DADWAGON

Swiper, no swiping! The real Dora the Explorer–14-year-old Caitlin Sanchez of Fairview, NJ–feels cheated by Nickelodeon and its owner, the giant vampire media squid Viacom. While she provided the voice of Dora, she was forced to travel around the country promoting the show on a $40 per diem. And apparently she was pressured into signing the convoluted contract without a lawyer present. Well, Dora’s got a lawyer now:

“I’ve never seen as convoluted and inscrutable contact as I’ve seen here,” Caitlin’s lawyer, John Balestriere, told the Daily News on Wednesday night.

Balestriere said Caitlin was cheated out of “millions, perhaps tens of millions.”

In that classic NY Daily News style, a huge piece of information is missing here: exactly what Caitlin does earn per episode. Apparently she was promised over $5000 per show, and a quick back-of-napkin calculation ($5000 x 8000 bajillion individual shows that seem to run on every goddamn TV my child is around) reveals that she should have earned 40 million bajillion dollars.

It’s tempting, of course, to hate on young Ms. Sanchez because I have a visceral dislike for Dora. But that’s the writers’ fault, and parents’ fault for supporting such asinine programming–the cartoon equivalent of the crappy maze you get with crayons and a kids menu at Bennigans. Don’t judge the voice talent for all of those shortcomings; the meat-world should Dora get her due.

The plight of the voice actor is also dear to my heart since I’ve recently learned that my friend and colleague Lisa Takeuchi Cullen was the voice of April O’Neil, the perpetually endangered ingenue from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game. That was her voice, which she recorded in Japan as child, calling for help in every arcade in America. Her father, not incidentally, provided the bombastic “body blow, body blow” voice from Nintendo’s legendary Punch Out boxing game. Being a professional, her father presumedly was paid the standard rate. Lisa, from what I gleaned, made next to nothing.

So here’s hoping that when this is all said and done, the judge looks to the jury and says:

Do you find for the plaintiff?

*blink, blink

*blink, blink

*blink, blink

Bueno!

What with the looming arrival of the Second Coming, which my girlfriend has now instructed me must henceforth be referred to as “Ellie” (her name), I’ve been thinking about how we go about giving kids their handles.

Now, Christopher’s wonderful Greek cousin notwithstanding, I actually do have a rich uncle story.

My grandfather and his brother were fairly successful immigrant businessmen here in New York after fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s. They operated a German food importing business in Tribeca, in a warehouse that the CEO of BMW USA now likely lives in. They retired the year I was born.

Both decided to go into the stock market, and both did reasonably well, although my great-uncle, Frankie, did really well. Frankie, I should point out, was something of an eccentric. He lived his adult years in a one-bedroom apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, never had kids, never learned to drive, and never spent any of that money that he earned.

When I was in high school my grandfather, who a few years earlier had moved out of New York to live with my mother, called me and told me that I should go visit Frankie, who I hadn’t seen since I was perhaps 5 years old (Frankie didn’t keep in touch; I have almost no memory of him). He said that Frankie was lonely and he would be grateful for the visit. I agreed to go, my grandfather called his brother, and it was set for me to come by with groceries one day.

Unfortunately, I was 18 and had, in my mind, more important things to do, and I never showed. My grandfather never reproached me for my callous behavior, but he never brought up the subject of his brother again, either.

Years later, both my grandfather and his brother, then 99 and 101, died within a month of each other. I never learned the final disposition of my great-uncle’s will, but from what I can ascertain, his many millions went to Jewish charities.

About a year later, I got a dog, me and my ex-wife’s earliest attempt at having a child. Because I’m such a swell guy, I used to joke with my friends that if my great-uncle, Frankie, had left me even one of his hundreds of millions that I would have named my first-born son after him. Instead, my dog, my pre-son, Frankie, earned that privilege.

I’m a helluva guy.

