Well, clearly the novelty was starting to wear off by birthday 2. No doubt by the time birthday 3 came around the menu was down to a Tastycake and some Slim Jims.

If that. :-) EL

Why don't you share that blackberry jam cake recipe with us.

Too much typing. :-) EL

I just noticed all my comments to other comments have smiley faces on them this morning. It must be the weather. EL

Because B-day 1 is for the adults, and B-bday 2 is when that nightmare of entertaining other kids begins.

The weather IS nice, isn't it! Hope it lasts til summer!

I just noticed all my comments to other comments have smiley faces on them this morning.

Damned gratuitous punctuation.

Our second son was presented with his first birthday cake (created after much tribulation which I will omit here) and promptly threw it on the floor. I don't remember what flavor it was.

Dahlink,
Thanks for the laugh! The visual of placing a cake (that was very trying to make) in front of a little one and watching him throw it on the floor is priceless.

One wonders if there was a bit of foul language that followed.

still chuckling...

I'm sure that Roland Barthes would agree that birthday parties for babies and todlers are really for the adults.

I'd ask who Roland Barthes is, but I don't care.

Eve, I believe that Owl is studying/practicing existentialism again, but just a guess. I was curious enough to google and that's about all I got out of it.

The act of writing something about someone you don't care about and announcing it to the world is an act of great caring.

or

How can you not care about what you don't know?

and

There is hidden meaning in your text.

and/or

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
– Roland Barthes

And thus a random act of wanton unwanting wonts for ... Roland Barthes week.

Either/Or ...

It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.
– Søren K

Anything to take my mind off of the murder in my heart every time I hear or see the insipid phrase "in this economy".

Existentialism? Nah. Those questions were answered long ago.

Just a shout out to an old friend. I guess Barthes is so far from existentialism that he almost loops back into it a bit. Roland Barthes was a giant of semiotics and structuralism who exposed bourgeois myth-creation in daily life and popular culture. My main point of reference was his critique of children's toys. Why give a baby a toy car? It's all about the adult and not at all about the baby – imprinting bourgeois materialism on a tabula rasa. I guess Barthes' semiology touches on existentialism when it exposes the emptiness of symbol creation via materialism and can't avoid comparisons to the best of Marx's critiques of materialism.

The possibilities for the semiotic analysis of food and restaurants is a bottomless pit. Just off the top of my head: stacked food, pasta shapes, restaurant names, etc etc etc. Shut up and eat.

And that's why nobody wants to talk to me first thing in the morning. 8>)

“Philosophy is not a theory but an activity”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein

... and the voice in my head that carries on dialogues with myself asks how I can simultaneously have Barthes, Marx, Hegel, Chogyam Trungpa, Wittgenstein, Camus, Sartre, Eco, Thich Nhat Hanh, Augustine, Abelard, and Kierkegard in my head at the same time ... how could you not? It's a party.

He's not really dead. As long as we remember him.
– Leonard McCoy

Owl Meat Garrulous --

Do you think Don Draper studied semiotics?
Would Don Draper survive in this economy?

Lacan-ic/La-iconic Laura Lee, Don Draper is semiotics.

Even. In. This non-bon-econ-homie anomie mon ami.

Watch me deconstruct right before your eyes. My doctor says that I have elevated entropy levels.

All this talk about entropy has me pondering the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And prompted me to scrounge up this old item which was sent to The National Review a few years ago:

Subject: Texas A&M chemistry midterm exam. The following is an actual question given: "Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)? Support your answers with proof."
Most of the students wrote using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats up when it is compressed), or some variant. One student wrote the following:

"First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving.
"I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.
"As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions. Some state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there are more than one of these religions, and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people and all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.
"Now, we look at the rate of change in the volume in Hell, because Boyle's law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand as souls are added. This gives two possibilities. (1) If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all hell breaks loose. (2) Of course, if Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over. So which is it?
"If we accept the postulate given to me by Ms. Sheryl Atkinson during my freshman year, that 'It would be a cold day in hell before I sleep with you' and take into account the fact that I still have not succeeded in having sexual relations with her, then (2) cannot be true, and thus I am sure Hell is exothermic."

This student got the only A.

The Three Laws of Thermodynamics:
1. You can't win.
2. You can't break even.
3. You can't get out of the game.

As a t-shirt I once saw said:
"Down With Entropy!"

An Aggie was that witty?

Hel is actually the name of a Germanic goddess.