It’s possible, entirely possible, that they represent a herd of zebra, and if you live in an environment in which the stories of the elders and the attention-seekers tend, overwhelmingly, to involve a rare, exciting, and terrifying encounter with a zebra then you might suspect, upon hearing the rumble, that the zebra are coming over the hill at any moment.

You might dread it, and in fear prepare. You might hope for it, because such an encounter might make you as special as all of those others who confronted zebra and about whom we still tell stories because people will attend those stories.

But those hoofbeats in the distance indicate horses. They indicate what they normally indicate, in a world unfiltered by thrilled imaginations, in which storytellers tell stories about the everyday instead of only about the shocking and unusual.

I heard the hoofbeats all weekend. I heard them portend a dramatic meeting with a herd of H1N1 zebra. There was no other explanation for what ailed Adrian: it must be H1N1, because every illness in the world right now is H1N1. There are no stories of doctors diagnosing common colds; news anchors relay death tolls from H1N1 but no stories of common experience. Common experience garners no attention: we all have it, so no one needs to point it out to us.

But the exceptional trumps the ordinary, and if you hear enough stories about how the world is then no matter what your ordinary experience of it is you will believe that the stories of other, exceptional cases, are genuinely descriptive rather than particularly unusual.

Adrian, dear Adrian, sweet boy: those hoofbeats indicate horses. All of the worrying and attention has meant that the simple answer was so easy to overlook: your troubles stem from an ear infection, a gift from your sister and her germy friends.

But who ever heard of an “ear infection”? The term is so submerged now that what might have been a reassuring thought (“Oh, Adrian probably has an ear infection.”) wallowed in exile while the H1N1 chorus echoed from television speakers and social media outlets.

I promise to think “horses” from now on.

Being home sick means that I won’t be co-oping in Adrian’s classroom today, and we’ll miss the class’s pumpkin patch extravaganza and pot luck, which means I don’t have to make or buy a side dish for the pot luck, but also means that I don’t get to take any pictures of Adrian dressed in his Buzz Lightyear costume surrounded by babies in far inferior costumes and also means I can’t remember where the period key is so this sentence is just going to go on and on and I have infinite iterations of conjunctions at my disposal to continue the run-on but I know you’ll get bored of so many words in a row that have nothing to do with each hey that looks like Gerard Depardieu on the television and I think it really is him and that’s the dude who plays Peter Pettigrew and I’m pretty sure that’s Uma Thurman but there is no world in which those three people should ever be in a film together unless it’s about a cook in Louis XIV’s Versailles and thankfully that is indeed what this is about so phew I can’t believe the world was this close to annihilation while Adrian just lay there on his mat convalescing the end.

I used to write a blog about parenting. It was okay. Sometimes I’d tell funny stories.

Hot blooded, check it and see. I’m gonna live to be a hundred and three. (That was a Foreigner/Jiminy Cricket mashup.)

You’d think, based on all that has transpired here today, that I’m the one with the fever, that I’m the one who woke up every hour and a half throughout the night because I was either coughing or my poten-denta were coming in. Alas, I am not fevered. I’m just tired. And it’s 9am and why not just type and type and type and see who reads down this far.

Teragram, em s’ti ?Dog ereht uoy era.

I just totally made that language up. It doesn’t mean anything. Don’t try to figure it out. Hey is that Gerard Depardieu in a movie with Queen Latifah because that should never happen unless it’s a comedy of errors involving a hotel called “poo” or something in a country no one goes to but looks kind of like that country Anne Hathaway is the queen of after she deposes Maria Poppins.

Can people make any money doing this? Adrian is bored and wants to go play some video games but I don’t have any quarters, so I figured if there was a way to make money from blogging maybe I could give him some quarters and he could make use of this sick day the way I used to in high school which was by going to the arcade and chain-smoking while getting the perfect score on Hippodrome and kicking ass at the Terminator 2: Judgment Day pinball game. I also liked Off-Road. What? Oh, but he shouldn’t smoke, no matter how cool the other babies say it makes them look. It makes them look ridiculous, especially when they have no pockets to put their pack in so they roll it up in the sleeve of their onesie.

Hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi.

