Dude!

Jack -- he's just this guy, you know? Fourteen months never looked so good.

Couch me no couch

Since Betty's cornered the market on elegance, we'll have to go another direction altogether.


The couch was actually quite nice when we bought if, off craigslist. The red spot was always there, but in those days we could actually use the other side of the cushion. In three years we have utterly destroyed it. "We" being the girls and the cats.

And because everyone who knows me knows I love repeating a good joke, here is one of my favorite pieces from sometime in late 2006 (can't dig up the original right now), written after being laid up sick on the couch.

Sickbed Revisited
(With apologies to Evelyn Waugh and, of course, all of you.)

She talked to herself, because hers was the only voice she could trust, when it assured her that she was still alive; what she said was not for the children, nor for any ears but her own.

"Better to-day. Better to-day. I can see now, across the expanse of the living-room, the fibers of the carpet, faded and grey, where yesterday I was confused and took the floor for a repository of broken toys and stuffed animals. Soon I shall see the tabletops and couch and know where it is that the ants get in.

"Better tomorrow. We live long in our family and talk early. Three is no age. Julia is only two and can remember where her candy is hidden and how much of it I ate, her 'tandy'; that was the name they had for it in the nursery and in the back-yard where unlettered girls have long memories. You can see where the big weedy shrub used to stand: the corner of the yard where the fence is uneven and half the grounds are waste, nettle and brier in hollows too deep for filling. We dug to the roots to hack it out and lay the foundations for the rose-bed planter. Those were our roots in front of the new house when the men in the orange truck came to cart them away to the dump .

"Julia knows about dumps, toys dumped on the floor, books dumped from the shelf, media scratched and worn from the loving touch of little fingers smeared with grime and orange juice. We were cultured then, purchasing old volumes and new music and bathing in the flickering light of the cinema. They came for the books first; later they scaled the sturdy cases and found the vases, the decanters, the Italian glassware. The family decends in the female line; Julia's son will page through the books his mother tore and mutilated in the days of the small house and the hair-shearing and the wall-patching; my daughter drew on the walls, her sister added the dents. Julia watched me set up the bookshelves and paint the kitchen; the paint was old before it was two months settled. Soon the linoleum will be tattered and pitted till the concrete foundation shows through and the baseboards rot away. Better to-day.

"Better to-day. I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was left on the girls' plates, drunk lukewarm tea, slept with children tangled in my own sheets; I shall go grey soon. I was twenty-two when I was sent to the line for the battle; most women took the epidural, so they said, but my midwife said, "You're a textbook model of delivery." So I was; so I am now, if only I could breathe.

"No air, no wind stirring under the cotton sheers; no one has opened the door since we put the chain on it. When the autumn comes," said Mother, oblivious of the falling leaves and the dying rose-bush and the late heat, "when the autumn comes I shall leave my bed and sit in the open air and breathe more easily. God take it, why have they dug a hole for me? Must a woman stifle to death in her own living-room? Eleanor, Eleanor, turn on the fan."

"The fan is already on, Mommy."

"I know it. I re-built this house. Some days I want to blow it up with gunpowder; bore the foundation, cram it with powder, trace the fuse, crouch under cover round the corner while we touch it off; we'll blast our way to daylight."

Thus, til mid-November, Mother lay dying, prone on the recliner with a box of tissues and a glass of ice water. Since there was no immediate change, Father went to work and the small girls watched videos till their brains ran out of their ears

Life Under Health Care Reform

Time being scarce the last few weeks, I'd originally planned on writing a post of this format about one of the Senate bills, but since the House bill (HR 3962: Affordable Health Care for America Act) is currently the one in the news, I'm focusing on that. The purpose here is to try my best to cut through the hysteria and hype coming from both sides and take a realistic look about what changes we would notice as US citizens if the House health care reform bill becomes law.

The first thing to keep in mind is that nothing much happens until 2013. This could probably called the "keep incumbents from being hurt by this act, especially Obama" provision. Whether the long term effects of the bill are good or bad, change often causes pain and confusion at first, and one of the key ways of getting legislators on board for the bill is to assure them that they're unlikely to be immediately booted out of office by voters upset about their premiums. This kind of cynicism is hardly unique to this one bill or to either party -- it just is what it is. So take the below as a discussion of how thing would be under HR 3962 in the period 5-6 years from now, assuming that is passes and there are no changes made between now and then.

