DadCentric

I don't think that's how it was intended to be used

We've had a couple of birthdays over the past few days: my youngest, Littlest Dubya, tuned one on Saturday and my oldest, Li'l Dubs, four on Tuesday. That means we have balloons lying around in various states of inflation and flotation. Some of the latex balloons have outright given up and lie on the floor, shriveling, streamers curled up around them; others continue to fight the good fight and hover five or six feet above the ground in defiance of gravity - thumbing their noses at Newton and Blood, Sweat and Tears. The mylar balloons, with their virtually non-porous skins, will float around indefinitely, mockingly: "Ha, you can't get rid of me...the kids can still see me...floating around...la, la, la, la. And you know they'll ask about me if you pop me...Hey, get away from me with those scissors...I'm Elmo, dammit!"

No, this isn't a post about talking balloons or the voices in my head. Last night the wife and I picked up some balloons off the floor and began using them as punch balls, and although the ones we used as kids were far more resilient and bigger and, well, cooler than these withering balloons, our kids wanted to try this new game. And, as often happens when I begin to wax nostalgic for toys of yesteryear, I found myself saying, "remember such and such?" Well, here's some of the "such and such" that was mentioned and remebered fondly.

DadCentric Review: The 2009 Ford Flex Limited

DISCLAIMER: The folks at the Ford Motor Company lent me a Ford Flex for a period of three days. The car was a standard model given out to reviewers and thus did not come with a nondescript aluminum briefcase stuffed with $5,000 in unmarked, non-sequential bills. The opinions - key word! OPINIONS! - here are the author's own and do not necessarily represent the views of DadCentric. Although they kind of do, since the author owns the site. Also, that picture to the left is of the Wagon Queen Family Truckster, which, face it, is the first thing you thought of when you first laid eyes on the Ford Flex.

A few weeks ago, the nice people from the Ford Motor Company dropped off a shiny new 2009 Ford Flex in my driveway. As part of a massive campaign targeting High Profile Bloggers, I would be driving the thing around, to see if it was worthy of a coveted DadCentric endorsement. 

A couple of things about me and cars: I am not a Car Person. I know very little about how they work, and terms like "oversteer" and "limited slip differential" are lost on me. I generally think sports cars are for guys who are trying to compensate for lack of hair/penile size; that said, I do own a 2006 Audi A4 2.0T Quattro (which is a "sports sedan", meaning that with some axle grease and a massive shoehorn you can barely fit two kids and their carseats in back). I prefer functionality over flash, which is why my other car is a 2002 Nissan Xterra - it hauls kids, dog, and surfboards with ease. Finally, minivans suck - they are a shining example of the fact that nearly all parenting products are created with only one half of the parenting equation - Mom - in mind. For that reason alone I refuse to buy one. (Example: the sliding doors. This is a Mom Thing. Moms think they're amazingly helpful, because it makes it easy to get the kids in the car, especially in the tight confines of packed school/mall parking lots. Dads think that the Duke boys did just fine going through the General Lee's windows and our kids should be able to do the same. The only van any self-respecting dad should want is this one.)

Which brings me to the Ford Flex. The Flex looks like a Mini Cooper that had accidentally driven into Bruce Banner's Gamma Ray Chamber, gotten zapped with the Hulkafying Gamma Rays, and then got pissed off when the people at the McDonald's drive-through forgot to supersize its McRib Value Meal. (Photo comparison: Mini. Flex. White roofs kick ass.) It's a beast of a car, with room for six people and their dog, or at least two 6 to 9 foot long surfboards (I eyeballed this - I don't think the good people at Ford would have wanted their Flex returned smelling of surf wax.) I suspected that the Flex might be the Holy Grail of Dadmobiles - a family car designed with BOTH parents in mind; functional, and not a complete embarrassment to drive. To test this hypothesis, Beth and I put the Flex through a grueling series of road tests.

Dear Santa, Sorry to Disturb You

Santa,

I know it's a busy time of year for you, so I'll keep this short. 

