I got roped into it because the officer-in-charge, one of my wife’s colleagues at the Salvo’s, was worried that they’d be short staffed and Jenny and a couple of her other colleagues agreed to sign up. Several more people turned up than were expected, maybe about 15 of us in total (not including the party spruikers outside), but that ended up being a blessing in disguise.

Jenny and I, and a guy named Charles were in charge of the Declaration votes – kinda like the “odd jobs” queue for people from other electorates, people whose names weren’t on the official roster, etc. The day started at around 7:15am when we arrived to help with the final set up of the booth (most of it had already been done the previous night by the officer-in-charge). People already started rocking up by about 7:30am, wanting to get the chore out of the way and not realising that polling didn’t begin until 8am.

So when we unlocked the doors, there was already a queue of people. Throughout the morning, the queue just kept growing and growing, to the point that it snaked its way out from the entrance out onto the street. I’m not 100% sure how many people there were in total, but judging by the count (more about that later), we would’ve processed in excess of 3,000 that day. The polls were open for 10 hours (from 8am – 6pm), which means that we processed on average 5 people a minute. The queue was long through most of the day and we had a lot of people who were irate at having spent half an hour or more minutes waiting in line. It only relented sometime around 5 – 5:30pm. It was a good thing that we had the extra hands otherwise none of us would’ve been able to take a break.

Speaking of breaks, after 6pm, there were none. The counting process began immediately after polling closed, with the spruikers coming in from outside to act as “scrutineers”. They themselves were not allowed to touch the ballot papers; only to  watch and ensure that nothing improper happened during the counting of the House of Representative ballot papers (not sure why they didn’t bother with the Senate). On our part, the three of us “Dec’s” sorted through the votes cast for the other electorates, to be sent on for inclusion in their final tallies. After all that was done, the whole team went on to count and sort the “tablecloths”. The above-the-line votes had to be counted towards the primary vote, but the below-the-line would presumably be sent somewhere for computers to determine the 2-party preferred calculations.

Jenny says that she saw at least one obligatory penis drawing in amongst the informals (the ones where the voter didn’t provide a valid vote); I didn’t come across any – not that I’m disappointed or anything; just surprised at how well behaved people were overall. Then again, we were in Putney and not some boganville out West. Counting continued until at least 10pm, and the sorting, securing and packing until nearly 11pm. All I remember of the counting was that for the Senate, our location recorded 1500+ for the Liberals, against 720 for Labor. I can’t remember how many the Greens got, not that it mattered anyway. It was clearly Liberal all the way for the good folk of Bennelong.

On Sunday, we rested. And rested. I never would’ve imagined that it’d be possible to get that tired from sitting down all day, and sorting through bits of paper all night. For all that, we got paid $339.83 for the day itself, and $51.14 for the online training that we had to complete prior to the day – before tax. Was it worth it? Not for the money, that’s for sure. It was an interesting and highly educational experience, but not one that I’m keen to repeat again.

Before your eyes glaze completely over, let me quickly say that even though the other issues might be more important to you in regards to how you vote, give me this opportunity to explain why you should give at least a passing thought to the NBN.

Who cares about the Internet?
By virtue of the fact that you’re reading this blog, I’m probably preaching to the converted. However I’m sure that you can think of family, friends and colleagues who think that going online is all about porn, spam, and time wasting. Online services (not simply the Web) are helping to transform society for the better. Have they tried submitting their tax return via e-tax and getting their refund promptly within 14 days? Do they know that they can talk to family and friends around the globe for free using Skype? Missed a show on TV and used a site like ABC iView to catch it there instead? The Internet isn’t about just the Web any more, and resist it all you like, but it’s quickly becoming an integral part of our lives.

Do we need more speed?
All of those things are available today, so what’s the NBN going to deliver that we can’t already get? In today’s terms, nothing. The issue is not, and should not be about speed. It’s about how efficiently we can move data around in a society and economy increasingly dependant on information. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google loves to rattle off the statistic that every 2 days, we are creating as much information as all of humankind has ever generated from between the dawn of time up until 2003.

