Theodore posted his bit of lo-fi patriotic Vietnamese rap yesterday, so today I’ll counter with hip-hop that I actually dig and that actually has to do with children.

DadWagon friend Bambu (you might remember our Q&A with him a few months back) has been releasing some entertaining videos. This new one shows him doing exactly what you’d expect a Raiders fan to do: pretending to smoke out on the porch with his toddler nearby. Although, in fairness to Raider nation, the mother of Bambu’s child, Rocky Rivera—a (grieving) Niners fan like myself—is also in the video doing the same.

Also: they’re not really smoking with their daughter around. She’s in the first shot, but from there it’s all just plastic dolls. No actual baby brain cells were harmed in the making of this video. And Bambu even gets around to warning about smoking too much weed in the song.

So my weed-on-child role model will have to continue to be my illustrious friend who once was driving a boat with his year-old boy on his lap, using the kid’s head to balance his pipe so he could steer and light the bowl at the same time. Bold move; I’d like to see a Raiders fan top that.

Nathan’s revelation yesterday that he’s too hungover to blog reminded me of something I’ve heard increasingly from friends: They’re quitting drinking. As a New Yorker, I’m kind of astounded that anyone would even consider this, but it’s true. One friend apparently quit drinking a while back; another, who lives in the South, did so recently.

Now, I can’t presume to really know what they were going through. And I would never simply laugh off their decisions. Still, I find it hard to imagine either of them as out-of-control drinkers, so dependent on booze that going cold turkey was the only solution. It makes me wonder if I really know these guys, particularly the Southerner, at all.

But it also reminds me of a third friend, this one a New Yorker too, who often frets that his desire for a nightly beer and/or whiskey is growing too strong, that it dictates how he’ll pass the post-work hours, even if he never actually gets drunk on his nightly tipple. He, too, is someone I can’t imagine truly out of control, and I begin to wonder if there’s something floating around in the culture that is provoking guilt over what, for thousands of years, has been man’s primary mechanism for coping with the horribleness of life. Heck, even Don Draper’s trying to slow down.

Here on Dadwagon, however, we are very pro-alcohol. I’m the guy bringing his kid to a bar, after all. I don’t see myself getting on that other wagon any time soon.

And that’s partly because I see drinking and parenting as parallel challenges. (This is not just a spurious theory ginned up to stretch out a blog post. Serious!) Both involve trying to balance a need for control with a need to give up control. Just as you hover over a little kid stumbling around the playground, you also need to give the child space to try new things and, yes, fall down from time to time. On the drinking side, it’s tricky, too—when have you reached the perfect moment of relaxation, beyond which more booze is bad?

I’m not saying that one helps with the other (although a beer or two can definitely make playing with small children more fun), just that they both test our limits and our self-knowledge. Although, I guess, in the case of my newly teetotaling friends, self-knowledge has been a revelation.

JP’s mother is Vietnamese, which makes him half-Vietnamese, which also means I feel justified in putting up this laughably ridiculous student rap, produced in Vietnam. As far as I can tell, it’s got nothing to do with children or parenting, other than the fact that the people who made it are young, and it’s bad, and I like it. Enjoy.

I had no idea that Kim Jong-Il and I had so much in common! We love our sons, and wish for them to have excellent futures. As the Times reported yesterday, Kim has begun to make arrangements (somewhat hastily, since his health is failing) for his youngest boy to take over the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, outgunning his older sons and his daughter. The middle son had no shot, being that—how to put this?—he has a sex life somewhat different from that of his dad.

But back to Kim and me. Consider the following:

• Kim is 68; his son is reported to be “in his late twenties.” My son was born when I was 40.

• Kim and son like crisply tailored military uniforms. I recently bought my son a shirt (size 2T) at the same haberdasher’s sample sale where I get my clothes.

• Kim has ordered built a spectacular subway system in Pyongyang, despite intermittent electric power and no jobs to which people might commute. I like trains.

• Every now and then, Kim comes to the U.N. and rails about the United States. During those weeks, traffic is tied up throughout my East Side neighborhood, and I rail about the U.N.

I guess the only difference is … well, there are a lot of them, actually. Mostly I wouldn’t wish the writer’s life (or a writer’s income) on my kid unless he wants it really, really bad. But other than that: same exact plan.