Your face makes my head feel better. I don’t mean that in a “I’m rubbing your face on my head” kind of way, which I know is the only way to take that sentence if you’re a rational individual. No, I mean that if I were given a choice between hockey and culinary school I’d probably choose hockey because who wants to watch people go to culinary school. Well, maybe if it were on ice, and there were hip checks. (Note: a hip check is not a cool bill at a restaurant.)

Sometimes my stomach feels solid and round like a possum. I know this because I once poked a possum with a broom handle to get him off my front porch and away from the bowl of cat food I left out for the stray cats in the neighbourhood. He didn’t want to leave, and I didn’t want to open the door to chase him off because have you ever seen their eyes???? They are dead, soulless creatures who just wait for you to leave your house then they pounce and you’re over. So I took the screen off the window and I poked him with a broom handle via the open window rather than let him see my toes up close. And he was solid. That’s how my stomach feels sometimes. And that paragraph executed a full and complete thought which is better than

There’s a balloon on the floor that used to float up to the ceiling. It’s black, but Erin denounces such pronouncements: “No! It’s purple!!!” Anyone want to buy a colourblind two year old? Although I’ve never heard of being colourblind in a way that would make black appear to have a hue. Maybe that’s not colourblind but hyper-colour-sighted. Damn, maybe that balloon really is purple in whatever dimension Erin can see into with those eyes.

I went to Versailles once. In the basement cafeteria of Versailles (which is not something you’d ever really think of as a thing, but there is totally a cafeteria, and there are bathroom attendants who sell gum and candy on little tables which isn’t that unusual for European bathrooms, but you only see stuff like that in America if you’re drunk at a nightclub and even then usually the dude isn’t so much selling gum as you are punching a stranger in the bathroom and stealing his gum) I designed, plotted, and wrote out a video game that was going to be the best video game ever. It was a first-person action game that also combined economic strategy, sword-fighting, political intrigue, and turned-based war simulation. It was a gladiator game. I had just seen “Gladiator” starring Russell Crowe a few months earlier and I’d also read Guy Gavriel Kay’s “The Sarantine Mosaic” and I was enthralled with Roman and Byzantine intrigue and games.

So, anyway, Adrian and I are going to watch “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” starring Russell Crowe because of that one time in the basement of Versailles when I bought gum in the bathroom next to the cafeteria. Uma Thurman was not present.

Or is it?

Let’s see. Monday I packed the kids up and drove to the San Francisco Zoo in the rain. The clouds parted, I tossed Adrian in the backpack, and Erin led the way into the zoo and the family farm area where, because it was raining earlier, she had the entire place to herself (apart from) some scary, WE-CAN-READ-YOUR-THOUGHTS, sheep.

Eventually the rain returned and an impending nap time forced us out of the zoo, so we packed up and went home for a couple of hours. A fun time was had nonetheless.

After naps (for everyone) it was time for swimming lessons for both kids. How can a dad alone change two kids and himself in a changing room in time to go to lessons? How can a dad swim with his infant son while his toddler daughter takes her small group lesson when she has a tendency to just launch herself into open water and dad is usually sitting within arm’s reach to drag her up? I wasn’t really worried, but I’m hardly ever worried. Even when I don’t know what I’m doing I act like I do. Also, Erin and I talked a lot about how she has to sit on the step in the pool when her teacher is with another kid. We talked so much about it that I kind of hesitate to move from any steps I’m occupying myself. We talked so much about it that Erin didn’t budge from her step at all that day unless her teacher called to her for her turn. I was utterly proud of her, and of us, for executing what was probably the smoothest lesson/change maneuver we’ve ever done, and we did it all with Adrian further complicating the picture.

(The trick is to get a towel on her, dry him off and change him, then buckle him in his carseat while drying her off, and then, if your prayer for a miracle is granted she will sit still long enough for you to get dried and changed yourself and then you can emerge from the locker room as if it is the easiest thing in the world to do, prompting one of your mom friends to say “I don’t know how you can do this with two!” A brief swell of pride, and a quick switch to ‘casual dismissal mode’ will allow you to say “Ah, this is nothing. You should have seen me take them both to the zoo earlier today.” And scene.)

That…was Monday.