The bill provides several new regulations on insurance companies and on you, which you'll notice quite clearly.

1) You will be legally required to purchase insurance. If you don't (and unless you fit criteria for financial hardship as defined in the bill) you will be fined either 2.5% of you income, or the average cost of the plans in the lowest tier of the health insurance exchange. So, if you make 40k/yr, you would be fined $1000. If you make 60k/yr, you would be fined $1500. If you refuse to pay your fines, you'll be treated exactly like any other tax evader (which means you can potentially be sent to jail.) The Senate bill specifically exempted non-payers from being sent to jail, but the House bill fails to differentiate those who refuse to pay health care fines from those who refuse to pay other taxes, so it is believed that standard tax evasion rules would apply. There will also be penalties placed on employers who do not offer their employees health insurance.

2) Health insurance companies will not be allowed to turn you down for coverage because of any pre-existing conditions you may have, nor will they be allowed to refuse to cover care related to those conditions.

3) Health insurance companies will be required to charge all people the same for the same plan -- not charge people with existing health problems more and vastly limits the amount that insurers can charge more to insure older people.

4) Provides subsidies for most American citizens if they are buying individual health insurance, in order to make complying with the individual mandate more affordable.

So what happens to you? Well, if you've one of the roughly 80% of Americans who currently health insurance through your employer: nothing much. If your employer wasn't providing coverage to some of its employees before, and decides to comply with the employer mandate rather than paying the relevant fines, it may seek to recoup the costs of expanding health coverage by increasing the share of your health benefits you have to pay for. Given that the average employer provided family health care plan currently costs about $13,000/yr, it's likely that there's a lot of room for your employer to push more of that cost in your direction. (And when it comes to cost savings, most of us would prefer that to layoffs.) In Massachusetts, which passed similar health care reform in the past, employer plan premium have been rising at almost twice the national average rate over the last few years. If the cost to you of your employer's insurance plan increases to beyond 12% of your annual income (for example: $400/mo for a family making 40k/yr) you would be eligible for subsidies from the government, but otherwise you would be on your own.

If, on the other hand, you currently do not have health insurance or have individual health insurance, you would be greatly affected by the bill. You would become eligible to buy your insurance through the national insurance exchange (and if you didn't buy coverage, you'd be fined, see above.) Among these plans would be the much discussed "public option", which would essentially be the same as a private health insurance plan except that it would be administered by a government agency. Adoption of the public options plans is not expected to be high, as the CBO estimates that their premiums will be higher than the average of the private plans in the exchange offering the same benefits.

The plans on the exchange are not necessarily cheap, but you will know pretty clearly what level of coverage you are getting as the plans will have to meet government defined levels of coverage. If you feel daunted by researching what an insurance plan does or does not cover, this might be a major benefit. If not, it might reduce flexibility for you. The average "basic" exchange plan for an individual is expected to cost $5,300 per year, the average for a family of four is expected to be $15,000. In addition to these premiums, you could expect to pay about 2,000 a year in co-pays and deductibles as an individual, or $5,500 as a family. (Obviously, if you get very little care, this would be less. My own family has deductibles similar to the exchange levels on our employer-based health care plan, and our total out of pocket last years was under $1000.)

However, you also receive a scaling set of subsidies in order to offset your costs, depending on how much money you make. Here are a few examples (these are directly from the CBO subsidy analysis):

A single person making $20,600 would pay an annual premium of $900 ($75/mo) and would pay no more than $600 in out of pocket expenses for the year. If he didn't buy insurance, he'd pay a fine of $515.

A single person making $38,300 would pay an annual premium of $4,300 ($358/mo) and would pay no more than $1,800 in out of pocket expenses for the year. If he didn't buy insurance, he'd pay a fine of $957.

A family of four making $42,000 would pay an annual premium of $1,900 ($158/mo) and would pay no more than $1,200 in out of pocket expenses for the year. If they didn't buy insurance, they'd pay a fine of $1050.

A family of four making $66,000 would pay an annual premium of $6,300 ($525/mo) and would pay no more than $3,700 in out of pocket expenses for the year. If they didn't buy insurance, they'd pay a fine of $1650.

