A Week on the Wagon: Musical Chairs Edition

First question: where the fuck has Nathan been? He wrote at the beginning of the week about how his child smuggled a Lego gun through a TSA checkpoint at LaGuardia, and then wasn’t heard from again. We suspect some sort of secret rendition in retribution for the gun-smuggling, and look forward to some Wikileaks photos of him being in the middle of one of those naked prisoner piles soon.

DadWagon, of course, rolls on without him. Brian Braiker, a journalist known on the Twits as @slarkpope, stopped to fill in the slack. Actually, as he pointed out, it is a little bit of a trial: in our ongoing quixotic search for a replacement for the illustrious and departed Christopher B., we will be bringing in some guests from time to time. As he and his fans might like to point out, he was dadblogging before it was cool (actually, it’s still not cool), writing Mr. Nice Guy and the “I, Breeder” blog for the Publication Now Known As NewsBeast. So he’s got some of the trade secrets. He knows how to pawn a video link off as actual content (F is for Float!). And when it’s time to write, he knows that multinational chemical companies make for fat targets (actually, his takedown of #LysolMoms was pretty awesome and worth a read). He was wrong about the extent of the hazing here, though: we won’t know if someone is a good fit with DadWagon until they’ve been through The Trials, which involves lots of offline things like fingernail extraction and eating enormous quantities of natto.

As for Matt and Theodore, they were up to their usual this week.

Matt told his daughter to call her vagina a “cooter” and actually thought it was a good solution. He also proved incapable of enjoying a quiet afternoon with her. He also had a strange education kick: he slagged Little Pim language videos, found a Beyonce/Algebra song, and commented on cheating Chinese students. Also, Facebook profile pics of Strawberry Shortcake may not end pedophilia for all time and the Internet really killed him this week.

Theodore passed along praise of the vas deferens and made his son cry by beating the tar out of him at checkers. He also launched a delicious attack on the veggie-people, or at least on the kind of people (there seem to be so many) who mistake their children’s natural dispositions for some fucking award-winning parenting. Although actually, Theodore himself showed off some fairly slick parenting skills—patience and perspective—by his deft handling of his son’s new efforts to play Theodore and his ex-wife against each other.

Perhaps we are learning something here after all.

Actually, no. We are not. Next week will undoubtedly feature the same sorry slurry of mistake and regret.

Enjoy your weekends.

Butt Drag: The Horror (and the Lawsuit)

Not that there's anything wrong with that
Not that there's anything wrong with that

Disclaimer and disclosure: I wrestled in high school. Alas, JP, if this is how it goes down these days, will not (Ellie, too):

Preston Hill, the former Buchanan senior who has since been expelled, faces a sexual battery charge after police say he rammed two fingers into a teammate’s anus during a wrestling practice last summer. The trial begins Thursday in Fresno County Superior Court.

Hill’s father claims his son used a wrestling move called the butt drag that he learned from Buchanan coaches. The butt drag, when done legally and with proper technique, requires a wrestler to intensely grab his opponent’s butt cheek to obtain leverage and better positioning.

“It’s making wrestling look bad,” said Wheeler, who wrestled at Fresno State for two years before spending the past nine years coaching at the high-school level. “Some people already see wrestling as a dirty sport. Now people are talking about anal penetration and wrestling in the same sentence.”

Yes, that’s what’s making wrestling look bad!

The Internet Is Ruining Everything (for Me)

Last week, as you may remember, we Dadwagoneers tried to figure out how we could successfully ignore Santa Claus, Christmas and the whole swarm of wintertime Christianity. Well, it appears we, or at least I, may have brought some indirect Internet backlash on ourselves/myself, as this week I’ve begun to come across all kinds of anti-me media. Example no. 1:

But look, you may say, that’s just one guy—one guy who writes very catchy and hilarious-even-if-I-disagree-with-them lyrics. Where’s the rest of the anti-Matt onslaught?

Well, here’s another one. These crazy design geeks have come up with a Christmas tree for Christmas-loving Jews—and it’s made of stars of David! It’s marketed, sort of, as a way for Jews to get in on the Christmas spirit, but you know me, I see it as an insidious attempt to transform and co-opt the most sacred emblems of my faith—a faith I cheerfully admit I don’t believe in or hold particularly dear.

Other things seemed put out there on the Internet just to frustrate me, like this 1-year-old baby at a church service who seems to be really into it, and who’s probably taken by her relatives as a miraculous example of how even the smallest children can feel the Lord’s presence, but is really a living, swaying demonstration of “religious socialization.”

Or perhaps this other amusing video of things that kids—and one day, probably, my kid—get taught in abstinence-only classes—things like… Oh my god, just watch the video yourself and then go barf and have a vasectomy.

Finally, we get to the one element of Christmastime that I actually kind of like: The Charlie Brown Christmas Special. Now, of course I don’t like it for the wonderful “true meaning of Christmas” it presents at the end, but for the litany of miseries visited on its hapless hero throughout. But of course, the Internet has to go screw that up, too. Here’s Deadspin.com:

I showed my kid the Charlie Brown Christmas special the other day and she was depressed for the rest of the week. Why are we still subjecting kids to this awful shit? …

I was all excited to show my kid this special, because I watched it when I was a kid and I’m a selfish asshole so I wanted my kid to watch it and like it and be like me. Then I turned it on and I was like, “Wait! I fucking hate this shit.” Then the show ended and my kid was like, “I didn’t like that show.” Then she went and started throwing things.

I’d quote a lot more from the piece, but you can go and read it yourself. Basically, the guy hates everything about Peanuts: the depression, the despair, the disappointment. Not only does he hate it, he doesn’t want his kid to like it either. No doubt he wants some uplifting, cheerful holiday-time charming crap that will please his daughter and then she won’t throw things. Well, the hell with you, Deadspin.com. Life is awful, Christmastime is a month of hypocrisy, and the Internet has ruined my week.

How to Teach Math to Kids

I don’t know if this kid Spencer Tweedy can add, subtract, multiply or solve partial differential equations, but he can (thanks, I guess, to Auto-Tune) sing:

A few weeks ago, my algebra class was assigned a project called “Mathematic Karaoke,” for which were told to pick a song, make it about numbers (and stuff), and record our selves singing it. … So it only seemed to appropriate to follow along the pop-stream criteria, with Ms. Beyoncé Knowles. Of course, Single Ladies was my tune of choice.

And here’s the result:

All I wanna know is: Which public school is this?