Sausages

It came in the mail. A photo. How odd, I thought to myself. A sausage? Somebody sent me a photo of a sausage? If so, it was none too appetizing: sickly pink (all those nitrates), wrinkled (old), and covered with a sickly gleam (putrification).

Alas, no. Not a sausage.

A baby.

Yes, another of my here-to-do-it-all acquaintances, having done everything else, smoked dope and tried same sex, done the backpack-round-the-world thing and the macrobiotic diet (it makes you feel worse, but it's good for you), having set up and bankrupted a tech start up and volunteered for two years in Africa, has finally turned, in the physiologically last possible moment, to what is billed as the ultimate experience of a lifetime.

Yes, he has had a baby.

And now the whole world has to see it and admire it. Myself included.

Now, I understand that parents find it constitutionally impossible to be objective about their productions, but, for crying outloud, surely, they must see that

a) newborns are ugly as all hell -- enough to spoil your lunch if you were planning a salsicia -- and that, in any case,
b) they all look the same.

Besides, I do not send out to all and sundry photos of my own ordinary physiological productions. Why should they?

And what am I to say in reply to this photo?

Another childless acquaintance says he has figured out the perfect reply to these "look at what we have laid" messages. He writes: "Now, that's a baby!!!". None of his addressees has apparently ever noticed -- which any 12 year old would -- that the reply means nothing. Instead, everyone seems somehow to assume that the intent of the message is to say that their particular baby is somehow really real while all other babies somehow are not.

Clearly, giving birth makes you stupid.