Magda and I had our last doc appt this afternoon. Fairly routine given we are just a couple of days now from the big event. There is no movement on the baby’s part to try and make with a fanciful escape (which is good) so we’ll hopefully be on schedule for Friday morning. I plan to be twittering through the whole thing and uploading pics to flickr as I can. We are in the same hospital again (Seton Central) and there’s no wifi to speak of so I’ll see if I can tether my phone to get some connectivity - given that the speeds are awful slow and present-day digicams produce rather large files I can make no promises. Additionally, I seem to have forgotten that we’ll be in the hospital for a few days (oh yeah, that!) so we will likely not return home until on Monday some time. All sets of parents, save Magda’s, are out of state until after the birth (wild set of coincidences and ironies there since they are *never* out of state) but hopefully they’ll join us over the weekend. We are still working on a name but my hope is that he’ll help us out when he makes with the arriving.

And because I’m such a geek I continue to work on the new blog theme which continues to get closer. I think I’ve got my tweets in the sidebar styled like I want them (I just need to add curves to non-gecko browsers (yes, it’s somewhat of a nod to twitterific). I also added styling to the search form so that it resembles the apple search input (thanks to brandspankingnew for the inspiration). There are really so many facets to consider and given that I don’t often get more than a half-hour/hour to work on it that makes it all the more difficult (context switching sucks). I still haven’t tested in any IEs but I don’t really care at the moment as it renders great in firefox and safari. I may just push what I have in the next few days and leave the rest to a more iterative approach since at least most of the plumbing is in better shape with this thing. Anyhow, it’s getting closer.

Found via Eric Meyer. An interesting set of questions - i’ll be curious to see the results. Oh, and if you leave your name and email there are prizes to be had!

This action will start the evening before, with flyering all over town. Then on April 28 there will be a picnic from 12:00pm–2:00pm in Zilker Park where we will wear our favorite anti-war/anti-Bush t-shirts, make protest signs and meet plenty of like minded Austin families!! We will spell out the word IMPEACH with our bodies. Click here for more info and to help out.

Via VolunteerForchange

To find a rally near you, check out this CommunityWalk Page. With the new little one arriving we obviously won’t be able to make this one

Somehow I ended up in a discussion today with a friend over the War in Iraq and I found myself trying to up-end the multitude of lies thrust into his brain by the Drudge Report

Now mind you, this friend is well read and intelligent so in moving the debate forward there was always the “prove it” or “link me” factor to any of the arguments I was providing. Among the things that he found shocking was that Bush/Cheney themselves had admitted that 1) the pre-war intelligence on WMD was wrong and they “misspoke” and 2) there was no operational relationship (or relationship whatsoever) between Al-Qaeda and Iraq. Those two ideas set the stage for the war so if you break these down then you break the basis for the war down, essentially. Doing a brief search tonight I, thankfully, ran again across Mother Jones’ excellent Lie by Lie: The Mother Jones Iraq War Timeline - which has got to be essential reading for those of you just joining the anti-war party we’re having (better late than never).

Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them. If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you. As our coalition takes away their power, we will deliver the food and medicine you need. We will tear down the apparatus of terror and we will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free. In a free Iraq, there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near.

Via Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation The Cross Hall - March 17, 2003

What a difference four years can make…

It seems that people who deliberately deconstruct religion, then exorcise it from their lives, eventually realize that maybe they’re not so much smarter than everyone who’s ever lived after all. When they inevitably discover that faith has a purely utilitarian value as a way of mitigating the mounting existential dread that arises from simply being alive, they generally resort to creating some kind of half-assed religion substitute. This leads to spiritual philosophies that embarrass everybody, like aromatherapy and everything Jewel believes.

Via misnomer