Allow me to respond to something I read in the local edition of the Sunday New York Times. A bit late in blog years, perhaps, but the story in question was about a year late in its own turn. So here goes nothing. The piece was called "Spies Around the Sandbox" (oooh, intriiiigue) and the nut of it--after some anecdotal throat-clearing that actually takes place in my very own neighborhood playground!--goes a little something like this. The story is about a "participatory tool in the world of child care surveillance can make nanny scrutiny everybody’s business":

The new resource is ISawYourNanny.blogspot.com, a 15-month-old New Yorkcentric Web log that has recorded hundreds of anonymous posts, or “sightings.” What happens is that a stranger, maybe a passer-by in the playground, witnesses a scene between adult and child that looks alarming ... Many of the sightings have the intricacy of a police report, including the date, time and location of the incident, along with detailed descriptions (“Adult female, 30-38 y.o., 120-140 lbs. ... wearing a large khaki-colored jacket with lots of snaps and zippers”). Sometimes the post is accompanied by hastily snapped cellphone shots, with faces partly obscured by the Web master. Occasionally, the post also includes a child’s first name, as it was heard called out by a nanny on the playground.

Then the predictable hand-wringing about "Big Brother" and bench-warming nannies and privacy and racism (but sadly, nothing about juicy daddy-nanny dalliances) ensues with tedious clockwork efficiency. What's inefficient here is the Web site itself. How many stars would have to align for you to find a post about your nanny beating down on (or, worse, ignoring or, worse still, feeding non-organic tofu cakes to) your child on ISawYourNanny? Someone would:

A) have to witness something egregious enough to report
B) know about the Web site
C) write a report with enough clarity and detail for you to know it was about your child, provided, that is
D) you actually check the site yourself
E) and you check it often enough to happen to catch it on the right day
F) because you are paranoid and you not-so-secretly hate your nanny almost as much as you hate yourself