 Yippeee!!! Father’s Day is on the horizon and, once again, we’re here to give you the most absolutely perfect advice about how to celebrate your father, step-father, someone else’s father who’s shacking up with mom now, the person who used to be your father and is now not quite a birthing person, your secret father who drops off the mail six days a week…take your pick.
Don’t get me wrong, here. I am absolutely going to accept any free bourbon or smoked meat that’s passed my way next Sunday. And it goes without saying that I’ll bask in the glow of a few hours spent with my kids and grandkids. Still, in the competition between Father’s Day and Mother’s Day, the special time to honor dear old dad comes in a distant fourth. And why not? Father’s Day isn’t really about fathers and their roles, anyway, and that’s a true fact. Every holiday has an origin story and the Father’s Day saga is very, very telling. According to detailed internet research (four websites!!!), the first known Father’s Day was held in 1908 to memorialize the 362 miners killed in an explosion at the Monongah coal mine in West Virginia. It was the worst mining accident in U.S. history and it only took seven months for someone to come up with the idea of honoring those men. It made a great deal of sense to pay tribute to the fallen, who were essentially a bunch of dads doing what dads did at the time. They went off to work in the coal mines and risked their lives doing it in order to put food on the table. Needless to say, the idea of honoring dads for their work did not exactly catch on. All was not lost, though. In the following year, a new type of Father’s Day was invented. In this case, a woman who was raised, along with five siblings, by a widowed father, was inspired to come up with a celebration honoring her father and others who shouldered the burden usually handled by moms. So, let’s be sure we’re on the same page here. A tribute to men who actually died on the job did not catch on, but Father’s Day was born because a man changed diapers. (Fun fact: that was actually the last time a man was recorded to have changed diapers before reaching 85 years of age.) It took quite a while to gain momentum, too, as we didn’t get Father’s Day as a national holiday until 1972…and we needed Richard Nixon to do it. If he’d held off just two more years, we’d still be waiting. To be fair, men weren’t really hot about the idea, either. Even in 1908, they’d figured out that new holidays were just an excuse to spend money on useless gifts and they were understandably hesitant about working more hours than absolutely necessary in the coal mines. We’ve all gotten used to the idea, though, and this coming Sunday will be a fun-filled festival of family conviviality. To help our readers find the perfect gift for their patriarchal progenitor, we’ve scoured all the pop-up ads that greet us every morning and we know the perfect gift: a liquor bottle in the shape of a golf ball. Yes, it cannot fail and you will thank me later, or now if you are of the mind. According to the marketing genii who put together can’t-miss ad campaigns, the two things every father loves are golf and alcohol, often simultaneously. Pretty much everything that popped up on my feed was connected to these fetishes and the algorithms are never, ever wrong. Subscribe? Why, yes, I'd love to, and all I need to do is click here?
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 I took a photography trip a couple of months ago and ended up in Costa Rica, which is one of the many nations whose name I can spell. Sometimes. Not being a total nincompoop, I knew that Costa Rica means “rich coast” in English, although I had no idea if it was the Pacific or the Caribbean coast that’s richer. I wasn’t even sure if it’s the coast that’s rich or maybe some guy named Rich built an estate there, but I definitely knew enough to buzz in if I was on Jeopardy! and the $100 answer was, “This country’s name means Rich Coast.” As a photographer, I was very excited to visit Costa Rica, eager to see the volcanoes and jungles and trees and, especially, to take pictures of sloths. As we all know, sloths are xenarthran mammals that constitute the suborder Folivora, which means something extremely sexual in Latin, or maybe French. They’re a national symbol of Costa Rica, much like the Limu Emu in the States, and you can find them in trees all over the country. Sloths are great subjects for photography, because they’re easy to spot if you have a really good guide and the Hubble telescope, and because they’re really funny looking. They’re big and hairy and they have faces that look like someone who overdid the plastic surgery just a little bit and decided to go back to basics. The best thing about them for a photographer, though, is that they move very, very slowly. They eat a high-fiber diet, which is great for keeping them, uh, regular, but they don’t get a ton of calories in a week. Moving slowly conserves energy, and that gives me time to adjust my sensor and my shutter speed and my aperture and figure out I have the wrong lens on the camera and change the lens and then realize my camera settings won’t work as well with the new lens, so I have to start over. With most wildlife, I finish with my settings and point the camera and discover that they’ve