Please stop outsourcing.  The elves have families.  They need their jobs and possibly universal health-care. 

But the truth is I'm not writing on behalf of the elves.  They've got unions.  They've got bailouts. 

I'm writing on behalf of me and those like me.  We're the suckers that are stuck putting together the toys that our kids are getting for Christmas and frankly, we don't like it.  No Sir, we don't like it.

When we were children and the elves were in their heyday the toys were always delivered Christmas morning already assembled.  And it was good.

Now, with the economy and NPFTA and the knock on lead, the majority of toys are no longer made in your workshop, but rather in factories and sweatshops by people over 3 feet tall (except some of the younger kids).  These people don't care about us.

Case in point, I spent the better part of last night in the garage assembling a toy.  It had more screws than Madonna on a bender.  The instructions didn't make sense and nothing fit quite as easily as the photo would have you believe.

I cut my hand with a screwdriver.  Twice.

Is this what Christmas has become?  Parents cussing and bleeding over expensive toys in the dead of the night?

Our parents had it easy. 

Please, Santa, do the right thing.  Think of the elves.  And me.

Sincerely,

A Concerned Parent

Because Daddy's a Shepherd, That's Why

My morning routine is not a particularly easy one, but it is at least reliable in its difficulty. I know which points in the morning usually push my eldest's buttons, when he's going to drag ass, and when I need to gently cattle-prod him along so as to keep the whole operation from coming to a complete and total stop. I know that he will always want to climb into his carseat by himself, and that any attempt to lift him into the seat will be met with the resistance of a thousand armies. I know that the left turn onto the freeway will be met by angry howls that I am going the wrong way, and that all reminders that we went this way yesterday, the day before, and every other day will be met with vehement denials.

Baby brother, by the way, is totally chill through all of this. It's all I can do to ask "why can't you be more like your brother?" That's supposedly bad. They did a study. It's on the internet.

But before either of those obstacles are met, we also have to get through the morning toy selection. The kids stay with their grandparents during the day, and their house is well stocked with toys. Still, eldest feels the need to select an item from his home stash to bring along nearly every day. Thing is, the selected toy is always forgotten in the car upon arrival at the Grandparent's house. Always. That is, until today, when the selected toy was actually a pair of tiny sheep that do absolutely nothing. They do not move, they do not make sound, they're just hard plastic sheep meant to act as accessories for a train set or some such. I'd been at work maybe ten minutes when my wife called from her office to tell me that eldest was having a fit because he forgot his sheep.

"I told him that the sheep had to go to work with daddy."

"Why did the sheep have to go to work with daddy?"

"They just did."

To provide proof of my need for sheeply assistance, I was asked to submit photographs of the sheep in action. These were emailed to the grandparents in hopes that all toy-related anguish would be soothed. Yay for camera phones and obliging co-workers.

After work, I went to pick the boys up. I made sure to bring the sheep home with me. I handed them to eldest, foolishly expecting him to light up at the sight of the objects whose absence had caused such distress that very morning. It was more like "cool, where's mom?"

 

Sellin' Out to the 'Soft

There are a lot of perks to being a prominent blogger like me.  First, there's the women.  Second, there's the $0.25 I earned last quarter via Amazon Associates.  Most importantly, though, there's the celebrity status, and it definitely has its benefits.

The fine people at Microsoft, using the same crackin' algorithm in their search engine to identify the blogger who posts most frequently on DadCentric, contacted me and asked if I'd be interested in attending an event in New York to get a preview of some of the "family-inclusive games" that would be coming out this year for the Xbox 360.

Now generally we here at DadCentric try to avoid overt pandering to corporate interests.  But it would take a bigger man than me to turn down a chance to play Madden 09 or Gears of War 2 before the rest of you losers guys.  After all, it is our responsibility to offer timely, useful advice to you, our beloved readers, and if Microsoft wants to provide the brownies and the comfy gaming couches I'm willing to do my part.

Besides, it might give you gentlemen some cover to justify a weekend-long Call of Duty tournament with me and Mr. Big Dubya.

