Second thoughts on family channel

Having second thoughts on the YouTube channel we've been planning.

Weer back

We've never really kept up on this blog, and I'm hoping this return will be the one in which we start adding here regularly.

I skimmed over the previous posts to make a couple of necessary changes and realized how much didn't turn out as we planned or expected. Most obviously, Conan has mostly chosen to go to public school. I have continued my concerns, as voiced in earlier posts, however my commitment to student-driven education has made it hard not to follow her lead on this.

And the genders of my fellow crazee family members have all gone somewhere. Rae has stopped going by Kim or Kimberly and identifies as genderqueer (or non-binary) and Conan has come out as a transgender girl. I skimmed through the previous entries largely to update their names/pronouns and hope I succeeded at getting them all.

The most obvious change I've seen in both since their coming out is how obviously more comfortable and happy both of them are in their own skins since their respective acknowledgments. That's especially noticeable considering all the potential stress and difficulty we've hit.

In May, I left my job, so Rae could work full time at a job they were very excited to be starting. I was going to work on my creative endeavors as well as work toward beginning a homeschool program with Conan. It was only a very short time later that Rae had an accident on the bus home, breaking their arm, up near the shoulder. Not only that, but the pre-surgery scans revealed a cancerous tumor in the bone that was being operated on, complicating the surgery as well as raising our anxiety by a fair degree.

We have a GoFundMe set up around that, if anyone is interested in helping out. We have also set up a Patreon for this video series, if you'd like to be a part of that.

We are on our way to the other end. I'm back to work, Rae is recovering well and is looking to get back to work part time as well. Conan is ready to go back to school this year. She is nervous about coming out to her classmates, but is excited about the programs at her school, and we've been assured other students have previously made this transition there and they are prepared to work with her on any issues that due come up. We'll be watching it closely, especially me who is suspicious of schools to start with.

Not only that, Rae and I are working on a creative project together, as well as discussing the possibility of collaborating on later things, depending on how we feel.

So, while we are still recovering from recent events, we are feeling optimistic.

We are also working to start a series of videos of us a family. I thought we had enough eccentricities among us to make it possibly interesting and fun. I did this one above to sort of see if I could make anything out of my trip to the Museum of Flight with Conan. I kind of enjoyed the process and think it worked reasonably well with what I was working with. Admittedly, there will continue to be a fair amount of those issues, so long as we're assembling footage from our phones and such, which is what we're looking at, by both necessity and preference. I suspect I'll work out some tricks for my lack of coverage and inconsistent sound... It does make one see why Reality TV has so much nonsense.

I've started my own channel, Rise of the Flying Guillotine, along with an accompanying blog, also Rise of the Flying Guillotine. My intentions are more modest with that, just a place for serving real rant again, for whatever it might be worth.

I'm sure I've missed more than I've gotten, but I expect to be back to cover that later.

What is it with people and what other people name their kids?

I'm late to the game blogging about the bullshit kerfuffle surrounding the recent popularity of naming girls Khaleesi, after the title Daenerys Targaryen gains and holds on the television program Game of Thrones, as well as A Song of Ice and Fire, the book series upon which the program is based.

If you haven't caught wind of this, go check out Game Of Thrones’ Khaleesi is now a more popular baby name than Betsy by Katie Rife.

Now, I answered the question Is it a bad idea to name your child after a fictional character? over on Quora, because naming your child after a popular fantasy character is something I have some expertise on. Every once in a while I get an upvote, which reminds me of my annoyance regarding the subject.

The first way you can tell this whole "controversy" is bullshit is the fact that they chose Betsy as the name that's fallen, which is goofy on a number of levels. Betsy?! I think I've only known one Betsy in my whole life. I suspect there are a lot of goofy names more popular than Betsy! Especially when compared to people with "Betsy" on their birth certificate.

The choice of Betsy cripples the logic of the whole thing, because Betsy is traditionally a nickname. Do I know if the Betsy I knew was named Betsy or Elizabeth shortened to Betsy? Nope. No idea. Do they know how many of the people named Elizabeth in 2012 will be called Betsy? Of course not. I bet not even all of those parents know whether they, or their daughters, will at some point take a liking - or disliking - to the nickname Betsy.

The other choice given in the article, but not as fussed about, was Nadine, which is traditionally given as a name in itself, so at least we can make some sense of how many of those Nadines will be Nadine forever.