moved to a different forest, so I’ll need to change lenses again to get the shot. Not sloths, though. I could get on a plane and go back to the States, stop in at the camera store, buy a new lens, fly back to Costa Rica---which means rich coast—and still get the picture. That doesn’t mean sloth photography is easy, though. As with everything else in life, there’s a catch. Sloths spend almost all their time in the trees, coming back to earth about once a week to poop, eat a bunch of leaves, and recharge their phones. In the trees, they can look like giant hairy lumps on a branch. When they descend, they look like giant hairy lumps on the ground. They also look a lot like my uncle Kenny at the beach, and both are a sight to cherish. They had a sloth sanctuary near my hotel, so I signed up for one of the guided tours and saw three or four of the hairy beasts in just a few hours. Well, I’m not actually sure I saw any sloths, since they were so high in the trees and blocked by so much foliage they could have been Uncle Kenny. I’ve never seen Uncle Kenny climb a tree, though, so I’m going to take the guide’s word for it that they were sloths. I had much better luck on the road, where there was a giant traffic jam caused by a sloth moving from one tree to another. Apparently, I wasn’t the only person who got shortchanged at the so-called “sloth sanctuary,” as dozens of turistas (tourists) ditched their automovils (automobiles) to take a foto (photo) and enjoy the vista (vista). Another great thing about sloths is that they don’t seem to be concerned about people. As the mob crowded around the tree, our new friend didn’t panic and try to climb back up like Quasimodo or King Kong, preferring to continue doing whatever he/she/it/they was/were doing before I got there. Or, maybe, he/she/it/they was/were running away, but so slowly nobody would know the difference. Either way, watching those Folivoras was well worth the effort and I’d encourage all photographers to make the trip. Send me a note and I’ll let you know exactly where I captured my best shots. I’m pretty sure he/she/it/they are/is still there.  Sharing a word to the whys this week as my befuddlement expands…
Subscribe? Why, yes, I'd love to, and all I need to do is click here?  I’ve always thought of myself as a hard-working, mission-first kinda guy, but lately I’m realizing that lazy people are wayyyyyyy smarter than I am. In fact, laziness might be a bigger sign of smarts than any IQ test, or even Wordle. Giving credit where it’s due, I owe this remarkable insight to my trainer, who has disabused me of my erroneous assumptions while abusing me in almost every other way imaginable. Every week, he has me doing 2,000 squats or 800 pushups or 500 crunches and, like any good student, I struggle and strain to complete the task. But here’s the thing. Once I’ve finished the job, I don’t get a break. Nope, the reward for lifting a couple thousand pounds is the opportunity to lift another thousand, and a thousand after that. Pretty soon, I’ll have quads the size of Philadelphia, but I don’t think that will appease him a bit. I had a few moments to think about it the other day, while I was walking off a leg cramp, and it occurred to me that this exercise thing is not an outlier. When I had an office job, I was one of the hardest workers in the place. No matter what the boss threw at me, I tackled it and completed it and took pride in my capabilities. And we all know what happened next, don’t we? Instead of a bonus or a day off, my reward for working hard was the opportunity to work harder. At first, I felt all warm and fuzzy when someone said, “You’re really good at this. Why don’t you take the first crack at it?” Eventually, though, I realized that I was at the desk until ten and all the people who weren’t as "really good at this" were living real lives outside the office. My sister used to tell me, “Once you take on a job, you own it.” It turns out she’s much smarter than I thought, because that’s one pattern that continues as infinitely as a Mobius strip. Whether it’s work or exercise or cooking or cleaning or making the vacation plans or the social plans…you get the idea…the person who does the work is doomed like Sisyphus to do even more. That’s why lazy people are so much smarter, and probably happier, than the rest of us. If the boss wants a job done, she doesn’t give it to a lazy bum who’s likely to miss the deadline. If someone gives up after lifting only three Volkswagens, the trainer doesn’t give them a fourth. If someone wants dinner, they don’t ask the person who won’t remember to turn on the oven. And so on. To be fair, every lazy person has to work, at least sometimes. Even the biggest sloth in the office needs to put in just enough effort to keep their job. There’s no point in dodging tasks if there are no assignments to evade. Clearly, laziness is a talent that requires great intellect and skill...an ability to be just sluggish enough to avoid work, without being so slow that you avoid a paycheck, as well. That’s a talent I’d love to develop at some point, and I’m 100% willing to work nonstop to become the laziest person you’ve ever known. Subscribe? Why, yes, I'd love to, and all I need to do is click here?  