I'm certain some of you (probably female, most likely my wife) stopped reading once you saw "Xbox" in the copy.  But if you're still on the fence you should keep reading, because there's some really cool stuff coming, and it's way more than the photo-realistic blood-sprays when you decapitate enemies with an assault rifle that you've come to know and love.

Some things you, as parents and potential shoppers, should know:

• The Xbox is morphing into a fully-operational media center.  It can stream music from your computer, share holiday photos online with your buddies, and can link to your Netflix account so you can stream movies in you queue directly to your TV.  You can also reorder you queue visually, and it will upconvert movies to the highest quality your TV will allow.  You'll never have to leave the couch to insert a DVD again.
• If Little _______ (insert your child's name here) spends his evenings in front of the Xbox, talking to his buddies on a Backstreet Boys headset and getting fat on cheese doodles while he should be doing homework, you've got a new weapon.  Xbox's will soon come with a parental control that sets a timer on how long the system will run.  That way when you say "you can play for an hour" you can set it up, leave the room, and know the game is gonna end whether he's ready or now.  I think this is a really awesome feature, one which my wife would probably use on me if she had the chance. 
• You can create an avatar.  This avatar will identify you online, and can sneak out of your system at night and beat up all the Mii's that your stupid Wii-owning neighbors created.
• The dashboard itself is being redesigned so it's much more graphical and easier to use.  It sorta looks like what Vista should have been had it not gorged on useless utilities and bad design.  Or, more specifically, it will work a lot like a Mac. 
• Finally, and most significantly, there are some very cool games coming out that you can bring home to the family with a clear conscience.  Obviously there are the sports games like Madden (which, I must say, is sooooo much easier to play now, and looks amazing) and Tiger Woods PGA.  But there's also a virtual karaoke game called Lips, which is basically Guitar Hero with microphones.  The kicker is that you can plug in your own iPod and play the game with YOUR music if you wanted (all AC/DC all the time, in my case).  There was even a party game called You're In the Movies in which you film yourself with an attached camera doing certain motions, and you'll be inserted into a short movie running from monsters or fighting ninjas.  They hinted that you may someday be able to insert yourself into movies you know and love (say, running away from a rolling boulder...)

For those of my brethren who are asking if Xbox is following the Path of Mario to becoming an emasculated virtual tennis machine, I say don't worry.  I'll be posting some brief comments on My Wife Hates My Xbox with my impressions of grittier fare such as Gears of War 2, Fallout 3, Call of Duty: World at War, and Fable 2.  If I knew how to type a drooling sound I'd just use that instead.

Microsoft is going for the same thing that Apple, Sony, and Tivo are going for: complete control of your mind living room.  They're all positioning themselves as a the single multimedia unit that picks up your music, photos, and movies and seamlessly serves them to you.  Few of us would argue that this is a truly noble cause.  If I were a betting man, I'd have said Apple or Tivo had the inside track two days ago.  Today...I'm not so sure.  It's got everything, and it plays Grand Theft Auto IV.   My Tivo can do lots of things, but it can't do that.  Maybe it's time to invest in this "family-inclusive" machine.

Honestly, I'm just surprised it came from John Hodgman.

It's The Most Logical Time of The Year

"Daddy." From the back seat, not a question, but a statement/request, usually an indicator that some kind of demand is about to be foisted upon me.

"Yeah. What's up."

"Um, I think I need to go to Target to get a Bumblebee Transformer."

"Need?"

"Yes. Because I have Optimus but I need Bumblebee for him."

"Ah. Well, you know, Christmas is coming..."

"But I think I need Bumblee now, not at Christmas."

"Yes, well, we can't start buying toys now, because if we do, then Santa won't have anything to bring you."

Pause.

"Daddy, I don't like Santa. He's a bad guy."

"Really."

"I don't like Christmas and I don't like Santa. So I don't want toys from him."

"So that means what, exactly."

"So because I don't like Santa I don't want him to bring me anything and so I have to go to Target to get my Bumblebee Transformer now."