These subsidies are currently designed to scale according to the enrollee's income, not according to the cost of the plan, so from what I can tell customers would be cushioned initially from any drastic increases in the cost of coverage (such as Maine, Massachusetts and other states passing similar regulations have experienced). However, that might potentially change if the cost of the program spiralled rapidly out of control due to the increased cost of providing insurance under this model.

In this regard, it might almost be a benefit to have the public option in play, as it would make it much harder for people to claim "it's all because of insurance company profiteering" if the public options premiums continue to run higher than private plan premiums as the CBO projects.

A few useful sources, though not everything in this post is derived from them alone:

The CBO analysis of the House bill.

The official summary of the House bill. (This copy of the file is at the Heritage Foundation, but the actual file is the one the House Democrats put out.)

CBO analysis of subsidies.

Where the Japanese Came From

This article is long (I'll admit, though I've had it up in browser a couple days I've still only read half of it) but it's a really fascinating survey of current research into where the Japanese people came from, both historically and linguistically. This is an unusually charged question, as linguistic and archeological questions go, because a great deal of Japanese (and Korean) national self-identity is caught up in the question. And evidence is intriguingly sparse and contradictory. (For instance, linguistics would suggest that the Japanese language split off from Korean -- it's apparent closest cousin linguistically -- at least 4,000 years ago, yet genetically Japanese are very similar to mainlanders, suggesting a fairly recent divergence.)

On a slightly related side-note, one of the things that's always struck me watching Japanese anime is that there seems to be a cultural perception in Japan that Japanese are "the white people of Asia". Japanese characters often look, to American eyes, very nearly European or American, while Korean or Chinese characters have very strongly Asian features. There also seems to be a real fascination with settings (more often fantastic than historical) which are clearly patterned on or explicitly set in turn of the century Europe -- though often Japanese names are mixed in freely with vaguelly Germanic ones.

What Jack Hath Wrought

In case anyone was wondering, "Gosh, why doesn't MrsDarwin post that much anymore?", it's because I live in a house where five minutes of an unattended 14-month-old nets you this:



That would be Jack taking his revenge for the tea party and lunch we had while he was napping, and on the bookcase just for being there. I was in the kitchen the whole time, chopping onions and adding them to soup. The lad is fast.

No wonder he's so worn out.

The Banal Evils of the Police State

With the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, many who lived under the communist regime of East Germany have taken the opportunity to go to the state archives and view the files which the Stasi secret police kept on them. Stasi files were not kept only on spies and political dissenters, but on ordinary people whose "offenses" were almost shockingly mundane, and whose betrayers were often friends or family:

A West German pudding. That was all it took. Once the Stasi found out about it, a family breadwinner was fired from his army job and an East German household was plunged into destitution.

Even worse, the family later found out that they had been turned in by a close friend. "She was watering the plants and went through the cupboards to find a Dr. Oetker dessert," Vera Iburg, who has worked with files kept by the East German secret police for the last 20 years, told SPIEGEL ONLINE, referring to the snoop. "What was she doing? She had no business there!"

It's an interesting example of the corrupting power of temptation that the availability of the means to easily hurt those around you by reporting others to the police motivated many to inform merely for the satisfaction of it:

The files -- which occupy over 100 kilometers of shelf space (not including the 16,000 sacks of shredded documents the Birthler Authority is currently trying to reassemble with the aid of computers) -- are testament to a darker side of humanity. And Ziehm says that films like "The Lives of Others," which indicate that many were coerced into spying on friends and neighbors, don't come close to plumbing the depths that some ultimately fall to. Friends informed voluntarily on friends and spouses even tattled on each other.

"More often than not, the Stasi did not need to apply pressure at all," he says. "In fact, many often felt snubbed if their information was deemed to be of no interest." The real motivation behind these acts of betrayal was much more humdrum than one might think. "People informed for personal gain, out of loyalty to the East German regime, or simply because they wanted to feel like they had some power," Ziehm says.

Often we think of repressive regimes' primary evil being what they do to the people of a country, yet it's perhaps more important (and more disturbing) to think of how the tools of such a regime corrupt many of the people themselves.

Bobby McFerrin sings Bach

I Want One Of Them Stimulous Jobs

There is something in me which, when it sees to related numbers, wants to immediately do a calculation, so when I saw a news story stating that the $215 billion in stimulous money given out thus far had resulted in 640,329 jobs, my first question was, "How much is that per job?"

