When did all my friends get so uncomplicatedly gooshy about their parents? I like mine a lot but I see all these "world's greatest dad" posts and think "am I supposed to do that?!"
Jammie's did one of those for me on Mother's Day, at about 4 pm, and it was very transparently "is this what everybody does? Does heebie want me to do this? Because everybody but everybody has done one."
I made my father croissants -- if he wants sycophantic social media posts he can get a Facebook account.
If you really loved him, you'd have made cronuts.
Anyway, it loosely seems like a lot of my peers in their 30s and 40s have fathers in their 70s and 80s. One person from high school even did a "even at 82 years old.." post about her father.
I got him a card but forgot to send it. My son got me a rock, which was at least painted.
I'm in my forties and my dad's in his seventies -- I mean, he could still pass for early sixties, but having kids in your thirties isn't unusually aged.
My dad will turn 70 this year. 70 is plain old old-fashioned old. It is sobering. So instead I think about things like why cronuts sound stupid.
8: When Newt was in nursery school, the week before Father's Day, he excitedly told us that they were making surprise presents for Fathers Day. Kidding around, I asked "Is it a rock?" And his little face fell, because it was a rock. Painted, but a rock.
We always just do a phone call. At times it occurs to me that I may not be the world's best offspring.
Homemade croissants are an incredible hassle, and probably not worth the trouble, but they turn out very good.
When xelA is 40, I'll be 81. Which is a bit shocking. My Dad is only 63 now, and my Mum was 60 this year.
My sister and I never did anything for Mother's or Father's Day, ever. My brother, topped everyone, when he came home from his child-minders (aged about 6) with a card he'd made for Mother's Day, which, when opened, read 'Fuk ov, Mum.'
That's brilliant. My brother and I weren't far off - one year Mothering Sunday was on April Fool's day, and we wrapped up an empty box. My mum was quite pleased at first, as we never usually did anything either.
My dad will be 68 next month. When our youngest is 40, C will be 73.
Mum insisted on mother's day and that father's day was made-up: it was easiest to go along with her, and dad didn't care (we phoned very weekend anyway).
And when my niece is my age I will be 100!
13: They are worth it as a gift precisely because they are a hassle and everyone knows it. Also because when done right they are delicious.
If someone made croissants for me I would know to be very, very flattered.
Poor Jane asked Snark when Janey Day was, and he leapt at the opportunity to say, brightly, "Every day is Janey Day!" She burst into tears.
I am confused by all of the children and spouses claiming that they have the world's best dad. I thought that there could be only one.
My sister FB-posted a picture of our father and us. She titled it simply Happy Father's Day. I am OK with that.
19: Janey is smart, because if every day is Janey day it means she can't expect anything better than the norm, which is the entire point of a Janey day.
I had my first kid in my mid-40s, which means that I will be about to die by the time he understands and forgives all my imperfections...that's OK though, I picked him a great mother who is younger than me and will still be there.
Speaking of which, my partner sent me a beautiful FD email, and gave me a day-long break from changing diapers and the like...for father's day I get a brief vacation from fatherly duties, woo-hoo!
When I was visiting my folks today, my dad said he wanted to go to the dump. So the two of us went and threw out a busted car hood. Good ol' practical dad.
He's 57, you geezers.
How much do I hate national sentimental holidays? The first fathers day after my father died, I was happy that for once I had no responsibilities on this day. I thought of it as the only upside of my fathers death. I enjoyed five or six wonderful fathers days, where no one expected me to give or receive anything, like Christmas had been before I married into a Christian family. Then I became a father, and lost the pleasure of opting out of a holiday. The one down side of being a father.
I used to dislike Father's Day, when it was all about me doing or getting things for someone else. Now other people get me gifts and do things for me, so yay Father's Day.
22: With all the regulations and stuff, going to the dump is hardly fun these days. You can't even shoot rats.
Anyway, my dad was 57 when I graduated high school.
My father's hair was completely gray by 40 and white by 50. My friends' fathers just seem to be catching up.