Again, to my recollection, a lifetime of meeting people has put me in contact with a grand total of 1 Nadine. My high school bus driver.

I think I'd notice, too, because it is also the name of one of the most finely crafted rock & roll songs in history.



So, the whole thing is framed around names that are just familiar enough to seem like it means something, but uncommon enough to render the whole thing utterly meaningless.

The thing I wonder about is, though, is why the fuck do we care?

Yeah, I used to be one of those people who grumped one thing or another about how people named their kids. That me would have complained about the "properness" of those people who named their kids Betsy rather than Elizabeth in that discussion above.

 Something happened to me, though, in the fuss over naming our child Conan. My in-laws got annoyed by it and there was a lot of back and forth over that, mostly involving passive-aggressive suggesting of more "normal" names, not one of which did we even consider... and, of course, would have dismissed on principle even if they had been names we might have otherwise considered.

So far, since his birth, we've had no real issues. Most people seem genuinely pleased when they get it. Now, sometimes people have trouble getting it.

We get "Connor?" a lot when we give the name, but that's hardly an issue in the long run..

Supposedly, the concern is "What about the children?" Right?

I'm sure everyone who is reading this an shaking their head is thinking this.

I think I'm in a pretty good position to speak to this.

I was born in 1971. My name is Neil. Neil was not and is not a terribly common name, but it is familiar to most people.

It's probably somewhere around Betsy and Nadine in being well-known but not common, although I'd guess, without looking it up, that it's a bit more common than those.

Growing up, Neils Armstrong, Diamond, Sedaka and Young were well known. I wasn't named after any of these. I was named much more traditionally after my father before me and his father before him.

But other kids would tease me about my name.

Why? Because it worked.

I was a sensitive kid, for whatever reason, and people made up silly rhymes about my name and it hurt my feelings and made me angry, so they kept it up.

Am I upset because of my name? Of course not. It's part of who I am. I like it.

Being the '70s, in liberal Seattle and going to a lot of experimental(ish) private schools, I knew a fair number of kids with odd names that they were given to them by their hippie parents, and you know what? Most of them were fine. Happy with their names. Why? Some probably got some flack, but most not. I suspect most of them just lucked into being less sensitive generally.

 I also knew a metric ton of Jennifers. The majority of them were named by parents who thought they were naming them something kind of interesting and unusual.

 I don't know if anyone has every made a study of it, but I suspect it has something to do with this -



I knew more Jennifers who were frustrated about the relative commonness of their name than people with unusual names who were frustrated by their unusual name.

To the extent there's a real judgment of kids names based on their rarity, it's all about parents not kids.

Remember, for most of childhood, most of the names you hear are new to you. So kids are in the habit of being introduced to people with a name they've never heard before and accepting that as the name of the person. They don't learn about names being out of the naming conventions is from their asshole parents and the bullshit judgments they offer.

You, name judging assholes, create the problem entirely.

If you introduce a kid to someone as Screwdriver, they'll just go along and call them Screwdriver, because they have no basis to judge that as unusual, until quite a ways into growing up. Not because they can't be jerks, as I said before they can and will, but because they don't have the context to specifically realize the oddness of that yet. The only way they get that is from adults in their life teaching them that.  By the time they know enough on their own to draw that conclusion on their own, they'd already most likely just know this Screwdriver and judge them and tease them based on whatever factors they really judge and tease other kids by, which has absolutely nothing to do with their names.


In the end, I'm done. I was an asshole to make dumb judgments about what people name their kids and you're an asshole if you're still doing it.

Thoughts on spanking and respect

The mother-in-law - Rae's former stepmother, who remains the major maternal figure in her life, for a variety of reasons - recently called her, offended that they'd posted "so many" anti-spanking memes or articles on her Facebook.

As far as we could tell, that was two of them, but that's us being pedantic.

She thought it reflected badly on her, which she found unfair as she'd never spanked Rae.  This is another demonstration of her world view that everything is about her.  Suffice to say, while the stories are not mine to tell, she did do things I consider worse than spanking - far, far worse, in fact - but it's worth crediting her for being right about that issue.

I have no patience with her, but that's my failing.  Not that she deserves a bit of my patience, but Rae deserves a lot more than I give too much of the time.

