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For our entire childhoods, my father would make themed 3D cakes on our birthdays. These would be the ultimate homemade expression of food love: not good enough for a cake store, yet so loved, constructed, and amazing.

My brother has been carrying on the tradition for years with his kids. I have a six and three year-old, and I finally got one that captures what dad was doing. Guthrie's third birthday last week got him a locomotive. Just the fact that he recognized it was reward enough for me.

This is before the finishing touches, and the icing - well, that's kind of what it looked like, yes. Steampunk!

This is perfect, regarding the tacitly-supported or explicity-promoted right-wing response to the Obama health care inititive:

I presently am dealing with an alcoholic friend, trying to walk that fine line between supportive and enabling. The comment about Obama being like "a deer in the headlights" made me realize that the right wing has become like an addict -- completely bonkers and in total denial about it. The question is: How do the rest of us do the intervention? [link]

Yes, when will this party stop the madness? Will it? Or can the Democratic Party somehow recpature the will to overcome the hatred.

Randomly sent from my brother-in-law, who found his white board, made things, photographed them, erased them, and made more. And who graciously let me post a couple of these here. His latest film.

This picture is by Tyler Hicks for the New York Times.

It's such a macho reporter fantasy to be embedded, and it reminds me of the kind of tough-nut self-involved culture that can sometimes exist in any front-line volunteerism as well. Can't stop for water! Gotta get this done now! Gotta take my shirt off! Gotta be me!

But then, this multimedia piece - and the accompanying article - from C.J. Chivers coverage of a unit getting ambushed in Afghanistan makes me shut up, lift my head, and sit speechless at what it takes to be a soldier. And that's the point of these journalists risking their lives - our insight/action/engagement. This has got to be one critical function of journalism, and I hope blogging and citizen journalism don't mark the end of fearless reporting like this. Wow.

Have you ever been really afraid? I have, maybe twice. Once when I had to stop, camp, and sleep lost on a solo hike in a desert. And once when I heard shots in a orange grove near where I slept in my car. And I've never been shot at. The chaos, your life flashing in front of you. Now. Take a picture that's in focus and tells the story of that moment, at that moment.

One of my favorite editors once told me that you had to be able to think as an editor without the software impeding the speed of your idea and its execution. You just have to think and do. That must be what Tyler Hicks was doing. Knowing his equipment so well that he could take these images in the midst of what surely was terrifying even for the most seasoned photojournalist.

Click to watch the multimedia once you get to the page - the link wasn't working in my cut-and-paste here.

I continue to be fascinated to watch the historic realignment of the republican party, and finally I feel like I'm hearing a rational new voice: social wedge issues and bigotry will not win the party a meaningful share of the electorate in the years to come. Intolerance as the basis of party loyalty just isn't the direction we're headed, unless there's a spate of terrorist acts in the U.S. and the electorate reverts to the policies of panic.

Steve Schmidt, John McCain's former top adviser, came out on Thursday (so to speak) and said that the Republican party risks becoming a strictly religious party if they continue to oppose gay marriage, or at least gay unions. Amen. Any connected progressive has got to want the Republican party to stop leaning on and fomenting hate as a tool for votes.

If they return to their roots - fiscal conservativism, federalism, isolationist trade policies - at least they will simultaneously bring their loyal membership into an alignment with integrity, respect, and honesty, too. These eight years have seen the total collapse of the party's core integrity, and they have got to recover that not only to continue to be meaningful, but to stop being just tragically ugly.

And if Obama continues as he has done to date, I just don't think fear is going to be a winning strategy anyway.

If you're thinking of becoming a parent, here's something about it.

It is likely that you will develop an ever-expanding and uncomfortably close knowledge of the details of television and toy culture. You will know the Star Wars Clone Wars ships that Lego has available. You will fall asleep to the endless looping of the Wow Wow Wubbzy theme song. You will know without blinking that you are holding Dr. Freeze's helmet between your thumb and index finger.

This ever-widening knowledge is secret, except to your children, who are of course your leaders in learning here. You can't share this junk with your friends who don't have children, because it looks like you yourself are a child. Which is in and of itself not untrue, given the amount of kid culture that you absorb as a byproduct of caregiving. And you certainly don't want to share with your friends who do have children, because they've got enough competing theme songs in their head already.

It is a burden best borne alone.

PS Mr Freeze is from the amazing Zakka, a block from where I work.

Norm Coleman tells the New York Times that he binds his tefillin every morning and prays because his senatorial race is in God's hands now.

In God's hands how, exactly? This is the god-will-tell-me-what-I-want-to-hear crap that drives me insane and makes genuine religious workers feel funny inside. I mean, come on Norm, if you're waiting for a sign from God, how about that you just LOST YOUR APPEAL? Or was it God telling you to appeal the appeal, as you've now announced you'll be doing?

When people ascribe fate or the hand of God to every shift in the wind, they abdicate their own duty as workers of the world: social, humanitarian, capitalist, moral, political: all of it. If Norm Coleman really believed this was in God's hands, perhaps he would open his heart to his own responsibilities to the greater good and bow away. Who knows, perhaps so would Al Franken. But Al has not declared his fate to be in the hands of God, so apparently he's still claiming some lingering desire to want to be a Senator from Minnesota.  Norm Coleman's desire has now evaporated in that toxic piousness and religiously-voided personal responsibility that so many use to shield their ugliness, vanity, and greed.

Please Norm, keep God out of this Minnesota outhouse of power-lust. Don't feel bad about wanting to win - you're just human, that's all. 

Every 40 years, a realignment.