I Tell My Children I love You Repeatedly

It is a slow day at the office as many people are still on vacation so I have a little more time to post. I just finished reading about a horrific tragedy on another blog and have to say that it is hard not to be stunned by it.

I don't want to be overly ghoulish in linking to it, so I just want to share a few thoughts based upon my own experience.

Last year when my father suddenly took ill and they thought he was going to die was very rough for many reasons. Among the many was that my last real conversation with him had been about trash. I hated the idea that this might be the last thing that he and I spoke about because it was lacking in so many areas.

One thing that I do frequently and repeatedly is tell my children that I love them. I say it constantly because I want it to be imprinted on their brains. It is not a question, it is a statement and I want them to never forget it.

Martha Doesn't Get It

Yahoo! has an article about an interview with Martha Stewart that is running in Vanity Fair. I have to take issue with some things that Martha said.

Martha Stewart says in a new interview that her nickname in prison was M. Diddy, that house arrest is "hideous" and that her prosecution was about bringing her down "to scare other people."

In the interview, Stewart tells Vanity Fair magazine she agrees with those who say her crime — lying about a personal stock sale — is far different from massive corporate scandals such as Enron, WorldCom and Tyco.

"Of course that is what it's all about," Vanity Fair quotes Stewart as saying. "Bring 'em down a notch, to scare other people. If Martha can be sent to jail, think hard before you sell that stock."

I most certainly agree that her crime was different than others and not of the same magnitude as others, but that doesn't mean that she shouldn't be punished. She knew what she was doing and she did so for relatively little money for a person of her wealth.

I don't feel badly for this. If you break the law you must be prepared for the consequences of your actions.

Feeling the Fumes

Saturday night I shared the story about my son and camp.

"And now for the latest dilemma in parenting, the behavior of children and the reaction of their parents. At my son's day camp there is a large boy who is relatively rough in his play. My son told me that this boy has knocked him and some of the other boys down. I asked my son what he did and have gotten several different responses.

I am not surprised, he is only 4.5 so some of this is natural.

One of the mothers of the other boys immediately had her son switched to another group. I am not a big fan of that. I don't want my son to be hurt, but I can't always be there to help him and I think that it is important for him to learn how to handle this.

I told him that if this other boy is bothering him he should ask him to stop and that if that does not work to tell a counselor.

And then I told him that if the counselor doesn't help him he is allowed and encouraged to defend himself. I was very careful and cautious in my language. I don't want him to get hurt by this boy and I don't want him to be pushed around. And frankly I would prefer that he not hurt this boy, but I cannot allow this to continue unabated."

When I first shared that story I had seen a very small bruise on my son's back, almost small enough to miss. Well that bruise must have been well fed because it has grown quite large and in conjunction with my son's reluctance to return to camp I am irked.

I am irked because the counselors should have told us about this. I don't need a typed report, just a simple "there is a bit of horseplay going on with the boys and we are on top of it" would have been sufficient for me.

But I didn't get that and I am concerned about his anxiety at returning to camp. No parent wants to see their child be hurt, mentally or physically. If he continues to mirror his old man in growth the time will come when the other children will be reluctant to test his willingness to take grief, but I cannot wait for that to happen.

I feel a little trapped here because I do not want to hamstring his growth by fighting his battles for him, he has to learn how to deal with this kind of nonsense, but I don't have to like it. And I don't have to sit back and watch either.

This morning his mother is going to walk him into camp and try and get some answers about what is going on and then we shall see what happens.

This may all blow over and I may just be acting like an overprotective parent, but I'd rather be safe than sorry here.

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

***Updated***
Ok, here is the scoop. This is a special needs child who is not trying to hurt the other children, he just gets very excited and has some control issues. Now that I know that and I know that the staff are paying attention I feel better.

It also will make it easier for me to help my son deal with this in an appropriate fashion.

I Hate Giving Up

One of the things that I remember from my youth is wrestling with the older brothers of my friends. I'd like to say that I won, but that would be a lie. I usually lost, badly.

They were bigger and stronger and the harder I struggled, the harder they tried to really get me. I don't think that they were trying to really hurt me, but in my neighborhood you didn't mess with the bigger kids unless you were willing to take the punishment that they would dish out.

It might be a pink belly, a noogie, a swirlie or some other creation that was designed to torment others, but you got it.

I hated losing, hated giving up. Maybe it was just an overinflated ego, but I would routinely refuse to give in and can remember being forced to tears on a number of occasions. And since I have a memory like an elephant years later I took great pleasure in demonstrating to one of the boys that we all hit puberty and sometimes payback can be a bitch. ;)

Anyway, I am still trying to figure out where I want to take Fragments of Fiction. It has been a while since I really dug into it and it is time to try again. It is time to pull it out and dust it off. I have completed around 20,000 words and I think that I can make it into something, and if I cannot I'll scrap part of it and start over.

I am not quitting.

So my friend allow me to present the newest blog here at the Shack, it is called Fragments of Fiction- Version 178th. If you have not read any of it I invite you to do so and even if you have I am open to your doing so again.

In other words, feedback is appreciated. Remember that it actually starts with this post.

Hot Diggity Dog

I can eat quite a bit, but not like these guys.

"NEW YORK -- For the fifth straight year, it was a victory Takeru Kobayashi could truly relish.