The point that the mother-in-law is missing is how often parents of a toddler has pro-spanking messages fed to them.  On social media or in the world.

I read Spanking Your Children is Hitting Your Children by Chuck Wendig to Rae today, a couple of days later. It's a very good article and my feelings on the issue match the ones expressed there, so I won't go into more detail than to highly recommend it.  I also read Spanking is Hitting, Part Two, which gives a more tempered argument that is also important to make.

In Honor thy father and thy mother, I discussed the question of people bending to nearly any length to justify their parents actions.  I think the dialog on corporal punishment largely comes to a standstill because of this one single, stupid problem.

Look at the dumb fucking meme that inspired the original Chuck Wendig post:

The entire thing is predicated on the notion of the person's parents being "right".

I think the implicit contempt expressed in the tone suggests more than a little that their psychological self-evaluation has failed on a massive scale.  Of course, the average person has little concept of what respect is.  It's a modestly complicated concept and most people were trained as children that respecting people was demonstrated by obeying them, which isn't a very good beginning to understanding it.

"Respect for Others" is taught by example.  Period.  There is no other way.

Spanking is not a very good way to demonstrate respect.  In fact, it actively demonstrates the opposite.  It's an act of profound disrespect.

Saying a person can't learn without violence being inflicted upon them is perhaps the ultimate in contemptuous statements.  It's certainly arguable in cases of Nazi Germany and rapists that without violence - or, at least, the threat of violence - one might not be able to stop them from their atrocious actions.  It happens I hold my child in much greater esteem than Nazis and rapists.

I don't remember either way if my parents did this to me, but I've always hated, even as a kid, watching people trying to teach their kids manners through humiliation.  "Hold on, what do you say?"

What a crock.  If you're polite and respectful to the people around you, your child will most likely grow up to be polite and respectful to the people around them.  That humiliation game is just intended to bolster your reputation as someone teaching their kids "manners".

But let's circle back to the world in which there's explicit and implicit messages pushing you to spank, outside of dumb as fuck Facebook memes.

Conan recently took up screaming.  Not screaming in pain or excitement.  Mostly randomly, although frequently it would seem in annoyance, as he'd often follow-up by saying "Annoying."

He'd do this in various public places, but especially on the bus.  I speculate he was annoyed about being in transit and a bit bored with the wait, but he wasn't able to communicate the more complicated point unfortunately.

Rae and I would do our best to gently shush him or tell him to stop in a more commanding tone.  Neither of them got us too far in those moments.

But at the worst it was intermittent, even when it was fairly often.

You could see people stare and glare and mutter that we should obviously be doing something more.  Most likely not everyone thought we should strike him, but you could tell we should be do something more and more aggressive to quell it.

I'm not sure what that would based on.  My experience, although admittedly anecdotal, in witnessing people who tried to physically punish or get into a screaming war with a toddler over making too much noise is that 100% of those escalate into something worse than intermittent screaming.

Now, he seems to be getting over that.  Not completely.  But largely.

And so goes life.

I promise, as soon as I stop seeing people arguing that I should spank my kid, I'll stop talking about why I'm not going to do that.

On the other hand, if you present an argument that isn't awful, I might treat it with respect.  As we can see above, that's not very likely.

And just to  hammer it home, here's Why Shouldn’t You Spank Your Kids? Here’s 9 Reasons.

The things we believe in

I've been on this little school rampage for a little bit, as you can tell.

I didn't really start this blog to go over these things.  I wanted to - and want to - share more personal things about our life and our son.

I'm bad at doing that.  When Conan's learning a new thing or whatever other thing he does, I tend to live in that moment and enjoy it, listen to her sing "Smells Like Teen Spirit", as I noted in this post on my other blog, talk to him as she figures out the body parts on his doll, or read What's That Squeak? to her for the umpteenth time, and then, unless it's relevant, there doesn't seem to me much of a story.

But I'll try to find more contexts to write about those things, because they make me unbelievably happy.

This subject, on the other hand, put me into a black, black headspace and I need to step away from it for a little while anyway.

I wanted to hit one more thing I note, and I suppose it's not unlike the earlier post Honor thy father and thy mother, but it's hard not to keep noticing the awkwardness of having this conversation in public.

The thing I notice is that saying you don't think compulsory school is the best way to teach kids seems a lot like saying you're an atheist.  In both cases, there seems a defensiveness among a significant group of adherents, religious believers or traditional schooling advocates.

