In an effort to keep up on what’s going on with daddyhood around the world, I recently signed up for a Google News alert on “father or dad.” The links that stream in daily are a stunning array of tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy and mystery. A brief summary:

• Van Morrison is a father again—at the age of 64. And apparently, George Ivan Morrison III bears a frightening resemblance to his pop-star pop. Meanwhile, Diego Maradona, the 49-year-old Argentine football soccer legend, is set to do the same thing, according to the ultimate source for Latin American football soccer news, DNAIndia.com.

• In Orange County, California, a teenage girl argued with her father, then moments later was struck and killed by a freight train. The incident is being investigated as an accident, but elsewhere there are no accidents: In England, a father gunned down his 4-year-old daughter and his girlfriend, then killed himself. He “was a very violent and temperamental man,” according to an insightful family friend. In Broward County, Florida, a man allegedly abducted his son and fled on a sailboat (whee!), and in Rockland, Maine, a dad was given 16 years in prison for killing his 2-month-old daughter. “[Expletive] murderer! [Expletive] murderer!” someone shouted at the sentencing. And in Sydney, Australia, a dad pulled a twofer, allegedly killing both his 77-year-old father and his 12-year-old neighbor. When police approached him, he set himself on fire.

• But not all dads are bad today! No, some are victims: In Denver, a pit bull attacked a father and daughter (they’re okay), and in Forest County, Wisconsin, a father saved his 17-year-old daughter’s life after their utility vehicle fell through thin ice. Alas, he drowned.

• There’s even good news about good dads! Here in New York, the Fire Department is promoting a father and son at the same time! And in Darby Township (wherever that is), a father who’d gone to prison in 1999 was reunited for Christmas with his daughter, whom he hadn’t seen in 13 years—thanks to Facebook.

• Finally, there is a mystery: Who is the late Brittany Murphy’s father? Her death certificate says “Unknown.” Van Morrison, is there something you’d like to tell us about this brown-eyed girl?

I haven’t even started thinking about how drunk I’m going to get on New Year’s Eve, and already the scolds at Prevention magazine are offering their suggestions about the five habits to break in 2010:

Everyone, and I mean everyone, has a bad habit (or three), and even if you’re not the resolution type, making one change this year can do wonders for your health, looks and self-esteem.

The bad habit list is 1) nail biting 2) forgetting to floss 3) midnight fridge raiding 4) smoking 5) overexposing yourself to the sun.

Okay, so instead of three, I happen to be guilty of four out of the top five. I won’t reveal which bad habit I have somehow managed to avoid, but I will confess to the one habit that I may have passed on to my 3-year-old daughter.

No, she doesn’t smoke.

But she is starting to show signs of chronic onychophagia, aka nail biting. It’s more common for kids than adults, of course. About 30 percent of 7-to-10-year-olds do it, and 45 percent of teenagers, but the numbers slack from there. Apparently, in my age group, only 5 percent bite their nails.

Why so few? Perhaps because some people say it’s a “symptom of an underlying and far graver emotional or psychological disorder.” Perhaps because, as Wikipedia puts it so succinctly, “it may also result in the transportation of bacteria that are buried under the surface of the nail, or pinworms from anus region to mouth.”

Umm, I think I just quit for good.

But even if I quit, she’ll continue to bite. I did when I was a kid, despite all my mother’s best efforts (including a brief attempt at using the awful-tasting Mavala Stop or something similar). And really, kids have been exasperating parents with nail-biting for an eternity. From a 1889 letter published in The Family Doctor and People’s Medical Advisor (a newsletter notable for its Victorian England obsession with corsets):

First, as to the odious habit of biting the nails. This is most disgusting in either sex, and must be stopped however severe the means that have to be employed. I knew a young lady who, after numerous devices had been tried in vain, was at length cured by being made to wear gloves with needles sewn into the finger tips. To prevent her taking these off she had metal bracelets, which tightly clasped her wrists and fastened with springs that could only be undone with a key which was kept by her maid.

That being quite possibly illegal in this century (outside of  few very expensive private clubs), I will have to console myself with the fact that, at this point, Dalia doesn’t have much contact with her “anus region.” She has people who do that for her.

Here at Dadwagon, we’re not real big on writing about the cute things our kids do. No, we’re much more concerned with bibby-banging, kvetching, decoding Dan Zanes lyrics and pissing off parent coaches. But since Chris has decided to jettison tradition and offer you, our dear readers, some actually useful advice, I figured I’d break another taboo and tell you about this morning.