Tuesday I got both kids out of the house with me by 9am, started a laundry cycle at the laundromat with both of them in tow, drove down to a different city to drop off some boxes, returned to the laundromat to move the clothes to the dryers, took the kids out to a late breakfast (or, in Erin’s case, second breakfast), then returned to the laundromat to fold the clothes while the infant fell asleep in his stroller and the toddler rearranged the laundry baskets. This all worked because I thought very hard about the timing of it all before I began the maneuvers (I say “maneuver” a lot, because sometimes you just have to be a bit of a tactician when you have the kids), and it could have failed, fantastically, if I’d been off by even ten or twenty minutes. As it was we never let our laundry just sit in a machine, and we returned home in time for lunch, some play time, and a nap before I started dinner.

That…was Tuesday. (Not as full as Monday, but not exactly sitting around eating bonbons either.)

Wednesday was a school day for all of us. The kids went to daycare and I tried to get some work done around the gym and co-oping. I did okay. I’m a better SAHD than student at this point, though.

Thursday was a day for feeling like crap, so I did.

Friday was a day for getting over myself and getting some work done, so I did, though again, without the kids my motivation to get things done is severely diminished.

Saturday was a family outing to the Children’s Discovery Museum in San Jose. Erin explored; Adrian hung out in the backpack looking around at things. 

During naptime I did some work at a house we’re trying to move into before the kids are in high school (and where I’d dropped the boxes during laundry time on Tuesday). I sold an oven to a guy off of Craigslist (after also completing flooring and water heater sales earlier in the week with people who did not, in fact, chop me up into little pieces and who paid in cash), and then tore out some closet doors and a little framing so that our new floors can extend into those closets smoothly instead of being broken up by a door frame. It will look sweet. If we ever live there. Which…well, there’s a very long story I’m not prepared to share just yet. I’ll keep it as a mystery.

Saturday night was Everybody Get a Little Sick night. So we did.

Sunday was Pumpkin Patch Day and we’d been promising Erin that she could wear her costume at the Pumpkin Patch all week long and we’d already planned to meet up with three other families in a sea of rotting squash and flu season snot. So we went….

And whose kids are cuter than these two?

Erin’s been talking about her Woody costume for nearly two weeks now. We made the mistake of letting her wear it on a couple of different nights and of course she snapped a piece of the lacing wrapping the brim of her cowboy hat. So, I dug around for some kind of tape or glue or something and despite having a junk drawer that is so full of crap that I can barely get it open we only have packing tape in the house.

So, there’s packing tape holding that hat together. But you can’t tell just by looking unless someone points in out to you. Hey, look over there!

See you next week. And Happy Halloween!

“You can’t judge what’s best for every parent!” echoes from the pillboxes on the hillside to the east.

“I’m sorry you don’t love your kids enough to want to spend all day with them!” lands with a concussive “boom” and takes out some of the foxholes to the north.

“If you’re such a judgmental asshole what makes you think your kids are better of with you at home with them?” shatters the brief stillness as the suicide bomber sets off his vest in the middle of the makeshift earthworks.

More artillery rattles off stone walls, upsetting rolling tanks and armoured personnel carriers bringing reinforcements in for both sides. “It’s for the good of the children!” “It’s for the good of the family!”

The bodies of the dead and dismembered rot in pools of vitriol and bitter tears. The bald vultures feast on every righteous, sanctimonious corpse, breathing in the fetid air cast off by the decomposing flesh of bodies losing their integrity in the blazing lights.

The moral of the story really should be: nobody wins except the vultures. If vultures could start wars they surely would. And maybe they do.

(Editor’s Note: I’m actually not neutral in this fight. The biggest mistake isn’t, as some think, considering all parents to be the same, and so the best choice for one is the best for all; the biggest mistake is in thinking that all children are the same, and that they all need a parent with them at all times.

I’ve seen the use of babysitters and daycare referred to as “outsourcing” parenting, with the implication being that any such situation is detrimental to the child in some way. This line is so stark there that it can’t help but be wrong. Kids require a threshold of parental involvement to be reached, surely, but I think this can be reached by the quality of attention as well as through quantity. The point is to not allow them to feel abandoned, but constantly embraced by their parents’ choices for them. Daycare, school, babysitting: these are all situations in which the child can either feel comfortable or neglected by his parents, and if he does feel so neglected then something has gone wrong. But it is thoroughly mistaken to think that these situations necessarily result in feelings of neglect. Bad parents will make their kids feel neglected and abandoned no matter where they are.)

