Envy, Thy Name Is Baseball

Before I get into any of this, let me be clear: things aren’t so bad. I have a lovely and continually pregnant wife, two lovely and preternaturally intelligent kids, a lovely and relatively remunerative job in an only-perceived-as-dying-but-not-really-dying industry, most of my teeth, and whatever additional things one might think of to connote basic, boring, lame-ass middle class ambrosia.

Now onto the complaining.

So I took JP to a baseball game this past weekend, which is a fine thing to do. Good seats, better hot dogs, and a fireworks display at the end. The only problem was that it wasn’t to a game contested by my favorite team–the Mets (whatever)–or his favorite–the Yankees. No, we weren’t watching the Major Leagues at all, but the minors, the Met’s a-ball affiliate that plays its games on the boardwalk in Coney Island. This was a reasonably priced evening, as these things go: $16 a pop for the tickets, plus whatever I spent on two dogs and a two cups of ice cream (served in a tiny cup that resembles a Met batting helmet–souvenir!) Fun was had by all (although the woman sitting next to us that JP spent the night describing videogames to might disagree).

As a kid, my father, who, at the time at least, occupied a fairly similar place in the middle class as I do today, took me to a few ballgames per year–major, not minor–plus the Knicks, and don’t forget the U.S. Open, a couple of Broadway shows, the opera or ballet once or twice when he could sedate me into going, along with a few other pricey cultural activities that slip my mind. He also sent me, my brother, and my two stepbrothers to an uptown private school.

Again, Tomoko and I are doing all right. It’s just that times have changed in this brutal and vicious city we so love, that the middle class lifestyle is now only the prerogative of the super-wealthy. Or, a better way to put it–I went looking for the middle class (in my wallet) and discovered there was no there there.

Final complaint: brother, can you spare a dime (I’d like to retire some day).

Connect Thyself: Router Giveaway from Linksys

Note: This post was sponsored by Linksys and the new Linksys E4200v2 router. For more information on sponsored posts, read the bottom of our About Page.

Just two short weeks ago, DadWagon reader Max Yang hit the jackpot with a $100 BestBuy gift certificate from our sponsor, Linksys. As Max so elegantly wrote in response, “Winner, winner, chicken dinner.”

Well, we are officially raising the stakes on that chicken dinner. It is now a full filet mignon. Because this week Linksys is giving away a E4200 router, retail value $179.99 (yes, that’s almost 80% more than $100).

But figures are not important. Before passing this on to one of you (rules for the contest below), we needed to be sure this thing works. So Linksys was good enough to send us a router to test drive. We hooked it up at DadWagon’s secret laboratory somewhere in the five boros, and we can now tell you this. It works. It works, in fact, much better than any router we’ve used in our civilian lives before.

The details:

Ease: We are a dadblog, written by men who wish there were still typewriters on earth (one of the four co-founders, for example, left to write a book about Polaroid cameras, of all things). We don’t code, we’re not good with cables. This router did not ask this of us. Put in the CD, stick blue cable into orange port, and you’re basically done. As bruised veterans of the 2010 War with the Wireless Repeater that Would Not Ever Ever Register on Any Network Ever (a riveting story to be told another time), we are glad for ease of use.

Power: This is not scientific, but the walls of our test-space are made of concrete that is, according to our measurements, hellathick. We were nervous at first about the range of a device that has no antenna (see the sleekness in the photo). That’s because we are the type of suckers who used to believe that a cellphone wouldn’t be any good unless it had an antenna (again, we are Luddites). As it happens, though, this router blasted (in a very invisible and non-damaging way) through any and all obstacles, and we were quickly able to download enough Dora the Explorer cartoons to have our children reading Don Quixote in the original before lunch.

Options: As part of the easy setup (see above), the router automatically established a guest network with a separate password for us. We hadn’t thought we’d need a guest network, but it would sure be handy if we were running an AirBnB hostel in the home, or if our house guests might steal our data, or if we want to keep our wives away from our passwords (kidding!). Granted, we don’t get a lot of visitors since we brought two incontinent yelping young things into this world. But the function is actually pretty cool. Bonus: USB capability, so you can plug a external hard drive directly into the router and store from your wireless devices. We live, as many fathers do, in a ceaseless whirlpool of digital photos and video, both personal and for work. We are, in essence, data-drowning. We applaud anyone who can give us a little life raft.

The Giveaway: Same rules as last time. Comment on this post on our Facebook page and in one week’s time we, with the help of the genius algorithms of Random.org, will pick a lucky winner. Even Max Yang is eligible.

The Worst Parents in the World

Note: This post was sponsored by Linksys and the new Linksys E4200v2 router. For more information on sponsored posts, read the bottom of our About Page.

 

Sasha and Matt enjoy the iPad in Rome, each with their drink of choice.

We saw them everywhere we went in Rome last month—at restaurants, on the bus and metro, in cafes. They looked like tourists, American most likely, youngish, with a toddler in tow. Totally normal. But, we’d notice, in the middle of meals, or squeezed into a crowded, slow mode of public transportation, they’d do the unforgivable. The kid would start to act up, and out would come—wait for it, wait for it—the iPhone. Sometimes the child would play simple games, Tozzle and the like, but often a video would come on, and the child would then sit entranced, immobile, ignoring the plate of specially prepared pasta al pomodoro while her parents would, in turn, ignore the child—and while all the sophisticated Italians in the area tried not to notice the little glass slate’s bleeps and burbles. And we, we resented them all—fatuous digital addicts in the birthplace of Western Civilization. How could they?