Answer? $312,339.44

Not too shabby, eh? I'd like one of them jobs just fine.

Now that I've had my sticker shock fun, let me be fair: if you're going to try to create jobs by flooding money into a set of projects, the cost if obviously much more than the cost of a salary. Say I decide to help a bakery create jobs by buying doughnuts. Buying $5000/month worth of doughnuts doesn't create a $60k/yr at the doughnut shop, because although there's need for more work, there's also need for dough, and cooking oil, and glaze, and more doughnut machines, etc. I might well have to spend $200k per year at the bakery in order for them to add $100k to their payroll, perhaps even more.

But what that emphasizes is that simply spending money like a drunken sailor (no disrespect to our naval readers) is not a very efficient way to help people who are out of work in the near term. The two most direct ways to help people out of work would be through providing longer unemployment benefits (and more programs to help people in problem industries to get new training) and to provide companies with direct payroll relief by reducing employer contributions to payroll taxes.

This is something we'll do well to keep in mind as Democrats on Capitol Hill start to get itchy for a second round of stimulous in order to emphasize that they are "doing something" about the increasingly grim job numbers.

La Guadalupana

While looking for a version of the Mexican folk song La Guadalupana, I came across this remix by Mexican father-and-son pop stars Emmanuel and Alexander Acha and thought it catchy. Our Spanish-speaking readers will have to let me know what the rap in the middle says; hopefully I'm not putting up something crazy offensive.

Zombies?

I'm not necessarily sure where to believe the real story lies in all this, but this lengthy article on zombies in Haiti is fascinating.

...
About a month after I arrived in Jérémie, a rumor swept through town that a deadly zombie was on the loose. This zombie, it was said, could kill by touch alone. The story had enough authority that schools closed. The head of the local secret society responsible for the management of the zombie population was asked to investigate. Later that week, Monsieur Roswald Val, having conducted a presumably thorough inquiry, made an announcement on Radio Lambi: There was nothing to fear; all his zombies were accounted for.

Shortly after that incident, I started taking Creole lessons from a motorcycle-taxi driver named Lucner Delzor. Delzor was married with four children, but he kept a mistress on the other side of town. He told me that he had never so much as drunk a glass of water at his mistress’s house for fear she might lace his food with love powder. He loved his wife and children far too much to risk that.

One of my first complete sentences in Creole was “Gen vréman vre zonbi an Ayiti?” Or: “Are there really, truly zombies in Haiti?”

“Bien sûr,” Delzor said. He had even seen them: affectless men and women with a deathlike pallor, high nasal voices, and the characteristic drooping at the chin — men and women who he knew for a fact had died and been buried.

“Ayiti, se repiblik zonbi,” Delzor added. Haiti is the republic of zombies.

I was eager to meet a zombie for myself, and began making appropriate inquiries. Several weeks later, my wife came home from a judicial conference. Making small talk, a local judicial official mentioned the strange case of zombification that his courtroom had seen not several months before. The case was, he said, “un peu spectaculaire.”

I met Judge Isaac Etienne a week or so later at his unfinished concrete house in the village of Roseaux. Roseaux is on the sea, and the fishermen, their nets already in, were stretched out on the small grassy town square, drinking rum and playing dominoes under a dazzling midmorning sun. The judge was a boyish-looking man of 42, slender, wearing baggy surfer shorts, flip-flops, and a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt.

The dossier was, at bottom, a murder story, the judge said — but it was a murder story with the great oddity that the victim did not die.
...

If one accepts the author's theory, this might be an interesting example of a situation in which both practictioners and victims of "magic" believe that real sorcery is being performed, while there remains a natural (though weird) explanation for the whole thing. Or could could go to either positing real sorcery or writing the whole thing up to hysteria amoung a poor and uneducated population.

More Than Intentions

Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek makes a good point which is too often glossed over in political debate:

Writing about health-care, Paul Krugman asserts that “conservatives … don’t want Americans to have universal coverage” (”The Defining Moment,” Oct. 30).

Among the earliest lessons that I teach my freshman economics students are (1) intentions are not results, and (2) to oppose a government program is not necessarily to object to the intentions stated by that program’s advocates.

