some awesome headed our way.

The Sequel That Shouldn’t Have Been Greenlit

Will Truman 75 Comments

marksanfordWhen Governor Mark Sanford abandoned his job to win back his lover and destroy his family, I can’t say that I approved of that.

However, once the damage had been done and the smoke had cleared, I was actually sort of happy him that he went on to marry the mistress and found happiness (I’d assume) with the love of his life.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my happiness for him (to the extent that I cared about him) was entirely contingent on his never seeking public office again. It hadn’t occurred to me that he would even try. I mean, this is not only cheated on his wife and sabotaged his family, but he abandoned his post to make that happen. That makes him relatively unique among philandering politicians. You do that, and you’re done in public life as far as I’m concerned. No second acts. That’s the price you pay, which, considering the gravity of the transgression, is a relatively minor one.

So yeah, I’m a bit bothered that he’s now Congressman-elect Mark Sanford. That’s like Jim McGreevey becoming an Episcopal minister. Or a congressman. (Okay, McGreevey professional transgression, but whatever.) Except that apparently, the New York Episcopal Church has higher standards and rejected McGreevey for being “a jackass.” The South Carolina Republicans in CD1, and indeed CD1 as a whole, apparently, is not so strict.