Toe Piranhas and Robots.

There's this school of thought that you should not give your Babies! war toys or violent toys. People who advocate that approach say that giving things like guns and war toys inspires violent behavior and perpetuates a culture of warmongering. And that's certainly worth thinking about.

Also worth thinking about: What if instead of giving a toy gun to your kids, you simply make them be the gun? Because that's what I do. And it's necessary.

I am not one of those parents who thinks that kids should only have nonviolent toys. I had, I bet, every violent toy you could think of growing up. Okay, maybe not every violent toy. I didn't have nunchuks, despite my best efforts, but I had an awful lot of dangerous toys. I had a "wrist rocket," a slingshot that had a lot of power. That one slipped by Mom, who complained, when she finally saw them, that she thought "wrist rocket" had more to do with rockets and less to do with shooting rocks at people's houses. I don't know what Mom was complaining about; she was the one who bought us BB guns.

Even the toys we had that weren't meant to be violent, like the Evel Knievel rev-up motorcycle,

copied dangerous activities. Plus the fact that they were not violent per se didn't stop us from using them in violent ways, like when we would shoot them at each other.

While violent toys permeated our household, it didn't really matter, like I said, because any toy can be violent. My sister, ten years younger than me, had girl toys like Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcakes. When we had to play with her, the Care Bears would usually want to go on some sort of quest to destroy Strawberry Shortcake. Grumpy Bear would start fights, too. And there were absolutely no ill effects on my sister from that type of play, unless you count as an "ill effect" her once taking an entirely-innocent Fisher-Price train and whacking me on the head with it.

All that violence never carried over into my adult life. I'm about as nonviolent as you can get. True, I'm nonviolent in part at least because any activity more strenuous than watching "Battlestar Galactica" leaves me aching in pain for days, but I am also nonviolent because I'm simply a nice guy. So nice that when I was putting in the range hood that we bought the other day and slipped and banged my head on the cabinet so hard that I caused it to bleed (or, as The Boy put it, "You're sweating red,") I didn't swear, or throw anything, or even make a scene. I did hold my breath for approximately 13 minutes until the urge to do all those things passed, while The Boy and Middle, who were helping me, tried desperately not to say anything or laugh. They're good kids; while they found it inherently funny that I had brained myself, they also know that the number 1 rule to follow when someone near you bumps their head is do not talk to that person at all.

Seriously. It doesn't matter what you say or do. You will make it worse. When someone bumps their head, the only thing you can do is ignore it. The Boy, when I bumped my head on the cabinet, turned immediately to Middle and said "Don't talk!" If you say "are you okay," or "did that hurt," or any of the other nonsensical things that people say when someone is staggering around the kitchen clutching a power screwdriver in one hand and a bleeding forehead in the other, you're just putting yourself in the line of fire. Just walk away and don't talk to that person for at least a half an hour.

It does not matter what you say. If I have just bumped my head, and you come in and say "Guess what? We won the Powerball! We're billionaires!" you will feel anger like the wrath of Zeus raining down on you. And it's going to ruin that moment.

I was putting in the range hood because I have still not entirely graduated to the level of society where all my furniture gets delivered already put together. I've moved up a little from the level where I have to put it all together, but I'm not all the way there yet. So when we decided to buy a new stove we were able to get the stove delivered and installed, but I had to do the range hood myself.

The decision to buy a new stove was prompted, apparently, by our upcoming trip to Florida. It seems that what Sweetie and I do is this: We plan a big trip, then make it harder to take that trip by buying some expensive piece of home furnishings. So four years ago, we went to Las Vegas, then got home and bought a big sectional couch and coffee table. Then last year, we booked a trip to Florida and promptly decided to buy a new TV, which then meant postponing the Florida trip. So now we've rebooked the Florida trip, and based on that, felt it was the best possible time to also buy a stove.

But we got the stove, and got it installed, and I was able to get back to my usual pasttime with the babies, which is, as I said, making one of them be the gun when we play, because I think they need to learn how to handle themselves in a violent world, even if it is a world that is violent primarily because their dad keeps playing violent games with them.

"Be The Gun" started out as a simpler game in which I chased the babies around saying I was going to get them and roaring. Mr F and Mr Bunches were born with running motors. Their favorite thing to do is run as fast and as far as they can. We take them to the park sometimes and they just tear off in a random direction, yelling. They can't do that in the house, so I chase them around the couch. (Like most of my parenting, it makes sense if you don't think about it.) They'll run around a couple of times, then let themselves be caught and suffer the "Toe Piranhas" (me grabbing their toes and yelling "Toe Piranhas!") and then we start again.

That was how the game went until Mr Bunches had a cold and couldn't run quite as much without coughing -- but he didn't want to be left out. So I picked him up and started carrying him to chase Mr F. But Mr F was fast that night. We had trouble catching him, which meant that I had to take extra measures, and I started using Mr Bunches as a laser gun to shoot Mr F, making the laser sounds (bew bew bew) and using Mr Bunches' arm as a trigger.

