DADWAGON

I have a son and a daughter, as well as a cat and a dog (no partridge and fuck the pear tree). I feed, clothe, care, and even love them all, though, in truth, the animals know I don’t love them as much as the children. It’s a shame, really, especially for the dog, Frankie, who I rescued from the pound long before JP was a screaming, pooping, twinkle in anyone’s eye.

The years since I have become a father haven’t been easy on ole Frank, and not just because JP has done everything he could to yank the mutt’s tail clean off. I simply have less love to give him now that there are other, more complex beings in my life. I don’t neglect him–it’s just that he’s gone from the proto-baby to the pet.

Moral of that story is simple (are you listening, the entire under-30 population of Park Slope?): It’s probably best not to get a pet as a pre-proxy for a youngster. Not that dogs and cats lack for charm, but that itch you’re feeling is likely for offspring and not animals.

Regardless, whatever you do, don’t do this:

The trouble began, Theresa Smith said, shortly after she bought a hamster for her 9-year-old son. A few months later, the hamster, Princess Stephanie, was playing in its exercise ball on the floor of their apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, when an older son, who is 25, flew into a rage.

“He kicked it deliberately, the ball flew across the room, the hamster flew out of the ball, and it died,” Ms. Smith said. After he had calmed down, the older son felt terrible, she said.

“He was very remorseful,” Ms. Smith said. “He brought my son three more hamsters.”

This act of contrition, however, only angered Ms. Smith’s daughter Monique, Theresa Smith said. Monique picked up the biggest of the three hamsters, Sweetie, “took it out of the cage, and she slammed it on the floor,” Theresa Smith said. “It died on impact.”

In response to my fantastic post on the the Asian-Jew-white-big-penis nexis, the New York Times and Gallup (or I should say the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index) conducted some research into what we already know: Men who do the Aisan thing do it for good reason. Here is a brief sketch of what, statistically speaking, represents the happiest (or “most well-being-ist”) man in America:

He’s a tall, Asian-American, observant Jew who is at least 65 and married, has children, lives in Hawaii, runs his own business and has a household income of more than $120,000 a year.

For this they pay a reporter? For this they conduct a study? To tell me what my grand-kids are gonna look like? Sheesh. We here at DadWagon don’t need Gallup to help us with our social engineering. We’re doing it already! Look out America, the happy is coming and it looks like our children’s children.

If you’re like me, you spend your days watching “House” on Hulu when you should be working. Which means you’re constantly watching commercials for the 2011 Toyota Highlander—ads like this one:

Do I really need to point out how thoroughly loathsome this ad—and the entire campaign, by Saatchi & Saatchi LA—is? God, when that curly-haired fucking moppet announces, “Just because you’re a parent doesn’t mean you have to be lame,” I really want to strangle him. I don’t care about the creatives behind the project—that kid is such a good actor he deserves to die a horrible, horrible death.

Over at some other Website, a Toyota spokesman calls the campaign “light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek.” It may be the former, but certainly not the latter. Everything in it is designed to show a hyper-self-consciously cool kid embarrassed by a parent’s poor choice of vehicle. No tongue, no cheek. And that is bad. Bad bad bad!

Yes, I know the ads have been out for several months. But they keep showing them! And so I have to conclude that, on some level, this has been an effective marketing strategy for Toyota. How, to paraphrase Insane Clown Posse, does that fucking work? What kind of person watches this ad and says to themselves, “You know, I don’t want to embarrass my child with my old car? I’m getting a Highlander!”?

Probably not the same kind of person who reads DadWagon. Which is why I feel justified in saying something like: If you buy a Highlander because of these ads, I hope you drive it off a cliff with your smarmy, leather-jacket-wearing kids in the backseat.

From our friend DaddyTypes, who continues to find high-brow ways to tilt at the seas of low-brow controversies that surround us, a proto-Charlie Sheen appearance by Cookie Monster with Martha Stewart.

What I find most uncanny about this orgasmic delay-then-gratify appearance is how they managed to exactly render my daughter’s behavior around chocolate, even though the video is from 2001, five years before her googly-eyed sugar-addicted self was even born.