Paul Krugman obviously teaches his students differently, for he clearly believes that (1) if government intends for Americans to have universal health coverage, then the result will be that Americans actually get universal health coverage, and (2) anyone who opposes a government program promising universal health coverage is a person who objects to Americans actually getting universal health coverage.

This is perhaps the most common fallacy of all in political argument for people to follow the form: I support bill/candidate X because I think it will have good result Y. You don't support X. Therefore you don't care about Y.

Generally speaking, Y is a very general positive sentiment while X is a very specific prescription. Examples:

"You don't support abolishing NAFTA, because you don't care whether ordinary Joes can make a decent wage in America."

"You don't support school vouchers, because you don't care whether poor kids can get a good education."

"You don't support the current health care reform legislation, because you don't care whether poor people can see a doctor when they're sick."

What this approach ignores is that the topic of dispute in politics is often not whether some general good should be achieved, but whether a particular proposal will actually contribute to the general good -- and if so whether its effects will be more positive than negative. This type of intention-based argumentation is an attempt to shut down any discussion on whether a proposal will have the desired effect (and whether its negative side effects will outweigh its intended benefits), and as such it strikes at the very root of reasonable political discussion.

Azur and Asmar: The Princes' Quest

We've been delighted here at Chez Darwin by Azur and Asmar: The Princes' Quest. It's the story of two boys, brown and white, raised as brothers on tales of the captive Djinn Fairy, then cruelly separated by Azur's coldly aristocratic father. When they grow up, each vows to rescue and marry the fairy himself. There are voyages, scoundrels, magic keys, and the most enchanting princess I've seen on screen in ages. You can watch it in the original French and Arabic, but we chose English (the Arabic is subtitled, not dubbed, which the non-reading three-year-old didn't seems to mind).

The animation style is almost completely unrelated to the Disney and Pixar stuff we've become accustomed to. It's flat and bright and highly textured and gorgeous. There are intricately patterned Arabic backgrounds that are so hypnotic and dazzling that it takes a moment to adjust the eyes. And there are NO SASSY TALKING ANIMALS. Need I say more?

Note to parents: you might balk, but here we were quite pleased that the first shot of the movie was the Arabic servant quite obviously breast-feeding first one, and then the other boy.

Mid Life

Many will doubtless consider it rather cheeky (or else simply self indulgent) for someone who is only thirty years old to write on the topic of middle age, yet the topic has been somewhat on my mind of late. As I was enjoying the cool autumn air the other day, it occurred to me that I was already more than half the age my father was when he died. This, combined with the fact that I married rather younger than my father and had children sooner often leaves me with the feeling that I am already advanced well upon life's road -- and by implication wondering if mine is shorter than most.

The above may make me sound rather morbid, but it's not really any fear of death that I'm thinking of here. Dante may have found himself, midway through life's journey, in a gloomy wood (even Dante was jumping the gun less -- he was about to turn 35 when he found himself in the gloomy wood in Lent, 1300, at the beginning of Inferno) -- by my experience is more of finding myself hurdling along at tremendous speed and wondering exactly I'm going, and how soon I shall arrive. We measure ourselves by the patterns we know, and so it seems natural to measure my life by that of my father. Yet having got married earlier, had children earlier, bought a house earlier, and settled on a single full time job earlier, I can't help an odd sort of feeling of: What happens later?

To add to the effect, outside the small splinter culture in which we live in our private lives, the people I know professionally have moved in the opposite direction, with most of them having first children in their mid thirties. The picture of the four kids on my desk marks me (depending on how people choose to analyze it) as being either a very young looking 38-40 or else quite dangerously insane. (For my part, I try to provide supporting evidence for both alternatives.)

In a world in which most people seem to expect to have college age children when in their 50s and being "father of the bride" in their sixties -- there seems little precedent for someone whose children will range form 27 to 20 when he turns 50 is supposed to do with the rest of his life. In a sense, it's rather exhilarating. Uncharted territory. Age-ward ho! Yet because it's uncharted, one can't shake the odd feeling that pretty soon all the path will be covered, and one will be left standing around saying, "Well. Here we are. Where are we anyway?"

For your Halloween viewing pleasure

Here's a little scooby snack for you. Ruh-roh!



And they might have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those darn kids.