They were, of course, us, the Gross Family, simply trying to muddle through a two-week vacation in Italy with the least amount of distress. Our daughter, Sasha, is 3, with all the impulses and uncontrollability that go with that age. For the most part, she’s pretty good, pretty quiet, pretty well-behaved, but at a certain point in every meal or museum trip, she’s run out of steam, and though we’d do everything we could to calm her and engage her in the food or activity, there were limits. And so I’d bring out my iPhone and fire up “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (in Mandarin, for what it’s worth) or Monkey Preschool Lunchbox (keeping the volume way down, for what that’s worth), and then Jean and I would enjoy the rest of whatever in relative peace.

But the guilt! The incredible, unbearable guilt! We’d succumbed to the worst of all temptations, and had proved ourselves to be the lazy, irresponsible, uncreative American parents everyone stereotypically expects us to be. No verbal games for Sasha, no in-depth toddler-level conversations, no new flavors discovered. Instead, pulsing pixels and slackjawed amusement for Sasha, an extra glass of wine for Mommy and Daddy.

Actually, that’s not true at all. Actually, I felt no guilt whatsoever. Sure, I would’ve preferred Sasha to eat all her food or attempt to engage with us, her parents. But just because the iPhone (and its ilk) is the easily ridiculed emblem of our digital age doesn’t mean it’s essentially bad.

The thing is, we love to make fun of our addiction to new technology—almost as much, in fact, as we love to play with new gadgets. But their ease of use and startling breadth of features always somehow provoke a level of guilt. Our parents and grandparents didn’t have these things—they had books and banjos and candlelight and each other, and they did fine. We shouldn’t have to placate our kids with retina displays—we should make do with yesterday’s (or last century’s) tech, right?

It’s a romantic idea, and a stupid one. I mean, I’ve been using computers in a serious way for the last 28 years, and now, what, I should deny my kid the opportunity to get the same experience? There is no fighting the fact that devices like the iPhone, iPad and i-everything-else are going to be a fundamental part of our children’s lives (barring a zombie invasion or SkyNet takeover, of course), and those who would argue that there’s something inherently better about pre-digital entertainment are wasting your time, and their own.

I don’t mean to say you shouldn’t also try to promote things like actual books, wooden toys, or whatever. I’ll certainly squeal out loud with joy (if internally) the first time I see Sasha amuse herself with a tome of quality material at a restaurant meal. That’s what I used to do when bored, and my total immersion in novels does not strike me as all that different from Sasha’s immersion in Pocket God.

So, today I would like to call for a small but subtle change: From now on, let no one express surprise over the facility with which small children manipulate Apple products. From now on, let no one use “iPhone” or “iPad” as snide shorthand to dismiss children and their parents as tone-deaf solipsists or cultural philistines. From now on, let’s accept the place of gadgets in our lives and our children’s lives alongside the books and Matchbox cars and dolls and Legos and all the other crap we amuse ourselves with in order to forget for a too-brief moment the crushing boringness of life and the inevitability of our deaths—and theirs, and their children’s, too.

From now on, let us chill out about technology, and guiltlessly use it whenever the hell we want. And let us not use it, too. These things are all equivalent now.

Let me leave you with one final anecdotal observation on kids and technology. Late last year, as Sasha’s third birthday approached, Jean and I discussed what to get her. She’s always been interested in the photos we take of her with our iPhones, so we thought: How about a kid’s camera? We got her the Fisher-Price Kid-Tough Something-Something, and when she opened it that December morning, Sasha was excited, running around the house and taking as many pictures as possible. Pretty neat.

But after that, she just didn’t use it much. If it happened to be lying around, she might pick it up and fire off a few shots, but it wasn’t the center of her life. And when we went off to Rome, it stayed home.

Which is not to say she didn’t bring a camera. No, she brought one—a tiny plastic toy camera, whose button cycles through images of various wild animals: a lion, an elephant, etc. It fits in her pocket, and it always seems to be nearby, and she’ll bring it up to her eye and squeal, “Say cheese!” as if she’s really taking a picture. She loves it, more than the digital one, I think. And that’s fine. When she’s ready to get serious about digital photography, the Fisher-Price one will still be around, and she can learn on that. Unless, by that time, she’s ready for her own iPhone.

Auschwitz Video Game Goes Kaput!

Via Heeb:

For four years, a team of programmers from around the world has been working to build a mod (or modification, for you non-nerdy “outdoor” types) of the classic 8-bit shooter, Wolfenstein 3D. Titled “Sonderkommando Revolt,” the game features a Jewish protagonist who escapes from certain death, seeking revenge by killing Nazis and rescuing as many Jews as he can. The game was to officially be released in January 2011, but that all changed two weeks ago when the team released a trailer for the game that shocked many humorless viewers. The trailer shows off shots around the concentration camp, some of which get about as graphic as an 8-bit game could. The “money shot” that has bound the panties of international blowhards features piles of dead Jews, stacked like dirty laundry behind a cage, their gore hanging out. Upsetting? You bet. Anti-semitic? That’s the question that has forced the team to shut down the project for good, thanks in part to some pushing from the Anti-Defamation League.

Yes, yes, yes. Tasteless and all that. Wouldn’t want my kid playing such a game. Perish. the. thought. But…

Wait, before the but–to my boys (and girls) over at the Anti-Defamation League. Please do not boycott DadWagon. We like to think we’re humorous, and most of us are at least partly kinda Jewish, and our former founding editor, Christopher Bonanos is frequently mistaken for a Jew (ask him–it’s true). In short, we feel entitled to make fun of sensitive Hebrews because we are insensitive Hebrews. So don’t boycott us even if all news is good news. We don’t have enough readers to tempt fate.

There.

But…isn’t this basically the fucking premise of Inglourious Basterds minus the zippy dialogue?