BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Australian baby ‘put in dryer’

Samuel Siddall, 21, was left in charge of his girlfriend’s baby while she went to the gym for an hour, police said.

She returned to find the baby had suffered serious burns. Doctors notified police because of the suspicious nature of her injuries.

They expect the baby to make a full recovery and leave hospital this week.

Is this guy clinically STUPID? Even I know better than this.

First you have to rinse the juice off, or it’ll be set by the heat of the dryer.

(Yes, this is mordant humor. Deal.)

And now for the reality-based analysis of this story – I don’t know who is more stupid here, the boyfriend, or the girlfriend who went off and left the baby (evidently not his) with him. You never leave the baby with the boyfriend. Sometimes, you don’t even leave the baby with the babydaddy. The well-being of the baby is in jeopardy, because too often, the boyfriend really doesn’t want it around, or can’t deal with it when the baby won’t stop crying. That’s where things like “shaken baby syndrome” come from.

In the animal kingdom, leaving an infant with a male that is not its sire is likely to result in a dead infant, because it’s not to the genetic advantage of males to leave infants that they didn’t father alive. In some species, the mother never lets the father near the infants, because he’ll kill them just to bring the female back into heat or estrus or whatever (doesn’t make sense, but that’s how it is).

Fortunately, humans don’t operate exactly like primates or felines (great and small), or there would be a lot more dead infants and boyfriends attempting to make lame excuses like “I put her in the dryer ’cause she spilled on herself.”

Yeah, right.