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Oh Please, what’s the big deal? I am already tired of the Christian protest spam I am getting against the faux threat of the children’s movie “The Golden Compass.” Much ado about not much.

There’s more subversive, damaging material in one violent summer blockbuster or teen sex comedy than in the entire Body of Phillip Pullman’s work. He may wish to “Kill God,” but it’s the wrong God he’s trying to kill. He may want to subvert the Church, but the Church he thinks he’s subverting is the wrong Church. Church done wrong, something all should be against. A teddy bear named “Jesus” would be more threatening than this movie.

I’ve never been in league with the Catholic League. I’m more inclined to agree with the reviewer for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops:

Will seeing this film inspire teens to read the books, which many have found problematic? Rather than banning the movie or books, parents might instead take the opportunity to talk through any thorny philosophical issues with their teens.

Yeah, let me be the one to “protect” my children from evil atheist subversion, please.

Hey Daddy! Here are some questions that i need to ask you for my project.

1. What is your job in futures officially called?

My title depends on the organization that is paying me. I have been a freelance environmental scanning researcher, strategic planner, and futures facilitator. Right now I am a Senior Consultant for Impact of Future Technology at IBM.

2. What trainging did you have to take?

I have a Masters Degree in Studies of the Future from the University of Houston at Clear Lake. University of Houston is one of the few universities in the world with a degree in studying the future.To get my degree I had to successfully complete an internship and demonstrate my abilities. To keep my job as a futurist I always have to be training. If you want to stay at the leading edge of anything you have to learn continuously. School is never over.

3. When did you begin your job dealing with the future?

I started doing freelance futures work when I was still getting my degree. I have worked for a bunch of different organizations on a part time basis. My full time work started with IBM in April of 2006.

4. Can you give me a few stories (senarios) that you have made for countries?

This is a problem for me because I sell intellectual property. The work I do is owned by the people who pay me, so I can’t give to you what I did for them. I can give you a few descriptions if I don’t get too specific, though.

Futurists tell stories about what the future could be like, so I have told stories about:

Augmented reality. Virtual objects mixed up with real life objects so that, for instance, you can run around and “play” an online video game throughout the streets of your city with the game objects “overlaid” onto the buildings, cars, and people. For a major government in Southeast Asia, I told a story about a professional sports league in 2015 that competed in augmented reality stadiums and was a hit on the “YouTube” version of ESPN. The technology got so popular that it sparked a revolution in education.

Automated Swarms of Robots. I wrote a story for a military client that involved trained swarms of small robots called “MEMS” the size of dust mites that could “think” together and form the appearance of everyday objects to spy and search past enemy lines. So the swarm could infiltrate the enemy and pose as a water bottle while it records where they put their landmines and warn our troops. When one of them goes to grab the bottle, the swarm disperses and the bottle “disappears” to form somewhere else as another object. That was for the year 2032.

An Edible City. I told a story about a large city of millions of people covered in flowers, fruits, herbs, and food plants. Everywhere you went there were plants that were not only beautiful, but delicious. Almost every citizen grew plants in their homes and window boxes and the government helped connect them to people who wanted to buy what they grew. The City got a big environmental benefit from all of the plants, they sold the products from the plants to countries around the world, and the”Edible City” became a tourism sensation with the help of the Food Network. All the famous chefs wanted to open restaraunts there because the food was so fresh. Everyone was happy.

Sometimes it is the job of a futurist to tell stories that inspire people. People need a Vision that describes what they want to be in the future.

Sometimes the stories futurists tell are very dark and gloomy, kind of like a warning. Al Gore tells stories about Global Warming. These are stories that you don’t want to come true, but they could. I once told a story about a global plague that ended in humanity reverting to the stone age. I imagined that an oil-eating microbe developed to clean up oil spills mutated to eat plastic. Essentially it ate all the plastic and civilization collapsed. Can you immagine what would happen if all the plastics suddenly diappeared?

5. Could you give me a few predictions? (elaborate on what you told me in the car about everything being computerized ect.)

Okay, here’s an important thing about futurists — futurists don’t predict the future.

They look at trends (which are mostly about the recent past) and evidence in the present. They extrapolate (project) trends out into the future. From this you get the “most likely” or “baseline” future. But the farther you go out, the more uncertain any statement about the future becomes. It just so happens that the farther you go out, the more value a statement about the future can have because you have more time to act on it.

Another important thing futurists do is take the “most likely” future and then talk about how it could be different than you’d expect. Any futurist worth the money you pay him will talk about multiple futures instead of just “the future.”

