“PaPaw, mon”
“Where we goin’”
“pin”
“You want to open the garage”
“Uh-huh, gawg”
“Do you want to push the button?”
“Uh-huh, but..tin”
“PaPaw, mow”
“Talk softly”
“PaPaw, mow”
“That’s better”
“We can’t ride the tractor, ’cause its raining”
“Mow!”
“Not now.  We can hammer nails”
“Uh-huh, naoes”

Grandson is learning to talk at an exponential rate now.  It’s just amazing.
He can also drive an 1-1/4 roofing nail in under 10 whacks!

I had a bit of an eye opener this week.  This is something that everybody is aware of unless you just flew in from Mars;  things that one writes and posts on the web really are open to total public scrutiny.  If you don’t want everyone or anyone under any circustance, either present or future, to read what you’ve written, then you better not post it on the web.  I was half listening to a story on the radio this week; I don’t remember exactly what the story was about but, it had something to do with a soldier who I think died in Iraq.  In the story the soldier’s widow was quoted on some things she wrote on a blog or bulletin board.  It may not have been an issue for her, the fact that this was now being broadcast over the radio waves.  This wasn’t clear from what I heard of the story, but the content sounded to me as if it was something that was written for a small, select audience of confidants.  One part was something to the effect of, “…wait ’till he get’s home with that sweet ass of his and we’ll make more babies…”.  It struck me like a ton of bricks;  The reporter who created this story was probably able, via some simple search techniques, to come up with some obscure postings by this “everyday” person and felt ethically sanctified and journalistically obliged to include them as part of her radio story.  I think what happened with me on hearing this was that it got me over the hump of thinking that all of the warnings coming from various sources were derived from a rampant big-brother paranoia.

The internet is an amazing and wonderful tool on one hand.  But, on the other hand is a media the likes of which we have never known.  It will take time before social, moral, ethical and legal norms evolve that allow us embed this tool as part of our lives while minimizing its capability to control and even catastrophically change our lives.  For those of us who are a little slow on the up-take, a little bit of paranoia my be a good thing.