Happy Friday, Internet. Here are some strange new laws you should be aware of:

In Florida, an attempt to ban bestiality triggered speculation that the state may have banned sex altogether. While this is not true, it’s still sad that the speculation was believable.

And why is it believable?

Because legislators are prone to such stupidity. Take Maine, for example, where they are in the process of banning the act of looking at children in a public place.

Censorship sunglasses, from Urban Outfitters.
Webcomic is .

You know that “why?” game that children like to play? Parents can win it sometimes — all it takes is a PhD?

(by Kate Bernauer)

It looks like France is about to lose the Internet. The Hadopi (“three strikes”) law came into force last week, and ISPs are already receiving tens of thousands of requests per day — expected to increase to approximately 150,000 per day shortly.

For those who are not caught up (rightly or wrongly) in this deluge of due-process-free banning from the Internet, US ISPs do not have to comply with more than twenty-eight such requests a month, due to the workload involved. And French law fines the ISP 1,500 Euros per day for unidentified IP addresses.

Assuming French ISPs can process numbers similar to US ones, that means they will likely be fined (as a group) approximatley one million euros every day under this law (and current conditions). A cost certain to be passed on to customers.

And that cost will grow with the backlog.

Which means that for those few Internet users left in France, their internet bill will skyrocket. Enjoy your 1,000 Euro/month Internet bill, if you can afford it.

Back in January and February, Karen and I spent a lot of time in Bulgaria. On our first (or second?) weekend there, we went to see the movie Book of Eli. Karen wasn’t feeling well, and spent most of the movie in the theatre bathroom.

That was not the only night she did not feel well on the trip — it continued for most of the trip.

Suspicions were raised.

Karen returned to London a week before I did, and suspicions were confirmed shortly thereafter. She made a doctor’s appointment — because that’s what you do — and the doctor asked her to go have a test done, due to a pain in her abdomen.

So, standing on an underground platform in Sofia, I received a phone call. Everything was OK.

And Karen had just seen our baby’s heart beating.

That was nearly two months ago. I have now seen — and heard — our baby’s heart beat as well. I have no idea what this means for the Big Bad Blog, and there are no plans for his to become a blog on parenting, but my life does inform its content to some degree. Those who want to hear more can pay attention to the (very) newly created parenting category on the Big Bad Blog, where I will hide all future baby/infant/child type news.

So there you have it. Baby time.

As you can see from the above photo, kids are not as innocent as they pretend to be. Professors at the University of Portsmouth, who have study the devious ways of the infant, characterize eight month olds as “deceptive”, and two year olds as “far more devious”.

Perhaps this explains why this man waterboarded his own four year old daughter. At a certain point, torture may be the only way to get them to admit to knowing the alphabet.

Or perhaps children are, in fact, innocent. And their rough treatment in the face of mistrust is what leads them to play the blues.