Frubber Bodied and Rubber-Faced Sons

Consider being father to a child who is "an interactive learning companion, a synthetic pal who can engage in conversation and convey human emotion through a face made of a skin-like, patented material Hanson calls frubber."

Or, perhaps you might prefer to sorta adopt a 60-year-old dyspeptic divorced comedian?

Obviously, there are stories behind David Hanson's two Zenos — one an eighteen-month-old, the other a robot — and Shelly Berman (is he really still alive?) taking Larry David under his wing.

Still, there is something about fatherhood that links the two disparate stories. Hanson was working on what would become the mechanized child while the flesh and bones one was still a gleam in the eye of mother and father. The 81-year-old Berman's adopted son (brother to an adopted daughter) died 40 years ago, at age 12, of a brain tumor.

Two fathers, investing themselves in real and then made-real sons.

** It's never all about the sperm. **