Friday, April 11, 2008

Out of the mouths of babes ...

Ya know, I never cared for the sung version of "The Lord's Prayer." (The song, not the prayer itself.) The melody is atrocious. Most people don't have the vocal range for it and murder the high notes. And at weddings, ministers always segue right into it from a spoken prayer, and I never know whether I can raise my head and watch the soloist, or if I'm supposed to still be looking at my shoes.

However, this tyke might make me a convert:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR4PQ30VkBk

She actually does a better job than most wedding singers I've heard, and I love her using Elmo as a prop.

The high notes, however, did startle my cat.

Friday, April 04, 2008

'Pregnant dude': hoax? UPDATE: Maybe not

I wouldn't be blogging about the so-called "pregnant man," Thomas Beatie of Oregon, but methinks there is something wrong with "his" story. Here are two excerpts from an article on Yahoo! TV:

Beatie's wife Nancy said she inseminated him with a syringe using sperm purchased from a bank.


Okay, fine. This "man" apparently retained his female reproductive organs, and this is what you'd call the poor man's version of artificial insemination, BUT ...

The couple said an earlier attempt at pregnancy failed when he developed a tubal pregnancy, resulting in surgery that removed his Fallopian tubes.


If Thomas has no Fallopian tubes, how did an egg get from ovary to the uterus to wait for the syringe-introduced sperm? And why would an ectopic pregnancy call for removal of both tubes anyway? (Unless you had a twin ectopic pregnancy and both tubes were involved, which I imagine is rarer than being struck by lightning.)

Furthermore, I'm not a doctor but I have a family member who has gone through the throes of infertility treatments. All kinds of things can screw with your hormone levels, which must be just so to make conception possible. If he had been dosing himself with testosterone to the point that he has facial hair (even if he supposedly quit two years ago), I'm skeptical about this person's ability to conceive.

I guess we'll all find out in about three months.

UPDATE: Another article I found indicated he lost only one Fallopian tube, and Thomas insists that his body recovered back to its normal hormonal balance after ceasing testosterone. Like I said, we'll see.

If this is for real, I shudder.