I don't have much time, but here's a synopsis. Vorlon was born this evening, on his due date. He's a boy, and a rather big one at that. Mom and baby are resting at the hospital, I'm headed back there very soon. Everyone is doing perfectly well. More to come!

This is one of those things that I knew I had to write (as mentioned at the bottom of this entry), but which made me feel a bit embarrassed after I wrote it. I couldn't bring myself to throw it out, so I offer it here with a big warning sticker, like the pathetic back-pedalling apologies at the start of Kevin Smith's Dogma. This parody may offend Catholics. There. I said it.

Greetings and blessings of the season,

I am MACIEJ WOJTYLA, son of Karol Wojtyla, the Holy See, Pope John Paul II. For decades I maintained a low profile in Krakow, so that knowledge of my existence would not interfere with my father's leadership of the Catholic church. Now that he has passed on from this earth, I come to you with an urgent business proposal, having received your contact information from a trusted associate.

After my father's death, I received a letter from the Vatican, sent by a papal assistant who had been entrusted with the secret of my existence. It contained a message from my father, written shortly before his death. In it, he expressed regret for having hidden me from the world all these years. He told me that he wished he had been able to know me better. He also informed me that he had siphoned US$95,400,000.00 (ninety five million, four hundred thousand US dollars) from the Vatican into an escrow account in Rome. Together with the money, the account held documents that revealed the locations of priceless church artifacts hidden throughout Great Britain, France, Italy, and Tunisia.

I require your assistance as a reliable foreign courier to receive the funds from the escrow account and transfer them to a numbered Swiss account that I have established. In compensation, I am prepared to offer you a 25% commission on the money in that account (twenty three million, eight hundred fifty thousand US dollars), together with a portion of the funds derived from the sale of any church artifacts recovered. I assure you that this transaction is 100% risk-free. All I require from you is co-operation and sincerity of purpose.

If you are interested in pursuing this business opportunity, please contact me at maciej_1185@hotmail.com. I will await your response before initiating the transfer logistics.

Thank you and God Bless,
Maciej Wojtyla

Personally, I think it works rather well. It has all the duplicity of a 419 fraud email, with a generous helping of papal mischief and a soupçon of The Da Vinci Code. Would anyone fall for it? An experienced reader of 419 emails would see through this one in a second. I mean, come on -- it's grammatical and correctly spelled. How believable can it be? I wanted to roughen up the text by passing it through Babelfish, but unfortunately it doesn't support Polish.

I was most directly inspired by a new 419 message that appeared after Yasser Arafat died, purporting to be from his wife. The pope seemed like the next logical step.

Some of you may be wondering if there's anything to report here at Thingo Central with respect to pregnancy, childbirth, and so on. Though we are officially in the 40th week, I have no news. Nath's still pregnant, still feeling pretty good (to the extent that a nine month pregnant woman ever feels "good"), and ready for action. Vorlon is fine, and doing a great job of tapdancing on Nath's internal organs. When this arrangement changes, I'm sure I'll mention it here.

In unrelated news, a cute little female cardinal has built a nest in the yew outside our living room. She sits there all day on top of two or three cute little speckled eggs. She waits patiently for the day that her young will emerge from their eggs and she will experience the joys of motherhood. There's some sort of metaphor here, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

I was scanning Daily Kos, a good progressive politics website (i.e., desperate handwringing over the state of the US government) today, and came across an interesting observation here, in a story about US mayors banding together to implement the Kyoto Accord despite the government's refusal. One mayor noted that when it comes to war, Bush is willing to jump in with the tiniest hint of evidence, but when it comes to climate change he's unwilling to see the truth despite a mountain of scientific fact. The reasons for his hypocrisy are easy to see, and probably oil-inspired on both sides.

For some reason, his head-in-the-sand attitude about climate change got me thinking about the abhorrent regression in US education, particularly in Kansas. Perhaps climate change could use a warning sticker the way science textbooks do. Feel free to print this out and stick it on your SUV if it makes you feel better.

(Also inspired by this page of textbook warning stickers.)

I've noticed that over the past couple of months, a new flavour of spam has emerged: unsolicited stock tips. These used to make up only a very small fraction of my overall spam traffic, but now the genre seems to have taken off. It's also more noticeable because I've started deleting all messages tagged as spam without reading them. Presumably stock tips are too new to be well-handled by SpamAssassin, and so they're more visible in my inbox.

