Author: marginnotes_m4x28l

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Please note: these instructions are for men. If you are a woman, you just take your shirt off.^[1]

1. Notice your baby is fussing and squirming. Lightly stroke his cheek. If he eagerly swings his mouth toward your finger, he is hungry.
2. Unless he is lying, which you will find out when you try to put the bottle in his mouth and he reacts as though you are trying to put out a cigarette on the tip of his tongue.
3. Pick him back up and keep walking endlessly up and down the living room. It may seem as though the baby is purposely trying to make your bad back worse by leaning out further and further to the side.
4. He is.
5. Unless he’s hungry now and is trying to get into the horizontal position he usually associates with eating! Quick, get him the bottle before he gets too furious to eat!
6. Unless he’s lying again.
7. Or maybe all of his squirming and grunting means he really wants to lie on the floor and look at some toys.
8. Or not. Christ, he’s got to be hungry, it’s been like four hours since the last time he ate. Try again.
9. OH MY GOD HE’S TAKING THE BOTTLE AND HE LOOKS LIKE HE’S REALLY INTO IT.
10. BUT HE’S FLAILING HIS ARMS AROUND UNCONTROLLABLY FOR SOME REASON and oh crap he just knocked the bottle out of his mouth.
11. Control his arms with one hand.
12. Reinsert the bottle with the other hand. OH CRAP HIS SLEEPER IS BUNCHING UP IN FRONT OF HIS MOUTH BLOCKING THE BOTTLE IT’S LIKE LARRY DAVID’S PANTS TENT EXCEPT NOT REALLY.
13. Let go of his arms and fold the sleeper’s chest tent out of the way and reinsert the bottle CRAP IT’S TOO LATE HE DOESN’T WANT IT ANYMORE.
14. Get back to walking, mule.
15. Despite his screaming when you stop walking, sit down on the couch and rest your back for a few minutes. You aren’t going to be any good to anyone if you cripple yourself.
16. Pat his back to help him calm down. Once he falls asleep, keep patting and shushing to keep him that way. Maybe you can keep him asleep until mom gets home from work.
17. You could always read a magazine or some research materials from work except OH CRAP THE TIME IT TAKES TO TURN THE PAGE IS TOO LONG FOR HIM TO GO WITHOUT BEING PATTED ON THE BACK HE’S WAKING UP QUICK GET BACK TO PATTING HIM ON THE BACK.
18. Perhaps you should just watch Ellen Degeneres instead.
19. Don’t forget to keep patting and shushing FOR THE NEXT HOUR AND A HALF.

_____
1. Assuming you are lactating.^[2]
2. Yes, I know, it’s not always that easy even if you have mammary glands and are lactating. I am sorry for making light.

Conan could still pull this out.

Jonathan Chait is right when he says, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of The Simpsons :

“Of course, the show has been on the decline now far longer than it was good. But oh, how good it was in its heyday.”

I was a Simpsons watcher before The Simpsons show existed, back when the much-cruder versions of the characters we love today helped break up The Tracey Ullman Show. Is it weird that-as a middle schooler sneaking TV in my room-I associated the then-upstart Fox channel with the underground comics I was snapping up over at The Fantasy Five and Dime in depressing downtown Sterling, Virginia?

In addition to Ullman and her Simpsons, there were Married With Children, 21 Jump Street, and eventually In Living Color, all of which seemed to me to throb with genre-busting creative fervor and to confront the uptight morality of, you know, people older than me in the same way that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the comic book, which, lest it need saying, was so different from the later show/movies).

They rerun Married With Children on one of the local channels here, and I find it pretty much unwatchable, and maybe I’d think the same of the other examples, although I do think I might enjoy a DVD boxed-set of 21 Jump Street, if only so that I can more precisely analyze how my sense of “cool” first began to form (the characters’ wardrobe choices influenced me throughout high school and might even still do so today).

But I can usually enjoy most of even a bad Simpsons episode.

In fact, one consolation I’ve taken in so often not having a television over the years (or, now, no longer being able to receive Fox via my digital-to-analog converter) is the fact that as a result so many Simpsons reruns will be new to me when I am once again in a position to watch them. (The Simpsons being the only Fox show I’d ever go out of my way to see, although I probably would have watched American Idol last night if I could have.)

