Last night, in our continuing efforts to get Jack potty-trained, Char sat him down just before bed to go potty. A few moments later he said, “Mom, I just did the water thing!” Recognizing this as the milestone that it is, we all congratulated him. Lily gave him a high-five. I picked him up and hugged him and we had this conversation:

Me: “Good job, Jack! That was awesome!”
Jack: “I’m a big boy now!”
Me: “Yes, that’s great! Pretty soon you’ll be wearing underwear all the time.”
Jack: “Yeah, and then I can do the water thing and I won’t need my pull-ups and we can put them in a garage sale!”
Me: “Uh… well, yep… I guess we can sell your pull-ups in a garage sale.”
Jack: “Yeah, ’cause I’m a big boy now.”

For the record, I have no idea why he thinks his pull-ups are going in a garage sale, but it’s perfectly fine with me.

I finished reading “Freakonomics” a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to mention it. The book is a fascinating, somewhat rambling, look at some odd questions that affect us all but probably never occurred to you. Questions like:

• Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?
• What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?
• Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?
• How much do parents really matter?

And perhaps the one that will cause the biggest stir:

• What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime?

I won’t spoil it for you; it’s definitely worth reading the answers as the authors have presented them, but be prepared for some controversial answers to questions you hadn’t thought to ask.

And in the meantime, spend a little time on the authors’ blog, which explores some of these ideas and other current thoughts. It’s well worth your time.

I was listening to the radio this morning and they were interviewing Michael Eric Dyson about the comments that Bill Cosby made last year at the celebration of 50 Years of Brown v. Board of Education. Dyson is pretty ticked off about what Cosby said, and I had seen it referred to in various places as “Cosby’s controversial remarks”. I decided it was time to read them for myself.

After I read them, I thought you might be interested, too.

[Read the transcript of Cosby’s remarks]
[Listen to excerpts of Cosby’s remarks]

As you may already know, I write a monthly column for the Indianapolis Business Journal. This month’s article is about using email as a communication medium for your business, both as a marketing and a customer service tool.

[Read the complete article]

Truthfully, it was only a matter of time. I stumbled into being a reader of Newsweek by purchasing it from a niece or nephew for a school fundraiser. I’ve kept the subscription for the past couple of years because I felt it was (at least) a good alternate source of information. But after being a consistent reader for some time, I began to find myself talking back to the damn thing more and more. I’d read stories that were either obviously slanted toward a particular view or espousing facts and figures that were so easily countered that I began to question the integrity of the entire publication.

And then this story about the Koran comes out. I’m sure you’ve heard by now, but here’s the synopsis:

Newsweek ran a story citing one annonymous source that soldiers at Guantanamo Bay flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet as a means of coercing prisoners into talking. (The logic of this escapes me, by the way.) The story has widely been blamed for riots in the Middle East, the results of which were at least 17 deaths and hundreds of injuries. Newsweek has since retracted the story, citing that the source “can’t remember” where he saw the allegations and, in fact, can’t vouch for the validity.

I have several problems with this entire episode, not the least of which include:

• What kind of mindset do you have to have to kill someone over the desecration of a book? Seriously, I have no problem with Islam and I believe that people should be able to believe anything they like. But the physical book – the pages and the ink – are not the same as the message of the words. Even if you hold the words and message to be sacred, isn’t the book (which was made by man), just a book?
• Even if the story was true (and it might yet be), what was Newsweek hoping to accomplish? Is something like this newsworthy, or just inflammatory? Couldn’t they have guessed how this might be received around the world? Couldn’t they have anticipated the likely response?

I believe they probably had both guessed and anticipated correctly, but decided it was better to sell more copies of their magazine that to examine the authenticity of the story, the veracity of the source, or the responsibility associated with printing it.

Now seventeen people are dead, hundreds are wounded, and our efforts in both Afghanistan and Iraq have been seriously undermined… all due to a story that, in the end, may not be true.