More Dad Than Alive

Figuring out this whole fatherhood thing, one day at a time. | Follow on Twitter @toddsandends

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Are you my MODOK? by Brendan Tobin

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13 Passages From Children's Books That Are More Disturbing Than They First Appear

From time to time people say to me, "Lemony Snicket, you write dreadful and shocking books. What sort of writing do you find dreadful and shocking yourself?" My reply to them is always the same: "Please be quiet, I'm trying to read." Nevertheless, I occasionally stumble upon a dreadful and/or shocking passage of children's literature that may have passed unnoticed by other readers with less investigative or hysterical temperaments.

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Is that baby born yet?

This is a really neat idea. (via)

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Hayao Miyazaki announces retirement.

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Why Are Adults on the Internet So Obsessed with Disney Princesses?

(This is my last Disney post for a while, I swear. I just need to purge it from my system. To my wife's credit, even with all her Disney brainwashing efforts on our daughter, she has done her best to avoid the princessy stuff as much as possible.)

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"Grim Grinning Ghosts"

As part of my wife's preemptive Disney World brainwashing program, she made sure to expose our daughter to a wide variety of Disney paraphernalia. One of her preferred methods of inoculation was this Disney Sing Along series from 1991, which is worth watching alone for the wondrous display of early '90s acid washed jeans and fanny-packed fashion, a "hip hop" breakdown on the historically racist "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah", and frequent cameos with then-popular Roger Rabbit. 

Our daughter, however, chose to fixate on the lone macabre number, "Grim Grinning Ghosts," with its references to restless bones etherializing and creepy creeps in daft disguises dancing in a midnight jamboree. She calls this little number "Spooky Spooky" and it's hands down her favorite, which I think means there's hope for her yet.

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Surviving Disney

I was skeptical of the whole idea of taking our two-year-old daughter down to Disney World for a five-day vacation, but my wife was adamant, and when she's adamant she usually wins. Turns out, it's a pretty terrific vacation spot for kids, almost as if it was purposefully designed to be the perfect family-friendly vacation destination spot. 

When I was a kid, my parents never took my sister or me on any "fun" vacations (cue world's smallest violin). Instead, they preferred to set out for serene lakefront vistas in northern Michigan that my buzzcut childhood self was unable to appreciate without a toy tomahawk or squirt gun in tow. My wife, however, had been to Disney several times before and she knew what to expect. This was all new to me; my wife was the seasoned pro.

With no degree of hyperbole intended, my wife spent months planning every possible way for us to get the most Disnified possible experience during our trip in the minutest of details. This included, but was not limited to: selecting which DIsney resort had the best decorative "theme" and location relative to the parks but was still within our price range (Port Orleans); determining our best option for renting an agile, heavy-duty stroller (Kingdom Strollers); packing a wide variety of non-perishable foodstuffs for noshing (Target); picking out cheap toys to easily distract our daughter during air travel (the neighborhood dollar stores); and of course plotting out a detailed schematic with down-to-the-minute precision that charted our daily park choices based on historically-analyzed crowd levels and highly-educated estimates of wait times for popular attractions, complete with full-color park maps that she printed and laminated for me to memorize and reference (Easy WDW). 

My job consisted of lugging around a heavy green JanSport crammed full with park survival necessities, keeping our daughter in sight at all times, and not grimacing too visibly when the final tally of our vacation was calculated. 

But all her planning paid off! We managed to fit in three parks in five days (one full day each for Animal Kingdom and Epcot and two-and-a-half days of Magic Kingdom), 37 character visits, 30 rides, 10 shows, 2 parades, and 2 fireworks displays, and thanks to my wife's preemptive scheduling we basically avoided having to wait for anything other than the buses to transport us to the parks and for the parks to open. 

A.M.'s favorite ride was, not surprisingly, It's a Small World with its rotating cast of singing, unblinking dolls that embody ethnic stereotypes across the globe, and her least favorite ride was the Southwest flight home, which she precipitated with her only epic meltdown of the entire trip. The great thing about Disney for toddlers is that most of the rides aren't spine-cracking thrill rides (like Space Mountain or Expedition Everest, which were great fun to hop on while your spouse manages your kid elsewhere), but these fully-immersive, unfolding storyboards like the Haunted Mansion or Spaceship Earth that are loaded with visual and auditory elements to keep a kids' attention rapt with wonder. 

It was a great vacation, but it was exhausting. It was hot with a relentless humidity that coated you with a slimy film of perspiration, and my feet and legs were awakened with a constant low-level throbbing from overuse. I'm glad I went, but I'm even more glad to be back. I'm just going to spend this rainy Sunday afternoon trying to recuperate and catch up on my Internet.

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Spending the week in the hot, muggy moneypit known as Walt Disney World. Regular blogcasting to resume in a few days.

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A Comic by Bill Watterson (click-through for the full comic)

I've seen this posted a hundred times on Facebook already, but it's too sweet not to share here.

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Are Grimm’s Fairy Tales too twisted for children?

On the covers are the most innocent of titles: Grimm’s Fairy Tales in their English version or Children’s and Household Tales in the original German editions published two hundred years ago. Nice tales for nice children.

But behind the safe titles lie dark stories of sex and violence – tales of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and incest, as one academic puts it. They are far from anything we might imagine as acceptable today. 

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A-Babies vs. X-Babies

There is so much amazing in this picture. I can't wait until my daughter is old enough for her first trip to the comic book store.

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"Pink Elephants on Parade" (1941)

Lately, my daughter has really been into Dumbo and, thanks to Netflix Instant streaming, I've been able to indulge her in repeated viewings. This scene in particular has captivated her, out of wonder or curiosity or fear, who knows. 

The setup to this scene is that Dumbo, disheartened after his humiliating demotion to the role of clown sidekick, glugs a big gulp of water to freshen up per the instructions of his mouse mentor, Timothy Q. Mouse. The only problem is, the water has been accidentally spiked with champagne and presumably something much stronger, because what follows is an intense hallucinatory experience for poor Dumbo as visions of shape-shifting technicolor pachyderms trounce and dance about to a swirling musical arrangement of marching band, Middle Eastern, and mambo that goes on for a much longer amount of time than you would expect for a kid's movie. Needless to say, they don't make 'em like they used to (it would be like Buzz Lightyear going on a psilocybin-induced vision quest as a way to come to terms with his toyhood). 

Aside from the flimsy context this scene provides to set Dumbo up for the turning point of self-discovery (he awakens from his trip passed out on a tree branch only to discover -- spoiler alert! -- that he can fly), the five minutes or so of marching elephants really doesn't do much to drive the narrative forward. Instead, it just seems like a wild interlude to showcase the possibility of animation, of colors and imagination, and since my daughter probably isn't following the plot too closely at this age anyway, that's enough reason to keep her glued to the screen.

Plus, she really likes the color pink, so that helps.

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New favorite game: Pig vs. Dragon. The rules of the game are as follows: the dragon (typically operated by my daughter) issues a mighty roar to the pig (typically operated by me). The pig squeals in terror and feebly attempts to hide, only to be pummeled by the dragon and dragon operator for 5-10 minute consecutive wrestling bouts. This is repeated as often as necessary until both parties are sufficiently fatigued. Spoiler alert: the dragon always wins.

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Workers in female-dominated professions do more housework

If you want a husband who shares housework more equitably, marry a nurse, a teacher or hair stylist -- €”or someone who's in a female-focused career.

Men in predominantly female jobs will perform 25% more household chores than a partner who works in a male-dominated profession like an electrician or engineer, a new study (pdf) of heterosexual couples from a Notre Dame professor shows.

And according to a not unrelated study, husbands who handle more of the chores around the house are less likely to have intimate marital moments with their spouse than husbands who don't do the dishes and laundry as much.

So, uh, honey, if you need me I'll be in the boudoir... not tidying up, if you catch my drift. *winks* *burps* *passes out fully clothed*

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Everything breaks

Yesterday was one of those days when every little thing turned from bad to worse in such a comical progression that it seems like it had to have been scripted by a sadist.

It was a Sunday, which is normally my one day a week I get to sleep in, but I decided to get up early anyway so I could tackle some overdue yard work before it got too hot out. After about an hour when I was starting to tidy up, I tried to get inside only to find that the front door wouldn't budge. No problem, I thought, I could just come in through the cellar entrance to check if the door had someone locked itself, but when I got to the front door, the handle fell off. Crap, I thought. So here I am, covered in sweat and weed whacker debris and WD-40, ineptly poking around a busted door handle with some screwdrivers and an iPad queued up with Google searches on how to fix this particular type of busted door handle. All the while, my daughter is running around the house yelling her little head off, with my wife is cursing me for not being a natural handyman and me silently cursing my own father for not being a handyman in his own right and therefore never having any sort of handy know-how to pass on to me. 

I eventually swallowed my pride and realized that I would probably need to just buy another damn door handle, but as I'm getting ready to head out to Lowe's, my wife asks if I can take her car because there's a place nearby where I can get the oil changed, and, oh by the way, she hasn't changed her car's oil in over a year. Fine, I say. I get in her car, turn the key, and then... nothing. Her car battery was dead, probably because the running lights were accidentally left on overnight. Great. Now I get to call AAA to come over and replace the battery before driving to Lowe's to buy a new front door handle and lock combo (which are way more expensive than you'd realize) and then heading over to a nearby Firestone to get her car's oil changed, only to be informed that I needed to purchase three new tires because the tread had worn out, they were cracking, and were dangerously under-inflated. And, then to cap it all off, my credit card was declined at Firestone, apparently for no other reason than to preemptively make sure I wasn't fraudulently attempting to purchase a round of tires in my spare time. By the end of the day, I wouldn't have been surprised if an Acme-brand anvil had fallen out of the sky to smote me on the spot.

All of this is to say, that as a father and as a property owner, no matter how much crap comes your way, you've got to buck up and prepare to be the final line of defense. As much as I wanted to have a low-key day spent watching Toy Story 3 for the Nth time with my daughter and maybe catch up reading some WWII history during her nap, life suddenly presented me with a mountain of turds and only a plastic spoon to clear away the mess. While I may not have the ingrained talent to fix the variety of mechanical disasters I faced over the weekend (why can't broken cars be repaired by means of sparkling color commentary???), it was definitely a lesson in resiliency, and being a parent is nothing if you aren't resilient.

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The Waldorf-Astoria put Little Jack Horner on the cover of their pink-and-cream booklet; as he brandishes his plummy thumb, a dish runs away with a spoon. But then there was the food—the bland, practically monastic food, appearing all the more austere for the teddy bear picnic taking place overleaf.

Michele Humes, "A brief history of the children's menu."

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But some of my best friends are child-free!