DADWAGON

The illustration at left should tell you everything you need to know about the Week that Was at DadWagon. It was created by the excellent illustrator Matthew Dujnic, as DadWagon’s rejoinder to the piss-poor Photoshop skills of our new frenemies at Die Hipster. Yes, they claimed that their version was ironically bad, but really, if you’re going to spend the time it takes to craft comments like “I’ve got your fucking picture and if I ever fucking find you I will staple your balls together to protect whats left of our gene pool,” then you can at least not suck at Photoshop.

So what did DadWagon do that requires us to have our balls stapled?

Well, Matt went public on CNN.com with his desire to occasionally bring Sasha along while he gets a beer in a bar. Thus began an enthusiastic exchange of ideas so sophisticated that it makes the TED 2010 conference seem like a rerun of HeeHaw. Many  insightful things were said about the nature of modern parenting, the importance of child-centered play, and societal acceptance of the changing definitions of fatherhood. Oh, and go die in a fire, Matt, because I hate your stupid fucking glasses. Queef.

If you know anything about Theodore and his native New Yorkers’ love of conflict, you know that this was a very happy time for him.

But although the CNN story got over 2700 comments, and our humble repost on the issue had over 100 commenters sublimating their anger issues, there was more to DadWagon this week.

We fear that Nathan is developing an obsession with pre-K that will be shared only by his wife and oldest child. His anger toward Michael Douglas’ dope-dealing son and his attack on Slate’s advice columnist seemed at least a little more mainstream. More of that, please.

We were glad, on the other had, to see Christopher get a little contrarian, celebrating the fact that the Gowanus Canal has the clap and defending the right of an air traffic controller to have a very special Bring Your Child to Work (and Get Fired) Day.

Theodore–whom we should remind you is divorced–needed to take an online survey to confirm that he wasn’t a great husband.

Not to be forgotten among those posts and the (admittedly insipid) brawl over babies in bars was the remarkable Q&A Matt did with Joel Johnson, a well-known tech blogger who came out on his own blog with a brutal and brave recounting of the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. We are grateful to Joel for sitting down with us, and to the other sites–particularly those aimed at survivors of sexual abuse–that reposted and linked to the interview.

Work on that uppercut; we will be back Monday.

As you may have read here before, we’re having affordability issues with Dalia’s current school, and have therefore set off into the wider world of Uptown Manhattan in search of a universal pre-K spot.

To that end, we’re in the middle of schedule-chewing string of school visits up and down Manhattan’s District 3. Some things I now know:

•Public pre-K is a beautiful thing, if you can get a spot. Just look at the classroom here. Bright, airy, warm, and right across from the projects at 104th Street.

•The bureaucracy is stunning. We went to the big pre-K meeting for the borough of Manhattan last night. It was a 90-minute session (which started an hour late). A third of the time was spent going through the Department of Education’s Website, page by page, in a PowerPoint presentation. As in, “Here, where it says fill in your first name, this is where you would put YOUR name. Okay, next slide”. After 30 minutes I wanted to shoot myself. There were a couple of moments of learning, but the actual pre-K classes better be more edifying than the meetings about the classes.

•They serve a tremendous number of kids. More than 22,000 children applied to public-school pre-K programs in the five boroughs last year, and more than 17,000 were offered some kind of spot. Good God, that’s an army of preschoolers.

•The parent coordinators, who tend to be the shock troops receiving the most complaints about the underfunded programs (“pre-K parents can be kind of… aggressive,” is how P.S. 163’s José Duran put it), do a great job. Duran and almost all the other coordinators we’ve dealt with have been patient, generous with their time, and ready to answer any question. Somehow, despite the ID checks with the cops and guards at each school building, the visits end up feeling less formal and far more welcoming than the stilted tours at most private schools.

•We still have no idea what’s going to happen. Maybe we’ll find a way to afford private school for another year. Maybe we’ll find a program that no one else has “discovered” that looks great and has plenty of open seats. Maybe we’ll win the lottery.

I’m headed to work in California over the next two weeks (so look for a marked improvement in my tone and temperament, as I gradually thaw out from the New York winter). But we will be at it when I get back. Applications are due April 9. Stay tuned.

Like Chris, I too have my mind on bad fathers today, only the bad father is me. Or really, what I am is a bad husband, if the folks at the website Kaboose can be believed.

I came across a short survey that women can take on the habits of their husbands, with the idea of determining which “popular celebrity dad” my wife (or in this case, my ex) conjured up “when [she] closed her eyes, and imagined the perfect man “gracing the magazine covers.”

In short, you answer a series of questions about your husband and at the end, it tells you which celebrity father he comes closest to being (minus the money, muscles, power, fame, etc.).

In the interests of science I decided to take the quiz.

I immediately realized this wasn’t going to be as easy as I imagined. First question was what kind of breakfast in bed your husband serves you. Here were the choices:

• A. Double shot vanilla latte, steak and eggs.
• B. Belgian waffles with blackberry syrup, a coffee, and some bacon on the side
• C. Eggs Benedict with fresh fruit salad and hand-squeezed orange juice

Now, in the seven years of misery that were my marriage (plus three living together prior to that) I never once served my wife breakfast in bed, never made her waffles, don’t know how to make a latte, and the only thing I ever considered “hand-squeezing” was her neck [legal disclaimer: this is a joke; I never considered anything of the sort]. What should I answer then? Well, I went to college, so I know what to do when stumped by a question: I answered C to everything.

This included this little sweetheart of a query: “Your man is known for being:

• A. a real sweetheart who is always there to help
• B. a hands-on dad who is talented in many ways [questions: are they implying oral sex?]
• C. a bit of a tough cookie [translation: PRE-NUP], or so it seems to others, but is really a softie at heart.

C for everything! This meant that, by the survey’s end, I appear to be the sort of man who knows karate, likes to fence, is always up for a “rocking concert,” and drives a Bentley. Score!

Once my answers were tabulated the celebrity dad I most resemble was….this guy below. Sheesh. I wonder: if I did any of the things in the survey, would I still be married? Thank God I didn’t.

You may have heard about the air-traffic controller at JFK who let his kid step up to the microphone and start directing planes last month. And you can’t quite hate the FAA for coming down like a ton of aircraft parts on the guy. It’s bad enough up there, where the flights are arriving and departing more than once per minute, 1,300 times per day. People are berserk about this, and it looks like he’s going to get canned. He sure as hell shouldn’t have done it.

But come on. The dad told the kid to say “you’re cleared for departure,” and the kid said “you’re cleared for departure.” Then the pilot told him he was awesome, and dad stepped back up to the desk. On a safety-risk scale of 1 to 10, this is a zero. It’s clearly the appearance of concern, rather than actual concern, that’s causing people to freak out here. Firing the guy? When there is a severe shortage of good controllers? Reprimand him, suspend him for a week, whatever. Send a message, and move on.

By the way, I am so jealous of that kid. (One of my best memories of being 6 years old centers around a trip to see the mainframe at my dad’s workplace, back when few people had ever seen a real computer outside the movies. I came home with a printed-out ASCII-character-based picture of Snoopy, which I kept for years.) Get me up in the tower at JFK, even today, and you’d have to pry the mic out of my hands.