But there are things we can say with reasonable certainty about the “most likely” future just because the evidence is overwhelming. It would take a pretty big surprise for the following not to happen eventually:

China or India will likely overtake the United States as the global superpower within 30 years. They each already have more honor students than the total number of children in the US. And they have children at greater rates than us. The numbers are against us.

Electronics will get increasingly intimate with humans, resulting in electronic devices woven into clothing and even implanted into the bodies of their owners.

Recent breakthroughs in imaging of the human brain will eventually lead to the ability to directly manipulate the contents of the brain. We’re talking about programming behaviors, editing memories, mind reading, direct learning, that kind of thing.

The ability to give every object the ability to compute and communicate using wireless technology will create an “internet of things.” Ordinary objects will talk to one another. Your milk bottle will be able to tell your refrigerator that its contents are about to go sour and your refigerator could then call you and tell you to pick up a new bottle on your way home. Your car will likely spy on you and to be able tell on you for speeding. But the upside is that you’ll never lose your keys — they will find you.

Biotechnology will be to this century what computer technology was to the 20th century. It’s hard to anticipate where genetic technology will take humanity, but you can be sure that it will take a while for our social systems to catch up to a world transformed by genetic technology. For instance, will it be fair to compete in school against richer students who can afford to augment themselves with genetic enhancements? Will they have special schools? And further down the line, will the “haves” split themselves off into a different, superior species to “regular” humans?

Potential wildcards — deal breakers that could change everything beyond recognition:
The collapse of the ecosystem of the world’s oceans (a real possibility with global warming)
A breakthrough in quantum computing that renders every computer on earth obsolete at once
Development of clean, abundant energy source using technologies such as zero point energy or cold fusion
Breakthrough in immortality research which extends ordinary human lifespans into the hundreds of years — Old age “cured” and people only die of diseases, murder, and accidents.
An acheivement in artificial intelligence yields living, conscious machines — this is called the “singularity” by many people.

6. Anything else you want to share with the class?

Most of you want to live to age eighty and beyond. Most of you have goals in life. To grow old and achieve your goals in life you need to have a vision for the future and work toward it over sixty years or more. That’s a long time to plan for and a lot of change to cover. Think how much has changed in just the last ten years. The Internet itself is barely over ten years old.

Most corporations only plan five years into the future. Whole governments plan maybe 30 years into the future. Ordinary individuals like you must be “extreme futurists” in order to survive and thrive in the world over the next sixty years. Learn to anticipate change and make it work for you instead of reacting all the time. Envision the future you want for yourself and work for it.

I love this dialogue between Daddy and Daughter. People who know me will recognize me in there somewhere. I am not a chemistry professor, but I did spend 30 minutes recently trying to explain the concept of process variaton to my daughter Girlzilla who keeps missing the bus, requiring a ride from me.

I started charging her $30 per ride. She was outraged. So I explained to her:

Think of all your morning out-the-door times as a population that has an average and a standard deviation
Not all of your out-the-door times meet standards (you miss the bus)
You can look at your morning prep from waking time to walking out the door as a process that produces this critical measure — out-the-door time
You can choose to change your process to make your average out the door time earlier, allowing for your current level of variation in your morning prep process (scoot the average)
You can choose to change your process to reduce the variation in your process (be more consistent) thus allowing you to have the same average, but make the bus more consistetly (squish the standard deviation)
But I admit change is painful. Especially if it involves getting up earlier in the morning
So you can also decide to live with a certain amount of non-conformance (missing the bus)
Apparently you have been deciding that the considerable pain of change is greater than the incovenience of missing the bus for you
But you have not accounted in your considerations the inconvenience to me
So I am charging you $30 (or six hours of babysitting) for each ride, thus shifting the pain back to you so you can make an informed evaluation of your morning preparatory process results
Now that your non-c0nformances are sufficiently painful, you can do any combination of three things:
Wake up earlier or do something to “scoot” your average ready time earlier, thus making it to the bus in time
Streamline your process to reduce the variation, allowing you to wake up at 6:15 and leave by 6:40 on a consistent basis and still make the bus in time
Or pay me for each non-conformance
Now you get to make the decision of how much money you wish to spend to avoid the pain of change, and thus I am treating you like an adult

Having explained everything so well, can you be surprised that she still was not convinced? Apparently my logic “Sucks.” But her on-time performance went up over 80% over the next month. So Daddy does know best. Heh.

Once in awhile I am so grateful that I am not traveling through adulthood without children to protect me. I am newly 41 years of age, and without kids I would truly feel it. Or worse.

