So, a few summers ago, after Alice came out for BlogHer '06, in San Jose, she asked me if I could drive her to the airport on my way out of town, and I said sure! I know exactly where the airport is! And I promptly took off in the wrong direction.
Alice -- she is so cute when she's trying not to panic about missing a cross-country flight -- politely let me know that she was a little worried about our trajectory. NONSENSE! I shouted, and then I began bellowing sea chanteys at the top of my lungs to drown out her shrieking.
I don't know if it was the combination of decibels and a cruelly unresolved chord or what, but suddenly we found ourselves hurtling through a vortex of time, space, and garlic. My car came to a lurching halt in . . . A LAND BEFORE TIME.
Well, long story short, we had to hole up in this cave for a couple of weeks and subsist on prehistoric nuts and berries. They were pretty good.
One day, while I was out foraging for jumper cables, I happened upon a red velvet duffel bag full of wondrously carved chips of stone. Also inside the duffel was this scroll-type deal that was written in what appeared to be a language that corresponded to the symbols carved into the stones. Alice began calling them "mystical runes," because she's fancy like that.
So, we threw the duffel in the trunk and doing that opened a time portal. We jumped into the car and drove straight through it. We got Alice to the airport in plenty of time to fight about who was going to be in charge of the duffel bag. Well, it turned out to be a little too big for carry-on, but Alice convinced me that because she lived in a large East Coast city with access to universities and secret underground laboratories, and all I lived near was a pretty good taco stand, SHE should take the runes and get them translated.
I didn't hear from her again until last Christmas, when she parachuted out of a helicopter and tried to stuff herself down my chimney. When she emerged from the flue with the duffel on her back and a twinkle in her eye, she excitedly told me that a man named Dr. Ronald Tischman had translated the runes and the scroll and made Alice swear that she would do everything in her power to bring the world's attention to their mystical pronouncements. It turns out that the scroll was a pre-Etruscan parenting manual. The pre-Etruscans had some really crazy ideas about how to raise children, but Dr. Tischman knew that their ancient beliefs could serve as a balm to our modern anxieties about childrearing, mostly by INTENSIFYING those anxieties. I know, right? Totally counterintuitive! And you should read the stuff about pregnancy. It's nuts.
So Alice hired a designer and we got to work organizing the material. We're not done yet, but we've managed to get the first phase uploaded. So thanks to the hard work of Dr. Tischman, himself a disgraced pediatrician, we are happy to announce the web site LET'S PANIC About Babies!