It’s not even relevant what the information is: news, entertainment, business, and even non-human readable information such as farm-to-fork tracking of food, the future holds a tsunami of data that needs the capacity to carry it. A helpful but imperfect analogy would be traffic congestion. As our population grows and more and more cars appear, our limited road infrastructure would need to be upgraded by building more and bigger roads. Unfortunately there’s a physical limitation – there just isn’t any space. But because fibre doesn’t take any more room than copper wire, it’s as if you could turn a 2-lane street into a 16-lane freeway without it taking up any extra space.

Can’t it wait until later?
We need to consider that the infrastructure being built is not for today, or even the near future – the NBN won’t even be completed until the next decade. Our current copper network has served us well since the first trunk linking Sydney and Melbourne was laid back in 1907, with the remainder of the country wired up at significant expense to the Commonwealth of Australia by the Postmaster General, through ’til 1935.

The PMG position is a Federal Ministerial post,  overseeing the Postmaster-General’s Department that was in charge of all domestic telephone, telegraph and postal services. With 16,000 staff, it accounted for 90% of the new federal bureaucracy. That figure went up to over 120,000 staff (around 50% of the federal bureaucracy) by the late sixties. (Source)

Pause to think about that for a moment. The building of the original telecommunications network accounted for between 50 – 90% of what we would today call “the government” of its time. But I digress.

Building the NBN is still predominantly physical work and will take a long time time to wire up the whole country, so whether we start now, next year, or next decade, the longer we put this project off, the further into the future it will be before we can start reaping the benefits of the NBN.

What about the cost?
The other massive stumbling block for opponents of NBN is the cost. There are so many misconceptions about it that I don’t have any hope of addressing them all here without burying you in gory technical details, but two huge points are:

The $43 billion figure constantly being thrown around is not one big huge lump-sum of taxpayers’ money, payable to NBN Co. up front. It is spread out over 8 years, and consists of a combination of taxpayer dollars (around $26-30bn roughly) and the sale of government bonds to private investors.

$43bn represents 3.85% of Australia’s annual gross domestic product, which averaged over 8 years is half-a-percent per year. We’re investing 0.5% of our country’s economic wealth into building the digital backbone of the future.

Still think it’s expensive? There’s more, but I don’t want to bore you with details on why the Coalition’s scare campaign is severely misguided. For that, I will simply point you in the direction of one Mr Ross Gittins.

The money could be better used elsewhere
A person could say this about any policy that one disagrees with. Faster rail links between cities? Don’t travel. More hospital beds? Fit as a fiddle. Paid parental leave? Already had five, can I give one back? It’s the moral high ground, and since no individual is going to agree with the way in which every single dollar is spent in this country – the arts, community building, welfare, etc. – it’s plain douche-baggery to object on the grounds that the funds should be spent on something else.

The government can’t be trusted to deliver on time, on budget
True. You got me there. But let me leave you with this quote, from Ian Verrender in the Sydney Morning Hearld:

[Tony Abbott] may not consider the potential long-term economic benefits to the nation. But his single-minded devotion to the enormous costs involved in the project at least has one major benefit. It will focus the minds of those whose task it is to roll out the network to make sure it is achieved with utmost efficiency.

Over the weekend I played with Jenny’s cousin’s son, a hyperactive two year old. Both my body and my mind received a thorough workout as we roughed up a stack of Jenga blocks, where the individual tiles were transformed into a pile of bricks, a horde of money, food, cars, trains and planes. Next, we moved onto an etch-a-sketch, where we drew faces, created scenes of day and night, and drew a whole lot of random scribbles from which we’d eke out meaning, like a Rorschach test. We did the same with his collection of toy cars as well as his Thomas the Tank Engines of various sizes (which somehow came to represent members of his family). Overall, about 2 hours of intense play.

It was like the opening scene of Toy Story 3 – toys aren’t simply objects to be appreciated for their features and design – they were avatars for the personalities and characters that we invent for them in our imaginations. As embarrassing as it is for me to admit this, I used to play with Transformers in the same way that girls played with dolls. I distinctly remember one Transformer called “Searchlight” that I used to play with a lot, for whom I built a little bed out of a tissue box for him to sleep at night.

As an adult, I no longer afford myself the opportunity to truly play with toys. My limit is putting them into spiffy poses and taking a photograph or two – any more than that and I’d probably be committed. The generally accepted adult expressions of creativity are things like this:

That’s great if you have the passion and the talent, but what do you do if you don’t?

