JesusH

Hi everybody. Thanks for all of your kind comments and e-mails. Emma’s day-to-day condition seems to be improving by leaps and bounds.

I just wanted to mention that I’ve set up another blog to chronicle her daily adventures, since I don’t really want to dilute JesusH’s nonsensical content with daily baby news of a more serious nature. For updated Emma information, please feel free to drop by The Emma Dispatch.

Thanks again for your support!

It has been a trying couple of days for Phet and I. The story starts with a routine checkup last Thursday, then a morning ultrasound on Friday. Continuing on, we have an entirely unexpected emergency C-section on Friday afternoon, leading to the birth of our daughter, Emma Mahatsachan Pease: a 6 lb, 18.5 inch baby girl, at 1:09 PM, to much fanfare and the adulation of all involved. Roughly 5 hours later, Emma was transferred to Neonatal Intensive Care at our hospital, Scripps Mercy. The doctor told us that she was very sick, with platelet levels of a tenth of those of healthy newborn as well as a long list of other issues such as poor oxygenation of the blood and dangerously low circulation. 2 hours later, she was deemed too severe for Mercy and was transferred to the NICU at UCSD Medical Center in Hillcrest. 12 hours later, she was transferred once again, this time to the NICU at Children’s Hospital, under suspicion that she had some sort of structural problem with her heart.

Starting with the ultrasound on Friday, all of the above events took place over a time period of roughly 30 hours. Everything about Emma’s birth and her subsequent escalation through the neonatal intensive care establishment occurred pretty much as depicted above: without warning or benefit of other helpful context.

If that’s all there was, this would all be so much of a downer that I probably wouldn’t have brought it up. However, Emma’s story continues.

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Around 6-8 weeks ago, V and I went to The Improv and saw Bill Dwyer, John Heffron, Joe Rogan, and some other random hacks. Oddly, we had received an e-mail from The Improv saying that Seinfeld’s Michael Richards would be appearing, but they didn’t list his name on the program after we got there, only saying that there would be a “surprise guest”. Before Rogan came on, sure enough, Michael Richards ambled up to the stage. Surprise!

Now we were pretty excited to see Michael Richards perform… he’s something of a larger than life figure. But what followed was the most painful – well, it seemed like an hour, but he was probably up for 15-20 minutes – of “comedy” I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t even Pauly Shore or CarrotTop funny. I mean, find a remedial sixth grader, give him 10 minutes to come up with 15 minutes of material, and it would have been funnier than Michael Richards.

At first, the audience gave a few courtesy laughs. (So I asked the cop giving me a jaywalking ticket where I should have crossed, and he pointed to the corner. And I’m like, “but I forgot my canteen”. ahem. ahuh. huh. huh.) But as it became clear that the material wasn’t getting any better even that stopped. And even though other, less tragically unfunny comedians were heckled that evening, nobody had the heart to heckle Michael Richards. It was too sad to see this supposed giant of comedy trying to do stand-up, which he clearly had no business doing. It got sadder, though, as Richards evidently was unwilling to leave the stage until he got a laugh. Eventually, he made some Jesus joke that got a couple chuckles, and high-tailed it off the stage on what couldn’t possibly be considered a high note, but was clearly the best he was going to get. Pity poor Joe Rogan who had to follow that, but did his level best to get us back.

Fast forward to Richards’ meltdown over the weekend. First off, the meltdown is not surprising if he’s been out there since Seinfeld went off the air, using his name to get into comedy clubs that shouldn’t even allow him in the audience. Imagine that, for some reason, every Major League baseball team felt obligated to let me pitch a couple of innings every time I showed up at their stadium, and you’ll have an idea of the kind of failure the man has been experiencing. Couple that with the fact that he’s still out there trying, and you get the ingredients for some kind of meltdown. To quote Morgan Freeman in the Shawshank Redemption: Hope will drive a man insane.

And then there was the truly bizarre Letterman apology.

I went into a rage and said some pretty nasty things to some Afro-Americans…

Afro-Americans?  When was the last time you heard that term? The man’s clearly been disconnected for a while.

I’m very, very sorry to those people in the audience, the blacks, the Hispanics, whites – everyone that was there that took the brunt of that anger and hate and rage and how it came through, and I’m concerned about more hate and more rage and more anger coming through, not just towards me but towards a black/white conflict. There’s a great deal of disturbance in this country and how blacks feel about what happened in Katrina,

1. Now they’re “the blacks”. He was confused when the audience laughed after he said “Afro-Americans” and he doesn’t know what to do. 2. Katrina? Huh?

