DADWAGON

Some unfinished business from last week, when Forbes.com annoyed the Mozartskugeln out of me with their list of 10 best places in the world to live. Now, I should know better than to get exercised over listicles. They are linkbait and pageview-generators, not meant to be serious or informative. And listicles also made up much of the secret sauce behind Time.com’s rebirth in 2008 and 2009, for which I should be grateful.

However, this list of best places to live wasn’t just randomly assembled. Rather, there seems to be an algorithm with distinct philosophy behind it, one that many parents fall prey to: namely, that safety trumps all. That “good living” is equal parts monotony and security, and all other considerations are secondary.

To save you the clicking, here is the full list:

1. Vienna, Austria

2. Zurich, Switzerland

3. Geneva, Switzerland

4. (tie) Vancouver, Canada

4. (tie) Auckland, New Zealand

6. Dusseldorf, Germany

7. (tie) Munich, Germany

7. (tie) Frankfurt, Germany

9. Bern, Switzerland

10. Sydney, Australia

I’m partial to Vancouver, and have never been to New Zealand or Australia. But I know the rest of the cities on the list, and all I can say is, blech. How can you  justify a top 10 global cities list that features seven cities from Switzerland, Germany and Austria? And among those three German cities listed, none would even make my top 10 list of cities in Germany. I mean, Dusseldorf? Really?

Perhaps this would be an appropriate list of the world’s cleanest cities (best-swept secrets?). But living, and raising families, should involve something a little more than Ordnung. A good city should have the potential to surprise and educate, roundly, about the world. It should, god forbid, even have a few rough edges. It should be able to inspire. It should be diverse, and not just in a lawyers-of-every-ethnicity sense, but economically, religiously, philosophically. It should look a bit like… New York, if the city hadn’t been poached over the last decade in ill-gotten Wall Street gains.

Anyhow, I might still put New York on my top-ten list (it’s worth noting that Honolulu was Forbes’ top-rated U.S. city, at #31; NYC was #49). I would add a different German city, one that didn’t rate very highly with Forbes: Berlin. Tokyo would be on my list somewhere, as would Bangkok, as far as I’m concerned, despite its penchant for putsches.

Whatever cities would make my list, they wouldn’t be there because they offer the least chance of dismemberment or assault. In justifying the Forbes list, on the other hand, one of the consultants who put it together said, “If you can’t be safe in Switzerland, you can’t be safe anywhere.”

If you need any reminder of just how hollow that philosophy is, even for those of us with children to raise, read Sweet Juniper. It’s a beautiful blog, in part about bringing up children in *gasp* Detroit. And it punctures every myth you can imagine about what a perfect world might look like for kids. The editors of Forbes should read it–and its fantastic descriptions of grocery shopping, mummy-hunting, and seed-bombing–before foisting a list of terrifyingly boring cities on us.

So here’s the question for you, dear reader: name a city that would go on your list. And perhaps more importantly, why would it be there? If you think I’m being naive be saying safety shouldn’t be the top priority, let me know.

Many of the Dadwagoneers faced down some kind of instability this week. Could you tell from their posts?

Matt experienced a genuine life shift: giving up his Frugal Traveler column at the Times, and moving to a looser (and presumably easier) schedule. And what does he do with his newfound freedom? Make wiseass remarks about selling Chinese babies, the ways in which network TV is destroying his marriage, and his daughter’s incipient racism. Then he topped it all off with this cheery little view of the world.

Theodore (whose workplace saw some turmoil this week) was in a similarly introspective mood, musing on John Seabrook’s adoption story and making fun of Nathan’s Tolstoy obsession. He also filled us in on the bizarre family tree (or grove of trees, really) from which his child descends.

Speaking of Nathan, he returned from Russia with a bit of that country’s sour shrug to him. He was uncharacteristically indecisive about his child’s tae kwon do classes (see secondary post here) and definitely sour about the prospect of what he considered the world’s worst Father’s Day gift. (What’s better, Nate–vodka?)

And me: Apparently I just bounce and spin around, reacting to whatever oddments and light insults life throws at me, with no coherent philosophy or approach at all. Unless you, reader, can come up with a reading that ties together Antonin Scalia, denim-printed diapers, my love of paper-shredding, and math puzzles. The only context is the lack of context, as George W.S. Trow sort of said.

Maybe it’ll all be clearer come Tuesday. Happy Memorial Day weekend to all.

I’m sure I don’t remember Gary Coleman quite as well as most people. I tuned in to “Diff’rent Strokes” long after it had gone into syndication, and never developed the kind of ironic affection for it that so many Gen Xers did. But what I do remember him from was “On the Right Track,” a movie in which he played a homeless shoeshine kid, living in a train station, who had a special power: When he shined shoes, he could pick winners from the Racing Form.

Predictably, the discovery of this ability meant everyone wanted to take advantage of our young hero, who still somehow managed to sail through the movie without losing his imperturbable optimism. Of course, he was acting.

Which is pretty much the story of Gary Coleman himself. Trapped forever in a child’s body due to a kidney ailment, he found little success as an adult, but whenever I saw him on the news—whether for suing his parents for mismanaging his $3.8 million trust fund or for just causing a ruckus—he maintained that chubby-cheeked childlike cuteness. He could turn on the charm for the cameras. Again, he was probably acting.

Or maybe not. He may have played an orphan on TV, but he was one in real life, too—a spiritual orphan, cut off from his family and desperate for someone to take care of him. That was Conrad Bain’s job, and it was our job, too, even though he was just as desperate to prove he didn’t need anyone. “Family never meant anything to me,” he said in 2003, “but a whole lot of trouble that I don’t need.” But what do you do with kids—teenagers, especially—who say they don’t need you? You try even harder.

The ridiculousness of his death is that he died after falling at home and hitting his head—meaningless and bathetic, it gives us no easy way to sum up his existence. I can almost imagine telling the young Gary that’s how he’d meet his end: After a lifetime of health problems, money problems, work problems, and behavior problems, you’ll trip, fall, hit your head and die at 42. I think we all know what he’d say to that.

So JP’s birthday is tomorrow, which is not what this post is about. This post about sex, late-summer early-fall sex, the kind of sex that results in children born … on Memorial Day weekend. Am I imagining this, or are half of the children that I know having birthdays coming up this weekend or week?

Is life that simple to understand? You go to the beach with your Other (you judge the significance), eat lobster, sip gin-and-tonics, and whammo! Nine months later it’s crotchfruit time.

Or is it even simpler than that? After Memorial Day, summer peak vacation pricing starts. Does everyone just schedule their schtupping so they can get a break on a time share?

I report. You decide how seriously to take it.