My Facebook is filled with men celebrating their dads and women celebrating their husbands for being dads. I don't get it.
I don't get it.
Do you not know that it's father's day? Or do you just not get the existence of Hallmark holidays?
28 - Why aren't the women saying how great their own fathers are? I do have friends from the South, but I'm pretty sure they haven't married their own fathers.
Oh, I see. My female facebook friends seem to be split between praising their fathers and the fathers of their children.
Maybe the women's fathers aren't great.
Yeah, well, I doubt any of your fathers regularly, voluntarily and in public wears bow ties, which I think makes him at least 50 years older than his year of birth.
Your dad only wears a bow tie if he rolls box cars.
My father died when he was 40, so now every year he's that much *younger* than me, which is weird. In 2 years, Keegan will be the age I was when my father died. Which is less weird, but still.
32: I didn't know Tucker Carlson had kids.
36: I think Jon Stewart shamed Carlson out of that bit of his young-fogey drag.
We had brunch with my dad, most of which he cooked. i gave him my first Japanese eggplant (sorry, local Eggplant, if this hurts) and a gift certificate for the hardware store because I'd bought my mother an antique rose and felt I needed to spend the same on him, although I doubt he cares. I'm really glad Lee and I share Mother's/s' Day and I don't have to buy presents again in June. I did finally get to use the Wii Just Dance (3, featuring both Janelle Monae's Tightope AND a version of Pata Pata) now that Nia has gotten her tv permissions back, so maybe it was my day.
I got to drive in the car by myself on my way to dinner, which I'm having with a friend who isn't here yet, and was working out how I'd choreograph an android-robot-themed Janelle Monae belly dance routine. Apparently I do need to exercise more.
Why aren't the women saying how great their own fathers are?
Yeah, one FB friend of mine was praising her fiance's father for raising such a great son. I'm sure there's a story there--who knows, maybe her father is dead--but it still struck me as a bit surprising.
And apo, I'm sorry. That must be hard. Lee has been older than her dad ever got to be for the whole time I've known her, and I think that sort of does a number on a person.
I'm sure there's a story there
It involves Gene Simmons's and too much alcohol. Don't bother to ask.
Zardoz gave me poop. Colorful, but not painted.
At our FD gathering, my brother explained his plan to become a tattoo artist. I'm inclined to support the idea on the grounds of sure-why-not-fuck-it-you-only-live-once, but I have no idea how wildly impractical of a plan this is.
Late capitalism seems just to have reached peak tattoo. (Peak lawyer was a few years ago.)
31, I suspect it's more like the situation in 2 where this is now A Thing that spouses do. It's possible I missed the reverse on Mother's Day. In real life, they seem to have pretty good relationships with their fathers.
Everybody I know gets tattoo gift cards for their mom on Mothers Day.
My father doesn't really like Father's Day, partly because he doesn't like being publicly celebrated in that way, and partly because he has a longstanding complaint that my mother stopped paying attention to him after she had me.
In my case, it's because my father is (long) dead, while Snark is a nice living father right here in my very own house. It's nice to wish him a happy Father's Day!
Contrariwise, it's not so nice to have my mother get distressed about my uncle's sharing -- with family only -- some not so great* photos of my father on Facebook. She's entitled, of course, but it made me sad when she said, "didn't it occur to him that if you or I wanted to share pictures of [rfts-père] on Facebook, we'd have done it by now?" Well, no, I wouldn't have, because I have NO PICTURES of him.
*In the sense of being physically unflattering.
45 -- where I am, it's a pretty practical/reasonable plan, provided you don't mind, you know, being a tattoo artist. (Also you kinda need to be able to draw etc.)
51: I think he would like the job of being a tattoo artist. He's kind of an out-there dude.
He's signed up for some drawing classes, so we'll see what happens next.
you kinda need to be able to draw etc.
He could specialize in designs for older men. Everyone would know him for his gramp stamps.
Is peak bee still a thing? Or are the bees fine now?
They're still dying, Smearcase. But don't worry about, because now so are the butterflies.
Peek Bee is a porno somebody made just to keep Rule 34 valid.
