Terrifying, indeed, this slideshow unearthed and sent around by Alex Smith: Horrifying Sesame Street Halloween Costumes.

Yes, we’ve had our fun with Bert, Kermit, Elmo and Katy Perry’s dirty pillows on this blog, but there is nothing funny about adults trying to dress like a muppet and failing, or, like this person, just fornicating all over the entire concept of muppetry.

But the images I will be discussing most with my therapist, if I ever get one, will be the ones involving Bert and Ernie. Crotchy Elmo is just the tip of the terror.

When the woman who fused gametes with me became pregnant for the first time, she started seeing other pregnant people everywhere she went: in the park, on the plane, on the subway. The whole world had gotten knocked up simultaneously. It was deeply subjective and yet entirely real to her.

And now, in quite the same way (actually, in a totally different and less awesome way), I see One-Pot Cooking everywhere.

DaddyTypes linked a while back to a story about a holy-crap-that’s-amazing pyramid apartment on top of the Smith Tower in Seattle, and the one thing that really stood out to me in the story was the little detail about the owner’s hospitality habits:

The next month alone, she said, would bring two school-parent dinners; the annual gathering of the Progress Alliance, a left-leaning donor group; a fund-raiser for Representative Jay Inslee, Democrat of Washington; and a “marvelously goofy TheFilmSchool event,” with guests acting out film roles, directed by the actor Tom Skerritt. Almost all these affairs would be “one-pot specials,” Ms. Franklin said, that she prepares herself.

Yup, I read one-pot.

And when I finally got around to watching the (surprisingly compelling) documentary Babies, what did I notice about the Mongolian and the Namibian child? That they seemed to be eating mush from, you guessed it, a one-pot of some kind.

I got this way because I recently bought my wife a birthday gift that was actually for me: a Zojirushi rice cooker. We are now, for the first time, a Rice-Cooker Family, a genetic cousin to the other one-pot varietals: the Pressure-Cooker People, the Crock Potters, Dutch Oveners, the half-wild Bedouries of Australia, the warring Sač clans of the Balkans. We are all bound by the same urge to just throw some of our favorite ingredients into some kind of concave lidded thing and cook it until we’re hungry.

We are, frankly, a little late to the party. My wife is half-Japanese and half-Mexican, a combination that really should qualify her for a free rice-cooker at birth. So now that we have one, we are making up for lost time. That means oatmeal and almonds every morning, brown rice with miso paste for lunch, Moroccan couscous for dinner. Dr. Atkins would be mortified by our reckless carboloading, if his own mingy diet hadn’t already (most likely) killed him.

I do have a spiritual guide in this journey: Roger Ebert, who aside from his blogging, reviewing and sharply truthful Tweeting, has found time to evangelize for rice-cookery in his 500th (or so) book, The Pot and How to Use It: The Mystery and Romance of the Rice Cooker.

It’s a slim volume without much pretense, perhaps fitting for someone who swears he’s neither gourmet nor gourmand, not to mention someone who stopped drinking in 1979 and stopped eating in 2006 (his well-documented fight with cancer left him reliant on a feeding tube).

What the book is, however, is a fabulous pep talk for intuitive, convenient cooking. Ebert may be obsessed with rice cookers (Zojirushis in particular), but it’s less about the device than the idea that we can and should cook real meals at home, space and time limitations be damned. This includes breakfast; having a rice-cooker means never again having to feed my kids the microwave oatmeal that Ebert dissects this way:

Take a good look on the label on that microwave oatmeal you’ve been eating. It’s probably loaded with salt, corn syrup, and palm and coconut oils–the two deadliest oils on the planet. It’s a dangerous travesty of the healthy food it pretends to be. But it’s high-fiber, you say? Terrific. You can die of a heart attack during a perfect bowel movement.

The book has some big lessons, I think, for dads. Many of us are newly tasked with cooking quick meals for growing families, preferably with actual ingredients instead of the multicolored plastics that pass for commercial food products these days. I have always cooked, but slowly, relying on recipes that I have read and reread like a contract lawyer. But I noticed that these days that the diners (my kids) tend to fall into sheer crazed hunger if I’m a half-hour or more late with dinner.

So the task, then, is to cook healthfully but most of all, quickly. Or, by better genius, to cook ahead of time, which is exactly what the rice cooker allows me to do. In the morning, where time sags and slows just a bit before the kids wake up, I can actually throw a risotto into the pot, press a few buttons, and it will begin cooking later in the afternoon and be ready by 5:30p. Ebert claims you can even cook andouille or beef stew (those are actual recipes from his book, though he supposes you could also cook “wild boar or minotaur”). I haven’t tried any of that yet, but if I can be the kind of father who not only dresses a kid or two and brushes a few of their teeth, but also cooks dinner using the meat of a mythical beast—all before sunrise—then I will be a man indeed.

One more thing: Ebert, one of the truly good and generous people in our business, has agreed to talk to DadWagon about his book, rice cookers, and what his father cooked for him as a child. He may even throw in a Minotaur recipe. Look for the interview tomorrow. We’re very excited.

This is a screenshot from when I took the kids to Jing Fong, the ridiculous Dim Sum banquet hall, this weekend and tried to use Google Maps to help me drive around Chinatown.

Here’s what the Don’t Be Evil Cartographers told me: to get one block over from where we were (green pin) to Mott Street (red pin), I would need to take the Manhattan bridge across the East River into Brooklyn, then drive back into Manhattan on the Brooklyn Bridge.

I’ve been burned before by the Goog. I used it in Istanbul to tell a cabbie exactly where I was headed, because he wanted to drive me in circles and charge an extra $5–but the data roaming fees came out to almost $50. Actually, that’s AT&T and me colluding in greed/stupidity. But Google did almost make me drive into a river near my cousin’s place in southwest France because the dirt road the map was leading me down was suddenly not actually a road. Much more tragic, I was once sent to Hoboken when what I asked for was an address in Jersey City.

And yes, I am an idiot for trying to drive in Chinatown on a weekend. And it’s maybe weird to use Google Maps to figure out what streets are one-way. But fortunately, the single shred of common sense that I still have left kept me from going to the next borough just to get to the next block.

For the last week or so, JP has been refusing to have me put him to bed at night, instead insisting that my girlfriend help him with his bath, brush his teeth, and read him a bedtime story.

The lazy part of my personality (AKA–70-75 percent, depending on how well I’ve slept) finds this development thrilling. The vegetable part of my evening starts that much sooner, and I get the satisfaction of knowing I’ve made my massively pregnant girlfriend put in a little extra labor at day’s end. Good stuff.

But there is a nagging uncertainty as to why JP wants her rather than me. I’m mostly happy with it–I want him to love and accept her, which he does. But I am the dad, I like my prerogatives, and now that I’m not wanted, I kinda want to do it.

And yet… sitting here to write this, at night, perhaps I’ll just insist on doing it tomorrow night.