by
Doug Weiner
A friend and former co-worker, Marc Wiz (he claims that's his real name), doesn't believe in the stork.It seems that Marc believes babies come from Siberia. Which strikes us as funny, bacause we always thought of Siberia as the kind of place people were dying (ha ha!) to get out of, or to avoid getting into in the first place. But Marc claimed that he and his wife were going there to ``get a baby'' (his exact words).
Right.
Of course, my first question was, ``Is there a Fodor's Guide to Siberia?''
It turns out there is. It consists of just a front and back cover.
So what about other guidebooks?
The Russian Tourist Bureau has some they issue when the court system grants you a free ticket to Siberia. We hear that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has one out, too, but we aren't sure of the real name, because the translators somehow called it, The Gulag Archipelago.
So of course I laughed a lot. And Marc and his wife disappeared for a few weeks of vacation at Christmas time, still claiming they were going to Siberia to get a baby.
In the middle of winter - primo vacation time in Siberia. The hot bet at work was that they were really going to Cancun, and just wanted to throw their relatives off the trail.
Oh, yeah, they took along lots of cash. (One cynic even suggested they were going to South America to start a vegetable import business.) But those of us who knew Marc and his wife knew they would never do anything like that.
We just figured they were working for the CIA, maybe buying the Russian's solution to the Y2K bug.
Three weeks later, right on time, they were back.
And, boy, did we have egg on our faces! Not only did Marc and his wife get a baby in Siberia, but they have pictures of the process. (They're not grotesque and blood-splattered as most delivery photos seem to be.)
The Russians are apparently way ahead of the USA in baby technology. The cost is a bit higher, even ignoring currency exchange rates, but the process is much easier on the mother (she doesn't even break a sweat), and involves the father even more than USAian birthing center. And get this: No breathing exersizes! Amazing!
Finally, this new technology allows Russian babies to be delivered much farther along, developmentally, than even Japanese babies. Irina (Marc's new baby) tested at an incredible 7 months, right out of the package (so to speak). Can you believe that? Their first day back, she was bouncing and grabbing fingers and already on an eating schedule and pretty much doing everything short of changing her own diapers.
Now this sounds like a good thing, right?
No, it sounds like a great thing!
Or it did until we realized the implications.
Do you understand what this means for the west? Not just the USA, but most of the world?
It means we now have a serious baby gap, and you should write the president (president@whitehouse.gov) and demand he do something about it! But ask him to keep it under control. If he takes a traditional MAD approach (Mutually Assured Drool), we'll be in a baby race. Babies will be born more and more mature until we have enough newborn 13 year olds to drown the entire world in teenage hormones 42 times.
But what, you might ask, can we do?
Surely if the Russians, who can't grow much besides giant, mutant, radioactive cucumbers that prey on humans, who can't even beat a computer at chess, can produce babies (so many, in fact, that they sell excess stock to western capitalists, for crying out loud!) who can almost dress themselves at birth, we can do it!
And don't look to the Japanese for help. They have to send their kids to twice as much school as anyone else. Maybe their babies are all premature and need more help?
On the other hand, tradition dictates that most of the people involved in global defense science are men. But I have been assured that women all over the globe have indicated that if the Russians will have their babies for them, they will happily pay enormous sums of money to let them do it. (Bonus points - this could rescue the Russian economy!) Especially if the babies are already past the colic stage. My wife has said that if we men have a problem with this, we are welcome to start taking a much larger part in baby production. So I say, if you want to have a kid, start saving now. And get a passport.
Oh, yeah. That egg on our face? It was stork egg. All these years we fell for that stupid stork bit, and we're out for revenge. And if the storks don't want to be on the endangered species list, they can ante up the bucks and go to Siberia for their babies, same as the rest of us.
Copyright 1998 Roadkills-R-Us Austin, TX. All rights reserved.