It feels to me like many people need to be assured that your lack of agreement with their belief system is not an attack on them or their belief system.

It's harder for me with school to offer that.  As I noted, here certainly, this is not, for me, an idle point of casual disagreement.  I feel like what those Jesus Camp kids or ones from similar kinds of religious background seem to feel when they get out of that environment and reject those beliefs.  It's a white hot anger.  Sometimes it's an atheistic anger at religion, others are angry at God.  Either way, it's not something I have a relationship to on that issue.

On religion, you believe what you believe, I'll believe what I believe and as long as you don't try to inhibit my life with your beliefs, we're totally great.  Go out and do good.  Make the world a happier place, please.  Whatever name you choose to do it in is fine by me.

Conversely, if you're doing harm and acting maliciously against the happiness of the world, I don't care what excuse you have either.

With school, it's harder.

Off and on, I've studied it.  I even took some degree of interest when I was in school.  Partially from my own frustration, partly because education had always been an active interest of my mother's, so the material was around me. I've studied it in the years since and, of course, with renewed vigor since Conan was conceived.

People try to convince me of the benefits of school for Conan's benefit, and some of that has made a difference, along with our experiences.  You can see Thoughts on school for a relatively large adjustment we've recently made.

Most people, even when they express concern over Conan, are defending the status quo.  They're entrenched in what they believe in.  For those especially, it's hard for me to argue.  Obviously, it's impossible to do without criticizing things they believe in.  Were I simple non-believer in school, I'm sure I could make those arguments reasonably and tactfully without straining myself.

So, for the record, please know, I'm not disagreeing with your experiences.  That teacher that inspired you was undoubtedly terrific.  In my opinion, even more so for standing out in such an extraordinarily flawed system.  The things you learned, the friends you made, the skills you gained are all valid and acknowledged by me.

I just think there are ways you could have gotten more, as well.  And I think all of who were - or who at least feel we were - failed by school could have gotten more from it, as well as less frustration.

Here's Conceiving Of Change And Invisible Alternatives to assist my point, as I'm running out of ways to state all of this in a positive way.

Like I said, all of this thought and discussion on this subject has not done good things for my mood.  I need to spend some time away from it.  I'm going to just enjoy Halloween with Conan and get back to my general feeling of satisfaction with my life.

Parenting, debate and the hunger dogs

My son, cuddling a Red Dalek Talking Plush Toy. We got it last night and it is the first plush toy he took with him to bed to cuddle up with to sleep.

I think occasionally on why I don't post here that often. Part of it is just a basic matter of time, priorities and other such bits and pieces, I also think I'm stuck with an unusual lack of desire for debate on parenting.

Not too long ago, Kim posted a thought she'd had on our plans to homeschool on Facebook and this ended up with me getting into rather a row with a mutual "friend" of sorts, because I thought her comments were useless and condescending and she thought they weren't, I guess. Mind you, I think the spirit of them was deep, deep condescension, but condescending people always just think they're right and you're wrong and they're, as such being ever helpful in demonstrating that to us. That's what makes them so goddamn condescending.

What I did come to is this, though, I really don't give much of a fuck what other people think, at least in a debate sense.

This is a larger issue, mind you.  I think my other blog, The Bleeding Tree, suffers of late because I've grown less interested in debating the merits of movies.  I'm not uninterested in other opinions in themselves, but the give and take of debating has fallen by the wayside.  The specifics of that might be its own post over there some day.  Who knows?

It's not that I don't think debate can be a valuable tool and important for critical thinking, but so little of what I come around is valuable or done in the spirit of, or featuring, critical thinking.  I couldn't tell you the last time I was involved in a debate I didn't feel stupider for having gotten involved in.  Is that my age or is that the way people debate nowaday?  Is it laziness or wisdom?  Probably a bit from each cup, if I were to guess.

But Kim posted this article today, How Attachment Parenting Produces Independent Kids, and I felt compelled to share and add to it.

My brother Ian was six years old when he was adopted. He had spent a good deal of his formative years literally starving. For the rest of his childhood - and I believe as an adult he's had some success in curbing this - he was literally unable to control his compulsion to eat. He would eat meat down to the marrow. He would eat off other people's plates. And as frustrating as it could be to all of us, and we were certainly not always as understanding as we should have been or would have liked to have been.

