Column: Something's wrong with my radio

One interesting aspect (and there are many) of having a daughter rapidly approaching her teenage years is that I get a firsthand glimpse into what music “the kids are listening to.” That way when I saw a possessed Nicki Minaj grinding against fake monks and priests on the Grammys I was only mildly traumatized, as opposed to some other people over 35, who are still curled up in the corner of their divans, muttering to themselves.

We spend a lot of time in the car listening to top 40 radio, although I’m not sure what makes a song “top 40” these days. (Number of downloads? Most views on YouTube? Ryan Seacrest breathing on them? It could be anything.) I should mention that I had planned to be one of those parents who were hip to their kids’ music, until I heard it and my eardrums shriveled up like snails in beer.

For one thing, none of today’s music seems to have any guitars in it, or if it does you can’t hear it over all the drumbeats and synthesizers and the rapper who comes in after the second verse. It’s perplexing — without guitars, how do aspiring musicians expect to impress girls? By talking into the Auto-Tune app on their iPhones? For crying out loud, I could do that.

But when I thought closely about my critiques, I realized a few things:

1) I’m this close to turning into Grandpa Simpson, muttering on about my pills and how I used to wear an onion on my belt.

2) Our music was pretty bad, too.

Not all of it, mind you — not Bruce Springsteen or Dire Straits or anything from the “Back to the Future” soundtrack — but some of it was just as inane as anything you hear on the radio today, and yes, I’m talking to you, Captain and (to a slightly lesser extent) Tennille.

Of course, I was fortunate to have grown up in an era when radio stations played more than one style at a time, which would explain why when I think about my childhood it has “American Pie,” “Rubber Band Man,” “I Will Survive” and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” playing in the background. Between that and the pants my mother put me in it’s no wonder I still wake up sweating.

Jukebox heroes

But I don’t think I felt the full impact of modern music until someone thought it would be a good idea to install a jukebox in the middle school cafeteria. I can only presume this was done to raise money and not to introduce us to the collected works of Shalamar, but apparently the PTA couldn’t see far enough past all those shiny new quarters to anticipate the obvious: that it would take the sixth grade about 12 minutes to figure out which songs were the most suggestive, and then play them constantly until the end of time.

There were a few options that made it into heavy rotation — “Makin’ It,” “Le Freak” (it was French — it had to be dirty) and pretty much everything by Blondie, who was clearly a wanton woman, even though as it turns out she wasn’t a she but actually a band. But as the eventual non-stop, play-on-repeat favorite, the sixth grade finally settled on “Good Girls Don’t” by The Knack, which included the popular refrain: “Good girls don’t … but I do.”

Don’t what? Do what? We had no idea, other than that it had to be something inappropriate for consumption in a middle school cafeteria. More quarters!

The jukebox didn’t even come close to lasting the whole year, although we never found out who was behind its removal. (I always suspected the math teacher, Mr. Rose, who was apoplectic over the fact that we couldn’t seem to understand “We don’t need no education” was supposed to be ironic.) But not before I got to hear all sorts of music, some of it good (Queen, Pretenders, Tom Petty), some of it bad (Leif Garrett, Anne Murray, whoever sang “Biggest Part of Me”), but all of it mine. Well, ours, if you include all the other sixth-graders who had no idea what Kool and the Gang meant by “Ooh La La.”

Musical mish-mosh

And so now, my daughter has music that’s hers. Some of it, like Adele and Lady Gaga, I can appreciate. Some of it, like Rihanna and Lil’ Wayne, sets off my built-in parenting alarms and sends my hand screaming toward the station dial. And some of it, like any song sung by a child whose day job is acting on the Disney Channel, strikes me as what I imagine a carbon monoxide alarm must sound like to a Sheltie.

But as mine did, my daughter’s tastes will mature over time (I’m hoping in a direction that has guitars in it), and for better or for worse, these songs by LMFAO and Drake and Katy Perry will someday make up the soundtrack of her adolescence. And like me with my mish-mosh of teen music memories, she’ll look back on them fondly, no matter how bad they may be.

No offense, Captain.

COLUMN: To bee or not to (spelling) bee

I have now been through three elementary school spelling bees, two with my daughter and one with my son, and each time I’ve wondered how this age-old tradition has managed to survive the movement to eradicate all vestiges of competition from American childhood. Clearly somebody’s been paid off.