Ever wonder why it’s so strange that we have 365.25 days in a year? What if I told you that God originally designed a year to be 360 days, and that it started getting longer and longer ever since Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Using the latest supercomputer models of our solar system, scientists have discovered that if you wind the clock back until a year equalled 360 days exactly, it would be… you guessed it, approximately 6,000 years ago – exactly the age that Theologians calculated the age of the Earth to be, and exactly what the bible says!

That’s not all! It’s no coincidence that 360 is the number of degrees in a circle; it is the smallest number divisible by everything from 1-10 (except 7 of course, which is the Holy Number); and it’s also the sum of two squares (a number multiplied by itself): 6 and 18. 18 divided by 6 is… three! The number of the holy trinity! And so on…

(Now if you don’t forward this to 10 of your friends, you will suffer from really, really, excruciatingly bad luck for the next hojillion years)

Look familiar? Well it shouldn’t, because I made it up. It took all of about 15 minutes worth of writing and Wikipedia “research” to create something similar to the stuff that we regularly receive in our inboxes. Here’s an example of one that I didn’t make up: the one about the supposed “missing” Christian verse in our national Anthem, Advance Australia Fair:

With Christ our head and cornerstone,
We’ll build our Nation’s might.
Whose way and truth and light alone
Can guide our path aright.
Our lives, a sacrifice of love
Reflect our Master’s care.
With faces turned to heaven above
Advance Australia fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing
Advance Australia fair!

It’s a nice verse, and while it has been around for some time, there’s no historical evidence to support the claim that this was written by the song’s original composer, Peter Dodds McCormick. What’s bad is the army of zealots who twist this into a claim that malicious forces are trying to censor the country’s Christian heritage. Um, the Christian heritage of a nation that started out as a penal colony?

I’m often astounded when a believer, who denounces numerology, astrology and other forms of spiritual mysticism, carelessly forward these messages on to friends and family. It’s but one symptom of an affliction suffered by all humans, but especially acutely by people of faith: confirmation bias, where one lets their guard down for anything that aligns with ones’ own beliefs, and puts it up for that which does not.

These are the myths that modern-day religion is built upon – the “spiritual food” that I used to gorge myself with, desperate for a true supernatural experience which never came. Despite all earnestness and no matter how much I followed the prescribed methods during my time as a Christian, I ultimately failed to have a genuine spiritual encounter. And that’s why I quit looking for Truth in religion – it’s riddled with distractions that do nothing more than tax ones’ ability to detect bullshit. If only religious institutions could just accept that what they can offer, compassion and community, is far greater than the spiritual benefits that they promise but can’t deliver.

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This post is part of the series An Atheist in God’s Kingdom.

However, GeekReads remains, and has instead become the home for my thoughts and opinions on popular entertainment – movies, games, Web comics, etc. What there isn’t very much of any more is book reviews, ‘coz the only time I get to read is while riding the Porcelain Express, and that only gets me through a few pages a day at best. Hence source material is a bit scarce (except maybe when I’ve gone and eaten something old and dodgy out of the fridge).

While trying to think of a new name, I had the idea of using the Internet Anagram Server (I, Rearrangement Servant) to see if I could make something clever by rearranging the letters of cyberseraphic. Amazingly, there are 5,231 possibilities (in comparison to a mere 1,361 for “Caesar Wong” and one single measly entry for “Jenny Wong”). Most of them are gibberish, but it’s bloody funny gibberish; just seeing “preachy scribe” had me in hysterics, being an almost-too-perfect description for this blog. I think I have way more fun than is normal for a person scanning through a list of words.

Still no viable alternatives for GeekReads, but if I wanted to create some dodgy sites I could go with “Cheery Bra Pics”, “Yep, barer chics” or even “Her Racy Biceps” for the extra kinky types. On a more wholesome note I could do a cutesy blog called “Peach Berry (sic)”, or while we’re on the fruit theme, how about a property website called “Peachy Cribs RE (Real Estate)”? Food blogs tend to be growing in popularity – I could call mine “Chars by recipe” or “Spicy crab here”. What about sports commentary “by epic archers”… we could be here all day.

In case you’re still scratching your head wondering, the second part of the post title isn’t “Gorillas get Batman”, “Install garbage, Tom” or “Algebra maligns tots”, but a rearrangement of “blog title’s anagram”.

