Cost Of Raising A Child

As Father's Day has come and gone here's some financial news to make one think twice about being a dad. Dad can expect to raise a child for 17 years or more but at an average cost of $234,000 to do it. I'm sure I spend much more than that on Jane.  A government report  found that a middle income family with a child born last year will spend about that much in child related expenses from birth through age 17. The estimate also includes the cost of transportation, child care, education, food, clothing, health care and miscellaneous expenses. Interestingly, the cost of child care for young children which ws tiny 50 years ago, is now the second largest expense as more moms work outside the home and have to pay for others to tend to little Johnny and Susie.
The $234,000 per year average is for middle income parents. Lower income parents have a much lower cost average at about $169,080 for each child up to age 17 and higher income parents spend on average $389,670. The cost at all levels is based on income levels, the area of the country in which the child and parents live, family size and things such as welfare payments to the lower income levels that pay for the child's expenses rather than the parents themselves. The number of children people have declines as income rises, everywhere, because the opportunity cost is higher when income is higher. When a couple has more money they have more choices and opportunities that are curtailed for children or they just get a dog. As much as I love kids, dogs don't ask for $500 prom dresses...

Also, the cost per child decreases as a family has more children. The report found that families with three or more children spend 22 percent less per child than those with two children. The savings result from hand-me-down clothes and toys, shared bedrooms and buying food in larger quantities. It's not recommended though that Sally's dresses be handed down to and worn by little Fred.

Hmmmm Maybe we parents should cut the child expense budget like those politicians always promise to do for us before the election. From my own perspective being a parent and spending whatever it takes for a little one is worth every penny. That new car or TV wears out, but one's child never stops driving you crazy and, thus, is "priceless".

Older Men Make Longer Living Children

Some good news for the oldies. Older dads and grandfathers may have longer living kids. That's according to a new study by researchers at Northwestern University, who found that children of  fathers in their late 30s to early 50 inherit longer telomeres, those bits of DNA at the end of chromosomes that affect aging and cell death. Typically, the longer your telomeres, the longer you live. Mine must be a mile long. I should get an electrified fence to keep the hot young babes away. Hmmmm Ok,  maybe that statement just proves that older men also hallucinate more. But the study I just cited  about babies with older dads is real. I'm not kidding about that. Though this doesn't imply that I am going to hang out in single bars and approach the young ladies with , "Hi, want to have a baby with me? I make better ones".

The study also says that the older your father's father was when your father was born, the more likely you are to have long telomeres. So the findings suggest being an older dad isn't all risk as we have been led to believe. What a turn around from other studies that say older parents produce more kids with genetic defects. This young generation believes that older people are less intelligent, less able to physically compete etc. We are often assigned with having but one saving grace, the idea that being older means more experienced.
"He may wear diapers and drool, but he knows a lot", those young whippersnappers can be heard to say.

I'll counter with, "And my sperm is better than yours too (as I soil my depends diapers and dribble all over myself)." Well, that might not be the most effective way to appeal to those hot young babes who want strong babies. We older men need to come up with some better lines and sell ourselves more (and stop wearing spandex...Yuk).  Maybe we should create some lines for the on-line dating sites that would make the sexy young babes chase after us. Microsoft did well with the slogan 'Intel Inside'. We older guys should wear a sign on our pants that says 'Better Babies Inside'.

On the other hand, I guess senility comes with being older too.............

Banning Sugar

The food police here in the U.S. are now after sugar ! This is a problem for a sugar junkie like me, and I think unfair to rage a politically correct assault to demonize one food as the cause of the growing fatness of America. Surely, Americans are too fat. But is sugar the culpret.....or perhaps is the real villain is both eating too much sugar and eating too much of everything else? I wonder also if governments should have the right regulate what we eat when the content is harmless. Sugar is an empty calorie, not harmful in itself unless, like all other foods we eat, it is eaten in overly large quantities. Maybe the blame for the obesity should be that we simply eat too much and exercise too little, not that sugar makes us fat.

Government is now in full sugar demonization mode as some states and cites have implemented "sugar taxes" to discourage eating it, Disney has announced it will no longer advertise food with sugar on it's TV networks radio station and its web sites, New York has pans to ban the sale of over sized soft drinks and on and on. Ironically, while the known dangerous cancer causing cigarette is allowed to exist freely in the market place, a harmless substance like sugar is declared as to be evil. And what about the devastating health effects of alcohol? I hear nothing about banning that. How crazy! Sugar has been consumed in large quantities for thousand years, and is low in calories (15 calories per tablespoon).

Evidence of the folly of banning sugar laden foods can be seen in the fact that overall consumption of sugary soft drinks has decreased dramatically in the past two decades. So saying we are fat because we drink too much coke is absurd. Though eating too much sugar causes many health problems, so does eating too much of anything else. Consumers do not need governments to regulate what they eat as long as the food they consume is not a toxic product (as is tobacco). Instead, advising and educating the consumer of the hazards of eating too many sweets is a more reasonable approach to curbing the sugar excess. Adding a bit of sugar to food can make our food taste better. It is a natural product and not a "bad" substance. What Americans need to control obesity is self control, limiting the amount of all foods they eat. But then, that takes will power and wisdom. Banning sugar does not.

This is an age of plenty. We eat too much, we play with technology too much, spend too much on "junk" at malls and stores we don't need or use etc. It's the quantity of sugar people eat that is harmful not the sugar itself. Demonizing a single harmless food will only make the public less attentive to real food issues. Obesity is a problem to be addressed, but to single out one component of one's diet as a way to cure the problem is idiotic. Better to forget that stupidity and enjoy a sugary cinnamon roll today!

Towns And Cities To Avoid

I was driving the other day and again saw that sign directing me to "Boring" Oregon. No, it didn't want to make me go there. But it got me to thinking about some of the other silly town names here in Oregon and in my native Louisiana. Oregon and Louisiana have many more crazy named towns than do the sedate states like Nebraska, Ohio, Indiana and other places no one wants to go to unless they have to. But they also have more than bigger states like New York.

So after researching the crazy names of cities and towns in all 50 states I have no conclusion as to why some states have more silly ones that others. But in general, given there are exceptions to the rule... as in boring Kentucky having a huge number, the more dull the boring state the fewer funny town names. States where people are more laid back and have a good sense of humor produce more wacky named towns and places that are conservative and religious produce far fewer.


When a city or town his given an odd or funny name it brands not only the place, but the residents of it. It's similar to naming a new born boy or girl something crazy. It's no wonder, for example, "Moon Unit Zappa", the given name to music great Frank Zappa's boy turned into a troubled child and adult. So if you name your child "Bambi", don't expect academic brilliance.
Here are some weird town/city names from Louisiana and Oregon for your next visit.

Oregon:
Beaver Creek (no the beaver's don't have title to the creek and in fact seemed to have left town. There aren't many beavers there anymore)
Bend ( as in bend over?)
Boring( rumor has it that the town lives up to it's name)
Bridal Veil (men avoid this place whenever possible)
Dork Canal (maybe my future home if I need to be out in a nursing home)
Funny Butte (I have yet to hear a butt tell a good joke. Maybe the funny ones are there)
Idiot Creek (no one has yet to claimed to be the founder of this one)
Poop Creek (be wary of drinking the water if in Poop Creek)
Wanker's Corner (they have seemed to put their wankers in the corner. I wonder why?)

Louisiana:
Bayou Crab (What makes a bayou crab special?)
Belcher (crude place)
Brimstone (another name for sulfur, meaning this places smells bad)
Cut Off (I hope they don't cut off those!)
Dry Prong (not the place to go if thirsty)
False River (if you see a river you there are hallucinating)
Frogmore (it's actually nothing to do with frogs. It's an archaeological site of Indian mounds)
Glasscock (what cab a cock do with a glass love muscle?)
Loco (I know.( after writing about this subject I belong there)
Napoleonville (though named after one of the world's biggest ego maniac, it's a very small town
Vatican (the Italians don't even know it moved)
Waterproof (homeowners never buy flood insurance there)
White Castle (they must be clean people)

D Day

Another anniversary of D Day has past. I won't go through the specifics of the event, but simply write that D Day (Decision Day) was the turning point of W.W. II and the end of the Nazi attempt to expand into other nations and practice some very inhumane doctrines there. There are few survivors, civilian or military, of W.W. II, and as a result few people today note it or think about the slaughter that came about in the world's greatest conflict (per casualty numbers). That is a shame. Our technology and conveniences have robbed us of appreciation of and about previous eras that can instruct us well even today.

Much of the world saw that war as a reluctant crusade to exterminate the horrors and threats of Nazism and as a result, there were few people who protested fighting Germany and her allies because the evil was clear to all. Today such clarity in the evil arena is not what it used to be. With modern communication, and the protests and restraints on government that go with those protests, it is hard to imagine countries being able to mobilize such a great war again.

That's the good news. No doubt, for example, the west would have long ago attacked Muslim countries in response to their support of Islamic terrorists if this were the era of the 40's rather than the 2000's. The public today would instantly oppose a war of that kind today and freeze their governments from executing such a war. It's a nice restraint to have in preventing a foolish rush to judgment.

The bad aspect of this is that renegade nations and groups sheltered by them, as in Iran and many Muslim nations, feel less pressure to behave fairly knowing that an attack on them today is unlikely. In a sense, W.W. II was the last world war to be fought in a conventional way. Such a world wide conflict will be highly unlikely to happen again. And that has a bad connotation as well as the good one I mentioned. That is, nations now may act badly and aggressively against others with much less fear that they will be challenged and stopped in their acting out.