And I’ll get to the force field of this hostility, why it’s there, why the rage is in any of us, why the trash takes place, whether or not it’s between me and a couple of hecklers in the audience or between this country and another nation,

Huh? Force field? He’s going to get to the bottom of why nation-states war?

So the man is clearly nuts. And not entertaining pre-batshit insane Tom Cruise crazy, or hopped up on Percoset Paula Abdul crazy… Michael Richards is homeless crazy. And there is nothing funny about homeless crazy.

…she’s a scumbag enabler. Much better.

From her overwrought explanation for publishing murderous O.J. Simpson’s book and doing an interview with him:

My son is now twenty-five years old, my daughter fifteen. I wanted them, and everyone else, to have a chance to see that there are consequences to grievous acts. That the consequences of pain and suffering will ultimately be brought upon its perpetrators. And I wanted, as so many victims do, to hear him say “I did it and I am sorry.”

I didn’t know if he would. But I wanted to try. I wanted his confession.

Why on earth would you think the Juice would do that? You aren’t stupid. He’s been capering about grinning like the Cheshire cat for years. The party’s not magically ending when he sits down with you.

I killed two people and all I got was this lousy book-interview deal.

Why on earth would your children not know there are consequences to grievous acts? Buy them a paper, for fuck’s sake, don’t put this assclown on the front page for the umpteenth time for getting away with giving two people permanent grins.

As if the sleazy Bernie Kerik thing wasn’t bad enough… Your kids will learn there are consequences to grievous acts when you become yesterday’s news, God willing, for this asinine project.

Update: Cooler heads have prevailed. No, I didn’t expect to be saying that about a Rupert Murdoch move either.

As the holiday season approaches, I’d like to spend some time talking about something that I always think about this time of year.  I receive dozens of solicitations each holiday season for charity from police organizations, homeless shelters, animal services and zoos, schools, you name it. So how do I decide which charities to give to?

I have what I suppose are unusual criteria… I like to ask the question of which charity will have the greatest “return”. I tend to believe that Americans are better off than other people in the world, so I consider it a poor use of my resources to give to charities such as “Make a Wish”, which aim to bring a little more joy into the life of dying children who are already well-off by world standards. While I understand the sentiment, I’ve seen true abject poverty and misery abroad, and I’d rather feed some kid in the Philippines for the rest of his life than send a kid in Minnesota with Leukemia to Disneyland.  It’s a tradeoff… I can help one or the other, and that’s how I make my decision.

But that’s not enough… while undoubtedly “Save the Children” is a great charity, how can my money have the most impact? I’ve read about charities that offer entrepeneurial “microloans” which follow the “teach a man to fish” philosophy, and those seem promising. Has anyone bothered to rank charities in terms of a charitable ROI? I’d be really interested in seeing that.  I have a limited amount to give, so it’s important to me that the money go where it will have the greatest impact.

As we head into the holiday season, I’d love to hear from other JesusHers.  What charities do you support, and why?

CharityWatch - ranks charities by administrative costs.
SocialROI- A social entrepreneurship blog.
Forbes.com – America’s most (and least) efficient charities.

I’d like to see Microsoft continue down the path of rewarding users with hot, hot imagery when software bombs out. It’s the best idea I’ve seen in weeks.

If I don’t see something like this for Windows Vista’s Blue Screen of Death, I’ll be very disappointed.

Via BoingBoing: This, apparently, is the screen that comes up when you get an installation error with the new Microsoft Zune.

That’s the same face I make when I accidentally hold down my shift key, pulling up the dreaded StickyKeys, or when there are two girls making out next to me on the grass.

Don’t forget to vote today!

Crappy camphone pic of a sketch of a bedsheet-sized voting guide I saw on an overpass while driving to work yesterday.

I got the court’s decision on my expensive, foolish speeding ticket today.

According to the decision, the speed survey on Carroll Canyon Road is over five years old, which was part of my written argument. By law, a speed trap can’t be legally conducted on a stretch of road which hasn’t had a speed survey in the last five years, so I win. Go team.
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What scares me: that on the eve of a hopefully sweeping correction in this country’s political bent there’s a conservative/religious thought leader out there who doesn’t have a collection of skeletons in his or her closet that would make a costume shop green with envy.

Thankfully, there seems to be a monster-under-the-bed‘s worth of chance of that. On the heels of Pagegate:

Evangelist Admits Meth, Massage, No Sex [via Drudge]

Meth-curious.

Priceless: Ted Haggard’s version of “I did not inhale”: “I bought it for myself but never used it,” he said. “I was tempted, but I never used it.”