See? All perfectly innocent and in no way promoting violence. Who could object to teaching your kids that one of them might at any moment be used as the instrument of destruction for the other one? That's just good parenting. And they need to learn these things, because kids never know when they might be the victim not only of their sibling (I still have a Fisher-Price shaped dent in my head, next to the stove-shaped new one) or of the Toe Piranhas but of colorful robots with guns and pincers:

See? He seems unaware and nonchalant-- but he can be that way because my parenting has prepared him for any eventuality.

And they have to be ready to fight off the Toe Piranhas and robots and their brother because if I try it, I'm liable to bust my head open.

Again.

Maybe I Should Steal Wavy Gravy's Identity

I'm worried that I'm not smart enough to live my life anymore. I started worrying because I realized that I didn't know everything I needed to know to live my life.

Didn't you think that as an adult, the kinds of tests you faced as a kid were over? You know the tests, the ones that ask you things that you'll never need to know? As a grown-up, we face all kinds of tests every day, tests that really cause us to show the world what we are made of. Tests like "Can I make it through the day on just 1 bowl of Honeycombs?" Or "Can I tilt my computer screen just enough so that nobody else in the office can see that I actually spend most of my day blogging and reading Peanuts' comics online?" Really the same kind of tests that our pioneer forefathers faced.

Those tests, as tough as they are, are preferable to the boring old kind of tests that we faced in school, tests that wanted to know things like "When did the Civil War start and end?" (Answer: It is what it is.) The Civil War was a popular subject for tests when I was a kid. Even more popular was "The Gilded Age." Remember "The Gilded Age," with robber barons and Mark Twain and Rutherford B. Hayes? I sure remember it, because every history class I've ever taken focused primarily on The Gilded Age. Here's how a year's worth of history broke down for me:

Revolutionary War and founding of America: 1 week.
Thomas Jefferson through Andrew Jackson: 1 week.
The run-up to the Civil War: 1 week.
The Civil War: 2 days.
The Gilded Age: October through April.
1900-1939: 1 week.
World War II to present: 2 days.
The 1960s: 2 1/2 weeks.

It gave me sort of a warped view of American history, one in which our founding fathers were roughly equal in importance to Wavy Gravy. That's what you get when Baby Boomers teach you from textbooks printed in 1921.

Nowadays, I've learned, kids don't even take tests anymore. What they do is watch press conferences in which Brett Favre retires. That's what my kids were doing last week in high school. The school showed the press conference. Live. The school motto should be: Preparing the leaders of tomorrow. For unemployment.

I thought I was done with tests of knowledge that can't help me, though. I thought I'd never need to do that again. Until all these e-commerce and internet websites came up with all kinds of tests that I have to pass to check my email or leave a comment or get my credit report.

It was bad enough with passwords and those scrambled letters. The little test for posting to this blog, for example, uses scrambled, mangled letters that I have to retype. And I never get it right the first time because to me, a loopy, twisted "h" could be an "n," making me guess which it is, and I'm always wrong.

But that procedure is preferable to the new test some sites use, making me answer a question like "How many days are in October," or "If Alice sells six candy bars and makes $6, how much did each one cost?" What makes that so hard is that I've subcontracted out my thinking to the Internet -- I no longer bother to know or remember things; I just look them up. When I can't think of the title of a song, or want to know what my schedule is next week, 0r need to call Sweetie, I don't search my memory. My memory is full of things like the lyrics to "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." I can't hold useful knowledge in there; I go look it up. But if I can't get onto my computer to look it up, then what do I do?

But I'd rather take a million of those tests then the even-worse wrinkle I found recently. I had to check my credit report, and, of course, they have test questions because everyone is worried about identity theft.

I, by the way, do not worry about identity theft. I owe a zillion dollars in student loans. If you want to steal my identity, go ahead. I'll let you know where to send the payments.

I've never checked my credit report before, so I did not expect the test and, when I began taking it, I didn't know how they came up with the test questions and answers in the first place. But there they were. I passed "What was the street you grew up on?" and I passed "Who was your prior employer?" Then I got this:

What is your favorite restaurant?

That threw me. First of all, what would they base that on? Nobody from a credit reporting agency called me to ask me that. Were they judging by credit cards I used at restaurants? Had they called my friends? Did Sweetie tip them off? Can spy satellites track me that closely? And what time frame were we talking, here? Over my lifetime? Over the past year? When I lived in Washington, D.C. and would stop and get chili cheese fries on the way home from work?

But more importantly, what if I answered truthfully? Would they look down on me? Because the answer, quite truthfully, is McDonald's. So I tried that, and it told me I was wrong.

That's right: my credit report said I did not know what my favorite restaurant was. I couldn't check my credit (and I still can't.) But more startling than that was that I didn't, apparently, know enough about me to convince a stranger that I really am me.

I don't know what to make of that. I'd rather they asked about The Gilded Age. That I can handle. As long as they don't scramble the letters.



