Your baby girl's plaintive cry makes your heart ache. Your heart and mostly your ears. You'll do anything to pacify her shrieking.

Many techniques have been tried by many fathers. But every baby is different, like a unique snowflake. A screeching, earsplitting snowflake. Through trial and error, a dad learns pretty quickly: Some things work, and some things don't work, and most things don't work. Here are some things that I've found don't work:

• Repeatedly doing the "Zip-your-lip" gesture.


• Bouncing her on your knee to Ginuwine's
  "Ride My Pony."


• Softly suggesting that she "Stop trippin'."


• Licking the tears off her face.


• Reminding her that she's lucky she wasn't born in a bamboo hut in Burma.


• Putting drops of sugar on her tongue.


• Putting drops of Five Hour Energy on
  her tongue.


• Putting as many pencils as you can into
  her mouth.


• Shotgunning a can of Pringles in front of her.


• Firing bottles of Febreze into the air like a western gunslinger.


• Taking her to the "Bodies" exhibit.


• Crumping.


• Pretending your index and middle fingers are a pair of scissors and cutting her hair like a chatty gay hair stylist.


• Smirnoff "Icing" her.


• Putting clothespins on your nipples and swinging them in her face.


• Propping her against the cat and leaving the apartment for twenty minutes.


• Ignoring her and watching 30 Rock.