Think about it: We don’t let kids count goals or runs scored, and routinely award them with trophies simply for showing up (or, if they don’t show up, we bring the trophies to their house later to show them there are no hard feelings). And yet the spelling bee continues, wherein we march 9-year-olds in front of an auditorium full of people and attempt to make them look stupid. It’s refreshing.

Actually, I’m kind of torn over the whole spelling bee concept. I’ve never been one of these parents who think that “everybody’s a winner,” which is a concept I think can be detrimental once a child grows up and discovers that life is all about being stomped on by the actual winners, who got that way because they inherited money, or are from China. On the other hand, spelling bees seem particularly cruel, especially on the parents, who spend the entire event sweating profusely and silently reliving their own childhood humiliations. (Er, not me. Other people.)

It turns out that for most parents, there is nothing good about a spelling bee. Besides being a nervous wreck, there’s all that time spent praying that someone else’s poor schmoe of a kid will be the first one to get eliminated, so you can put off the dashing of your own son or daughter’s childhood innocence for at least one more day. Eventually this leads to an unseemly feeling of glee when one of your child’s competitors gets stuck with encyclopedia or cupboard or delicatessen.

In fact, I’m not proud of it, but I think most parents would agree that it’s hard to get through a spelling bee without thinking of that famous quote by Gandhi: “The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears.” Wait, that was actually Genghis Khan. But you get the idea.

As for the kids themselves, they run the gamut when it comes to reactions. You have the ones who have smiles on their faces the whole time, who are clearly delusional, and the ones who look like they’ve just gone through a question-and-answer session with Dick Cheney, who understand the gravity of their predicament. Then there are those who flub a word they were sure they knew, and their faces drop when they hear the bell, like poor Travis when he finds out Old Yeller has rabies.

On the plus side, pretty much all the participants who get through one of these things alive seem to feel pretty good about themselves afterwards, even if they get a word wrong eventually. True, both of my kids have been blessed with some mercifully easy words — my son got “kid” the other night, and had to ask the moderator if that’s what she actually said, in case she was trying to slip in some obscure homophone that sounds like “kid” but is actually spelled with an arcane series of unexpected h’s.

They’ve also gotten some tough ones, but my son said even though he had the jitters at the start, “It got easier every time I got up there.” By the end — he finished seventh — he was a model of poise, looking completely at home in front of a cafetorium full of people, and that alone was worth the effort no matter how far he got.

As for the parents … We’ll be home recovering if you want to stop by to deliver our trophies.

Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

COLUMN: Eh, who needs a shower?

You may have heard of the “swag bags” that Hollywood stars get when they attend awards shows, containing tens of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry, electronics and vouchers for luxurious getaways. Being a journalist is sort of like that, except instead of jewelry and electronics, you get giant wipes you can use to clean the sweat off your children “when a shower isn’t feasible.” Or maybe it’s just me who gets those … I’ll have to ask Brian Williams the next time I see him.

Regardless, that’s what I found in my mailbox this week — free “review” samples of “Qwik Shower Gym Class Wipes,” aimed specifically at “active children, tweens and pubescent teens who get soiled, sweaty, stinky and self-conscious.” In other words, all of them, except for the boys ages 5-13, who don’t get self-conscious so much as proud. (“Smell that smell? I made that!”)

I speak from experience on that front, because I have a 9-year-old son who, as has been well documented previously in these pages, is somewhat of an aficionado of unpleasant bodily odors. Tim is sort of like a sommelier, except instead of wine he’s an expert in what comes out of your pores after two hours of playing lacrosse in an outfit that weighs three times your natural body weight.

So I had to admit that he was an ideal candidate to test the Qwik Shower Gym Class Wipes, particularly this past weekend, when he spent an hour running up and down a court for youth basketball “evaluations.” This is the procedure by which coaches put their young players through a series of precise and elaborate drills in order to determine if any of them might, possibly, have heard of a basketball. Tim came home smelling exactly like his elementary school gym, which most local residents agree probably had a worker accidentally sealed up under the floor when it was built in 1972.

Tim was gracious enough to agree to participate in my little test, even though the Qwik Shower wipe, when opened, looked like one of those Wet-Naps they used to give out in Chinese restaurants, except dramatically enlarged, possibly by accidental exposure to gamma rays. Seeing it in its full, outspread glory, it’s hard not to think: If you’re the type of person who sometimes finds your entire body covered in duck sauce, this product is for you.

Tim’s first response when applying the Qwik Shower to his soiled, sweaty, stinky and self-conscious self: “This thing is cold!” And he was right — it might have benefited from a few seconds in the microwave first, although ostensibly if you have a microwave handy, there’s probably an actual shower somewhere nearby.

In general, though, Tim seemed generally fresher and cleaner after wiping down, smelling primarily of the vaguely sterile “slight fresh scent” promised on the packaging — just strong enough to be preferable to the typical little-boy odors, but not pungent enough so that he might be mistaken for something that should have been hanging from the rear-view mirror of a pet owner’s Audi.

As for Tim’s reaction, he was happy to avoid an actual bath, but declared, “If I end up having a rash, I’m suing!” These are words to live by if I’ve ever heard any.

Meanwhile, just when I figured I’d had enough professional exposure to bodily emissions for one week, I got an e-mail with the following subject line: “It’s Booger Season!!” You can tell from the dual exclamation points that this was not meant as simple information but rather as a declaration of catastrophic proportions, like “My Shorts Are On Fire!!” or “The End of the World is Nigh!!”

Turns out it was a release publicizing “Boogie Wipes” and their “Save the Sleeve” campaign, which “empowers kids to … blow their nose, instead of using their sleeve, to wipe away germs.” Somehow I never saw kids with mucous on their sleeves as a protected class in need of some kind of nose-blowing empowerment movement, but just to drive the point home, they included a picture of a 2-liter soda bottle filled with “boogers,” which I have a sinking feeling may be the next item I find in my mailbox.

Not to sound unappreciative, but it seems to me certain Hollywood types could probably use these products even more than I could. So if any of you celebrities (I won’t mention any names, Lindsay Lohan) want to send along some of your electronics and jewelry swag, I’d be happy to send you my Qwik Shower and Boogie Wipes in a fair exchange.

You’re on your own for the duck sauce, though.

Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

COLUMN: Admit it — you wanna 'Piranha'

The other day, my son saw the commercial for Piranha 3D and had exactly the reaction you’d expect from a 9-year-old boy: “I WANT TO SEE THAT!” And I had the response required from said boy’s 42-year-old father, namely, “Absolutely not. It’s completely inappropriate.” By which I of course meant, “I WANT TO SEE THAT!”

“Inappropriate” is one of those catch-all words we parents use when we mean, “This is something I’d rather put off discussing as long as possible.” But in the case of Piranha 3D — which, judging from the trailer, consists primarily of people in tiny bathing suits being eaten in extreme close-up by prehistoric fish — the word seems entirely, well, appropriate. It looks like a movie that is completely inappropriate for viewing by almost everybody.

So why is my gut reaction to run down to my local IMAX and plunk down 15 bucks? After all, I consider myself a student of the cinema. I’ve paid to watch foreign films — with subtitles, not the dubbed kind where someone steps on Tokyo. Once I even went to a library to watch De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a movie in which not a single person was skeletonized in 3-D.

Maybe I should blame the cheesy horror films of my childhood — for instance, I remember spending one particular Saturday afternoon glued to Kingdom of the Spiders (1977), a movie in which William Shatner and nobody else you’ve ever heard of are eaten by tarantulas. The movie did not have a happy ending for anybody except Shatner, who released Star Trek: The Motion Picture two years later and immediately removed this from his resume.

It was terrible, and yet I still remember it 30 years later as if I had seen it yesterday, whereas plenty of other “better” movies I saw back then have completely deserted my memory. You know, movies like The Black Stallion (1979), which got four stars from Roger Ebert and I think may have featured a horse, and possibly Mickey Rooney. I guarantee that if either of those characters had been eaten by a spider or a prehistoric piranha, I would recall that movie much better today.

The way I see it, as long as they’re not too exploitative (apologies to Roger Corman), creature features provide some much-needed mindless scares, and at least have the courage of their convictions. For instance, Entertainment Weekly reports that the makers of Piranha 3D used a tanker truck to fill an Arizona lake with at least (at least!) 7,000 gallons of fake blood, which we can only presume is still being cleaned off the fake turtles and pelicans.

Granted, I’ll admit that when I do happen to watch one of these movies now, I can’t help but see them through the eyes of a jaded adult. You’re supposed to revel in the untimely demises of the principal characters at the hands (teeth, claws, appendages) of whatever creature the filmmakers have dreamed up, but that’s harder once you’ve left your callow youth — these days I can’t help but think of the poor state trooper who has to knock on some lady’s door and tell her that her husband was eaten by a fish.

But even if they’re better for the young, 9 is probably a little too young for many of these flicks. I can only imagine if I took my son to Piranha 3D he’d wind up like the kids of a friend of mine — she gave in and let them watch Jaws recently, and now not only won’t they go in the ocean, they won’t sleep in their own beds, out of fear of land sharks. Also, bringing a 9-year-old to Piranha 3D would probably trigger a DSS investigation, and rightly so.

But I’m willing to compromise. Maybe we can settle on something with a little less carnage, like Gremlins (the little pointy-eared creatures movie) or Tremors (the giant worm movie). Or even Kingdom of the Spiders — believe it or not, they have it on Netflix.

I wonder if Shatner knows about that?

Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

COLUMN: Kids force you to face the music

If you’ve ever been the parent of a toddler, you’ve probably experienced the urge to take Barney the Dinosaur, or each member of The Wiggles, or that marginal singer who took the gig singing “99 Favorite Nursery Rhymes” to keep from starving, and smother them to death under a Dora the Explorer pillow. Never fear: It’s very common, and no jury in the land would convict you.

It’s tempting to count the minutes until your kids grow out of the phase when this kind of music is their main entertainment option, but as more experienced parents will always tell you, you shouldn’t rush things — first of all, it won’t be long before every look they give you betrays their belief that their actual parents had been forced to sell them as babies to a roving pack of simpletons.

And in this case, beware that Barney the Dinosaur gives way to the likes of Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez. If you don’t know who these two are, picture the Stepford children that used to hang around with Barney, and then imagine them as if they went through the trampy makeover that Olivia Newton-John got at the end of “Grease.”

If you’re like me, you may have had this misguided idea that as your kids’ musical tastes began to mature, they’d switch to genres you’d find more palatable in your car or household — maybe even including some of the contents of your own music collection. Surely all those years of playing Bruce Springsteen or Billy Joel or progressive rock from the early 1970s had an effect on them, at least subconsciously.

And it turns out you were right: It caused them to hate it.

Sure, I see people with their 8-year-olds at Springsteen concerts now, but they’re the exception; I suspect they’re part of some obscure Mormon splinter sect practicing their brainwashing techniques. Most kids are probably like mine, who view the idea of a Springsteen concert as a sort of sixth circle of hell, like the island in “Pinocchio” where the kids get turned into donkeys.

No, instead they’ve somehow gotten into their heads a penchant for bubblegum pop and dance music. I can blame my daughter’s affection for Miley on Disney’s ubiquitous marketing machine — after all, I’m just one man. But how both she and my son fell for the Black Eyed Peas is beyond me; I rarely let them listen to Kiss 108 for more than the minute it takes to figure out we’re listening to a song about some activity I don’t even want my kids to know exists until they’re in their 20s.

The also don’t get the idea of volume — not loudness, but capacity. I recently helped my daughter load her new iPod Nano, which holds 2,000 songs, and she was extremely picky about which tracks to include.

“Why would I want to put on a whole bunch of songs I’ll never listen to?” she asked.

“That’s the whole idea!” I responded, waving the sleek purple device in front of her face. “The whole point of the iPod is to have hundreds of songs you’ll never listen to! But you could listen to them if you wanted to.” That’s when I got the simpletons look.

I guess kids will always rebel against their parents’ musical tastes, but even if I like guitar rock and they like auto-tuned dance tracks, I figure the fact that we’re all appreciating some kind of music is cause for hope. And that’s not to say there isn’t any common ground, either.

For instance, we all hate Barney now.

This column appeared originally in West of Boston Life magazine and North Shore Sunday. Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

COLUMN: More Father’s Day tips for baffled dads

Every year around this time, I like to dip into my pool of fatherly knowledge and offer up some tips on being a good dad. Unfortunately, it’s sort of like a little plastic pool, about a foot deep with cartoon whales on it.

Still, with kids ages 11 and 8, I figure I can come up with some half-decent advice — and maybe even some signs of hope for those of you with younger children who are concerned it’s only a matter of time before you screw them up. You know who you are.

1) Be prepared to do research. For years you were able to appear informed about your kids’ interests through your vast general knowledge, which you could mostly make up, since they had no access to Wikipedia. But eventually they gravitate toward activities you know nothing about, and if you don’t make a concerted effort to learn about them you risk being labeled an idiot, even before that typically happens.