Of course, for the reason Chait points out, both my desire to watch Fox and the extent to which the above consolation actually consoles me has declined over the years. So I was excited when he called out and linked to an episode from the 1992 season that is entirely unfamiliar to me. Glad to know that some gems still await me. Chait particularly recommends Barney’s “Plow King” commercial at minute 11:50.

The Simpsons 409

Well, no, but was Raj Patel stuttering when Amy Goodman interviewed him about his new book, The Value of Nothing, yesterday on Democracy Now? As he answered Amy’s first question, it seemed all he could do to get each word out. I apologize if Raj really does have a stutter, but it seemed to me that it was an affectation, as though he wanted to prove that he is not only passionate but also has so much to say that it is all he can do to control the firehose stream of his consciousness long enough to form complete sentences.

Then today I saw this from Christopher Hitchens’s Vanity Fair article about the origins of the filler word “like”:

“This is an example of “filler” words being used as props, to try to shore up a lame sentence. People who can’t get along without “um” or “er” or “basically” (or, in England, “actually”) or “et cetera et cetera” are of two types: the chronically modest and inarticulate, such as Ms. Kennedy, and the mildly authoritarian who want to make themselves un-interruptible. Saul Bellow’s character Ravelstein is a good example of the latter: in order to deny any opening to a rival, he says “the-uh, the-uh” while searching for the noun or concept that is eluding him.”

This doesn’t quite fit my impression of Patel. I think he’s really just imitating/influenced by some stereotype of a scholar at some ancient British university, brought blinking out from his study to expound on his scholarship for a lecture hall of eager young students and too confident in the import of his work to bother worrying about presenting it in a considerate, easy-to-understand fashion.

But I couldn’t wait to be the first person to go into print comparing Raj Patel to Bellow’s uber-neoconservative character, Ravelstein (in what is a truly great book, by the way-among other things, it influenced me to shave my head for one of the first times, not that that takes much doing).

By the way, the title of Patel’s book comes from an Oscar Wilde quote, although he’s either misquoting him or there are multiple versions of this particular aphorism floating around.

Finally, why does Democracy Now sound so bad? There’s always this weird hiss and the voices seem bloodless and inhuman, sort of the way the first CDs sounded. I’d ascribe it to using digital technology instead of analog-it reminds me of nothing so much as the way voices sound when I’m interviewing people who use VoIP phones-but aren’t all radio programs recorded digitally now? Maybe it’s the result of just using really cheap digital technology.

In an Atlantic cover story called “How America Can Rise Again,” the always interesting James Fallows quotes the always interesting Garry Wills:

“When people say how bad things are, I always emphasize that we have never in our history been so good on human rights. The rights of women, gays, the disabled, Native Americans, Hispanics-all of those have soared in the last 40 years.” Even the “birther” and “tea bag” movements are indirect evidence of progress, Wills said. “They are reactions to a really great achievement. We did elect a black president. Not many people thought that was possible, even two or three years ago.”

Last Wednesday, two high-school football players from a small Montana town were charged with felony assault for a November 17th hazing incident in which they allegedly beat a younger boy with a piece of wood.

Charging documents claim that Rico Rodriguez, 15, held the boy down while Zachary Peavey, 16, swung the stick. According to the Billings Gazette, their coach, Jay Santy, “had earlier downplayed the alleged assault, saying criminal charges were not warranted.”

“The way I understood it,” Santy told the Gazette, “it was kids messing around and they got carried away.”

Nonetheless, the boys were expelled indefinitely in December and will be arraigned in state district court on January 27th.

Hazing incidents happen all the time, of course, especially on sports teams, and many are the school administrators nationwide who have struggled with how best to prevent them. But if anyone in Huntley Project, the area where the boys are from, is wondering where they got the idea that it’s acceptable for football players to act like thugs-and, perhaps more importantly, where Santy got the idea that it’s acceptable for a coach to downplay an attack on one of his players involving a weapon-it’s possible that we need to look no further than 350 miles west to Missoula, and Bobby Hauck’s Montana Grizzlies football team.

