I was contacted this weekend by Aaron Rochlen, PhD, regarding a stay-at-home dad research project he is running at the University of Texas at Austin. You can read about him here-- http://www.edb.utexas.edu/faculty/rochlen/ar.html

His research is based on online surveys completed by stay-at-home fathers, so if you are one and you'd be interested in donating about 10 minutes of your time to a very worthy effort, go on over to http://www.hostedsurvey.com/takesurvey.asp?c=SAHF1 and answer the questions posed there about your reasoning for staying home and your feelings (and others') towards it.

After spending a few more months hammering the airwaves and the national consciousness, and after increasing voter outreach efforts, it seems that Barack Obama and his supporters have finally achieved full penetration of the coveted preschool demographic [http://literaldan.blogspot.com/2008/02/rock-bama-captain-of-team-america.html].

I have here some video evidence of my 17-month-old daughter's spontaneous spouting of Obama's name, and her hearty laughter and enjoyment of hearing said name repeated back to her. After indulging her in this activity for several minutes the other day, she has been doing this intermittently ever since.

See here Exhibit A: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_QfFtFiVuM

And hey-- I already got my first vicious anti-Obama spam comment! I should print it, frame it, and hang it over the cash register.

Exciting news, folks-- remember all those wasted days in childhood spent playing baseball, riding bikes, stomping Goombas, and driving Ganon back to whence he came? Remember how what you really wanted to be doing, as you wandered after school like a lost soul searching for its rightful home, was playing an educational videogame that taught you the ins and outs of working as a federal judge while also helping you develop a healthy respect for centralized authority?

Well, however well you may have managed on your own, now you can feel like a kid again, one lucky enough to grow up in a world that provides for you in the way every kid dreams:

Retired U.S. justice O'Connor unveils video game - http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080605/od_nm/videogames _judge _dc

Up next from the same company, C. Everett Koop walks us all through a day in a life of Surgeon-Generaling (with a hidden minigame showing us how he makes that delicious fried chicken!); one of America's top archeology professors spends 25 playable hours in a lecture hall convincing you how much his life and career is exactly like an Indiana Jones movie; a comptroller walks us through what exactly comptrolling is all about (now with 40% more paperwork!); and your grandpa inhabits a fully-realized virtual world encompassing an entire suburban den, where he reclines a full 55 degrees before enumerating the many ways in which the world today is much, much worse than when he was growing up.

Make sure to check out the Blog Carnival over at Discovering Dad-- http://discoveringdad.blogspot.com/2008/05/discovering-dad-blog-carnival-june-2008.html

This month I'm honored to be featured alongside a very solid crew of writers talking about what it takes to be a Dad.

A week or so ago, Bad Momma challenged me to a cage match of bad, lazy parenting. Our only allowed lethal weapon is sarcasm.

You can see the immediate sucker punch she riddled off right here- http://www.cre8buzz.com/profiles/2104/blogs/14021/blog_entries/33732

Now, being the lazy person that I am, it took me awhile to respond officially, but here I am now striking back. Since I can't trust a 4-year-old to take a hilarious picture of me were I even able to distill my essence into a single frame, and since the mood for such things is kinda lost later on in the evening when my wife gets home (not that she's not also hilarious and fun, we just usually have real-life, grown-up junk to do), I've had to resort to instead crafting a stunningly accurate representation of myself and my usual parenting habits.

I think you'll feel as enlightened after studying it in depth as I did after creating it.