However, I’m an even bigger language geek, so I ain’t always drinking the company kool-aid (blue, naturally). For example, I once wrote a scathing internal blog post criticising the capitalisation in the brand name for our server range (included for your reading pleasure at the end of this post) and another bemoaning the lack of consistency in pronoun use across the Web site (rather less interesting, and the less said about it the better). But the thing that’s bugging me at the moment is how we call ourselves “IBMers”:

Who was it that decided appendding “-er” to the brand would form a suitable descriptor? If you think about it, the label spelled out would be “International Business Machines-er” (or “International Business Machiner” if I was feeling generous). We’re not the only ones. At Google recently, ex-Late Show host Conan O’Brien made mockery of – that’s right – Googlers.

Is there a grammatical convention that dictates which suffix one should adopt? Like how do we know which one to use for countries, where sometimes you add -an like Australian, American, European and other times -ish such as British, Swedish, etc. If the process is entirely arbitrary then I’d like to add a few suggestions, to help employees and clients alike to classify the many different types of IBMer that they’re likely to come across:

IBMpath
Used to describe a colleague that takes great pains to show care for yourself and others. Or mutter it under your breath so that it sounds sounds like sociopath.

IBMish
These guys are the ones who have been in the company for a long time, and resist any attempts to adopt new business techniques or technologies. They prefer to continue in their backward ways.

IBMling
The corporate under-class, downtrodden and unappreciated.
Alice: “The client is upset that their project went over budget. What shall we do?”
Bob: “Don’t worry, I’ll send one of my IBMlings.”
Alice: “But they’ll eat him alive!”
Bob: “That’s OK, he just spends the whole day looking at Facebook anyway.”
Alice: “Ah, no worries then.”

IBMard
These folks have usually come into the business through an acquisition, or else they’ve been with another company for some length of time before starting at IBM. Try as they might, they Just Don’t Get It. Regardless of how many times you’ve explained it, or how much training you put them through, they refuse to do things the IBM way. Who cares that it’s faster, easier and cheaper if it doesn’t require 20 levels of management sign-off? That’s just how we do it in IBM.

IBMoid
Strange creatures that manage the deeply arcane aspects of the business. Often heard speaking in alien language with phrases that resembles English, but are completely unintelligible, like “all hands meeting”, “business as usual” and “drop-dead date”.

How does your company refer its employees?

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Here’s the blog post that I mentioned earlier…

Less than x-cited (originally posted sometime in 2006)
Some of you might have missed this little tidbit in the latest issue of A/NZ Newslinks, but STG is changing the name of eServer xSeries to IBM System x™. In most regards, I’m quite happy that they’ve finally dropped the very awkward eServer branding (the capitalisation of it never really fit very well with that of the other products, e.g. ThinkPad, ThinkCentre, IntelliStation, etc.) however I still have some reservations about retaining the lowercase “x”.

Granted, IBM now has to differentiate itself from the brands that it sold off to Lenovo, but maybe there should have been a move towards integrating other IBM product and service offerings into a single, consistent messaging (or naming) scheme. For example, take the Lotus software range, where each application has a functional, descriptive name: e.g. Lotus Learning Management System or Lotus Web Conferencing.

Where the “e-” prefix has stopped being fashionable, and everything “i-” is slowly being absorbed by the Apple marketing juggernaut that is the iPod, the adoption of plain-speaking names should be applauded. Imagine, if instead of “IBM System x” we simply had a range of “IBM Servers” with family groups such as:

• IBM Mainframe Servers
• IBM Enterprise Application Servers
• IBM Small to Medium Business Server

… or something to that effect. Customers would be able to differentiate our product offerings immediately, without having to wade through various blurbs and summaries about the product range (does the average Joe even know who an iSeries is aimed at?) I know that my thinking doesn’t take into account the probable multi-million dollars worth of research into marketing, branding and customer research, and far be it from me to suggest that I could have done a better job (or come up with a better name), but I still feel compelled to say that I’m disappointed with “System x” – a name with such forced mediocrity that it can’t even afford to capitalise the “x” for fear of seeming pretentious or rude.

