A re-run of a lovely Dave Barry column…

If you’re a new parent, there will come a time when either you or your spouse will say these words:

”Let’s take the baby to a restaurant!”

Now, to a normal, sane person, this statement is absurd. It’s like saying: ”Let’s take a moose to the opera!”

But neither you nor your spouse will see anything inappropriate about the idea of taking your baby to a restaurant. This is because, as new parents, you are experiencing a magical period of wonder, joy and possibility that has made you really stupid.

You are not alone: All new parents undergo a sharp drop in intelligence. It’s nature’s way of enabling them to form an emotional bond with a tiny human who relates with other humans exclusively by spitting up on them. Even very smart parents are affected, as we see from these two quotations:

Albert Einstein Shortly Before The Birth Of His Son: ”To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms — this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.”

Albert Einstein Shortly After The Birth Of His Son: ”Daddy’s gonna EAT THESE WIDDLE TOES!”

Lots more where that came from. Go to it.

A satirical posting circulating on the Net…

BATON ROUGE, LA. – The White House announced today that President Bush has successfully sold the state of Louisiana back to the French at more than double its original selling price of $11,250,000.

“This is a bold step forward for America,” said Bush. “And America will be stronger and better as a result. I stand here today in unity with French President Jack Chirac, who was so kind to accept my offer of Louisiana in exchange for 25 million dollars cash.”

The state, ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild.

“Jack understands full well that this one’s a ‘fixer upper,'” said Bush. “He and the French people are quite prepared to pump out all that water, and make Louisiana a decent place to live again. And they’ve got a lot of work to do. But Jack’s assured me, if it’s not right, they’re going to fix it.”

The move has been met with incredulity from the beleaguered residents of Louisiana.

However, President Bush’s decision has been widely lauded by Republicans.

“This is an unexpected but brilliant move by the President,” said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. “Instead of spending billions and billions, and billions of dollars rebuilding the state of Louisiana, we’ve just made 25 million dollars in pure profit.”

“This is indeed a smart move,” commented Fox News analyst Brit Hume. “Not only have we stopped the flooding in our own budget, we’ve made money on the deal.”

The money gained from ‘The Louisiana Refund’ is expected to be immediately pumped into the rebuilding of Iraq.

Footnote: The original Louisiana Purchase (in 1803) involved far more territory than the state of Louisiana. Indeed, according to Wikipedia,

the lands purchased contained parts or all of present-day Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota west of the Mississippi River, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, New Mexico, northern Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, the portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Rocky Mountains, the portions of southern Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan and southern Alberta that drain into the Missouri River, and Louisiana on both sides of the Mississippi River including the city of New Orleans.

In fact, the land included in the Purchase comprises over one-quarter of the territory of the modern continental United States. And all for $3 per square mile!

Lovely Wired profile of Tim O’Reilly. It prompted me to dig out my picture of him — taken at EuroFOO ’04 in Holland.

Last month I wondered why a small village in Cambridgeshire should be twinned with the celebrated German city of Weimar. Now comes an email from the eagle-eyed James Miller who reveals that

The “Weimar” twinned with Sawtry is not the grand seat of European culture.

In fact it’s a small district about 10km south of Marburg, in Hessen, on the river Lahn.

The main town is Niederweimar (try Googe images).

It’s nice to have these puzzles solved.

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer each earned a salary of $600,000 and a bonus of $400,000 for Microsoft’s 2005 fiscal year — which ended on June 30, according to Microsoft’s annual proxy filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That’s a million each — peanuts by US corporate standards, even in these post-Enron days.

Just finished watching the first part of Martin Scorsese’s riveting film about Bob Dylan. As the credits rolled I saw the words “With Special Thanks to Steve Jobs”. For what, exactly?

Fascinating list of the 50 most-cited 20th-century works in the Arts and Humanities Index. No. 1 is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, followed by James Joyce (Ulysses), Northrop Fry (Anatomy of Criticism), Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations) and Noam Chomsky (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax). Chomsky appears three times in the list, as does Joyce. Wittgenstein appears twice, as do Karl Popper and Levi-Strauss. Hmmm…

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.