From a Father's Loss

The fathers' loss category appears to be an odd, but growing, international marketing niche. The good news — for now, at least — is that the fathers who suffered and their future like are the ones to benefit.

Out of Indiana comes Tuesday Mornings with Dads, tales of fathers who have lost a son or a daughter. With obvious reference to Mitch Albom's Tuesdays and the Chicken Soup series of personal growth essays, the book hopes to reap profits for charities important to these fathers of tragedy.

Via Paris (although focused on American service) comes a calendar raising funds to support goldstarfathers.com, a site for the grief and support of men who have lost children to war. There is martial art and for every man who contacted producer Blackwell (whose son was blown up by mortar in 2007) about his own loss there is a star noting the day when the child died.

Honoring grieving fathers and helping them honor their children is a noble idea. Unfortunately, it is one thing to hope that only those personally affected guide these products and another to truly believe it will be a long time before random and unconnected folks and businesses start making money off the "father's loss" hook.

Evil d. Good, Again

An unfortunate life lesson is offered with two recently published books.

St. Louis Park's (Minn.) Lloyd Svendsbye has written about growing up with an honorable man. His memoir is titled with his father's death bed statement about his contentment with life: I Paid All My Debts. Svendsbye, a Norwegian immigrant, created a life from the Minnesota soil, fighting against the harsh climate and through the Depression, among other farming challenges.

Queens (N.Y.) Victoria Gotti has also recently penned some thoughts about her dad. This Family of Mine talks about growing up as the child of a thief, extortionist and killer. With her brother and sister chiming in with publicity to help remind folks about their dad's evil — even as they claim he was practically the stereotypical loving papa at home — it seems pretty likely that the heinous will vastly outsell the virtuous.

Presumably (hopefully), the afterlife reward varies significantly from the one here on earth.

Father of Father Goose

As imagined by L. Frank Baum (father of four ... and of The Wizard of Oz):

Old Mother Goose became quite new,

And joined a Women's Club,

She left poor Father Goose at home

To care for Sis and Bub.

They called for stories by the score,

And laughed and cried to hear

All of the queer and merry songs

That in this book appear....

And so this week's objet d'eBay is a relic from 1899, the second edition of nonsense poems (some quite offensive to modern taste) that paid quite a few bills, which is a pretty good reason for a father to get his nonsense on.

Pink and Gray Stories

What daddy stories should you tell? Our current preference is for all pops to tell Binky the Pink Elephant types of stories



like the two fathers who decided to publish iPhone books. After all, Binky is much safer a tale than lying to your son about what kind of spy you were during WWII with tales of gray.

Singing the Dad Songs

Unfortunately, there isn't enough news (even so-called news) to rinse out the taste of Mackenzie Phillips' joint sordidity with her musical father John. There is the news that son Adam Cohen has begun to embrace the musical influences of his folk legend father Leonard. And a father-son (ages old and 7) rocking out to Pearl Jam is a heart-warming story of a boy's first concert and a dad's dream-come-true.

It's a microcosm of most lives with fathers where the extremely bad so often blankets the many small goods. Alas ...

Dreaming Big

Daddy dreams news.

We have the wonderful, such as the fulfillment of Mizzou man Johnny Stabno's generation-long dream of climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, reaching the summit on his 64th birthday alongside his son, Andreas. And we have the likely loony theory that Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father [Earlier: Dreams] should really be called "dreams from a Kenyan father as transcribed and repurposed by a discredited 60s radical." That theory (established belief among those who hate the current U.S. president) in simpler terms, is that Bill Ayers is the real author of Obama's memoir.

Fake Daddies. Real Lessons?

The caring-but-out-of touch-old dad, the oblivious-I-am-your-friend dad and the gay dads. Four actors play pops in the new ABC sit com, Modern Family and so let the competition begin for best dad (or least best lessons to be learned from any dad). Hopefully there'll be at least a few.

Not What You'd Think

More material for the "don't jump to conclusion's file": From the culture of gay can come surprising fertility.

In nature, evidence comes from the partnership of two Griffon vultures. Dashik and Yehud, both male, were an item before a zookeeper thought about making them foster parents, which they did successfully before splitting up. However, post split up, the gay dads biologically fathered with new, female partners, having baby GVs on the same day and with the exact same weight.

In politics, we have the case of San Francisco (the Gay Sodom, according to some who believe the San Francisco treat should be nothing more licentious than rice). Mayor and gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom has been busy off the campaign trail twittering the birth of his new baby girl, Montana. Newsom follows in the stroller path of former mayor Willie Brown, who also fathered while in office and joins an apparent heterosexual fertility culture by the bay in City Hall as supervisors and others have also become new pops.

And the lesson is ...?