DADWAGON

(This is the Tantrum, in which Dadwagon’s writers debate one question over the course of a week. For previous Tantrums, click here.)

Given my sordid past—dragging Sasha around Italy and San Francisco, carrying her to filthy, seedy bars full of tattooed, puking people—you might think I’d be in favor of kids in restaurants. It only makes sense, right? Idiot yuppie-hipster dad just loooves to show off his pwecious cwotchfwuit in inappropriate settings.

The hell with that. Although Sasha was a perfect doll in restaurants at the age of 6 weeks—snuggled in her carrier, she didn’t want much—lately she’s a challenge. Now she wants to run, not snuggle; to play, not eat. On the increasingly rare occasions when we do go out for a meal, it’ll be lunch or brunch, somewhere family-friendly (highchairs, plenty of room), and we’ll bring enough books and toys to keep her occupied, and we’ll get in and out as fast as possible.

But somewhere nice? Are you kidding? Back when Sasha was around 4 or 5 months old, I brought her, on my own, to brunch with a friend visiting from Korea. (Hi, Dan!) The place: Char No. 4, a pretty decent Southern-ish restaurant in my neighborhood. At first, she was great, sitting patiently in the seat of her stroller, which I’d detached and placed next to me. But, inevitably, she began to cry, and nothing would console her—not milk, not nothing. By the time my food arrived, I was ready to flee—only I couldn’t properly unfold the base of the stroller. I was about ready to fling the whole thing across the restaurant when Dan stepped in, picked Sasha up and walked her around. Instantly, she calmed down. Oh, okay. I scarfed my meal, and we were outta there. Never again, I swore.

So, no. No. No. No. Somewhere nice? Really nice? Like, $400-per-person nice? Sasha’s not worth it—hell, I’m not worth it. (As an aside: I’m not sure this is how rich people think. Follow this link to see what I mean.) And even if I were to bring her to such a place—perhaps as a result of a traumatic brain injury—should the restaurant offer a kids’ menu? Would I ask for an adults’ menu at Chuck E. Cheese’s?

But you know what? Fuck restaurants in general. I’m tired of them. Very rarely do I eat anything at a restaurant that I can’t cook myself, better and cheaper. The whole range of upper-mid-level restaurants is a complete waste of time and money—gastronomical ambition tempered (and therefore neutered) by the need to serve a mass audience. If you’re making something that’s truly beyond my abilities—Taiwanese thin noodles, for example, or some exotic truffle-foam sous vide thing—I’m up for it. But if all you’re doing at your hip $29-entrée spot is roasting free-range hens or braising veal shanks, then thank you very much, but I can do that at home—and serve the leftovers to Sasha.

New York City seems like it should be the heart of Bugaboo country. The Dutch company specializes in 20-pound curb-hopping strollers (great for bumping over epic potholes, not great for popping in the trunk to head to the mall). Their most popular model–the Frog–costs $759. (The foam-tire Cameleon is $880.) The price points on their Marc Jacobs and (Red) limited editions ($1,500 and $1,029 respectively) are a lot more Wall Street than Sesame Street.

So when the country’s first Bugaboo retail store opened up this month in El Segundo, a humble slice of Los Angeles, just south of LAX, it seemed curious. I already had the family down visiting in-laws for the week, and I took them and went there undercover–which is pretty easy when you’re a dadblogger–to check it out.

Here’s what I know about El Segundo: it used to be home to a colossally screwed and landless tribe called the Tongva. It has massive oil refineries. Someone from A Tribe Called Quest left their wallet there. It ain’t exactly Park Slope.

The first thing I learned when we pulled up is that it’s not really a store, per se, with any grand retail ambitions. It’s more like a showroom attached to Bugaboo’s new corporate headquarters. The company had outgrown the converted auto-body shop it was occupying down the road in Hermosa Beach (30 employees sharing a bathroom, apparently). So they moved to El Segundo, which won an Eddy Award a few years ago for being the most business-friendly city in the region. The showroom is in front, but just behind it is a bright peppermint-green kitchen (painted the owner’s favorite color), which leads to the cavernous open-plan workspace where the worker bees of Bugaboo (sales? design? accounting?) do their thing.