When people suggest to me that the best way to make a child independent is to withhold some degree of attention/affection so they won't look to you, it sounds insane to me. It's a surprisingly popular theory, though. I'm incapable of making it make sense in my brain at all, though. If it works for you in your life, that's terrific for you and your child(ren).

As I said, I'm not terribly interested in debating these things and am no more interested in telling you what would or should work for you than I am in hearing you tell me what would or should work for me.
To me, I only see that if one deprives a child of their needs, they only need more.  A starving child learns to take all of the food they can get, when they can get it.  A child starving for attention/affection learns to take all of the attention/affection they can get, when they can get it.

I can't speak for everyone, but I know Conan is a pretty independent little kid for a two-year-old.  I believe that by never make her feel she needs to worry about where attention/affection will come from next, she's able to regulate his own needs.  At least he's developing that.

Sure, she gets tired and fussy sometimes and needs extra attention - hell, so do I - but generally she's happy to play on her own and solve her world with occasional breaks for cuddling and hearing a book. From my perspective, this not only is the only way that makes sense, it's the way that's working.

Like I said, if some other way works for you or those you know, I can't make sense of it, but I have no interest in debating you.  What I know is that with how well this is working for our family, I have no intention of changing it.  If anything, I only want to do a better job.

T.V. is not the devil.

Well this is actually Rae Sarver posting this but I am not as internet savvy as my wonderful husband. There are several parenting groups that I follow on Facebook that seem to (at least a large majority) follow the belief that T.V. should not only never be turned on around a child but not even used for an adult. I struggled with this for most of my life. When Neil and I met I had a T.V. in the living room but only because that was my roommate's. I did not really watch T.V. Neil is a HUGE movie fan and likes to watch them frequently. I must say since we have had our child he has decreased his movie watching significantly.

The T.V. is on now as I write. I turned it on to play "Blue's Clues" while Conan ate a late breakfast. Conan wakes up at about 11 and I made her oatmeal and cereal and milk but she likes to graze. She doesn't sit and watch it but she does shake her booty to the songs and answer back when they call out.

As far as myself? I may watch a show when she naps but that is about it. On rainy days I have been known to put on a show while he sat in her bedroom and played. She is very independent. This may surprise those people in my life that have warned me of the dangers of co-sleeping and extended breastfeeding and baby wearing as tools to insure a clingy child.

We pretty much go with the flow in this house. She doesn't have a set in stone bedtime yet she goes to sleep between 10:30pm-11:30 pm. Thats when I gets home from my part time job.

When I am at work, Neil may watch something while Conan plays but he never ignores Conan to do so. Conan seems to have little to no interest in T.V. and we have not kept it from her. I think that if you make T.V. a huge forbidden fruit that causes problems when she gets older and gorges herself (so to speak) on T.V.

So ya- T.V. is not the devil.

Motörhead Mama/Plasmatics Papa

As we suggested in our introduction, Introducing the folks, music played a big part in our thought process in naming this blog.

I noticed, in searching for alternative parenting discussion that veered away from the expected hippie-dippie path, that most alternative parenting discussions find themselves in seem to identify as "punk", to one extent or another.

Before I step too far away from the point, by the way, may I note that while I am, at this point, as guilty as anyone of using hippie as a pejorative, I think a parenting plan that uses the kinds of philosophy Abbie Hoffman and others might have advocated, is very much in line with what I am interested in pursuing. It just seems the people who carry on that image are so fucking precious. They might as well be a bunch of boring religious conservative frankly.

And, for a whole number of reasons, but starting with the fact that Heavy Metal Homesteader played such a role in forming the idea that we need to create a discussion of parenting from our own version of the debate, I'd like to find more parenting discussions that identify as "heavy metal", but so far I haven't had much luck.

Not to mention that I started my days of the teenage version of rebellion, that self-conscious kind of rebellion, with heavy metal. I'm quite sure my basic nature was always rebellious. I can't recall a time my thought-process didn't include a strong inclination to question the hell out of everything.


Perhaps this would be as good a time as any to note that both of us are very eclectic in what music we listen to. We both listen to classical and I have recently expanded the realm of instrumental music that Rae listens to to include movie scores. We both like country, to one degree or another, although Kim is only recently coming out of that closet. We both like hip hop, but I'm much more stuck in my time - being somewhere in the early-to-mid-'90s. I think Brian Wilson is among the world's musical giants. Rae loves Lady Gaga.

