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It’s been a long year of bizarre, inexplicable, sometimes unpleasant political news, and since today dawned with Herman Cain‘s mysterious campaign announcement looming like the Eye of Sauron over the news cycle, let’s start the day with something unapologetically adorable. Last Monday, MSNBC host Chris Hayes welcomed Rachel Maddow‘s Best New Thing in the World into the world, daughter Ryan Shaw-Hayes. Maddow welcomed the infant to the world herself on Thursday, lamenting that the Blackwater onesie she tried to buy her got lost over eBay.

In Sunday’s column by Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, the increase in typos and other copy editing errors stood trial. Angry letters have started coming more frequently, wondering, “If they don’t care about basics… how much do they care about factual accuracy?” Alexander served up the standard answer: our staffs have shrunk! But he also had a bizarre new scapegoat; namely, search engine optimization. Huh?

Welcome to the fun-filled world of a start-up! For the past four weeks, we’ve taken to comparing the site to a baby: Don’t leave it alone, don’t expect much sleep, you never know what it’ll burp up. (Wordpress! How you bedevil us!). Though it’s certainly forced us to stretch in ways we weren’t expecting, we’ve enjoyed the past month — enough to look forward to sticking around for a while (sorry, Brain Trust).