At least Brian McLaren is more qualified than most – not in the sense of any religious accomplishment – but for the fact that he holds a Bachelor degree “with highest honour” (summa cum laud), as well as a Masters degree, in English. He also holds a controversially liberal view of his religion, which is the crux of A Generous Orthodoxy – to encourage Christians toward an idealised form of the faith that he describes as being both “neo-liberalist” and “neo-conservative”. Each chapter of the book provides a brief historical context of a particular denomination or orthodoxy, followed by the merits that warrant inclusion in his generous orthodoxy*.

I’d be punching above my weight to pretend that I know my left from my right, and all that religious and political speak other commentators take for granted, but what I can tell you is that I share much of McLaren’s views, except McLaren’s insistence on God. For example, the chapter on “Charismatic/contemplative” speaks out against rampant consumerism:

One acquires more and more things without taking the time to ever see and know them, and thus one never truly enjoys them. One has without truly having.

… which is quite agreeable. It should be enough just to stop here and encourage one to stop consuming beyond one’s means to appreciate that which is being consumed, but he goes on to suggest that the remedy must be in God:

I feel [...] that I am carrying around this hilarious secret: that I actually own all things, that all things are mine-because I am Christ’s, and Christ is God’s, and God allows me to have things in the way that matters most. Not having them in my legal possession [...] but by having them in my spiritual possession.

I despise this kind of forced analogy between the physical and spiritual realms. What does it even mean to spiritually possess a physical object, other than assigning arbitrary moral values to them? It’s this kind of thinking – e.g. disputes about the sacraments – that led to the need to have a generous orthodoxy in the first place!

I feel similarly about the rest of the book – that there are many merits to the existence and efforts of the church: community, co-operation, tolerance, charity, repentance – none of which ultimately requires attribution to God except to use Him as the glue to join all these unrelated parts together in one big liberal ideology.

If you’re predisposed to noticing the faults in religious discourse, you’ll find plenty of fodder in A Generous Orthodoxy. McLaren’s literary background also sadly fails to inoculate him from the usual religious shtick of cheap, meaningless analogies (“Think of the difference between a corpse and a living, breathing body, and you’ll understand the difference between a bunch of words and words vitalized with God’s breath.”) and mangling the language (“What if we were to redefine protestant as “pro-testifying”?)

As usual, my pointed criticism has probably made me sound overly harsh. It’s not entirely intentional. As I alluded to before, the book contains much worth in regards to educating the Christian and secular reader alike about the many and various denominations of Christianity, and what there is to like about each. McLaren is a clear and lucid communicator, and while he’s no C. S. Lewis, this particular work doesn’t bring any discredit to the realm of Christian writing.

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* I strongly recommending skipping past Part One entirely though, as McLaren spends an incredible amount of verbiage apologising for everything from the state of the Christian religion, to his lack of qualifications on the topic, to the very existence of the book itself – towards the end of it he’d almost convinced me not to bother reading the rest.

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This book review is part of the series An Atheist in God’s Kingdom.

Should I have returned the compliment – “thanks mate, you’re looking pretty sharp yourself”, or downplayed it with “nah, I just threw it on this morning ‘coz it was cold”?

Is it possible to learn this in a systematic fashion to compensate for not having acquired it by osmosis during the last 32 years?

I had a fairly typical day at the office today, doing the usual stuff, and trying to crack a new idea that’s been brewing in my head for the last week or so. By the late afternoon though, I started to get really bored and distracted, and found it hard to concentrate on work. Tried flicking open some Facebook and forums, but those weren’t doing it for me either. Nothing unusual, right? Happens to everybody.

Knock-off time. As I started walking to my car, the ideas started flooding into my brain, and I thought to myself “why does this always happen?” Maybe it’s happened to you too: your best ideas have come to you while driving, in the shower, walking the dog… but never behind your desk. My take on this is that we’re spatial beings who live in a three-dimensional world. Our brains and bodies work best in 3D space, and it takes a surprising amount of effort to confine it to a flat surface. Therefore when I finally made a break from my work (and not just a temporary respite) my mind was freed from its boxy jail.

I dub this condition spatial dissonance – the encroachment of the flat virtual world into the real world. The problem is, my career and hobbies are all currently critically dependent on interfacing with a screen, and while I can quite easily take up new hobbies that don’t involve monitors or TVs, I’m at much less liberty to make similar changes at work.

