Murder is up in New York, as is drinking until you end up in the hospital. And in my household, toddler gun violence is at an all time high.

Of course, it’s simulated violence. Like the Dagestani warlord whose son’s wedding ended up on Wikileaks, I only let my child play with a gold-plated pistol: the blinged-up housing keeps it from actually firing.

But if the shooting is fake,  the intent seems to be quite real. “Bum, bum, bum,” my 2-year-old son says from dawn till dusk, pointing sticks and spoons and Legos at us all. “I shoot you with my ShootGun.”

I’m not one to worry too much about violence on TV and what it may be doing to my child. Violence in the media is not new to this generation (Bambi had so much mayhem and death that it was rated one of the top horror movies of all time by Time Magazine). And then there’s that story I like to retell (apocryphal, perhaps), about some pacifist friends of my grandfather and his wife. They forbade their sons to play with toy guns or anything militaristic, only to find that the boys were tearing slices of bread into gun shapes and slaughtering each other with their breadguns in fake mercenary exploits.

An Austrian-born psychiatrist named Peter Neubauer was an early Cassandra about violence on TV (he also wrote an Oedipal study of one-parent children that I’m sure is just plain weird), but even Neubauer found that children were more likely to be disturbed or affected by what they saw if their home life was in turmoil. So I do hope that Nico will be relatively unscathed as long as the hacking, chopping, sawing, blasting, smashing, grinding and knifing stays on the screen, and not in the home. He’ll just be mimicking instead of having actual homicidal ideations.

That’s the plan, at least.

My folks left yesterday after spending a week in town greeting the new baby. Many things to be said about this, of course, much of it good, some not so much. Among the good was the fact that my mother and step-father are neat freaks with a decidedly missionary flair … and Tomoko and I are not.

As such, I enjoyed a full week of parental cleaning! Some folks might find that annoying, a way for the aged parent to reassert his or her authority over the misbehaving child. I don’t feel that way. I like my floor mopped twice weekly, and I’m only about to do it twice yearly (which, by the way, is twice more than Tomoko).

These domestic predilections reminded me of one of my family’s stories, likely apocryphal. It involves my great-aunt Sonia, whom I never met. She moved to Mexico City in the 1930s, and died several years ago. Anyway, she was of a certain communistic political bent, which wasn’t all that unusual among Jews in New York in the Depression. She must have been rather committed to the cause, however—instead of selling out and moving to Secaucus, she bugged out for Mexico, where she married an archaeologist. Their son, Paul Leduc, has, apparently, directed one of the best biopics of Frida Kahlo.

My father went to visit his Aunt Sonia in Mexico when he was a teenager. He was a curious sort, so he asked her why she had moved to Mexico. Was it her dedication to communist causes and social justice? Was it a commentary on the debased American capitalist culture in which she’d been raised?

Not really, Aunt Sonia said, looking around her tidy and well-appointed living room. Perhaps, she admitted, it had been politics that inspired her to cross the southern border—but it wasn’t what had kept her there.

“It’s the servants, Stevie,” she said. “I love the servants.”

There’s a lesson in there somewhere I imagine, but I’m staying away from it.

This clip came via Lindy West (one of 20 under 40!), so I can’t take credit for unearthing it. But because this is a dad-blog, the big-monster-came-and-took-him-to-daddy-heaven line in the clip below seems a good tribute to Leslie Nielsen. The native of Regina (rhymes with ‘vagina’), Saskatchewan–a member of Canada’s Walk of Fame and would-be star of Lipshitz Saves the World (Who’s the Shitz, He’s the Shitz)—died yesterday at 84.

Godspeed, Saskatchewanian.

See you on Monday, folks. Gobble, gobble.