Once again, my kids have stumbled me over a great fun find, Who Needs Donuts by Mark Alan Stamaty. I found the book sitting on a table at the library in the kids section. I read it to the kids last night and then spent about thirty minutes myself just looking at the details in the pictures, like a kid myself. I might have to buy my own copy while it is still in reprint.

Each page of Stamaty’s book mixes the detail of a “Where’s Waldo” scene with a gently surreal absurdist outlook on life. Turns out that the absurdist style got the book panned by overly conservative reviewers at School Library Weekly (they obviously didn’t have children to protect them like I do!) when it was published in the 1970’s and Stamaty gave up children’s book publishing for a life of writing comics for the Village Voice, New York Book Review, and Slate. He was poor and needed to focus on forms that would actually earn him a living. (read a great interview about the book at Rands In Repose) Years later, one of the reviewers apologized to him and said her review was wrong, but it was too late, he had moved on.

So it turns out that if it weren’t for a few stuffy reviewers, Mark Alan Stamaty might well have been be one of the best loved children’s authors both kids and parents alike could adore. Then there would have been the animated series, the merchandising, and just maybe my kids would be watching Stamaty-toons instead of insipid-toons on cable today.

But instead, “Who Needs Donuts” is a rare gem and a “cult classic.” And it looks as if I am joining this particular cult. Thanks to my kids.

It’s good for them. And you, I’d venture to hypothesize. I wonder if oxytocin and arginine vasopressin are part of the reason why it feels so much better to have someone else rub your neck than it feels to rub your own?

Petunia loves to play what we call “The Pencil Game.” This is a random art game where we each take turns picking a color from dad’s humongous box of colored pencils and drawing a shape on a common piece of drawing paper. There are (usually) no rules other than take turns and take care of the art supplies.

I’ve been using some form of collaborative art process as a kids activity for many years now. It teaches taking turns, colors, shapes, and general creativity. When Girlzilla was just a wee monster, we’d pass back and forth a drawing book and take turns adding critters, faces, doodles and the like to a drawing. The drawing gets crazier and crazier as you go which is the whole idea. With Fresh and Petunia, we just scribble. Some days’ results look like Cy Twombly on crack.

What I’d like to do is think up some random art games that get incrementally more complicated as our kids developmentally progress. Maybe teach some math skills along with art play and colors. Does anyone out there do that kind of thing? Does anyone know of any resources that might help?

I guess I could make up a bunch of silly art games, but it’d be nice to see what other people do.

Speaking of silly art games, here’s a scribbly art toy that is pretty fun. Maybe I’ll try to make a “pencil game” out of it.

This weekend we had Girlzilla’s famous Halloween party in our house, which has not fully recovered from the twenty some-odd party teens and the five girls who stayed the night. Looks like we’ll be doing it again next year.

So in the process of pulling this thing off, I had time to meditate on the phenomenon of the mythical “Cool Parent” that every parent of teens in their heart of hearts wants to be. I have some rules I think will help those who wish to pursue this rewarding but foolhardy goal:

Rule 1 — You are not cool. Remember that.

Seems a little counterintuitive, but it’s true. You are old. There is no way you will be cool. Cool is something you can only attain if you do not seek it. You may only be able to fake it for a few hours at a time. In fact I suspect that authentically cool people only fake it for a few hours at a time themselves.

Rule 2 — Enforce the rules.

Kids expect you as a parent to set boundaries and enforce them. If you let them get away with stuff because you want them to like you, that’s very lame.

Rule 3 — Remember what you were like when you were that age.

And plan activities accordingly. Accuracy is very important here. A few years off in either direction can be a disaster.

Rule 4 — Talk to the kids with respect.

Most teens, like most adults, like to talk about themselves. If you can get them on their subject and not try to lecture, teach, or pretend you know what they’re talking about, you too can have a one on one respectful adult conversation with a teen.

Rule 5 — Relish your old fogey status.

To a lot of teens, adults can be kind of one-dimensional. Don’t be afraid to be three dimensional. Be your goofy, nerdy, quirky selves. Go ahead, play the oboe, show off your spoon collection, wear dress socks with tennis shoes. If you are comfortable in your own persona it gives them hope that someday they can be so too.

Rule 6 — Short time span

This is key. It is much easier to be cool with someone else’s children because they’re short term. They will go home soon and you have no responsibility to raise them to be responsible healthy citizens. If they want to take the bowl of Halloween candy upstairs and gorge themselves in bed, hey, it’s just for one night. You can return to being the nutrition Nazi that your kids know and love tomorrow.