Sasha is a little over a year old now, and is just starting to develop some fine motor control. So, whenever we feed her, we give her her own spoon, which she generally just mashes into her bowl of rice and vegetables and whatever leftovers Jean and I didn’t want to finish ourselves. Occasionally, she makes a motion like she’s pretending to eat.

But this morning—wonder of wonders!—she actually, with a little difficulty and only intermittent success, started scooping milk-soaked Cheerios out of the bowl and into her mouth. Yay!

That’s not the cute part, however.

The cute part is what she did when she got tired of eating. She took the spoon, turned it around, and put the handle in her mouth, with the other end sticking straight at me. And then she grinned, one of those grins that makes her eyes go all crinkly. “My heart melted.” (Sorry, I can’t say that, even though I kind of mean it, without ironic quotation marks or the phrase “kind of” or the ridiculous link.)

But then my heart froze. This could be a problem, I realized: The baby knows she’s cute! At the tender age of 1 year and a few weeks, she’s already figured out that she can get away with not eating (and who knows what other misbehaviors?) simply by mugging for Daddy. Is this a warning? Or a sign that, as long as she stays adorable (or attractive), she’ll go far in this world? Should I be happy or worried?

I don’t know. All I know is it was damn cute.

But no, I ain’t gonna post a photo of her. Not unless she asks me to.

Dalia, at the age of 3 years and 10 months, now has imaginary friends.

DadWagon reader, meet Wawa and Zoë. I believe they are standing just behind your left shoulder.

Okay, now that you’ve met, let’s talk about the Most Celebrated Imaginary Friend of the Last Decade, Charlie Ravioli. Adam Gopnick wrote about him in a 2002 New Yorker article:

“My daughter Olivia, who just turned three, has an imaginary friend whose name is Charlie Ravioli. Olivia is growing up in Manhattan, and so Charlie Ravioli has a lot of local traits: he lives in an apartment “on Madison and Lexington,” he dines on grilled chicken, fruit, and water, and, having reached the age of seven and a half, he feels, or is thought, “old.” But the most peculiarly local thing about Olivia’s imaginary playmate is this: he is always too busy to play with her. She holds her toy cell phone up to her ear, and we hear her talk into it: “Ravioli? It’s Olivia . . . It’s Olivia. Come and play? O.K. Call me. Bye.”

Ravioli was nominated for an Ellie award. He became the subject of sermons. I’ve always been a little suspicious of how complete and well-articulated the imaginary life of his barely 3-year-old daughter was, but then again, Gopnik is “full of wisdom and elegance”, so perhaps his daughter is equally precocious.

What Gopnik really taught me, though, is to look for the meaning behind the imaginary friends. And in this regard, I, like Gopnik, am a little troubled.

First, there’s the issue of baby-hate: one of the friends likes babies (Zoë), but the other hates them and, we are told, wants to push Dalia’s little brother Nico (Wawa). It feels like a bit of a set-up, as if one day we will find Nico stuffed in the trash can and Dalia will only have to say that she warned us that Wawa didn’t like babies.

I am a bit uneasier, however, about this: Wawa and Zoë keep dying.

If Charlie Ravioli doesn’t have time for Olivia because he’s busy, Wawa often can’t come because she was just killed. Dalia usually can’t say how Wawa died, but I have a feeling that Wawa died in a traffic accident on her motorcycle, because that’s how my uncle, whom Dalia knew well enough, died in August.

The conversation I had with Dalia after the accident was difficult. Kid logic just strips everything down to its most naked and unbearable: Where did he go? Is he coming back? Why not? Why did he have to die? I had no good answers, for her or for myself. It was miserable.

I worried for a while that all this talk of death would traumatize her. But then I spoke to a friend of mine in Seattle who had lost her brother earlier this year. She also has a daughter Dalia’s age, and she told me a perfect little story about death and preschoolers: on a walk down some leafy Seattle street, she had tried to explain to her daughter why Uncle Adam wasn’t coming back. She pointed to an old tree that had fallen over.

“See,” she told her daughter, “Adam is like that tree. When something dies, it doesn’t come back. You can’t talk to it anymore, or see it. It’s just gone.”

They walked in silence for a block or two, until the daughter turned to her mom and announced that she was sad.

“I know,” the mom said. “I really miss Uncle Adam, too”

“Actually,” said the 3-year-old, “I’m sad about that tree.”

That’s the beautiful thing about kids. Those little brains are so good at coping. They can parcel out the big hurts in small packages. They worry about a dead tree. They have a pair of imaginary friends who are killed in the morning but come back to play after nap. As 2Pac said–and he would have to know–Life Goes On: