Quick Roundup 443

The Pros and Cons of Parenthood

Over at Try Reason!, John Drake lists the good and the bad of being a dad. He concludes with the following.

There's no question I'm happy I had children. They can be trying at times, but I'm quickly realizing that the biggest issues I have with fatherhood usually stem from failures on my part to live rationally. If anything, they challenge me to be a better person. And this, along with their unconditional love, are two of the greatest things that come with being a dad.

He also jogged my memory about a post by Amy Mossoff from about a week ago concerning the book A Baby Maybe, by Elizabeth Whelan. Mossoff begins straight away with the aspect of the possibility that happens to give me the most pause:

When Adam and I got married we were both undecided about having children, and I think we both leaned towards the negative. The first thing that started steering us in the other direction was a vacation we took with our close friends and their 18 month old son. We spent a week in the Bahamas with them and saw firsthand how they were able to integrate their child into their lives and continue to do fun, adventurous things, even if it did mean lugging around a lot more stuff. We thought to ourselves, "We could do that."

And then she explains why the book was so helpful with her and her husband's decision -- because it indicates three major aspects of the decision that make it so different from so many others one makes in life.

Saucy Salmon

As an added bonus, The Little Things has probably also saved me from having to hunt down a good salmon recipe. Remembering how my family usually had fried fish on Friday nights for a while as I grew up, I mentioned to my wife my desire to learn/tinker with fried fish.

She likes salmon -- which is good, but not what I had in mind -- and told me she'd like to do that from time to time as well. This recipe uses a creole seasoning we just happen to have on hand, sounds relatively easy, and is described as "no fail." That sounds like three good reasons to try it out to me.

One down, one to go. I'll get the fried fish recipe from my Mom on a future phone call.

A Very Small Window into a Very Small Soul?

Matt Drudge reports the following, which I reproduce in whole since he does not archive material originally posted to his site. The image is one of four from a montage also posted at the above temporary link.

As the summer begins, White House watchers have spotted a new look by President Obama: The Evil Eye!

Staffers have joked about the menacing glance, which comes when the president meets with world leaders who are not aligned with his progressive view.

White House photographers have captured the "evil eye" in recent weeks, during sessions with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Colombia's Alvaro Uribev.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi got hit with the commander's malocchio last week in the Oval office.

And at least one White House reporter has been on the receiving end of the daggers during a press conference.

Developing...

I am not well-versed about microexpressions, but I wonder if this is what Drudge is really talking about here. If so, that might explain why it took so long for someone to capture this "new" expression of malevolence. I put scare quotes around the word "new" because I and many others have wondered aloud whether Obama is stupid or evil. (Another blogger draws an intriguing parallel between another Obama Administration official's somewhat similar expression and that seen on Jim Taggart when he was introduced in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.)

Recently, Myrhaf successfully predicted that Obama would choose the wrong side in the so-called coup in Honduras and afterwards, Alan Sullivan commented that Barack Obama had joined the Axis of Evil. But from the looks of this, Obama has not merely effectively been a member of the Axis of Evil, but has lived there, emotionally at least, all along.

Central Planners

C. August has made a valuable connection about the unit-economy and unambiguity -- rare in today's muddled political discourse -- of the above phrase.

-- CAV