Rule 7 — Get Away

Find time away from children of all ages. Go be with people your own age. Teens all know the restorative powers of being away from the likes of you adults. Take a clue from them and find some much needed adult perspective.

So there you go. Sort of works for us. Of course having a brother who’s a Cool Uncle and a DJ helps a lot too.

Today at lunch with Heidi, Olivia, and Petunia, we all reached to join hands to say the blessing. (Yes, we do it even in Boston Market.) Anyway, Olivia, had already previewed the Mac and Cheese with her hands, covering them in cheesy goop. Petunia, seeing this, tried to reach beyond Olivia’s hand to grasp her wrist. After several attempts that resembled some sort of kiddie secret hand dance, Petunia finally gave up and grabbed Olivia’s hand to say the blessing.

Exactly three nanoseconds after the “Amen,” Petunia had a napkin in hand, wiping the cheesy goo from her fingers. Seizing the teaching moment, I said to her, “Somtimes when you love someone you have to get messy.” She gave me a look back that said, “Brother, dont I know it.”

Petunia swam on her own for the first time last night. Our three year old jumped off the diving board and swam to the side of the pool under her own power. Three times. Whoopee.

Both Petunia and Fresh have been able to swim short distances on their own for several weeks, but neither had developed the capability to come up for a breath and keep on swimming. Petunia, age three, swims as if she’s jogging underwater — clearly more to learn there on the technique — like the little engine that could. Just as you think you might want to reach in and give her a hand, she pokes her little head out just enough to gasp a breath and go back to work. Maybe it was Heidi’s and my willingness to hold off on coming to her aid for a second or two more to see if she could do it herself that put her over the top. Hmm…. A lesson in parenting there.

Fresh is not yet so motivated to learn. Fresh is older and bigger than Petunia at age five. His larger size is his limitation so far. Since he can stop and stand anywhere in the shallow end, he hasn’t needed to figure out how to breathe while swimming. He just plants his feet and breathes. Of course this makes perfect sense to do — why work so hard at breathing while swimming when you can just stop, stand, and breathe? Fresh’s greater mobility around the shallow end means he is less motivated to venture into places where he cannot stand. Fresh has less motivation to stray from his comfort zone. Petunia has no comfort zone, so to speak, so she learned how to swim.

And the key for both of them is to learn how to come up for a breath in the midst of the activity.

(Olivia will just jump into the pool and swim-wiggle with every bit of faith that she can already swim. No fear there at all. Gotta watch her every second.)

So my question is, who’s teaching who here? A guy can (re)learn a lot about life whilst teaching his kids to swim.

Fathers’ Day was yesterday. My Dad was somewhere in Oklahoma, not answering his cell phone. (Check your messages, Dad.)

As with Mothers’ Day, it’s hard to expect to have adequate recognition for a year’s worth of parenting crammed into a single day. What Fathers’ Day plans can live up to those expectations? I tried to think of something I wanted to do that sounded like a Special Fathers’ Day Event, but really I didn’t want to do much more than stick close to home and hang out with the wife and kids. Heidi made the best breakfast in recent memory, we grilled steaks, we went to the pool, we played “Dance Dance Revolution.” It was a low key kind of Fathers’ Day. We just hung out together. But that’s exactly what I like to do.

I have decided that Being There is 90% of fatherhood. In mind, spirit, and body. Being There. My biggest test of Being There is when I put my kids to bed at night. We read books, sing a few songs, say prayers, and lights out. When I am in my right mind, I don’t rush through. I try to relish those moments.

But mind you, bedtime is right at the boundary between Kid Time and Adult Time. Freedom and relaxation beckon. So it is tempting to just shuffle the kiddies into bed with a minimal interaction. But Being There is what I owe my kids. Being There is what will ultimately save me as a human being. So instead of rushing though bedtime, on my good days, I take my time. Or give my time. Whichever.

I don’t know where I’d be without my wife and kids. Without them I cannot be assured that I wouldn’t be self-absorbed 24/7. Maybe without a family to live with, for, and in I would find something else to devote my life to, somethign to help me grow up. Fatherhood and marriage are saving my life. A guy should have to pay admission for such a thing. Instead all I have to do is just show up. Such a deal.

Almost as a counterpoint to my previous post, this Psychology Today article asserts that “Hands-on” overparenting is creating a “Nation of Wimps” who can’t handle the trials of adolescence and adulthood.

So, maybe we should all stay together for the sake of the children but, while we’re at it, do more adult stuff (like work on our marriages) and spend a little less time with Junior, letting him just play by himself more? Sounds like a good plan to me.

Must reading for every parent. Listen to your child’s music. Really listen.