I like to think of myself as a fairly honest bloke, but it occurs to me that I end up saying things that aren’t exactly, 100% true from time to time. It’s all in the interest of good will and not hurting feelings, of course, never for my own personal benefit, but I’m probably losing points on the cosmic scorecard. This realization has led me into an intense and deeply challenging level of introspection, forcing me to reconsider my entire value as a human being and the lack of purpose in my existence. JK. I forgave myself within 1.7 nanoseconds and decided I’ll keep up my deceit. It’s not like anyone died, or at least nobody who didn’t really deserve it, and I haven’t been one of them, so far. Still, I want to be 112% transparent with my readers, so it’s only fair that I share my fabrications with you. If you ever hear me saying or writing any of these things, be assured I am lying to you:
While some of my minions might be shocked and disappointed at my prevarications, the truth is that you all should be thanking me and, so far, none of you appears to be grateful enough. Lying is so much better than truthing, which makes me almost saintly for doing it so much. First, lies are much more creative than the truth, which is just one thing and doesn’t change much. Lies can stretch the boundaries of possibility, inspire great emotion, and spark our fantasies. Facts are facts, but lies are portals to new worlds. Second, lies keep the peace. It’s always a risk to level with someone about a tough subject, but a great lie can make everyone feel better about themselves and maintain a relationship. When we lie to someone, we are showing them kindness and saying we care about their feelings. When we tell the truth, we’re harsh and cruel and insensitive. Third, lies free us from accountability. That’s the case for the lies we tell, of course, but even more so for the lies we are told. Once we accept and act on the basis of a lie, we have the perfect out, and the perfect villain, for anything that goes wrong afterwards. “Dang, I can’t believe how much Karen screwed things up for you by lying to me about that.” Now that I think about it, I’m going to give up on the truth altogether and recognize that dishonesty is the best policy. Maybe I can use that slogan when I run for president. Subscribe? Why, yes, I'd love to, and all I need to do is click here?  You know you're really a winner when you get an offer for a free colonoscopy, but there's even more good news on the horizon this week... Surge stiffing. Sometimes, I’ll take pity on a server in an empty restaurant and I’ll add a few bucks to their tip. That means I can stiff the servers when the restaurant is bustling, right? Hello? Totally tasteless. Every so often, I’ll decide to try a new recipe and things will be going pretty well until I get to the last step. If I had any idea how to, “Season to taste,” I wouldn’t need to be following a recipe in the first place. Bark once for yes. If a dog ages roughly (ruffly?) the equivalent of 12 human years in its first year of puppyhood, should we have a birthday party for them once each month? Dog-friendly restaurants are waiting anxiously for your opinion. Wearing thin. My doctor say I can no longer consume red meat, alcohol, bacon, French fries or pizza. It’s called the Dyson Diet, because it sucks all the joy out of life. Make me an offer. Speaking of healthcare, I just got invited to webinar about colon cancer screening and treatment and they highlighted that the webinar is FREE. Once, when I was much younger, my inbox overflowed with pleas from Nigerian princes and amorous Russian babes, but now my life has come to this. At least the colon cancer webinar is FREE, because those Russian babes turned out to be very, very expensive. Call me, maybe. Remember when there was a big to-do about everyone asking for your Social Security number and it seemed businesses were prohibited from using it as your identifier? Good times. Now, it’s your cell phone number, which is the new key to entry everywhere. A couple of weeks ago, the host at a restaurant asked for my number, I gave it to her, and I was already on whatever database the restaurant uses for its reservations. Burner phones. They’re not just for drug dealers anymore. The road taken, more or less. I made a choice that changed my life yesterday. When the light turned green, I opted to go straight instead of turning left and, now, everything else that happens in my future will be affected by that very major decision. We tend to think about the big turning points, the dramatic moments, when we look at our histories, but those might not be the most meaningful events. Those are the events we remember, but only because we were there, at that time, after a million other choices along the way. Ciao buona. If exercising regularly makes you stronger and reading more makes you more well informed, shouldn’t eating more make you thinner? Asking for a friend. Subscribe? Why, yes, I'd love to, and all I need to do is click here? |
Who writes this stuff?Dadwrites oozes from the warped mind of Michael Rosenbaum, an award-winning author who spends most of his time these days as a start-up business mentor, book coach, photographer and, mostly, a grandfather. All views are his alone, largely due to the fact that he can’t find anyone who agrees with him. Archives
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