grapes and raspberry yogurt

This is the craziest thing. I don’t know why but these sentences seemed particularly bizarre, like candidates for Top Ten Sentences No Reporter Ever Thought They’d Write:
The leg, with hip and spine attached, dented the shingled roof of her garage before bouncing into the lawn.
and
Peters said a Customs agent that met the flight at the airport found another leg hanging from the wheel well.

Also this weirdo thing, which is kinda cool in a morbid, grotesque sort of way, just like the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, which I am dying to visit….ahahhahahhhaaaaaaaa!
My favorite letter responding to this story was this one, and why it made me laugh out loud I still am not sure:
I hate the corpse you decided to put at the top of the front page this weekend. It is extremely grotesque. Salon is my start-up page, and every time I have opened Internet Explorer this weekend I see a flayed corpse. Gahhh!
Please, never, ever, ever, ever put a corpse at the top of the front page again.
-- Paul N. Henry
Again, sentences most people probably never thought they’d write. I can just hear the editors at Salon saying, “OK, we’ll try not to…”

And this sentence, too, from the Guardian’s article on the Judy Blume classic Forever:
Fortunately, not even Margaret Drabble's poor grasp of belly button jargon has been enough to put the book-buying public off.

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Again, I love, love, LOVE Mimi. And Nora and her croutons (number three under the Virtual Nora Scrapbook section). I’ll bet the library patrons thought I’d lost my mind – I was reading this and laughing out loud at the reference desk all by myself the other night.

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I *really* have to read We Have to Talk About Kevin. Especially with it winning the Orange Prize and all. Which is, for those of you who don’t know, the prize for best fiction written by a woman. Although none of Shriver’s other books look remotely interesting to me.

I am about a third of the way through Peter Rushforth’s Kindergarten. I like it but feel that the kids in it are too clever by half. Even though I think they are really cool kids that I would like to be around. But I don’t know any fourteen- or sixteen-year-olds that talk the way these kids do. Perhaps I am just sadly deficient in my intellectual teenager category of acquaintances?

This article about books for children ages 4-7 is terrific. I can’t wait to get some at the library for Simon. We’ve been having fun with Amelia Bedelia and Toad and Frog, but it’s nice to have more choices. And some of these seem like they will definitely appeal to my son’s quirky and quick sense of humor, especially the Neil Gaiman and the Roger McGough. I just hope they’re available in the States; many books I read reviews of in the Guardian are not yet available here. Boo hiss.

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What is it with these women - Joolz, Jools…why not just spell it Jules? Like your parents intended. Because you know, the double O just makes me think of words like drools and fools and Kools.

I am clearly still in a foul mood from 1) having the twit at McDonalds give me the wrong change, 2) having him give me diet Coke instead of regular, and I can’t drink diet when I am pregnant, and 3) not even noticing either of these things until I was already halfway to work and it was too late to do a thing about them. Ah, the vagaries of pregnancy hormones!

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Here is Dan’s response to the Stroller Bitch. I really wish I’d sent this one to the editor:
Dear Sirs,
In response to Nicole Mullen's letter of 6/8/05, I would like to say that her suggestion to ban strollers is completely out of proportion to the problem at hand. Her remedy is to inconvenience all parents of young children in order to make sure she punishes the one parent who upset her. In fact, I was that parent. Nicole was waddling in front of me at the Arts Festival last week for the better part of a city block. I had said, "Excuse me", "Pardon me" and "Beep! Beep!" several times to no avail. (Apparently the clogging capacity of corn dogs and fried dough reaches immediately to the blood vessels in the ear canal.) At a break in the sidewalk, between buildings, I attempted to circumnavigate her planetary mass, but unfortunately the gravitational pull overwhelmed my helmsmanship, and my poor toddler went crashing into her like a meteorite into a mesa.

There is no need to prohibit others still willing to play Jedi Knight with the Death Stars of the city. I've put my ship in dry dock.

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And last but not least – where do I stand on cord blood banking? My brother and his wife are due any minute now, and it’s their first, and they are considering this option. Understandably, since my brother obviously emerged from the same overcautious – some might say “nervous” – gene pool as me. Here was my somewhat casual reply to his query:
My personal feeling, for what it's worth, is that you can only protect and prepare so much. Sometimes you have to prioritize what you can and can't do. You simply cannot prepare for every eventuality, much as you'd like to. And my gut feeling is that the cash could be put to better use for an education or whatever. Simplistic, but there you have it. That said, it's probably because so far my kids are pretty healthy that I feel this way.
Of course on the other hand and on a smaller scale: I breastfeed because it prevents ear infections; I am religious about car seats because I worry for my kids' safety even though I have never ever had an accident; I do draw the line at peeling grapes, but my kids are not allowed to have balloons because of horror stories I have heard, just as I worry constantly that they are going to fall out of one of our windows. You can't help what your personal bugaboo is going to be. If it happens to be cancer, and cord blood banking will give you peace of mind, it might be worth the money.

But I will do some reading and try to develop a more scientific reason to be for or against it. That said, there will be no cord blood banking for my kid. Sorry, Charlie.