I’m still Rickrolling people, about 20 years after Rickrolling stopped being interesting.

The “Holy crap! A talking muffin!” joke still cracks me the hell up.

I appreciate the adult contemporary comedy stylings of Greg Behrendt.

I do want to know who’s there, and I am glad it’s not a banana.

But whomever is responsible for the nomination of this thing you’re reading for Best Daddy Blog over at The Bump…that’s a joke that goes right over my head. It’s weird, and awesome, and hilarious, I think (but I can’t be sure, because, you see, I don’t get the joke) and mostly this is going to result in some money being raised for a good cause in spite of my smashed ego.

Because you should go vote, and vote often (I actually don’t know if you can vote more than once) for Matt Logelin in this category. If he wins the thing he’s going to donate the winnings to the foundation he set up in memory of his sadly passed wife, and he’s also going to match funds.

I hate to say “Don’t vote for me” because I really am very narcissistic. But I don’t have a charity. And although I have a couple of pictures of Erin in the backpack in my header, and go by “Backpacking Dad” and am selling the Backpacking Dad brand hither and yon, Matt has a picture of his daughter in a backpack on his header too, and that dude is standing in the middle of a rope bridge or something. Maybe it’s chain link. But still, it looks like it spans something fierce. I never go anywhere that might reveal itself to be rope bridge worthy. Bastard.

Go vote for him. Even though he’s already thrashing me by about an 80 to 1 margin. I think…yes…bastard.

(Editor’s Note: While in many cultures it is frowned upon to call someone you’ve never met a “bastard”, in this case it’s perfectly acceptable because some of my best friends are black.)

Thank you for the nomination.

“Erin, sit down please.”

“O-kay!” and she sat. Briefly.

“Erin, sit down please.”

“O-kay!”, and she sat. Briefly.

“Erin, sit down or I’m going to take your fries away.”

The mild death stare from Emily…well…you didn’t want to be in my Oh-So-Self-Righteously-Blogging chair.

Goddammit.

The way the story was related, couched in concepts like “consequences”, “following through”, and “character building” sounded sensible and considerate (although I flinch whenever I hear “character building” said in any tone other than bombastic, satirical deprecation), and at home Emily and I have been giving our own lessons in following through with consequences, teaching Erin’s little neural network how to process conditionals.

But I am not okay with what happened today. I’m getting myself a little worked up about it, in fact, and it’s only become more offensive to me the farther away from the conversation I get.

I was told, in a daily roundup as I was retrieving Erin from school, that they were working on teaching consequences. The example the teacher pulled from today was that when Erin would not stop trying to nab her neighbour’s fruit the teacher packed up her lunch and put it away. I had an uneasy reaction at the time I was told, but as it’s settled in my head I’ve realized that I’m not just uneasy, yet unsure about it: I have no respect at all for that action.

Preemptively let me note that this is not about the teacher depriving Erin of nutrition. As far as I can tell she didn’t. Erin’s lunch containers were at levels consistent with her having eaten a normal amount for her (she’s usually a light eater at lunch), so I’m not upset that she was potentially starving my daughter.

Also, I’ve taken Erin’s food away plenty of times at home, so it’s not the thought of the teacher packing up her food that bothers me. I often threaten to take her food away if she’s not eating it, if she’s not paying attention to it. Usually this has the desired result of her paying attention and eating her food, though occasionally it reveals that she is just finished eating, and so I take the plate away.

But I’ve never, as far as I can recall, taken her food away as a consequence of her doing something other than obviously being done eating, being done with her food. That is what bothers me so much about what happened today.

Using food, the promise of food, the power over food, as a way to control my daughter’s behaviour is completely inappropriate. Firstly, because it isn’t their power to have: I make Erin’s lunch, I provide enough for her to eat, and to eat well. I don’t provide her lunch as a disciplinary tool. As her teachers they are there to see that Erin gets enough to eat on their watch, and that should be their only involvement with her food.

Secondly, I think that using the power to withhold food as a method of discipline is barbaric. I don’t mean that it’s abusive (although there are plenty of examples of genuinely abusive food withholding). I mean that it’s retrograde. It’s discipline through violent authority (the one with the physical power using it to withhold food) which is at odds with so many of the common moral maxims we’ve adopted in contemporary society that I can’t even fathom it.