Obviously I don't read these messages. But I got to wondering. Some of you may know of an old fraud you can perpetrate via postal mail. Pick 1024 people and a random NASDAQ listing (GOOG, for the sake of argument). To 512 of the people, send a letter saying "I predict that next week, GOOG will go up". To the other 512, send a letter saying "I predict that next week, GOOG will go down". After a week, half the recipients think you made a successful prediction. Now repeat the process with just those 512 people. 256 will think you predicted correctly two weeks in a row. Continue with the remaining 128, 64, 32, and so on. After ten weeks, you can convince one person that you're able to predict the stock market. Then you exploit their credulity by charging them for investment advice.

Spam is a perfect medium in which to reinvent this process. You can start with a pool of 16 million people instead of 1024, and carry on for 24 weeks predicting the stock market (or carry on for ten weeks and be left with a pool of 16 thousand believers). And so I must wonder whether any of these stock advice spams are trying to do exactly this, whether I'm in the middle of some scammer's ten-week program. I'm far too indifferent to start tracking these messages, so I'll probably never know.

I must get a dozen of these a day, so it's hard to imagine that anyone could fall for this breed of spam. I mean, if all these guys really could predict the stock market, we'd all be millionaires (or, more likely, the market would disintegrate). But let's face it. People buy bogus pills to enlarge their penises and send money to children of deposed Nigerian leaders, so who am I kidding. This actually reminds me of a 419 scam I'd like to start. Perhaps in an upcoming entry...

I set up an account on LiveJournal, a popular blogging site. I have no intention of abandoning this site and the beautiful python code that runs it (in your face, LiveJournal!), but there are advantages to having an account there. Most importantly, I can list myself as a friend of other bloggers there, and thereby read their restricted entries. This is particularly useful when the friend in question is on sabbatical in Europe and I'd like to find out how she's doing these days (and yes, just asking her is so twentieth century).

Note that melted_snowball seems to have created an account called thingo_net just so that he can syndicate this site. Perhaps I'll ask him to show me how to do that directly from my LJ account so that his creation becomes superfluous. I'm not sure LJ works that way, or if it really matters...

Well, that's a relief. I went to the morning appointment yesterday, where the endodontist was able to tell in about five minutes that I needed a root canal. I mentioned that I was flying across the country on Sunday, and he told me there was no way I ought to be doing that with my tooth in the condition it was. He canceled a more routine appointment and performed the root canal that very afternoon. Or at least the first step (the pulpectomy). And when the anaesthetic wore off that evening, everything felt much, much better. My jaw is still sore from the pounding it received, but I no longer need to be whacked in the head with a brick. I also put in a full day's work today, and didn't need to lie on the couch moaning and watching Star Trek VI. I must be fine.

I've got a few more appointments coming, but as those of you who have had root canals know, this first one was the long one. The others are much easier (though potentially expensive). I'll omit the details for Dan's benefit.

In the meantime I'm trying to understand the underlying cause: the bone resorption that opened up a big hole in my tooth. It's something that I apparently inherited (my grandmother had false teeth in her twenties), but perhaps it could be controlled via some appropriate supplement or change in diet. Stay tuned for more thrilling adventures in dentistry.

In February, I mentioned the unsettling results of my visit to the dentist. I have since had all three follow-up appointments, and everything went fine. Or so I thought.

One of my appointments was for a cleaning. My teeth are clean. One was for a sexy, sexy night guard. I've got that and I'm getting back into the habit of wearing it (I wore one consistently until our move back here from the west coast). The third appointment was for two fillings -- one to fix a chipped tooth, and the other to fill a mysterious chasm that had opened up in my molar. Let me emphasize that this wasn't the result of tooth decay. On reflection, I can at least be proud that I didn't have any new cavities. Small comfort. But the dentist filled my teeth (one without any anaesthetic), pronounced me cured, and sent me on my way with a warning about sensitivity to hot and cold.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the big filling is going to work. At this point, most of that side of my jaw is sore, and there's a throbbing pain emanating from the tooth itself. I visited the dentist this morning (it's easy when his practice is at the end of your block). After some brow-furrowing and consternation, he declared that I may need a root canal after all. I've got an appointment with a specialist tomorrow morning for an initial consultation. I'm not excited about a root canal, but at this point I think I'd take a brick to the side of the head if my mouth would just calm down. In the meantime, I think I have to restrict my diet to lukewarm foods.