Yesterday was the sixth birthday of my older son, the Reverend Doctor Vinoski Sweetness.  (His Uncle Steve gave him that rapper name when he was born.)

Yes, it’s hard to believe six years have slipped by.  One thing you learn when you have kids is that the parents around you who constantly say they can’t believe how fast their kids are growing up aren’t talking just to talk; they are really, truly amazed at it all.

It’s been the best six years of my life.

Johnny is a bit of a problem child, because he’s brilliant and ridiculously sensitive.  So he has trouble relating with other kids, and with a world that isn’t perfect the way he pictures it in his head, and that upset him terribly and visibly.  In his sensitivity he seems just like me to me, so I have some sense what he’s in for, and that worries me.  In his intelligence he’s beyond me, so I don’t know what that means.  I can’t imagine that being able to read chapter books to himself at five wasn’t some help to that racing brain.

Johnny is also a kid you can already have a worthwhile conversation with, and he’s got an amazing sense of humor.  He is an absolute joy.

Yes, living with him is a bit schizophrenic.  But I can only imagine the fun and educational times we’re in for.  Happy birthday, Johnny Shizzle-cakes!

US reserves of oil and gas are skyrocketing — with gas reserves increasing by the most in history last year, thanks to technology advances.

If oil prices remain high, our shale comes into greater economic play, and energy independence becomes nearly fathomable.  (Of course, it’s a very little-known fact that only a relatively small percentage of US energy comes from the Middle East — but lots from Canada, which is almost our 51st state.)

Giant fields were discovered off the coasts of Brazil and Africa, too.

Thanks to Ace of Spades.

This is Otzi the Iceman:

His was the frozen, mummified body found by a German tourist in the Italian Alps back in ’91.  Dutch forensic experts recreated his face using modern forensic techniques.

The picture was part of this report, which also reveals that scientists say he died at about 45 years of age.

That’s how old I am.

I look better than this, I’m pretty sure.  Of course, he died in 3289 BC.  Life was probably a bit more challenging back then.  And who knows how much better Otzi would’ve looked if he’d been able to join the boys and me in our visit yesterday to Glenn the barber?

Sunday was Bug’s third birthday.

As Sweet Miss ViVi said in her Facebook post, he’s been a “whirling ray of sunshine” ever since that day.

But it was a rocky road getting to that day.  One of the worst days in my life was the one early in December 2007 when my wife called on her way to the hospital with problems with the pregnancy.  After a few tense days, she was allowed to go home — onto full bed rest.  Her Mom came to help out; days later her uncle passed away suddenly and we were alone again.

Or not.  We had more food than we could even store (thank goodness it was winter in Buffalo — free refrigeration!)  We had free day care for Johnny Shizzle Cakes — I’d drop him off with my wife’s tennis friend in the mornings when he didn’t have preschool, and she’d take him home in the afternoon, or some other friends of ours would pick him up and keep him.  The preschool broke their own rules and allowed us to send him there an extra day a week.

Miss ViVi was finally allowed up and around, but she was still on restrictions, so the help continued.  My boss told me he didn’t want to see a) me, when I needed to be doing family stuff, or b) any of “that damned FMLA paperwork.”  Even after Bug was born, we got free babysitting and more free food.

I’ll never forget, and I can never give enough thanks to, all those dear, warm, wonderful people in Buffalo, New York, who helped us through a very difficult but even more amazing time in our lives.

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit linked to this article about the ridiculously poor life expectancy of men at a particular housing estate in South Wales.  His link quoted the line, “You have to get your pleasures where you can.”  That’s telling; what do people expect in a culture where the very concept of manliness has been rendered anathema?

I found this passage telling as well:

Victoria Winckler, of the Bevan Foundation think tank in the South Wales Valleys, said the life expectancy data should shock the authorities into action.

She said: “Although healthy living is very important, itâ s not the only answer.

“Eating well and exercising still does not give you enough money to go out occasionally or heat your home.

“It doesn’t give you a job with a sense of purpose and well-being.