Thirdly, and somewhat irrationally, I think that using food as a motivator increases the likelihood of a person having problems with food later. I say that I think this irrationally because I’ve never actually seen studies saying that food issues and eating disorders are related in any way to food being used in discipline. But I’ve also never seen a study saying that they aren’t linked. It’s irrational, but it’s also probably understandable that this is a worry I have.

No small part of the level to which I’m worked up about this is that I just feel guilty that my kids aren’t at home with me, that I have to take time during the week to work instead of just being home to raise them myself. But I’m also feeling very righteous right now.

It’s probably a good thing that I won’t be seeing the teachers until the middle of next week. I need to calm down about this a little before I speak to them.

“I’m sharing my dinner with Ai-doo.”

Sometimes Ai-doo is a baby. Sometimes Ai-doo is a cricket. Mostly Ai-doo is Erin’s imaginary friend.

She tells long stories detailing their exploits together, and Ai-doo tends to be a trouble-maker. Sometimes she is afraid of him (her?) but usually they are just playing together.

We’ve wondered, Emily and I, where Ai-doo comes from. He showed up in the early summer, and there are a number of songs Erin listens to that have the phrase “I do” in them. It’s possible she just invented a name.

But I suspect Ai-doo has a more sinister origin than a simple children’s song or a child’s imagination. I suspect that Ai-doo is less an imaginary, than an incorporeal friend.

Because, you see, in the early summer we went to Disneyland as part of our Southern California Road Trip. And at Disneyland, as Erin knows, the ghosts all live “at the haunted smanshon”. And in the bridal room in the Haunted Mansion there dwells the haunt of a groom, whose form is revealed as he pops up from behind a box to declaim: “I do!”

And as the narrator promises, warns, or curses as you prepare to disembark from your doom buggy, we ought to beware hitchhiking ghosts.

Because surely, certainly, a ghost has followed us home.

The question the FTC considers is this:

In analyzing statements made via these new media, the fundamental question is whether, viewed objectively, the relationship between the advertiser and the speaker is such that the speaker’s statement can be considered “sponsored” by the advertiser and therefore an “advertising message.”

Many blogs review products, make statements like “Yay Pepsi” or “Home Depot sucks”, and even get paid to advertise products. Not every instance of a mention of a product will doom the blog to the hell of Guidelines regulation.

The facts and circumstances that will determine the answer to this question are extremely varied and cannot be fully enumerated here, but would include: whether the speaker is compensated by the advertiser or its agent; whether the product or service in question was provided for free by the advertiser; the terms of any agreement; the length of the relationship; the previous receipt of products or services from the same or similar advertisers, or the likelihood of future receipt of such products or services; and the value of the items or services received.

So the first thing the FTC will consider is whether or not a post is “sponsored”, and to do this it will look at things like the history of free products received, the history of the relationship between a blogger and a company, and whether the blogger has been compensated by the company. It is not clear whether or not the product itself is considered compensation, but that doesn’t matter since the receipt of free product itself is one of the things the FTC will look at in order to determine if a blog post is sponsored.

Presumably this doesn’t mean that if you are a review blogger and you receive products to review at no cost to yourself that your blog posts are “sponsored” in the relevant sense. But it also isn’t clear that this is not the case. Because the receipt of products is spelled out separately from compensation it could be interpreted either way. And, with the FTC proceeding on a case by case basis what is considered “sponsorship” on one blog may end up being considered fair content on another.

Paid posts will certainly be considered sponsored. Posts that discuss a product purchased with the blogger’s own money or otherwise not provided directly or indirectly at the cost of the company will certainly not be considered sponsored. It’s the middle ground that gets messy for evaluative purposes, and the FTC has not provided an easy way to tell whether you yourself are going to end up falling under the Guidelines unless you are getting paid to post. They want to see individual cases.

In a spasm of un-speak, the FTC says:

Even if that consumer receives a single, unsolicited item from one manufacturer and writes positively about it on a personal blog or on  a public message board, the review is not likely to be deemed an endorsement, given the absence of a course of dealing with that advertiser (or others) that would suggest that the consumer is disseminating a “sponsored” advertising message.