War should always be a last answer. Humans lose lives needlessly in them for wars are most often nothing more than temporary territorial changes. The humans who experience war return from those conflicts physically or emotionally injured, and the civilian population loses much as well. The carnage of D day and W.W. II should be a good reminder to us of that.

Pakistan Stops Twittering

You know, I hate most technology so much that I would probably move into a cave if one were available. But even I am outraged at censorship of free expression.  According to the Pakistan government, Pakistan shut down Twitter for about eight hours recently because Twitter refused to remove content considered objectionable to Muslims. Hmmmm Cooler heads (maybe cooler ....if you like all that tweeting nonsense) prevailed though and Pakistani Prime Minister Raza Gilani intervened to end the ban and restore access. It was banned because of a Twitter contest that asked people to go to face book for a contest that encouraged people to post their idea of what Islam’s prophet Mohammed looked like.Muslims don't like any representations of Mohammed, considering it iconic anc disrespectful.

Trying to censor such harmless speech is idiotic in this age of electronic media. Probably he government initially banned Twitter to please the nutty fundamentalists in Pakistan who seem to run the country.  But it is not possible to control use of the internet.  First, people are used to using electronic media to communicate what they feel and believe., and secondly, it is impossible for governments to censor all the electronics out there.

I think the Prime Minister probably restored twitter in Pakistan  because he wanted to avoid another of the many past situations in which the craziest of Muslims placed death threats on humans who speak about Islam "inappropriately".  He understands that individual can censor how they communicate with others, but governments can no longer effectively censor for the collective citizenry. Unfortunately, the extremists fundamentalist Muslims, the ones who long ago captured modern islam and are controlling it, do not have that understanding.

One would think they would have learned that lesson by now, because the extremists themselves use the western communication technology they claim to hate to plan their agendas and communicate their  (often subversive, deviate) policies and strategies, knowing that their communications can not be controlled by anyone else. Hmmmm.... They reason, the west can't stop us from using their technological inventions for our own purposes, but we can stop our own followers from using it. Apparently, two plus two is not four in the fundamentalist Islamic world.

In banning Twitter, Pakistan joined a list of countries including China, Burma, the United Arab Emirates and Libya that have denied their citizens access to the blogging sites like twitter.  All of them are doomed to fail in their censorship attempts. Some of the Pakistani Twitter users immediately downloaded software to circumvent the ban, while others were able to tweet via "smart phones" (I hate that personification of a phone. I doubt that either the phones or the users of them are in any way smart) . So the ban was immediately unenforceable for those with the tech savvy and desire to circumvent it.

Now....if you could just find a way to

Chat Slang

IDK sup re IM.... Omg! ATM 411 FUBAR. MIRL!!! Did you get that? If not, you are not up to date on some of the common chat slang these days. Here's a translation of what I wrote in those first sentences. "I don't know what's up regarding Instant messaging. Oh my gosh! At the moment information is fouled up beyond all recognition. Meet me in real life not online."

Don't feel badly about not understanding that mess. I didn't either until stumbling on Chatslang.com and creating my little cryptic message above. I think our problem is that we are not teenagers, and thus, don't have much experience in the use of online chat slang abbreviations or emotioncoms. Just call me O.o *-* and :-/ (that's, confused, frustrated and perplexed in case you also don't know your cutsie slang icons)

It seems there is an ever increasingly broader chat alternative language on line today called chat slang. But those using it are a homogeneous group, mostly composed of pre teens and teenagers.

Fine...let them have their on line chat slang. But I have seem some of this chat slang creeping into mainstream language, both verbal and written. And I don't like it. No doubt Shakespeare would be aghast (I wander what the chat icon for aghast is?) But then language must evolve and change over time or it dies (like Latin did and like French seems to want to, given its insular and rigid nature). Maybe Shakespeare would lol if that slang was around in his day.

As a fan of clearer, more precise, grammatically and syntactically clear and standard language usage, I ask a few questions for you about the rise of chat slang (please answer in standard English). Is chat slang a higher or lower form of language? How much of it is a good or bad thing? Do those who chat slang excessively lower their standard language usage level. =D (that's a chat icon for "laugh out loud", which itself was a chat slang that has crept into mainstream written and speech today).

It is probably a temporary and harmless language aberration. But it does seem to me to be another element of the dumbing down and laziness of humans brought about by the ease of modern technology. Sometimes such silly slang is brought about by a subculture (teenagers and pre teens, in this instance) as a way of insulting itself from the main culture. But chat slang is used by adults too. Staying of chat lines is one way to avoid much of that mess. I wonder if you have ever used any chat slang yourself? IHA! bi bi