Triple The Dad

I hate the Olympics for all the reasons I stated here . I'm just not sure you can be a good person and root for such an awful occasion. Still, I find myself recording events, skipping past the awful commentary to get to the races, explaining to kids that they have  watch Michael Phelps because he is the greatest swimmer they will ever see, and rooting along with my kids for the "pretty girl" - gymnast Laurie Hernandez. Before you jump all over me, we don't emphasis looks. I'll mention that a particular act seems hard, or that the athlete must have practiced a lot and worked really hard to accomplish something. That is my parenting style: I compliment the work, effort and time it took to do something. I didn't come up with the nickname. We were watching gymnastics and one of the kids said "she is pretty." It was probably my daughter, because she is always noticing people's eyes and marking them as "pretty." And as kids will do, that ...

I hate the Olympics. I'm not sure exactly when it started. I remember loving them at one point. My parents absolutely adore them, so the love affair probably sprouted in my childhood. Back then the Berlin Wall stood tall and Soviet Russia was a very real threat. We were not long removed from school children hiding under desks to avoid nuclear holocaust. Rooting for the U.S. bordered on a moral duty. I can recall checking the morning's papers to see the medal count. But at some point it all became too much. Too much gross nationalism; too much overhyped hoopla; too much doping; too much controversy; too much rewarding hosting duties to cities clearly incapable of the job; too much displacing poor people so that relatively rich people can participate in a sport ; just too much. I see people on FB who post constantly about the plight of the poor in this country and who have been on humanitarian missions expressing glee and delight in the Olympics. I'm not sure you can be a...

People hate Cam Newton. I'll be damned if I really understand why, but they do. Not in a bullying way like some people hate red-haired QBs , but in a more fundamental way. A Google search for "I hate Cam Newton" returns 5,200,000 results. "I hate Tom Brady" returns a mere 3,970,000; "I hate Bill Bellichick" returned only 838,000. For reference, Tom Brady is one of the best QBs in history. Bill Bellichick is his coach, and one of the winningest coaches in history. Both have been caught up in questionable cheating scandals . There are ample reasons to hate either one. Yet Cam Newton has somewhere between 1.3 and 6.2 more "hate" than the two of them. Combined the two of them can't touch Newton. As I'm writing this a guy on the radio called in and said "I hate Cam Newton." Why? Because he dances too much; apparently. And he smiles a lot. Check out that screen cap above. Cam's teeth are in 10 of the 12. I searched fo...

Its Super Bowl time, and since my team didn't make it, I haven't been paying very close attention.  But I got to talking with Aaron Gouveia on Twitter after I noticed one of his tweets about how a redhead would never QB a team to said Super Bowl.  Essentially, Aaron was mocking redheads.  My team doesn't have a redheaded QB, so we are safe (for now!), but I mentioned to him that this might fall under the term of bullying.  Aaron, in case you don't know, is rightfully well known in the Daddy-bloggersphere for his excellent  Daddy Files blog.  Seriously, go read it now,  and follow @DaddyFiles on Twitter.  And before I really get going on this rant, let me say: I get it.  Even as great as Gouveia is, he probably can't hold candle to the prestige, money and social status of a Pro-Bowl NFL player like Andy Dalton.  Andy Dalton could never do another thing in the NFL and probably still have more name recognition, money and power than Go...

I posted last week about why I dropped my opposition to the color pink. Lo and behold, I stumbled upon this article about pink lockers at the University of Iowa. The lockers in the visitor's locker room, you see, are pink.  The walls have been that way since forever, apparently, but during a 2005 renovation the school took it a step further and added shades of pink everywhere, including lockers. There is pretty no question that when the practice started in 1979 it was intended as an insult.  And the new pink-hued lockerrooms were of course was called out as sexist and discriminatory.  But why is that?  Would it be sexist to put Tonka trucks out?  To make the benches appear like tires rising out of the ground?  If the visiting women's team's locker room was blue would that be sexist? Being offended by the presence of pink gives the people using that symbol, and the symbol itself, power.  If the visiting team wins 9/10 games, does the color pink...