Rarely do we parents look past the sex, the profanity, the misogyny, the violence, and the anger in adolescents’ music to hear the actual message. If we did, the message would be loud and clear. It’s a message that’s very, very popular with this generation of children . Kids are pretty pissed off about the divorce culture to the point that they spend millions of dollars turning to bands who express their pain in the most explicit terms.

Sociologists and experts are heralding “Family Diversity” and trying to get everybody to accept that “changes in marriage and family life” are here to stay and aren’t “necessarily a problem”. The kids in question, at least according to the music they listen to, beg to differ:

“Meanwhile, a small number of emotionally damaged former children, embraced and adored by millions of teenagers like them, rage on in every commercial medium available about the multiple damages of the disappearance of loving, protective, attentive adults — and they reap a fortune for it. If this spectacle alone doesn’t tell us something about the ongoing emotional costs of parent-child separation on today’s outsize scale, it’s hard to see what could.”

Many adults want to blame the people who create today’s toxic adolescent culture, but today’s adolescent culture points the finger right back. As Eminem says,

“Don’t blame me when lil’ Eric jumps off of the terrace / You shoulda been watchin him — apparently you ain’t parents.”

I hate to say it, but Eminem is Right.

So apparently Bush did not win on the economy or the war or even terrorism after all. He won on moral direction. America needs moral direction and President Bush is going to give it to us. A “Great Re-learning.” Let the culture wars begin. And seeing as how 11 states passed gay marriage bans, we’re gonna start with them homosexuals, apparently.

I was watching this reality show called Nanny 911 last night for the first time when it hit me. The whole nation missed out on parenting. We have a national Daddy (or Mommy) complex. Now we turn to our reality TV and, apparently, our government to establish the “moral direction,” which we have lost or missed somewhere along the line.

We have reality TV shows that show us “what not to wear”, shows that tell guys how not to be boorish slobs, shows that tell married people how not to be annoying spouses. And now we have one show that teaches parents the basics of parenting. Dr. Phil scolds us and we beg for more.

We missed out on role models for all of that stuff, apparently, and now we’ve gone to the polls and said “To hell with the economy and the war, I want someone to reestablish morals here in America.” The great conservative base has spoken and the pendulum has sped past the middle to the far right.

So you’d better straighten up and fly right out there, cause your sins are the ones they’ll try to ban next. Or put on TV for everyone to laugh at.
We’ve got surrogate parents, TV and the government, and daddy’s gonna teach us all a lesson.

I said all though the long and painful campaign season that we will get the president we deserve. I was right, unfortunately.

“When we get our spiritual house in order, we’ll be dead. This goes on. You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty.” - Flannery O’Connor

When a six year old throws things and shouts that he doesn’t want to live with you anymore, you can dismiss it as rageful acting out. But when he’s calmed down and says the same thing, what is that? Can a six year old even make that determination? Somehow I doubt either possible answer. How do I act in the best interest of a kid who is so wounded he continues to wound himself? Do I really love him, or do I just love the prospect of helping him, or is there any difference? If I stick to my guns in the face of all logic, am I being faithful in love? Or just prideful and stubborn? How much certainty do you need to make your way?

It occurs to me that no one asked the starfish if they wanted to be thrown back. Maybe they liked the warmth of the sun and resented the hell out of the Boy. If so, was he right to save the starfish from themselves? Or did that only serve to make the Boy feel good? And would the Boy be in the business of throwing starfish if those starfish could sting him in their anger?

None of this makes any sense to me either. I’m just venting, rambling.

When you asked for more kid posts, I bet this wasn’t what you had in mind, huh?

I’m a mean dad. Did I mention that?

Since the weather’s been so nice, I came home, changed clothes, and made the children turn off the TV and g0………… outside! MWAHHahhahahaha!

We all went out and played around. The children were bored within 15 minutes. But I am a big believer in the instructive power of boredom. So I was not affected by their insistent pleas for access to electronic entertainment.

Speedy got so frustrated at my refusal to budge and my repeated attempts to lure him into some sort of activity involving circulating a ball back and forth that he yelled at me, “You’re mean. You’re a…a..Outdoors Monster!”

Before I was a dad, I bought into that cliche where the dad is pouring over bills and the boy walks up and asks his dad to play catch but the dad is too busy and so the boy goes away disappointed and then the boy grows up into a dad who pays bills instead of playing catch with his own boy. I decided that I was not going to be that dad. What I didn’t count on was not getting the kids who like to play catch.

I was going to be a catch-playing dad. Instead I became the Outdoors Monster.