I doubt that-as Rodriguez and Peavey cornered their teammate in the locker room-they were consciously emulating the behavior of a team that has since 2007 become at least as well known for violent criminality as for its admirable winning record on the field. Unfortunately, however, it’s fair to say that it would have been unwise for Huntley Project parents to hold up the Montana Grizzlies as role models to their children-unless the only thing they wanted their kids to care about was winning football games.

And speaking of role models, there is something in Santy’s reported response that is reminiscent of Hauck’s response to an incident in March 2009, in which two of his players are alleged to have attacked a fellow UM student at a party, eventually kicking him multiple times-including in the head-as he lay unconscious in the street.

Police weren’t called and no charges were filed, so there is much that will never be known about what happened that night. But here are some things we do know:

• Coach Hauck gave every appearance of trying to duck public accountability for a vicious and potentially deadly attack by two of his players on a member of the community he serves, including by trying to bully a student reporter with denial of access. (This behavior attracted national attention and condemnation.)
• Coach Hauck claimed to have disciplined the two players, but-other than having them sit out the first game of the fall season-it’s unclear what this consisted of. (Hauck never responded to my or any other reporter’s requests for information.)
• The two players were both starters, and Hauck-whom we now know was also job hunting-stood to earn a $30,000 bonus if he brought his team to and won the FCS championship.

Let me be clear that I am not rehearsing the same old tired argument about how athletes should be better role models to young people. This is too much to ask of 20-year-old college athletes, but even if we were talking about allegedly grown-up NFL players, it’s foolish to look to someone who can run fast and throw far for guidance in anything but those skills.

What I am saying is that a college football coach has a responsibility to behave like a role model for and demand accountability from his players. If we cannot agree that the primary mission of a college football team is as a venue for the education and improvement of its players, then I don’t understand why we need to have college football teams at all. It’s wonderful that the Grizzlies bring so much pleasure to so many people, but that must never be considered a goal of having such a team, lest we start using on-field performance to excuse the failure of its coach to demand that his players treat their team membership as the honor and privilege that it is.

Missoulians were rightfully proud of the accomplishments of the Grizzlies under Hauck; imagine if they could be equally as proud of the off-field behavior of those players. Imagine if it had become known that Hauck had threatened to expel from the team any players who even appeared to be engaged in criminal behavior. Imagine if parents in Huntley Project-parents across Montana-could point to an example like that.

The last time I wrote about Hauck’s shameful behavior, I received more than a few comments from people with a severe case of hero worship for the man, essentially recommending that I get down on my knees with them and thank the big, powerful man for whatever scraps he chooses to toss to the community he works for and represents.

These same fans had barely had time to hang their knee pads in the closet after the Griz’s December championship defeat before the announcement came that Hauck would be moving on to greener pastures in Las Vegas. Fortunately for all Griz fans, Hauck’s replacement, Robin Pflugrad, looks like a capable man with every chance of replicating Hauck’s winning record.

Here’s hoping he won’t replicate Hauck’s record of avoiding accountability and covering up for the violent behavior of his players.

In my latest Went West column, I take a look at Montana’s culture of drinking and driving.

In the last days of the terrible year 2009, Missoula residents received a fresh helping of horror to carry with them into the new year. The day after Christmas, four local high-school girls were walking along a dark stretch of highway on the edge of town when a pickup truck drifted off the road and slammed into them. The crash killed two of the girls and hospitalized the other two.

Court documents say that the accused driver had a blood alcohol content of .147 three hours after the accident. He was also on prescription medication. And in a sort of trifecta of recklessness, he happened to be talking on his cell phone when he plowed into the girls, who were walking about five feet from the edge of the road.

The rest is here.

The beginning of the first full week of 2010 found me soaking in a hot-springs pool with my brother. Our Monday visit was my third to Jerry Johnson Hot Springs, and one of the previous visits-Christmas morning 2007-was also with my brother, so it seemed fitting that we might return as a way of sort-of ringing in the new year.

First we stopped at Lolo Pass to walk the snowshoe trail, where I used Neale’s camera to snap the above picture of him on top of the ridge.

He returned the favor.

Then we drove over the pass into Idaho and counted off the 22 or so miles to the Jerry Johnson parking area.

To get to Jerry Johnson from the parking area, you cross a wooden foot bridge and then walk a couple of miles along the banks of the Lochsa River.

