Double Daddy Dare

"Dare to be Stupid" is pretty much the good daddy theme song ... even if Al Yankovic's lyrics don't always offer the best advice for responsible popping. Of course, since this week's objet d'eBay is a cassette — and no rightminded person still has the capability to play it — what he says probably doesn't matter as much as what you think he says.

Should he rewrite DtbS, making it darker thanks to the wisdom gained from life with daughter Nina, born 12 years after the album was released? I know it would change my lyrics.

As for acquiring this treasure, here's W(eird)AY, himself, on what you have to look forward to when you get caught in the search for the cassette:

** Does he use his accordion skills to lullaby his child to sleep or drown out her crying? **

2.0 Does Not Equal 72

In "Fatherhood 2.0," Time Magazine cites research that dads who nurture their kids have happier children and lives. "Basically," saisd the research's author, Texas Professor Aaron Rochlen, "masculinity is bad for you."

And in the essay about the changing nature of how society views fathering the magazine cherry picks from available research to highlight another study showing lower-testosteroned males held baby dolls longer than their higher testosterone's brethren. Which makes me wonder if I can ever breed again, having sat on the floor of my daughters' bedroom through an interminable number of naked Barbie (are there any others?) tea parties. The real question is that while masculinity may be bad for you as Time suggests, but what kind of life is attendee at parties where you pretend to eat and drink with unclothed plastic?

Speaking/writing of naked plastic, what exactly was the 72-year-old Brit grandfather fantasizing as he went through the motions to "donate his sperm" at the bank where his daughter-in-law would be making a withdrawal? Perhaps some find this story warm and cuddly, a grandfather doing his all for his son, but doctors quoted say it's potentially dangerous as if getting a 9.2 on the "icky scale" weren't enough to put a stop to it.

** Doesn't seem holy, the divine doublety: grandad and dad the same. **

Through the (Fun House) Looking Glass Mirror

Larry Birkhead and Jerry Stiller: factional fathers in fictional roles.

Birkhead, sperm donor to the car crash that was Anna Nicole Smith and winner of the Danielynn Smith lottery, is reportedly parlaying his good luck into a "reality" television show.

Contrast this with hall of fame — is there such a thing? there certainly should be — Stiller, whose career began in the role of real life/stage husband to Anne Meara, now taking on what has become the comfortable role of crazy father to his (and Meara's) real life son Ben Stiller. They appear in The Heartbreak Kid remake of the 1972 American, not 1993 Australian, film.

** It's a bit too post-modern to define when two guys pretend to be the fathers they're not. **

Zero Son Gain

One of "Two and a Half Men," Jon Cryer, doesn't know how his television son will develop. In a recent interview he suggested it all depended on how the producer's son — presumably the inspiration for the Jake character — grows and the challenges he offers his father.



Nor, like fathers everywhere, does he fully understand what planet his son comes from. As he admits, "Oh I will avoid those same pitfalls ... but you can't and they sneak up and bite you, no matter what. My son just gave me my first ... I was telling him ""You can't play the video games, you can't have the ice cream until you do the chores"" and he said, ""Whatever."" I went ""Oh my God!"" that was my first 'whatever' at 7. I felt like I should have written it down like on the [growth] chart — my first friggin 'whatever' of a long list of 'whatevers.'"

** For an actor father it is art not imitating but being life. **

Here, but Not Present

A dad's absence is still a presence in a child's life.

Three sons of Newark, doctors, describe their experience in coming to grips with absent fathers in their third book, The Bond. Sad as their experience is, would they (or their fathers) trade it for never having the opportunity to learn the biological link — a fate mandated in certain circumstances by a recent Canadian court ruling?

** It's more than DNA — dad not around. **

Who? When? How?

Suppose you are asked to define first-time fatherhood. Do you offer a single definition?

Is Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis a dad just because girlfriend Heather Christie gave birth to a son sharing his DNA? Could four-time father Kevin Federline be defined as a new father, now that he seems to be taking the role seriously? Or are you a (re)new(ed) dad every time you face another step in your child's life, from when s/he is born to when they get on the school bus alone to when they ship you off to the home.

Or should you think of "fatherhood" as Justice Potter Stewart explained obscenity: something he knew when he saw?

** But the usual elements are? **

A Brief Search for Non-fiction in Fiction

Of course you expect your fiction to be non-fiction, in the sense that it provides something autobiographical about the author. And a collaboration of father and daughter (and maybe a third uncredited author, but we'll ignore him as the title page does) must surely tell something of what goes on between them. Wouldn't it?

With "George's Secret Key to the Universe," the first of a children's trilogy, whose plot centers on a scientist and scientist-in-training daughter who hold secrets to the universe, how can one not look closely to find comparisons with the biographies of Stephen and Lucy Hawking — father, daughter and brainiac invalid, novelist daughter.

Ah, but what do you find?

** Was it because there was not enough father-child revelation that millions bought but left unread and certainly uncomprehended Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time? **

Better Red

Sergei's dad thought sputnik was a "hollowed, polished ball with four whiskers of antennas. ... a scientific amusement."

Pops, of course, was Nikita Kruschev, the shoe-banging proponent of "godless communisim," who was prime minister of the Soviet Union when they beat the U.S. into space by launching a satellite, as well as a temporary push by America to improve the science and mathematical education of its students.

The younger Kruschev, who also gives bent to the position that his father was an even tempered man "[who] didn't like to raise his voice," is currently touring and lecturing as part of the 50th anniversary of the Oct. 4, 1957, launch.

Of course, his getting paid to talk about something not that important to him at the time is like living off dad's history by going on and on about your father's Oldsmobile. A phrase which, in General Motors' negative ad campaign for its cars — this isn't your father's Oldsmobile — still lives on as a very popular phrase and the only think keeping alive an extinct car line.

... Which, I guess, brings us back around to the Soviet Union. A giant bureaucracy that imploded and is no more ... which might be a case study for the genius's at GM to consider before they again tries to slight dads and their cars. Or, perhaps, what Mr. Kruschev should really be helping to explain to us?

** A dad can never know whether it is the big moments or small that will constitute the legacy he leaves to his children. **