And, of course, we both think Alice Cooper is the bee's knees!

Limiting you musical appreciation is just one more way to limit your brain.

But the real problem with identifying this blog by musical style is finding that spot where those two ideas meet.

Motörhead lives there. The Plasmatics hit it at their peak.

It's like the best of both worlds coming together.

Perhaps the word just becomes "headbanging", although that has become too closely associated and branded as "metal", I suspect.

Or perhaps, we come full circle to The MC5 and The Stooges and the same kind of Yippie approach to non-conformity that grew up from the hippie ideas.


As such, Rae's idea of choosing the reference to Mama Weer All Crazee Now seemed was perfect. It doesn't make a direct reference to a musical style, but it evokes Slade and The Runaways, another pair of bands that fit somewhere in that unusual middle zone. Heck, even Quiet Riot feels a little more somewhere in between than they were slotted at back in the day.

Our entire question in reaching out to the world has been not comfortably finding a place, so it seems obvious we should not find a comfortable style of music, one that the general public has no real name for nor any quick, simple associates to make with it. Something that continually dances around the edges of the mainstream to the extent that it has familiar touchstones, but doesn't have its own lifestyle or champions.

I think that's where we are. I'm looking forward to examining it, now that I've gotten to point in a direction and said there.

To move this toward Conan and how she lives and behaves, which I expect to be a bigger part of this blog all the time, right now he's absconded with my phone, which means Rae can't call me, so she can listen to Attention Deficit Domination by Hank 3 in the bedroom. Clearly she's doing all she can to join our world.

We went to Motörhead, as well as The Meat Puppets, Roky Erickson, The Baseball Project and Peelander-Z in the last month she was in utero, so she might just come by it naturally. I'll be back soon, and bring my wonderful spouse with me.

Introducing the folks

Hi, we're Rae and Neil.  That's Conan on the left.  She's almost 2.

Conan Daigoro Levon Sarver.

Named for Conan of Cimmeria, Ogami Daigorō from Lone Wolf and Cub and either Levon by Elton John or the great Levon Helm, depending which of us you ask and on which day. Maybe that tells you something about what kind of parents we are.

Or maybe what it tells you says something about you.

Who knows?

We're new to parenting.  Neil is 42, but is apparently a late-bloomer as that goes.  Rae is 29, so Neil is robbing the cradle.

We're playing most of this by ear, and having a great time.  The three of us have a great time together.   Our instincts seem to be taking us to all the things we want.

Conan is a joy and we find that we naturally gravitate toward decisions that serve that.  Some days are easier than others but we're working together.

But then the others come.  The others have done it better or worse yet have never done it, but are sure  they know better anyway.

And even in a "weird" town like Austin, Texas, where we're making our way, there seems too often to be a dichotomy that we don't find out way into.  We're not hippie enough to join all the granola meetings and be comfortable, but definitely too far out to join the local daycare group.

We're working to be healthier, but we like pizza and cake.

We're trying to be natural, but we're on a budget.

We're co-sleeping and extended breastfeeding.  We're planning to homeschool.

However looking through a lot of Facebook pages on the subject led Neil to throw up his hands and wish there was something like Heavy Metal Homesteader about parenting.  We decided we should just jump in and fill the void for ourselves.

Punk Rock Parents is taken. So is The Kids Are Alright.

Neil suggested "Says Fucking Who?" It has a certain punk rock quality, a little childhood petulance, while also speaking to the most basic question regarding all the advice and counsel a person has foisted upon them as a new parent. So many bits of wisdom are passed along, so just dismal. Others leave you curious, begging the question... "Says fucking who?", even when intended with a generous spirit.

Society likes traditions and strongly encourages us all to follow the traditions that were handed down. We'd like to examine them as we go and see which ones feel useful.

And we'd like to do the same with the new-fangled ideas, the hippie-dippie ideas, the ideas from outside our Western culture.

We don't think the new or the old, the western or the eastern, the established or the crazy is better by its own virtue. We want to find and apply the things that work best for us and that work best for Conan.

We're embracing the madness of all of the possibilities.

In the process, perhaps we'll stir up some thoughts for other people, too.



Or if you prefer:



And we will also accept:


But only under cases of extreme duress.