Matt’s post yesterday laid out a nice prospect for old age, but it did get me thinking: Do you actually think you can, or will, retire? I once did, though it seemed like a stretch: I’d need a six-figure sum, and if I lived small, and compound interest did its thing, I could probably pull that off.

But adulthood brings expenses, and expensive-but-worth-it life choices. We own an apartment that carries a high mortgage and a big monthly maintenance charge. That means, though we do not live month-to-month, the amount we put away for our old age is nowhere near what it might otherwise be. Everyone in publishing knows that salary freezes and layoffs are the norm these days, and presumably that shakeout will eventually end, it’s not done by a long shot. And there will be a point, twenty years from now, when the math goes all kerflooey: our mortgage will not yet be paid off, our kid will be in college, and we will be in our mid-sixties, considering how much longer we want to (or even can) work.

The older writers and editors I know sort of ease into retirement: They drop back to working three days a week, or shift from the demands of daily deadlines to long-term stuff like books, which sounds like a pleasant late-career turn. But can I even count on that business being around in 25 years? Take it from me, because I am working on an actual book for an actual publisher: The research time alone turns your typical advance into minimum-wage work, and my advance was considerably less than typical. I sense that, for all but a lucky and hypertalented few, authorship is a tidy path to eating cat food out of a tin. (As is Dadwagon, by the way, except that it’d be dry pet food, not the fancy canned stuff.)

What I am reduced to counting on, or praying for, is some mysterious economic boom to come. We got one, out of the blue, in the Clinton years, when the Internet bubble quintupled everyone’s 401(k) accounts, and if any of you were smart enough to ride that train, then get off just as it went over the cliff, you did some serious earning. (I didn’t, not really.) It’s a hell of a thing to bet on another one of those run-ups happening between now and 2035, but you have to figure that the current doldrums are not forever, that they’ll go for two more years or four or eight, and then we’ll be in an upswing. It doesn’t have to be world-changing, like the Web-era boom; it just has to inject enough cash into the publishing business to keep me from getting laid off, and presumably anything that does that will generally lift the economy at large. When that day comes, we ride it as long as we dare, and then whatever we’ve saved goes into the least risky accounts imaginable. And we hope to God that it’s enough. (I suspect it won’t be.)

Also under consideration: A long-lost relative, some Greek third cousin I’ve never heard of, who leaves me $10 million. That would work, too.

The best summation I heard about this piece of good news came from my friend Jeffery L., who wrote about it on Facebook:

The prize was criticized by the Vatican, consistent with their reproductive policy that the world needs more unwanted children, and fewer wanted ones.

Infertility is not a mark of God’s disfavor. And the incredible advances in helping infertile couples experience the miracles that we both appreciate and complain about on this blog are something that should have won the prize long ago (Robert Edwards may have won the award, for example, but his collaborator died years ago).

The Vatican is out of line on this and, sadly, on many issues as they relate to parenting and families. The shame of it that Catholic values seem like they can strengthen individual families (unless one of the kids turns out gay—whoops!), but they seem to be somewhat disastrous on a macro scale.

Consider Monsignor Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, head of the gloriously named Pontifical Academy for Life. He supposedly is the person who advices the Pope about medical ethics issues, which would seem a sleepy job, since those views on abortion, contraception, etc., haven’t changed in millenia. But de Paula was vigorously fighting back against this Nobel prize.

“I find the choice of Robert Edwards completely out of order,” [de Paula] told ANSA news agency yesterday.

“Without Edwards, there would not be a market on which millions of ovocytes are sold… and there would not be a large number of freezers filled with embryos in the world.”

“In the best of cases they are transferred into a uterus, but most probably they will end up abandoned or dead, a problem for which the new Nobel Prize winner is responsible.”

What I find objectionable (again, not just in this case) is that de Paula’s understanding of the meaning of an ovocyte is, in his mind, not just his own baggage, but a definition to which the rest of the world—Nobel prize-givers included—should bow down. Bah.