I guess that’s why found this TED talk video so interesting. In it, John Underkoffler makes the point that User Interface design has lagged significantly behind increases in speed and capacity, and gives a live demonstration of a real-world implementation of the spatial interface technology that he helped to design for the movie Minority Report.

I can’t wait.

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Here’s the video:

When it comes to the subject of sex, my beliefs tend to fall on the conservative side – a random mix of Asian attitudes combined with a “brief” flirtation with religion. I also believe that I’m living in a highly sexualised Western form of society¹, hence I often find myself at odds with liberalists in the circles that I frequent, who reckon things are about right or could even be less restrictive.

That’s why I’m surprised at the conclusion I reached while thinking about the “recent” hoo-ha in the media around body image issues, which is: our society needs more nudity. To recap, or for those of you who weren’t paying attention, here are a couple of events that lit up blogs, discussion forums, talk-back radio shows, letters-to-the-editor pages and wherever else a person can get a word in edgewise (probably not a good idea to click the links if you’re at work):

• Debate over whether Jennifer Hawkins’ “unretouched” magazine pictures are disingenuous
• Police harassing nudists at Little Congwong Beach
• Bill Henson (’nuff said)

Prior to this *ahem* revelation, I’d been thinking about being unable to come to terms with my mortality², and how as a society we hide death. Dead animals are swept away. Thrown out. Disposed of. Dead humans are packaged up and buried in specially designated areas. With the exception of the odd friend or relative passing away, our society systematically sanitises every indication that we’re all racing towards the grave.

In a different-but-same kind of way, I think this is what’s happening with our less-than-perfect bodies. Society strives to hide them away like Adam and Eve covering themselves upon discovering the shame of their nakedness. It’s becoming increasingly rare to see what a “normal” naked person looks like – or more precisely, the full spectrum of shapes and sizes that human beings come in as opposed to the parade of evil 666 clones: six-foot tall, size six (women), and six-packs (men). Against this tide of beauty served up by the media, yada yada yada, body image and nakedness have now become unequivocally equated with sex.

The culture I see around me now now is such that breast-feeding is an act considered so sexually provocative that people clamour to censor it from the public eye, lest a minor (God forbid!) accidentally catch a glimpse of the side of a boob³. And those who choose to practice public nudity are treated as if they’re handing out invitations to perverts and paedophiles.

As a conservative, I used to think that the solution to the problem was to rage at the media and tell them to cease-and-desist with their barrage of soft-core pornography, but now in light of the above I’m thinking that it will only serve to exacerbate the problem. A better solution might be to redress the imbalance of body types by encouraging works that display our humanity in all its glory – literally.

Not that I know how to appreciate art, but I can honestly say that there are some artists whose works I previously would have deplored, but can now entertain a kind of begrudging respect for (again, not safe for work):

• Spenser Tunick, who photographs naked people en masse
• Greg Friedler and his Naked <city> series of books

It’s easy to dismiss these as pornography purely because their primary purpose is to depict nudity, but stripped of eroticism – particular Friedler’s books where individuals are displayed clothed and unclothed in side-by-side shots to show the contrast between the two – doesn’t the fault really lie with the viewer if sexual stimulation is the primary response? We must retrain our minds to appreciate the human form for purposes other than sex.

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And finally, a few random pieces of information that I wasn’t able to work into the above piece, but which I think are still worth mentioning:

• It’s backed by Science™! In an SBS program called “What’s the problem with nudity?” scientists concluded that being clothed helps prevent promiscuity while bringing up children. The problem that I see here is that the assumption nakedness = sexiness is already baked into the experiment a-priori. What about those primitive tribes where the people wear very little clothing, and the women go around topless?
• Artistic nudes – paintings, statues and other works of art featuring nudity practically have a category of their own. How did the people of those times (say, the renaissance period) treat nudes? Was it the equivalent of pornography in their age, or were they able to appreciate the human form objectively because their society wasn’t affected by hyper-sexualisation?

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Epic footnotes!

1. That is, on any reasonable day, you will encounter sexually suggestive material regardless of whether you wanted to see it or not.
2. Read: I’ve always been scared shitless about dying. If you want to correlate this with my recent religious conversion: You’re wrong. Go away.
3. I will not entertain the possibility that some think that breast-feeding is too disgusting to be seen in public. Might as well say that people should always dine in private – the way some people eat is infinitely more disturbing than seeing a mother discreetly feeding her baby.