(Next week: Lucas uses DeMorgan's Theorems to explain why he shouldn't have to eat his broccoli.)

While we're on the subject of Transformers

When obsolete Transformers hit bottom...

Damn You Michael Bay!

It's my own goddamn fault. For weeks, the boy has been obsessed with  GIANT ROBOTS!, as he puts it. I don't recall when exactly it was that we saw a teaser for the new Transformers flick, but for Lucas, it was a watershed moment. Here at least was the summation of all he holds to be Cool - a race car TURNS INTO A ROBOT, runs around and breaks a bunch of shit and then - AND THEN (wait for it...waaaaait for it....) TURNSBACKINTOARACECAROHSWEETMYSTERYOFLIFEATLASTI'VE
FOUNDYOOOOOOOOOOOU!

I didn't help matters much. I was just as geeked out about it as he was (even though as a kid, I found the original Transformers cartoon to be sorta lame. Give me the Argo with her Wave Motion Gun cutting swathes of destruction through the Gamelon Battle Fleet over a 30 minute toy commercial any day) and figured that as benign as the original cartoon was (just like The A-Team - thousands upon thousands  of rounds of ammo spent, with nary a death, or even a wound), the theatrical version would be geared towards the kiddies. Toys, right? Hasbro? Target audience of 6 year-old boys? (And their geeky dads?) I let my kid watch The Incredibles, and it's PG. I felt OK about letting him watch a PG rated GIANT ROBOT! movie.

Well, I got the target audience part half right.

Anyway, over the past couple of weeks the commercials for the film became more frequent - with one distressing disclaimer. This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated. "Dad? Are we going to see Giant Robot Movie?" "Er, maybe?" I'd reply. "It's not out for a while." Then, finally, a full-on trailer appeared (totally rocked, too, with Starscream in jet form flying under a bridge and then turning into robot form and grabbing the bridge and blowing some shit up, fuck yeah!) and the dreaded announcement. "RATED PG-13".

Crap. Furthermore, over the past two days the advance reviews came out (I won't speak to the film's quality - if one goes into a film about giant robots who blow shit up and turn into cars and jets, one shouldn't expect Citizen Kane. Er, wait.) and apparently, it's pretty violent. Not Saving Private Ryan gory, but people die in Michael Bay-type ways. Also, it's long - 2.5 hours. About an hour past the kid's tolerance level.

So, a conundrum. Although Lucas knows the movie exists, I'm pretty sure he has no idea exactly when it hits the theaters. I could just tell him it's not out for another 10 years. Or I could wait until the DVD comes out, and fast forward through all the mayhem ("Transfomers: A Michael Bay Vignette"). Actually, it occurred to Beth to wonder - why don't directors release Kid's Cuts of their movies? We get the Unrated Versions of The Hills Have Eyes and Saw - why not a PG version of Transformers ( or, say, Scarface? Some CGI work and the "Say hello to my little friend!" scene could take on a whole new meaning - Tony Montana produces a magical singing gnome. Could work, I tellya.) It looks like, for the time being, the kid's out of luck. Maybe we'll pick up the original Transformers: The Movie on DVD to appease him. After all, the scariest thing in it is that ghastly song.

The Official DadCentric Guide To What To Get Dad For Dad's Day That I Actually Wrote For A Site For Moms

I don't pay much attention to Father's Day - I'm an Arbor Day man myself - but Charlene Prince Birkeland asked me to send along some suggestions on what to get the dad who has everything but still wants more, greedy bastard. You'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes, capitalist running dog lackey dad who has everything. Vive la guerra! Anyways. This is what I came up with.

Rounding out the top ten: a jet-powered hang glider, a submarine, a lifetime supply of Triscuits, a couple of hours with Alan Thicke, the original master reels of the Beach Boys' "Smile" (and people laughed at me when I said I was sending my sidekick Kato, a ninja schooled in the ancient art of hypnosis, to pay Brian Wilson a visit. Bidding starts at $320,000; email me if you want in), and a pony.

A New Hope... For Me to Poop On

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