Kobayashi, 27, captured the Nathan's Famous hot dog eating contest Monday, gobbling a nauseating 49 dogs in 12 minutes -- but missing his own world record of 53½, set at last year's July Fourth competition.

The win means the coveted Mustard Yellow Belt will return to Japan for the ninth year out of the past 10. New Jersey's Steve Keiner, who won in 1999, is the only American to capture the title in the past decade.

Kobayashi, of Nagano, stands 5 feet 7 inches and weighs just 144 pounds.

The runner-up was Sonya Thomas of Alexandria, Va. -- known as The Black Widow on the competitive-eating circuit -- who set an American record by downing 37 hot dogs in the same 12 minutes.

Thomas, who manages a Burger King restaurant, separates the hot dog from the bun and eats them separately. She dips the bun in water to make it easier to swallow with less chewing.

"I want to be No. 1 in the world, so I practice," she told CNN shortly after the contest. "I'm working on more speed."

She said she was planning a light dinner -- maybe a salad.

"My stomach doesn't hurt," she said, "but my jaw is tired."

Thomas, who weighs a remarkable 105 pounds, is a rising speed-eating star. Last December in Atlantic City, N.J., she finished off 89 meatballs -- about six pounds' worth -- in 12 minutes. And in August, she captured a lobster-eating contest in Maine by consuming 38 of the creatures in 12 minutes.

The hot dog contest takes place outside the original Nathan's in Coney Island. The contest was first held there in 1916."

Top 25 Questions for Scientists

Science magazine has a very interesting series that they have launched in which they address the top 125 questions that have not yet been satisfactorily answered. I find much of this to be absolutely fascinating. Here I'll share with you a few snippets:

What We Don't Know
Donald Kennedy and Colin Norman

At Science, we tend to get excited about new discoveries that lift the veil a little on how things work, from cells to the universe. That puts our focus firmly on what has been added to our stock of knowledge. For this anniversary issue, we decided to shift our frame of reference, to look instead at what we don't know: the scientific puzzles that are driving basic scientific research.

We began by asking Science's Senior Editorial Board, our Board of Reviewing Editors, and our own editors and writers to suggest questions that point to critical knowledge gaps. The ground rules: Scientists should have a good shot at answering the questions over the next 25 years, or they should at least know how to go about answering them. We intended simply to choose 25 of these suggestions and turn them into a survey of the big questions facing science. But when a group of editors and writers sat down to select those big questions, we quickly realized that 25 simply wouldn't convey the grand sweep of cutting-edge research that lies behind the responses we received. So we have ended up with 125 questions, a fitting number for Science's 125th anniversary.

First, a note on what this special issue is not: It is not a survey of the big societal challenges that science can help solve, nor is it a forecast of what science might achieve. Think of it instead as a survey of our scientific ignorance, a broad swath of questions that scientists themselves are asking. As Tom Siegfried puts it in his introductory essay, they are "opportunities to be exploited."

We selected 25 of the 125 questions to highlight based on several criteria: how fundamental they are, how broad-ranging, and whether their solutions will impact other scientific disciplines. Some have few immediate practical implications--the composition of the universe, for example. Others we chose because the answers will have enormous societal impact--whether an effective HIV vaccine is feasible, or how much the carbon dioxide we are pumping into the atmosphere will warm our planet, for example. Some, such as the nature of dark energy, have come to prominence only recently; others, such as the mechanism behind limb regeneration in amphibians, have intrigued scientists for more than a century. We listed the 25 highlighted questions in no special order, but we did group the 100 additional questions roughly by discipline."

And here is a list of the top 25 questions:

THE QUESTIONS
The Top 25
Essays by our news staff on 25 big questions facing science over the next quarter-century.

>	What Is the Universe Made Of?
>	What is the Biological Basis of Consciousness?
>	Why Do Humans Have So Few Genes?
>	To What Extent Are Genetic Variation and Personal Health Linked?
>	Can the Laws of Physics Be Unified?
>	How Much Can Human Life Span Be Extended?
>	What Controls Organ Regeneration?
>	How Can a Skin Cell Become a Nerve Cell?
>	How Does a Single Somatic Cell Become a Whole Plant?
>	How Does Earth's Interior Work?
>	Are We Alone in the Universe?
>	How and Where Did Life on Earth Arise?
>	What Determines Species Diversity?
>	What Genetic Changes Made Us Uniquely Human?
>	How Are Memories Stored and Retrieved?
>	How Did Cooperative Behavior Evolve?
>	How Will Big Pictures Emerge from a Sea of Biological Data?
>	How Far Can We Push Chemical Self-Assembly?
>	What Are the Limits of Conventional Computing?
>	Can We Selectively Shut Off Immune Responses?
>	Do Deeper Principles Underlie Quantum Uncertainty and Nonlocality?
>	Is an Effective HIV Vaccine Feasible?
>	How Hot Will the Greenhouse World Be?
>	What Can Replace Cheap Oil -- and When?
>	Will Malthus Continue to Be Wrong?

I haven't read all of this yet, but so far I have found most of it to be interesting.

Happy Fourth of July

To my American readers I wish you all a very happy and healthy holiday. And it goes without saying that I extend my thanks and gratitude to our vets, past and present.