Monthly Archives: June 2010

Dealing With Bullies the New Old-Fashioned Way

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There’s something I don’t understand about the local paper’s Sunday article about cyber-bullying and how schools are dealing with it. It’s actually quite a good story, and shows, without much exaggeration, how texting and Facebook are making the already uncomfortable experience of middle school even more unbearable.

But what struck me was the opening anecdote, in which the parents of a sixth-grade girl discover their daughter has received “a dozen shocking, sexually explicit threats” from the cellphone of a 12-year-old boy. Immediately, they bring the problem to the principal of the kids’ New Jersey high school:

Punish him, insisted the parents.

“I said, ‘This occurred out of school, on a weekend,’ ” recalled the principal, Tony Orsini. “We can’t discipline him.”

Had they contacted the boy’s family, he asked.

Too awkward, they replied. The fathers coach sports together.

Wait, wait, wait! What? I can understand the kids being too young and frightened to deal with this on their own. But the parents are supposed to be adults. The fathers even seem to have some kind of social relationship, but they consider it “too awkward” to discuss this serious problem?

What am I missing here? Is it because I don’t care about sports that I don’t understand why “coaching sports together” is a reason NOT to deal with this outside the school (and legal) system? Or is it because my daughter is too young for me ever to have had to deal with any kind of between-kids issue with another parent? I mean, I know that’s coming one day—we live in a small building with two other kids Sasha’s age, and surely one day one of them will do something to Sasha that I’ll have to talk to their dads about. Or vice-versa. But that will, I hope, be the advantage of having relatively close relations with kids’ parents—we know each other, and can deal with these problems much more easily.

Am I totally out of my mind here? Or are these cyber-bullied parents just pussies?

Terror Babies!

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This one, from Texas congressman Louis Gohmert (no relation to Gomer Pyle) needs little context since it’s so laudably insane. Seems that terrorist cells abroad are “gaming” the American immigration system by inseminating terrorist-moms with terror-babies bent on “destroying our way of life.”

That’s good stuff.

A Week on the Wagon: Embowelment Edition

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In the annals of history, few exhortations have been as universally stirring to mankind as the words that DadWagon’s own Christopher Bonanos composed yea this very afternoon. After a week in which he said “Meh” to Father’s Day and “mush” to a children’s classic, after throwing in the towel in the millennia-old gender wars, he turned his attention to the most vital of human endeavors—diaper advertising—and raised a sonorous cry to the heavens. Quoth this Greek: “Bring on the brown!”

But once the brown has been brought, what then do we do with the do, dear brothers? Why, we call up Theodore, who declared himself useless except when it comes to cleaning up feces. He was perhaps being a little unfair to himself, as he possesses other skills, such as making fun of that poor schmo Jon Gosselin and finding the sunny side of the divorce battle that has torn his life apart. A talented man, that Mr. Ross.

Nathan, meanwhile, spent the week glued to the television, tearing himself away from a Stanley Cup (right?) match only long enough to tease stormsweeper with the prospect of a Father’s Day handjob, then turning right back to the boob toob in anticipation of some hot gay daddies (on CNN). And then, without a trace of irony, he wondered whether all his gadgetry, Twittery and bloggerizing were distracting him from the business of fatherhood.

While some might criticize this form of LCD OCD, I prefer to think Nathan’s simply following the government’s advice on being a good father, which I recently unearthed (in order to mock). I guess I was in a mocking mood, because I also laughed at my daughter’s cataclysmic tumble on a Chinatown sidewalk (no wonder she pretends not to know me), the almost-sale of a baby at Walmart ($25), and the Taiwanese government’s attempt to convince its citizens to procreate.

The four of us also Tantrumed over some chick’s declaration of the “End of Men,” and although we came to no clear resolution, I think we can all agree that while men haven’t ended, this week has. See you on Monday!

How to Sell a Pee-Sopper

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OrganicBabyFood1We here at Dadwagon have had plenty to say about the marketing of diapers, on the grounds that it’s both ridiculous and sexist. What we haven’t seen is an ad that deals with the contents of a disposable diaper. Disgustingly.

Till now! Take a very close look, via Copyranter, at this ad. (Yes, it’s for baby food, not diapers, but I have a point to make here.) Those green blotches are little country scenes, filled with presumably sweet-smelling meadows and trees. But view the photo quickly, from a normal distance, and it’s more like the usual diaper leavings.

I’m in favor of it, frankly. The customary TV spots in which a flask of sterile blue liquid is poured into an absorbent surface have always bugged me, because all they do is scream THIS IS NOT URINE, HONESTLY, ABSOLUTELY, DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT PEE, LA LA LA, NOTHING ABOUT PEE GOING ON HERE, AND DON’T EVEN TALK TO US ABOUT FECES, WE DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT WORD MEANS! If you ask me, they’ll do a lot better with potty humor and poop jokes. Every new parent of this generation, or the next few generations for that matter, has been reared in a high-irony environment, and there’s no reason to dance around this stinkiest of subjects. Literalism has already come to feminine-hygiene ads, which have ceded those running-on-the-beach-in-gauzy-lighting moments in favor of (gasp) actually showing us what a tampon looks like, and, in one memorable ad, even showing an abstracted red dot. When it comes to diapering, we’re still stuck in 1960. I say, bring on the brown.