Peak Bee for me was in seventh grade, when I won the middle school spelling bee (beating out an eighth grader, score!). I went on to the regionals, where I lost on the word "haggard". My mind just went snow-white blank.
(I think I've told this story here before.)
My colleague and occasional collaborator took second place in the national spelling bee (or whatever it's called). But that was before the national spelling bee was a thing. Or so much of a thing, maybe. Anyway, he met Reagan, who made fun of him for missing the word he missed. Because Reagan was a dick who liked to mock children, that's why.
The only spelling bee I remember is the one where they asked me to spell "tempera" and I spelled "tempera" and they said "no, it's t-e-m-p-u-r-a". Sigh.
Did you ask them to use the word in a sentence? Then let it go, Mr. Sour Grapes Loser!
Sorry, I'm lying in bed and thinking of Reagan.
After yesterday I'm sitting here with this vague sense that I should be busy gathering wood or checking traps or searching for alien alloys.
And also a less vague sense that this weekend I did no work and so my boss colleague is probably going to shout at me again.
I got robbed so bad in the one real spelling bee I ever participated in. I lost on "Mrs." because I didn't correctly specify the capitalization and punctuation. AT BEST orthogonal to actual spelling ability. I am pretty sure they rigged it so I would lose.
Huh, I thought spelling bees never involved punctuation, because I lost one for putting a space in "taxi cab". Which means 62 was wrong, and VW is right that I'm a sore loser.
69: they certainly should not involve punctuation. Maybe we can get a whitehouse.gov petition or a kickstarter or a series of violently repressed protests going on this score.
If I remember correctly (probably not) there was no prior warning that punctuation and capitalization would be important; I remain convinced the teacher running the thing didn't like me.
After writing 67 it occurs to me that I'm investing an inordinate amount of energy in trying to avoid being shouted at, and yet people keep shouting at me anyway. Maybe I should start shouting back.
Given the actual job relationships (that is, this isn't, in fact, your boss), I'd think so.
I told my dad I couldn't drive yet to have dinner with him at the casino but we could have dinner in my neighborhood if he drove out here. He didn't feel like it.
Comma, comma, comma, comma.
66: I got to watch somebody play that game for two hours today. Thanks, Unfogged!
My dad is 73. I posted a picture on FB of the two of us coming off the Inca Trail into Machu Picchu in 2002, but didn't write anything gooshy. All the people hiking around us were in their early twenties, and when we went over the highest pass on the trail, a few of them came up to me and said, "Is that your dad? How old is he?". As I am now closer to his age at the time than theirs, I am very much hoping that his fitness and sense of adventure was not actually all that extraordinary.
73: Oh, it's not just the not-boss, it's also the postdoc who appears to have decided that working with me is his ticket to a faculty job and is trying to micromanage how I spend my time.
Nice hike with my son this afternoon. The bigger drama was my wife flying home today to bury her father, who passed away late last week.
I don't care much for converting it to Husbands Day, but what with the evolution of Mothers Day, turnabout is fair play.
78: tell the postdoc that if he keeps shouting at you, you will take away his scales, teeth and scraps of cloth.
Sorry to hear about your father-in-law.
Condolences to Charley.
I'm in Albuquerque visiting my mom this week, mostly to help her get rid of all the stuff we inherited from my dad's family that we're never going to use. Today we went through the books that were in the garage. For rugged frontier types, my ancestors sure had a lot of books. This seems like an appropriate way to spend Father's Day.
Thanks. He'd been bedridden the last few years, and growing increasingly less able to follow things for the last couple of months. He went very peacefully, so it's more or less a blessing to have come to the end.
My FB profile is a pic of him (and my mil) taken at our wedding 30 years ago, when he was exactly the age I am now.
It really flies by, friends.
Yep. Debility and death are just hanging right around the corner. Stupid human condition.
I'm not sure if that means I should try to get more done next week or not to bother so much about getting stuff done.
I guess I should be happy that I don't get cloth from whatever is wandering into various traps I've set. And let's not think about the teeth.
It really flies by, friends.
That it does.
My mother died six months ago; my father followed her three months later. Apart from the grief, and the numbing sense of loss, and so on and so forth, with the death of one's parents there is, more selfishly, the shocking realization: 'Holy crap! I'm next.' Speaking in terms of the cycle of life blah blah blah and the generations blah blah, but when someone dies, you are forced (if only momentarily, and then it's time to sublimate again, or else how can we live?) to confront the fact that death always wins, and that shit is real.
My condolences, Charley. I am sorry for your wife's (and your) loss.
My daughter demonstrated on Father's Day that she no longer needs to hold her father's hand while crossing the street on roller skates.
I saved another father's life on this father's day.
Some dude fled from me on foot on a traffic stop, probably because of the bags of meth I found under his seat. We contained the block he ran into and got a K-9 out there to track him and it turns out he hid in an unlocked car...in the trunk. At 3:30 in the afternoon when it was 94 degrees. He was in there for like an hour or more because our K-9's weren't on duty and we called one from a neighboring agency. BUT, if I hadn't called that K-9, he totally would have died in that trunk. He was all overheated and dehydrated and shit when we pulled him out of there. Totally too out of it to properly fist bump for being a fellow Cali guy after I noticed "west coast" tattooed in block letters on the back of his head.
I ask him if he has kids and it turns out he has one with a girl I know. And by "I know" I mean I've arrested her, her ex husband, her nephew, her uncle, and two of her cousins. It's all fairy tale endings out here on the street.
gswift, you have these things on call? Awesome.
Condolences Charley. And to your wife.
I'm sorry for your loss, CCarp. And a nice save by gswift.
I lost the regional spelling bee on 'heinous', which I knew how to spell but had never heard pronounced. This is a big flaw in absorbing spelling through books.
And by "I know" I mean I've arrested her, her ex husband, her nephew, her uncle, and two of her cousins.
Gswift needs to write a hardboiled cop movie. And we should have a special gswift thread, just for stories and questions.
I like what I saw on my Facebook feed yesterday, which was basically just everyone changing their profile picture to a picture of them with their dad. Often with a perfunctory message of appreciation, sometimes just the picture.
Mine led to a discussion of which book I (age 3 weeks) and my dad were reading. Based on magnifying-glass analysis of the original photo it turned out to be part of the Cambridge Astrophysics Series.
I liked the pictures also. I got to see how the guy who briefly made me supremely overconfident at pitch was aging. He told me to bid by assuming my partner was always good for four. This worked very well until it stopped working.
I lost the regional spelling bee on 'heinous'
In the 5th grade, I lost it on ventricle (which does not end in al).
And now you get to spend 40 hours a week correcting people's misspellings of medical terms.
Best juxtaposition on FB was 3 posts apart, two totally unrelated friends- one posted a gushy picture with the caption, "It's easy to be a dad, it takes a man to be a father." Other person posted, "Any fool can be a father, but it takes a real man to be a dad!" WHICH IS IT FACEBOOK?!?
Does anybody know how to make people stop sending me spam for primate specific immunoglobulin mAbs? I liked the discount v1agra ones better.
Any holor can be a bleen, but it takes a real cue to be a grue.
I love 100. I'm always similarly amused (for no good reason) by sayings which preference listening over hearing.
I mean I've arrested her, her ex husband, her nephew, her uncle, and two of her cousins.
Do you get a prize for collecting the entire family?
100: The second implies that no women are fools, which seems false.
Any idiot can father a baby, but it takes real balls to steal somebody else's.
Contra 106, you won't be able to father a baby either if you don't have real balls.
Gswift needs to write a hardboiled cop movie.
Ain't that the truth.
urple needs to write a hardboiled egg movie. Maybe they can team up!
Gswift needs to write a hardboiled cop movie.
The cops may well be hardboiled but (judging by his anecdotes) the criminals seem to be more in the "addled" category.
|| Boring bleg, but does anyone know: when they pay you for your vacation time upon leaving a job, is it taxed a whole lot like a bonus or just normal with federal and state and stuff? Or something else altogether? It seems like the kind of thing someone would know.
|>
WHICH IS IT FACEBOOK?!?
Google would select representative samples of users, serve them either version at random, create a weighted metric based on +1s, clickthroughs, reaction times, and reshares, and answer the question with A/B testing.
Then give all the results to the NSA.
Oh, disregard bleg. Turned out to be easier just to google up than I thought.
I have 3,000 words answering your bleg! I just hit preview and see this.
I think you are pulling my bleg, but will happily read your 3,000 words if not!
I hadn't gotten to the point of a specific answer to your question. It sort of turned into Dave Ramsey/Suze Orman slash fiction.
111: I'm not sure I fully grasp from what I googled what's different about bonuses - it might just be at the point of withholding rather than in the final calculation - but it does look like what the IRS treats differently is "supplemental wages", which includes bonuses but also back pay and sick leave payments, so I'd guess vacation time payments would also fall in that category.
|| I'd encourage DC people, especially non-lawyers, to take a little time off Thursday morning and attend the opinion reading at the Supreme Court. It's at 10, but you'll probably need to be in line quite a bit earlier. It'll be over by 10:30 or so. High quality ceremonial drama. (Especially if Scalia has an angry dissent on ssm, voting rights, or AA -- if he has a majority opinion on any of those, you can have a head start on drinking early.) |>
(I could probably have put that in the white people thread. Anyway, what doesn't get read on Thursday will be read next Monday, it seems like.)
119, 120: High quality ceremonial drama.
And for those playing along at home, a chance to see any of our esteemed news outlets manage to report things ass-backward.
The German equivalent resolves the ambiguity: "Vater werden ist nicht schwer, Vater sein dagegen sehr." ("To become a father is not difficult. To be a father is very much so.")
Ahhhhh, now I understand the caption here.
(Part of the drama comes from the set order in which they read opinions. It's based on seniority of of the justice writing the majority, with cj coming last. So you always have Thomas, Kennedy, Scalia, and then Roberts maybe taking the last at bats.)
Our Father's Day consisted of my father-in-law's unveiling*--although when we first set up the date we did not make the connection (just the weekend in June when people were free). Appropriate I guess, although during the remembrance portion some participants had trouble focusing on the "good" parts of his dad-ness rather than the last years of cantankerous assholishness. (My wife, however, despite being the brunt of the much of the cantanker, was quite gracious and helped steer things toward the positive end of the behavorial spectrum.)
*So in NYC, but a typical frantic overbooked visit.
Should we have an SS prediction thread?
Mine:
A relative "punt" on ssm.
AA goes down (despite the weak case).
And although I really don't believe it, Roberts steps into to "save" section 5.
I have low confidence in any of the predictions, and I'm bemused by my reliance on Roberts' sense of vanity about his place in history.
The abbreviations in 125 are blurring together into total gobledlygook. It took me forever to figure out that "ssm" is same-sex marriage, and I know SS is supposed to be the Supreme Court but I can't see how.
126: Oops. sorry, rushing as I need to leave in a couple of minutes. I have no idea how SC became SS. The SupremeS.
128 is obviously rendered pointless by 127. Still, that's not too far removed from my averaged pointedness.
For the first Father's Day after our second son died, my poor man got good and drunk.
And the ICWA. Should probably look at what else is still outstanding.
Today's jury ruling is probably a big deal. Not sure about Lawyers vs. Car Dealers (won by car dealers), but in a happier time, Johnny Carson would have had some fun with that.
Ooof. I'm sorry. How are you guys holding up? Any updates?
SS? Sounds like a Godwin violation to me.
In other funny FB posts, someone posted this "famous failures" picture of 6 people, but the way it's formatted at first I thought it was saying the left column was famous and the right column were failures and I had no idea why they were comparing Einstein to Michael Jordan.
Today's jury ruling is probably a big deal.
Huge.
In short, any fact that results in an increase in the mandatory minimum sentence must be charged in the indictment and proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. That rule already applied to any fact that increased the maximum sentence.
138: Really! That is spectacular -- I have to go read it.
The composition of the 5-4 majority is interesting too - Thomas, Ginsberg, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Breyer.
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-9335_i4dk.pdf
140: Huh. Only one defector from the white male bloc.
"Arizona may not require documentary proof of citizenship from people seeking to vote in federal elections there, the Supreme Court ruled in a 7-to-2 decision on Monday. The decision was the third in as many terms to consider tough measures from Arizona addressing what lawmakers there say is a crisis caused by illegal immigration. But the Supreme Court has pushed back, protecting the dominant role of the national government in regulating immigration and voting."
Dissents- Alito on technicality of language, Thomas on straight up "states can do whatever crazy shit they want" doctrine.
They're just making people think they're reasonable before they blow away preclearance later this week.
142: He didn't join the majority as a white male, he joined it as a supreme court justice.
Man, the 5th amendment thing is bullshit. 5th amendment says you can not be forced to incriminate yourself. SCOTUS now says when asked a question where the answer would incriminate you, remaining silent = incrimination. But if you answer, you can either a) incriminate yourself, or b) lie and presumably be charged further for that (or is maintaining innocence still allowed without further punishment? I forget which rights still count.) So the 3 options under the 5th are now: 1) incriminate yourself; 2) be silent and incriminate yourself; 3) lie and commit a new crime where your lie is incriminating yourself. I guess the answer is to make sure you're never brought in for questioning.
I, for one, think that Apprendi was both (a) wrongly decided as a matter of law (there's no evidence that the Constitution required that result) and (b) counter-productive for criminal defendants, who lost leverage in plea negotiations once they no longer could rely on sentencing hearings to determine enhancements instead of full trials. But clearly it made no sense to have Apprendi for sentencing enhancements, but not to have Apprendi for mandatory minimums, so Breyer basically got it totally right.
146: I'm minded of Fred Clark - the Fifth Amendment is now a magic spell, because you have to say the right words to benefit from it.
Hasn't the fourth amendment been in a similar state for a while? Not necessarily saying the right words, but performing the right rituals (putting an object here, there's an expectation of privacy, there, there isn't, and to know the difference you have to follow the courts).
Actually, do any lawyers know the answer to my aside? If you take the stand in your own defense, or even just enter a plea of innocent, and you're found guilty, can they follow up with charges of perjury, using as evidence the fact that you were found guilty? I feel like that used to be illegal or maybe just never prosecuted, but who knows these days.
Because, you know, if you're found innocent could you use that as evidence of wrongful imprisonment for the time you were under arresHAHAHAHAHAHA..
146: Not quite. As long as you expressly invoke your Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination as the reason for your silence, you should still be okay. Because how else are the cops supposed to know the reason for your silence? It's a conundrum!
150: No, you don't commit perjury simply by pleading not guilty, even if you are later found guilty (or if you are guilty as a matter of fact)--a plea isn't testimony. If you take the stand and knowingly offer materially false/misleading testimony, sure, you've committed perjury. But the fact of a guilty verdict doesn't automatically render all your testimony false or misleading, and the prosecution should still have to prove that a particular statement was intentionally false or misleading.
I haven't read Salinas yet. I think the dissent in the car dealer case has much the better of the argument. I'd be happy to see a Kennedy retirement at the end of this term or next.
I took a cue from a friend and took myself to the movies on Father's Day for the first time since the baby was born. (I took her to brunch at a friend's house first.) Frances Ha and The Stories We Tell, the latter of which was topical and made me want to send a script to Sarah Polley. My in-laws thought it was odd, and I actually missed the wee 'un by the end of the day. But it was a good idea.
Then I came home and started thinking myself into interesting but eventually insomniac circles on the topic of #nodads. I remembered a cool hippie picture of my own dad that I would have posted to FB if I could have found it, but the picture would have been covering up for about 995 words. I subscribe to #1 (Smearcase and I have commiserated on the impossibility of parental relationships).
62-64 was my fate too, substituting differential/deferential.