The ground was still snow-covered, but it had that drizzled-on, acne-scarred appearance that snow gets after being rained on and then refrozen, and the trail was such a sheet of ice in places that it forced us off into the still-soft snow in the underbrush so as to be able to negotiate the steeper sections without slipping.

The first pool, which lies 30 or so feet down a steep slope from the trail-basically in the river-announced itself with a big cloud of steam hanging over the trail. In a first for me, the pool was empty, and we clambered down to claim it for ourselves.

One advantage of this pool is that it lies so far from the trail. As a result, once it’s occupied, there are psychological barriers that are likely to keep others away. The other two pools are on the trail, so people can stroll right up to you and decide whether you send out a serial-killer or sex-maniac vibe before stripping down (clothing is optional!). If they decide to just keep walking, it won’t be obvious that it’s because they’re having second thoughts about being naked in public near you-they might just be hiking around.

But with the waterfall-fed pool, they will have climbed all the way down from the trail before noticing how weirdly close together your eyes are, or the Mortal Combat knife you have positioned close to hand on a nearby rock.

So despite occasional traffic along the trail, we had the pool to ourselves and spent about two hours soaking, eating a late picnic lunch, and sharing a thermos of hot chocolate before making the drive back to Missoula.

By the time Neale left for North Carolina on Thursday morning, Missoula was in the grip of a terrible cold snap, with overnight temperatures around zero and days of bright sunshine that still only brought us up to fifteen degrees or so. I’m usually not very sensitive to cold, but this was bad enough that I actually wore long underwear and took to letting the car warm up for a while, empty, on the mornings that I headed down to my branch office at Break Espresso to get a little work done.

Bad enough that-as I walked back to the car from the Break, facing into the bitter winds funneling out of Hellgate Canyon-I wondered whether I really do want to stay in Missoula.

This week, Coen continued his slow adjustment back to the routine that was sort of in place before Christmas. To delay the point when she will have to return to work full-time, Amy has been working half days, so I’m home with Coen from a little after noon until around five thirty.

The keystone of this arrangement, of course, is Coen’s taking a bottle from me, which he decided in the week after Christmas he wasn’t going to do anymore, instead screaming and writhing away as if I were trying to pour acid into his mouth.

On Wednesday, as on several preceding days, I had to call Amy home from work early, but on Thursday he finally cooperated and drank down a bottle, in addition to taking three naps.

On Friday, he outdid himself and took two bottles, although he refused to take one of his naps unless I held him upright against my chest and lightly patted his back while he slept. This is no exaggeration: I was reading the New Yorker while he slept, and every time I turned a page, he would start to stir awake until I raced my hand back to his back and returned to the patting.

It’s a see-saw, I guess: bottle-feeding gets easier, but napping gets harder. Adherents to the Babywise brand of baby-raising philosophy would say we erred by not putting Coen on a “schedule” in his first weeks for both eating and sleeping, and letting him cry himself out if he didn’t like it. I regard Babywise with the same skepticism I have for libertarians, Marxists, and other ideologues who claim to know how to make everything perfect if you’ll just follow their program to the letter, but I suppose second-guessing comes with the parenting territory.

• In 2010, will Montana maintain its standing as the deadliest DUI state? My latest Went West column: http://bit.ly/8xRb0A #
• Cyclist-bashing Dr. Thompson gets five years in prison. http://bit.ly/7p7XY4 #
• Overheard in the Break: "I think we're one of the few couples that actually planned our pregnancy." #
• Persistence pays: 3rd polite, "just checking" email to a potential client gets an apology and a proposal to get the ball rolling next week. #
• I know the internet doesn't care what I had for lunch, but my son had a bottle. #
• Why doesn't @Missoulian link to earlier articles when it is updating a story? Win-win: helps researchers, gets more page views. #
• At the Break early after dropping my brother at the airport. #
• My mom is looking for hints about the best gadgets for digitizing old VHS tapes. #
• Another day, another chance to feel worthless as a father and to wonder how we survive economically when my son won't take a g.d. bottle. #
• Is there a FB app that helps quantify/graph your FB activity over the year? (Number posts, kind, etc.) #
• The public is our most effective first response against terrorism (5 flights saved by passengers since 2001!): http://bit.ly/88m7If #
• "He wasn't stabbing me for real." http://bit.ly/4HfdTG #