Grow Up, Don't Dress Up

Perhaps I'm overly cranky after two weeks which have been busy enough at work that I've been virtually unable to blog, but it strikes me as particularly foolish that a number of people around the office building were so crestfallen at the idea of missing out on a chance to wear their Halloween costumes to work that they decided to dress up on the 30th. Somehow it seems doubly pathetic when this is combined with a fear of actually looking too un-ordinary, and the reveller thus shows up wearing medical scrubs and a stethoscope to your desk job so you can be "in costume" without looking weird.

I was starting to think we had an invasion of doctors and nurses there were so many people in colorful scrubs, until I saw some brave (or foolish -- you pick) soul parading about in black robes, pointed hat, and carrying a broomstick. (Alternatively, maybe that's just the product manager everyone has been calling La Bruja.)

I'm down on moving holidays at the best of times, but a bunch of people in their 30s and 40s being so attached to the idea of wearing costumes to work that they spontaneously move it just strikes me as pathetic.

Growl.

Anonymous

Here, by popular demand, is a photo of Anonymous, chroniclers of the kings of Hungary. Sorry about the quality of the picture -- I stood on a kitchen chair and took a shot of it in its frame. But you can still see that the tip of his pen has been rubbed golden from all the visitors who touch it to bring themselves a bit of Anonymous's vast literary success.

Historical importance, indeed

This one is for Christopher, whose memories of the cathedral in Cologne prompted me to tell my own anecdote about our visit there.

Darwin and I visited Cologne in the spring of 1999. Our train trip into Germany was an ordeal by non-reservation -- after tooling about laid-back Austria and Italy, no one had told us that the Germans would reserve every seat on the train. We squeezed in the corridor (along with everyone else who didn't reserve) and spent all night trying to melt into the wall to let a group of drunk Americans tromp back and forth to the lavatory. A memorable, if not comfortable, ride.

The press had lightened by the time we were approaching Cologne. Finally able to sit down in a compartment, we glued ourselves to the window, thrilled by the sight of the spires that suggested an end to our journey. But as the miles of fields stretched onward and the spires loomed ever larger and larger, our impatience to be there paled before the realization of the massive scale of the dom. The fact that we could see it meant not that we were close, but that it was mind-bogglingly, humblingly huge.

In the paved plaza before the cathedral, we strolled about amidst the other tourists, feeling dwarfish. And then, we saw it. At our feet was stone, almost indistinguishable from every other stone in the plaza, except that it was engraved. In English. We reached for the camera.


The photographic proof of this is now matted and framed in the kitchen. Every day we see it, in the triple frame between the statue of Anonymous from Budapest and the fountain from the same plaza. And almost every day we wonder: What does it mean? Who put it there? And why didn't he know whether or not it was a place of historical importance? Was he implying that one day it would be a place of historical importance? That at this moment it was a place of historical importance and he just didn't know it yet?

The one who laid the stone was a careful man, hedging his bets. He allows that historical importance might spring from, yea, this very moment, and yet he does not assume that the moment is already historical. He leaves a monument in case one day history will come back to vindicate his cautious assessment of its possible progress. And yet he leaves no name, so he will not be blamed if history proves to be a bitch and fails to provide that place with any import.

Here's some interesting history on the Cologne cathedral as well as a fascinating historical image.

The official cathedral website -- the English page, I think. There's a 3o minute documentary which one can watch in English with lots of great history and pictures.

Not exactly...

We had a long hard week last week, and the coming one doesn't look to be any lighter. Working late, meetings, dentist appointments, checkups, the baby's toe turning black (his own fault) -- lots going on here. But still, it isn't exactly brain surgery.



Thank you, thank you, CMinor, for introducing us to Mitchell and Webb.

Elitist Bumper Sticker

Waiting to be made: "Non cogitas, ergo non es."

When the Two Become One

I always find myself a bit surprised when people find it hard to tell my and MrsDarwin's writing apart. After all, I never have this problem. And we so often measure others by ourselves, even when we have little right to expect similarity.

If it doesn't seem revoltingly naval-gazing to ask:

1) Do you find Darwin and MrsDarwin posts hard to tell apart some or all of the time?
2) Does it seem to you natural or odd for spouses to seem hard to tell apart in print?



And if it does seem revoltingly naval gazing... Well, sorry. It's Tuesday and I'm already talking about it having been a long week at work. All I can say is: