DadCentric

You've Wet Your Bed, Now Sleep In It

We all know for a fact that every single solitary thing that goes wrong in a person’s life, every flaw in one’s being, every bit of sadness they experience, every shortcoming, every unattractive feature, every skill one lacks, every inch of height one fails to grow until one is of a suitable stature to become a basketball star and get rich and famous and yell at cameras that one is not a role model, ALL OF IT can be attributed back to one’s  parents. And of course one’s parents are only flawed because of their parents, who are themselves flawed because of their parents, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. Buried in the ground somewhere, or perhaps on display in some museum, are the bones of some caveman who is the source of all our problems. Boy, does that fucker need to get an earful.

Someone out there is reading this and taking me seriously. Sigh. 

The Skulduggery Pleasant Series and You, the Winner

If I were to tell you about the Skulduggery Pleasant books you might ask, who is SkuIduggery Plesant?  And then I would quote the website because they provide a very quotable answer:

Skulduggery Pleasant?  He's a wise-cracking detective, powerful magician, master of dirty tricks and burglary (in the name of the greater good, of course).  As well as ally, protector, and mentor of Stephanie Edgley, a very unusual and darkly talented twelve-year old.  And, oh yeah - he's dead.

What?

You heard read me.  D-E-A-D.  Kids love that stuff.  And so does my wife.  Hence my being on the first book and her being done with all three.  In my defense, she reads really fast.

The Skulduggery Pleasant series is fantastic teen literature. By fantastic I mean that is intended for teens but strong enough for a woman.  Or any adult, really.  Think Eragon, Harry Potter and Bartimaeus.  Also, anything by John Grisham.

My wife claimed that she was surprised, pleasantly, to find intensity and darkness in the series.  Me? I expected it.  And it delivered.

Full Disclosure

First, do no harm. It's a dad's mantra. At some point I figured out that it may well be the most important bit of advice a parent can give, or get. First, do no harm. In layman's terms - don't fuck up your kid.

The single most tedious, boring, and masturbatory subject that a blogger can write about is blogging. So I apologize for that in advance. But in this case, it's necessary to touch upon a Buzzword that so many of the mommy- and daddy-bloggers throw around. "Honest". "I love (BLOGGER WHOSE NOM DU PLUME RHYMES WITH MOOSE). She's just so honest." (Don't Maytag me, Heather. Just using you as an example.) We say the things about others that the masses will not. The masses lack the stones. We are the agents of change. We are brave. Courageous, even.

Bullshit.

Timber!

Last week the tree people found themselves a honey hole in our neighborhood again.

Not to be left out, we tossed some money their way to top off the pine tree that was hit by lightning a few summers ago. The pine died a slow death after getting zapped but it's also the cornerstone of the tree house we built, so we'd been reluctant to have any work done on it.

I came home just in time to see the tree being felled; one guy daintily straddling the tree on top of the tree house and the other holding a rope about 25 yards away. 

He started his chain saw and within a few moments, "Timber!" and the tree was on the ground.

It was anti-climatic.

Definitely not the sight to behold when we had the leaning pine in the front yard taken down. That dude was a real lumberjack like Paul Bunyan. Not that these guys weren't capable. I spent a fair amount of time talking with one of the fellows the other day, commenting to him on how much business they did in one day in my neighborhood. He actually said that it happens like that quite often. "The people who are sitting there drinking their coffee watching a neighbor get a tree cut down, " he paused, "they see it and think to themselves 'I need a tree taken down'."

I told him about Paul Bunyan who took down my tree in the front yard. He said a lot of leaning trees are actually really healthy. 

"That's what the other dude said," I told him. 

"Oh and we also dumping a bunch of mulch down here from your neighbor at your wife's request," he explained.

The whole neighborhood has smelled like a car deodorizer the past week and now I'm greeted by a steaming pile of mulch each morning.

Where are my helpful neighbors now that I have a huge pile of shredded pine tree in my yard? 

My guess is that I haven't seen them because they too are immersed in scoopin', wheelbarrowin' and spreadin' the mulch much like me...

LeapFrog's Tag and Tag Junior - The DadCentric Review

I'll admit that when I first saw the commercials for the Leap Frog Tag/Tag Junior Reading Systems, by which I mean they were shown to me, repeatedly, I wasn't exactly sold on the concept.  The concept being reading, which I'm against.

I kid. I kid.

I love reading.  It's fundamental, emphasis on fund.  Also, mental.

What I wasn't sure about was the idea of a toy reading to my child.  You see, I'm of the school that such things could make a child lazy.  They should be reading for themselves.  They should also clean their own room.  If anything is going to read to my children it's going to be me.  Or the robot I made that feeds them hugs and wisdom.  Me and the robot? We're the thing.

TV's Best Dads: The Very Special Clip Show/Ask DadCentric Episode

As the network shows are wont to do, we're going to wrap up our series on TV's Best Dads by giving you a Very Special Clip Show. You know the ones: the main characters all decide to go their separate ways for Christmas, and then Fate intervenes and strands them all at the airport or at some diner and they sit around and reminisce about Special Moments From Their Collective Pasts (cue the wavy lines fading into scene from previous episode). So imagine us sitting around a snowbound Denny's, enjoying our Moons Over My Hammy sandwiches, and talking about those very special TV Dads....

Remember that time I said Don Draper was a great dad?

How about when cIII said that he thought Hank Moody was a good father? 

Or when CroutonBoy waxed poetic about Frank Reynolds' parenting skills?

Or when Whit talked about proud patriarch Tracy Jordan?

Or TwoBusy, diving deep into Dexter's daddyness?

Or when The Holmes dug up Nathaniel Fisher, Sr.?

Or Mr. Big Dubya's ride-along with Jax Teller?

Ah, good times. (Dabs eyes with tissue.) So there you have it - our take on TV's Best Dads. We now open the floor for discussion. Who'd we leave out? Let us know in the comments!

TV's Best Dads: Jackson "Jax" Teller

"A true outlaw finds the balance between the passion in his heart and the reason in his mind. The outcome is the balance of might and right." - Jackson "Jax" Teller [reading from his father's unpublished manuscript]

"I got no answers, my family plan is right out of the Sid and Nancy handbook. I'm so used to shit movin' in the other direction, I don't know what I'd do if something actually hooked up." - Jackson "Jax" Teller

Harley Davidson Super Glide Sport? Check. Club leathers? Check. 9mm in shoulder holster? Check. Kiss son on forehead before you chase a Mayan down, shoot him in the head, desecrate the body and frame him for a drive-by? Check. Check. You betcha fuckin' ass check.

Jackson "Jax" Teller, vice president of the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club, Redwood Original (SAMCRO or, as they are otherwise known, Sam Crow) suddenly finds himself conflicted. On the one hand, Jax is a tattooed one percenter, an ex-con, a member of the Men of Mayhem (meaning he has killed on behalf of the club), the second-in-command of a group of bikers who make their money selling guns to whomever has the cash, primarily the drug gangs. On the other, Jax is a new father to Abel, who was born premature because his mother (Jax's ex-wife) was a voracious meth addict. And that birth has got Jax re-examining himself, the club and his place in it.

TV's Best Dads: Nathaniel Fisher, Sr.

So I'm walking along one day, and this asshole stops me and asks me if I'm alright. He says I got a look. He'd seen a man with that same look once, and had ignored it, and that man had jumped out a nine-story window. You know the reconstruction involved in a death like that? - Nathaniel Fisher, Sr.

TV's Best Dads: Dexter

"Wanna know a secret? Daddy kills people."
         -- Dexter Morgan

There is virtually nothing about the conundrum of Dexter Morgan as father figure that is not horrifying, fascinating, and strangely, defiantly, wonderfully correct.

TV's Best Dads: Tracy Jordan

"I like to walk around my house naked, to remind my oldest son who’s still got the biggest ding-dong." - Tracy Jordan

Tracy Jordan gets it.  It is relative. 

He's a dad in his early forties.  He loves his wife, Star Wars and his kids.  Tracy Jordan has two boys, Tracy Jordan, Jr. and George Forman Jordan.  Theirs is a relationship of give and take and mental instability. The mental issues tend to fall heavily towards the father.  Tracy Jordan is under a lot of pressure.

But he loves pressure.  He wants to take it behind the middle school and get it pregnant.