This is not to say that use of a personal blog means that the statements made therein would necessarily be deemed outside the scope of the Guides; the Commission would have to consider the rest of the indicia set forth above to determine if the speaker was essentially “sponsored” by the advertiser.

This is a long way of saying “don’t feel too worried about receiving and reviewing that single product….but don’t feel too relaxed about it either. We’ll look into it and let you know if we think it constituted sponsorship.”

Further muddling the issue is the value question: the FTC thinks that the value of the product being offered for review is evidence to be used in determining whether or not the post was sponsored. But bloggers have a wide range of prices for their souls: some will sell out for laundry detergent, while others hold out for family vacations. Both bloggers may have been influenced to write a review, and a complimentary one (the issue the FTC hopes to address by applying the Guidelines to bloggers) but the sap who sold his soul for detergent is less likely to be called on it.

(Just as an aside, I don’t care what bloggers do with their blogs. The issue the FTC is looking at is disclosure of material connections. If both of the above-mentioned bloggers disclose the fact that they received the product for free then the FTC wouldn’t even ask the sponsorship question. That question needs to be asked in cases in which the details are not disclosed to readers, so that the Guidelines on material connections, advertising, and endorsements can be applied.)

The point of the FTC looking at blogs and considering the question at all is to prevent deceptive practices in a medium that advertisers are taking advantage of. The worry is about paid endorsement passing as objective commentary. So for bloggers this means disclosing your deal (although if you have no real history with a company or type of product endorsement and you accept a cheap product out of the blue it seems as though you needn’t worry about the FTC).

But bloggers often treat review posts as content. And more importantly, for those who consider their blog writing in some sense creative those post are also creative content. And looking at the apparently rampant product placement in the film and television industry, with no disclosures about which products shown on screen being used and enjoyed by action heroes or sitcom stars are dowried products leaves a terrible taste in the mouths of bloggers who see very little difference between what goes on on screen and what goes on on blog.

Granted, a review post about a product is doing more to pass as objective evaluation (and so possibly to mislead the public if the evaluation is not, in fact, objective, but is instead a positive mention, or pos-men, paid for by an advertiser) than Bruce Willis slamming back a Coke after blowing up a building. But those placements seem, on the surface, to be no less endorsing than a paid review that describes in detail all the enjoyment the blogger received from the product. But the FTC considers one a sort of misleading, or deceptive statement, and the other a sort of fair use. And stunningly, the one that is judged misleading or deceptive is not the one contrived by professional writers scripting an imagined story and actors portraying lives that aren’t their own. Those lies are okay, because we know about them. They do not make a product placement suspect as a misleading or deceptive endorsement.

In fact, the FTC was challenged a few years ago to force producers to place notices, on screen, during product placements in order to inform the consuming public about which shots included paid placements and which did not. The FTC refused, claiming:

The principal reason for identifying an advertisement as such is that consumers may give more credence to objective representations about a product’s performance or other attributes if made by an independent third party than in made by the advertiser itself.

….

Despite the variety and frequency of product placement and brand integration into programming, your complaint does not suggest that product placement results in consumers giving more credence to objective claims about product’s attributes. Indeed, in product placement, few objective claims appear to be made about the product’s performance or attributes.

Which is to say, product placements are okay, since they don’t trick the consumer into thinking someone is endorsing a product based on its qualities rather than based on cash. So there is no need to alert the consuming public that the actor chugging a Budweiser on screen is doing so because the producers were paid to include that beer.

I fear that the changes going into effect on December 1st, 2009 will result in far more blog posts that mimic product placements than they will reveal the compromising relationships between a blogger and an advertiser. There is a perfect model of consumer influence in place with product placement advertising, and the FTC considers those realms to be appropriately subject to the 1980 Guidelines about deceptive claims (Bruce Willis drinking a Coke and it turning him invisible would be a violation, but just saying “ahhhh” would not) without requiring additional regulatory ink to be spilled. Those relationships do not have to be disclosed at all.

So be prepared for many posts from me describing how my day is going, with casual mentions about the fact that I’m drinking a Pepsi, or flying American Airlines, or wearing Nike shoes.

Are we going to be better off?

(h/t to @jessicagottlieb for the link)