Give, give, give — yes, by all means, let’s “shock the authorities into action.”  Here’s a thought:  it’s the authorities who are responsible for this abomination.  Authorities who’ve so thoroughly obliterated the notion of earning your way, creating your own opportunities, embracing and relishing the challenges of being a man, that the “men” they rule are nothing but self-destructive children — older than the ones in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but the same nonetheless, because they’ve been prevented from growing up by an illegitimate, destructive nonsense of an “enlightened” modern culture.  Miss Winckler, you can “give” them all you like — but that won’t change a damn thing.

God bless America.  So far, anyway…

Much ink is being spilled these days about the failure of our elites.  I agree with the overall notion; in both government and business, we’ve seen colossal incompetence on display.

I think a huge part of the problem is that our leaders don’t really want to be leaders.  Too many of those who are reaching the upper echelons today are motivated not by a desire to deliver to results and to engage in the hard work it takes to do so, but by the titles and perks and power of position.

I’ve previously posted about how much I enjoyed Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein.  One of his points in the book was about the awesome responsibility of leadership:

“…Suddenly you are the Old Man, the Boss, Commanding Officer Present – and you discover with a sickening shock that fellow human beings are depending on you alone to tell them what to do, how to fight, how to complete the mission and get out alive.  They wait for the sure voice of command – while seconds trickle away – and it’s up to you to be that voice, make decisions, give the right orders… and not only the right ones but in a calm, unworried tone.  Because it’s a cinch, gentlemen, that your team is in trouble – bad trouble! – and a strange voice with panic in it can turn the best combat team in the Galaxy into a leaderless, lawless, fear-crazed mob.

“The whole merciless load will land without warning.  You must act at once and you’ll have only God over you.  Don’t expect Him to fill in the tactical details; that’s your job.  He’ll be doing all that a soldier has a right to expect if He helps you keep the panic you are sure to feel out of your voice.”

The Commandant continued:  “That’s the Moment of Truth, gentlemen.  Regrettably there is no method known to military science to tell a real officer from a glib imitation with pips on his shoulders, other than through ordeal by fire.  Real ones come through – or die gallantly; imitations crack up.”

Too many leaders today shirk their responsibility to tell those depending on them “what to do, how to fight, how to complete the mission and get out alive.”  Too many of them crack up, yet keep their titles and perks and power of position despite their clear incompetence.  Too many of them believe they’re delegating, when they’re really shirking the jobs that are theirs to do alone.  But this is not delegating.  It’s dereliction.

A new record for the treadmill — 11 miles.  It wasn’t as boring as I’d feared it would be, which makes me feel a lot better about the even longer workouts to come.

Glenn Reynolds linked to a great post from The Art of Manliness.

Just this morning, I was reading Michael Gerber’s description of the small business ideal in his book The E-Myth Revisited, where he tells of the heavenly customer service experience he gets each and every time he visits his favorite resort.

I can’t help but believe that the owners of the Mexican restaurant my wife and boys and I visited tonight also read that description, then decided they would do the exact opposite.  Well, not entirely — we were seated immediately, and a waiter took our drinks order fairly quickly.  Then, fifteen minutes later, when our drinks finally showed up, we asked for the menus we’d never been given.  Fifteen minutes after that the waiter took our food order.

An hour later the lovely Miss ViVi asked another waiter if the cooks had even started cooking our food yet.  She never saw that waiter again.  (We hope he’s okay.)  Ten minutes after that we left, since it was the boys’ bedtime and they hadn’t eaten yet.  We didn’t pay for the drinks.  So sorry.

It wouldn’t be civil of me to name the restaurant, but I will say it’s the new Mexican restaurant in a town whose name rhymes with “Chaska, Minnesota.”  (Rhymes really, really closely.)

PS — just a note to all you restaurateurs out there:  if you don’t actually have chocolate milk, just say so!  Don’t try to concoct it yourselves using what appeared to be the same goop I saw running in an earthen ditch in a chemical plant I visited twenty years ago outside Paducah, Kentucky.

PPS — we never did get silverware and napkins.  Perhaps we should have taken that as a clue…

I take two things away from this article:

1.  Al Gore is a big bloated gasbag.

2.  We all had best be studying up on Time of the Great Freeze.