The upside to the accidental location was that we had to place all to ourselves, along with the undivided attention of the hyperkinetic and enthusiastic account manager named Ricardo who was manning the place. He had relocated from New York not long ago when Bugaboo closed its offices near Madison Square Park and he sounded a little wistful about NYC–he told a few totally New York food-geek stories, about how the Bugaboo staff would monitor the line at the Shake Shack via Webcam and then dash down three flights of stairs when it was short enough. I told him about Tito’s Tacos, but I have a feeling it won’t make him forget all about the Shackburgers.

But he was awesomely indulgent of my kids, who wanted to climb all over the products, and sit in the mesh bags, and push the strollers into walls. And he gave us a sneak preview of the new updated Bee stroller, due out in April, which is basically the same, just a bit sturdier and a bit more expensive, with a slightly more user-friendly strap and thinner side flaps.

Here’s the thing: in New York, I hated Bugaboos. I owned McClarens, which cost a third as much, and $20 Target umbrella strollers, and I was all too ready to buy into the stroller wars pitting haughty Bugaboo owners against the angry rabble rest of us. But in Los Angeles, all that seems petty and judgmental. Yes, $800 is a lot for a stroller, but you do actually get something for the price: design and function. Maybe not where I’d invest, but people spend lots of money on all kinds of geegaws, so why not strollers?  We owned a TV that cost more the Cameleon stroller and got a lot less use. Others (like Matt, who owns a Frog) can tell you with more authority about the suspension and the steering and the shocks over the long-haul. But from our short visit, it did just seem all very buttery.

Not that we left with a new stroller, mainly because we don’t quite have $800 to spend on anything at the moment. But if we did, we would. And there’s going to be a big sale, I’m told, so you should: June 19, 30 percent off everything. Only in-store, only in beautiful El Segundo.

As we all know, Japan is always on the cutting edge of everything. And with a perennially ailing economy and a declining birthrate, the Japanese have an awesome new tool to get their citizens procreating: a robot baby with vaguely human facial expressions! The video:

On the one hand, you’ve got to admire the Japanese devotion to all things virtual. The nation that gave us Tamagotchi is a place where you can have a virtual girlfriend, marry a pillow, and have sex with a lifelike simulacrum of an anime character. For anyone even a little bit anxious about love, sex, marriage, and fatherhood, it can be  enticing: Why deal with all that messy reality when technology can clean it all up?

What I see here, though, is not just Wacky Japan getting wacky again. No, I see a society that’s gotten to a point where the practicalities of the traditional process of having a family have gotten so complicated and difficult that no one’s having kids. Seriously: In 2001, the nation had 1.2 million births, and the government projected that by 2050 it would be half that—in a nation of 127 million people! This is not good news.

Now, I don’t particularly care if Japanese people fail to reproduce, although without Japanese people who will make my yummy, yummy ramen? But I see this as instructional for us here in New Yorkistan.

For example: I’m 35, rather old in traditional terms to have a 1-year-old. Why did I wait so long? Why do so few of my friends have kids older than 4? Is it because we weren’t emotionally ready for the responsibility? Or was it because it just seemed, on a very practical level, impossible to have kids and pursue anything resembling a career?

I don’t mean this all as a big kvetch—just as a way to think about American policies designed (or not) to make it easier (or harder) for families to survive. Parents taking off work early, maternity/paternity leave, health insurance, acceptance of children in public places—all those things that some people love to complain about are, I feel more and more, essential if we want this country to, you know, keep going.

The alternative, of course, is to permit much more immigration—which, of course, I’m also totally in favor of.

Okay, so we don’t condone what the teacher did here. Obviously. Even though Christopher did kick his own kid in the face.

And although I’ve made some poor discipline decisions, I don’t think I’ve ever thought up something  this stupid. In the Houston suburb of Sugarland, 5-year-old Devarius punches a girl in the face on a pre-K field trip. So the teacher allegedly told the other kids in the class, “When we get on the van, I want everyone to punch Devarius in the face.”

This is good video, not least for the vintage Quanell X appearance toward the end. I first heard about Quanell after he protested the Joe Horn vigilante killings I wrote about a couple years ago. He’s an odd one, born in the seventies but forever stuck in the sixties, with a long resume of pretty dubious statements, and yes, that arrest for evading arrest.  Quanell was actually right about Joe Horn, but I’m not so sure about this one. Is it really true that this boy could have been killed by the crushing fistfalls of other pre-K students? Should the whole school be shut down (the teacher was fired immediately, as she should have been)? The report doesn’t make the case that this was just one in a long string of abuses.