P.S. It took me three tries to post this because "U" looks a lot like "V" on that test.

No Six-Minute Milk, And Other Rules For Living.

I have a great many rules for living.

The first and most important is, of course, The Golden Rule. You know that one: Do unto others ... etc.

Don't hold it against me that I abbreviated that rule, either. I don't think that Jesus would mind if I save a little typing. Then again, I didn't think that Jesus would mind when my sister and I used to give "high fives for Jesus," but Mom thought that he would mind. But I'm pretty sure he wouldn't because we didn't do it sarcastically or anything. Well, not sarcastically towards Him. A little sarcastically towards Mom.

I didn't invent the Golden Rule, but I try to follow it. I try to follow all of my rules. Like the Second Most Important Rule. It may not be Golden, but it's worth a lot. Worth so much that I'd like others to follow it, too, although all too few people actually try. The Second Most Important Rule is to constantly ask yourself: What can I do to make Roy's life easier today? I don't know why that rule is not more popular. It doesn't require all that much effort. All you have to do is, say, not be ahead of me in line in the 15-items or less lane and refuse to let me skip even though all I've got is 2 cartons of milk and you've got 14 items, and it's 14 items only if you count the three Twix bars as one item, but they're separately packaged, so I think they're three, and then you ask the cashier to get you some packs of cigarettes, and it's two different kinds, so that's clearly over 15 items, all of which is taking place while my milk is getting warm, and a gallon of milk over the course of its lifetime should really only be out of the refrigerator for maybe 5 minutes, in the aggregate, and you're using all of those up while I stand in line behind you.

So following The Second Most Important Rule would have saved all that trouble just by letting me skip, and then we're all happy, right? Well, I'm happy, and that's what The Second Most Important Rule is all about.

Plus, you'd be helping enforce The Milk Rule, which, as I said, is that Milk should not be removed from the refrigerator for more than 5 minutes, total, in its lifetime. I can taste it if its been out longer than that, and it's gross. 6-minute Milk is disgusting.

You've got to have rules in your life, or everything will devolve into Cloverfield. (Cloverfield is my new word for chaos, because I assume that the movie was about the chaotic effect of some kind of monster attack on New York. I assume that because I never got to see the movie. Also, now, when one of the Babies! acts up, I refer to them as "Cloverfield" because I think maybe the monster was called "Cloverfield." I probably should just see the movie.)

(I also call the Babies! other nicknames. In the mornings, when I go get them for breakfast, they are the Raspberries, because Raspberries is mine and Sweetie's code word for "Help me with the babies!" If you go into their room, for example, and they're both jumping so high they're almost bouncing out of the crib and they need their diapers changed and they start fighting, you yell raspberries over the baby monitor. And pray.)

(And I call them "Bungalow Bill" and "Captain Marvel" after the Beatles' song. But that's mostly when they're at work with me and we play a lot of Beatles' music.)

(The Babies!, by the way, do not have any idea what their actual names are. I'm serious. We have nicknames for them that we use all the time and have since they were born, and they've never been called by their real names, so when they go places like the photo studio for pictures, we have to explain to the photographer what their nicknames are and why we call them that, because the Babies! do not answer to their real names. So keep that in mind when you get around to picking a nickname for your own kid(s).)

So to avoid Cloverfield in my own life, I have a series of Rules for Living that I follow religiously -- and not religiously like "high five for Jesus" religiously, religiously the way your great aunt went to church every day: seriously and without bending them, ever.

My rules range from clothing-related rules like "Always take dress shirts from the right side of the closet," because I hang my shirts and pants to the left, so the shirts on the right are the ones I haven't worn in the longest. That way I don't repeat shirts too often. Or "Don't take off my shirt while jogging until I'm through the park," a rule meant mostly to protect the little kids; I don't tan much and I'm not in what you would call peak physical condition, so I don't want to be responsible for scaring little kids by showing them what almost-40 really looks like. Or "Corduroys can only be worn between October 1 and March 31 no matter what the temperatures are on other times," which is the only reason I get a little excited about cold weather, and the only reason I'm a little sad when spring gets here: I love the zoop zoop zoop sound my cords make when I walk.

I've got non-clothing-related Rules, too, like "Lunch has three categories," which has as its corollary, And one of the categories should be Ramen noodles. And rules meant to protect me, like When you're going to the doctor, leave your wallet and keys in the car and wear the light shoes in case they weigh you, because everyone knows that the wallet bumps that weight way up. And sometimes they round it up, too, for no reason at all! The last time I went, the little slider was right in the middle and it could be a 2 or 3, and the nurse went with 3. Why? I don't know. Maybe she was accounting for the fact that I'd taken off my belt. Belts are heavy.

You get the point. My Rules for Living make the world a better place. For me. Especially The Second Most Important Rule. Commit that one to memory. And if you don't let me skip, at least get only one Twix. Because there were none left for me.

Raspberries! Raspberries!