Xorton's Rant

My daughter has arrived! While I think the name in the title to this blog it pretty darned cool, her actual name is Iona, which I hope will result in significantly less teasing at school. For the record, only one person guessed correctly. For those of you interested in the details, she weighed 8 lbs and 6 ounces at birth and is 21 inches long. She has light ginger coloured hair and the attitude to accompany it. Being first time parents, we have received all sorts of unsolicited, though well intentioned advice/observations from others, including: Say Good-Bye to sleep . This is completely inaccurate. While, it's only been a few days, I find that we haven't had to say good-bye to sleep, we've simply had to adjust when we sleep... such as having a thirty second kip while waiting at a red light (people are always helpful in reminding you when to go), or while collapsed on the shower floor. Additionally, places that had once been considered as ludicrous places to take a...

Recently we cancelled our traditional cable television service. We've begun this "experiment" on the basis of a couple issues: One, we really don't like shelling out hard earned dollars for a multitude television stations of garbage, for a small number of stations we actually watched. We used to watch four stations (History and Discovery being a couple of them), however with the long slide into sub-par content, we were reduced to two. Discovery has essentially become a showcase for pseudo-scientific programming (I don't count crazy people with educational "degrees" from non-existent universities majoring in ancient aliens talking about invented "theories" science), while History generally doesn't show actual historical programming any more and mostly airs reality television about people living in swamps and the like*. I don't count that as history, although I fear their marketing department believes it to be "history in the mak...

It's been a busy couple of months for me, so I've been on something of a sabbatical from blog writing. As most of my readers are aware, my partner and I are expecting the imminent arrival of a baby daughter. Many people are still curious as to the name we've picked. My nephews (who are always entertaining), when prompted to make a guess answered with: "Is it 'Star Wars'?" Certainly the most unique guess we've had so far... they certainly know me well! Considering female character names from the series, 'Mon Mothma' would certainly make for a unique name (I know Leia is pretty run of the mill at this point)... although not necessarily one that I would punish my own child with. One of my friends recently made a slip when we were discussing that point and called the character 'Mon Mothra', which while being very amusing would not make for a very child friendly name. I think it would make for an interesting (I hesitate to call it ...