Take my son, who this year decided to take up lacrosse; this is not a very well known sport, mainly because there has never been an inspirational Hollywood movie about it, possibly starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. To the untrained eye, it resembles guys running around whacking each other with sticks. But I did a little research into it and discovered it’s actually a highly nuanced, very strategic sport, in which guys run around whacking each other with sticks.

2) You have to work on the basics. When I first started teaching my son how to play baseball, I could do no wrong; I was like Mark Fidrych, Reggie Jackson and Garry Maddox all rolled into one, primarily because he had never heard of any of those people. But now that he’s an accomplished ballplayer in his own right, there are certain things he expects from me, like the ability to pitch him a ball in his strike zone, and not the strike zone of an imaginary 8-foot-tall person swinging a 5-foot bat.

This means the kids aren’t the only ones who need to practice. With that in mind, I plan to go out and, even if it takes me hour upon hour of intense personal effort, buy him a pitching machine.

3) Hide the remote. When your kids are little and they’re watching “Caillou” — the cartoon about the eerily bald, fit-prone 4-year-old whom even Mr. Rogers would trip if nobody was looking — you think children’s television can’t possibly get any worse. Then they start watching “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody,” starring twin actors apparently grown in a Disney laboratory using DNA from the band Nelson and a squirrel.

The comedy (“comedy”) on these shows usually involves bodily functions, hilarious personal injury and characters being nasty to each other. We’ve actually had to ban several Disney and Nickelodeon programs because the characters are so mean — I’m concerned that the sidekick girl from “iCarly” may actually be a sociopath. I’m just waiting for the episode where they find Gibby’s head in a box.

4) Beware the math. You might have thought your college degree, or perhaps your master’s, or the fact that you’ve spent years running a multinational corporation, would have prepared you for your daughter’s fifth-grade math homework. This is not true, however, because the way students learn math has been reworked by a committee of people who hate you.

It’s not just that they’ve taught our children completely alien procedures to use when solving math problems, leading to daily battles as parents insist on dividing and subtracting while their kids are trying to “regroup,” whatever that means. They also end every assignment with an essay question in which students have to explain why the problem works out the way it does, a development which seriously undermines the time-honored mathematical tradition of just guessing.

5) Give yourself a little credit. Although fathering is tough, you can sometimes spot signs that you’re making progress. For instance, when my son asked me what I was doing today, I said I was writing about how to be a good dad — and he replied, “Well, you’re a good dad, so that should be pretty easy.” Hey … That must mean I’m doing something right!

It’s just a good thing I didn’t say I was writing about how to be a good pitcher.

This column appeared originally in North Shore Sunday. Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

AT LARGE Fake News Wednesday: Teen Aims To Be Youngest To Wrestle A Lion To Death

LOS ANGELES (CAP) - Justin Merkenson, a 14-year-old from Cupertino, Calif., will try to break into the record books by becoming the youngest person ever to wrestle a live lion, he announced at a press conference yesterday flanked by his parents, siblings and other proud relatives.

"It's been my dream since I was 11 to wrestle a fully grown African lion," Merkenson told reporters. "I've been working this whole time toward that goal, and I feel like I'm finally ready to take it on, sort of."

Justin's parents, Larry and Marylou Merkenson, acknowledge they've faced criticism for allowing their son to take on a challenge many see as too dangerous for a boy his age, or any age, really.

"I do grapple with it," concedes Larry Merkenson. "But he's ready for it from the standpoint of animal wrestling ability, and emotionally I believe he's ready to tackle this head-on.

"I've tried to scare him away from it by showing him some ugly stuff that can happen when you get that close to a ferocious jungle predator, but he just gets more encouraged," he said. "He's kind of stupid that way."

Justin notes that he began wrestling small animals, like cats and possums, at age 13, moving up to larger-breed dogs and eventually more aggressive creatures like raccoons and domestic goats.

"The ones with the horns can get pretty nasty," said Justin.

He plans to keep a record of his attempt via a blog called Justin's Lion Wrestling Blog, although he admitted it might be difficult to type while attempting to keep his head out of the lion's massive jaws. "But nobody ever said this would be easy, I don't think," he noted.

Still, opposition to the attempt is mounting. Darlene Fortenski, spokeswoman for Mothers Against Everything (MAE), denounced the idea, calling it "a very bad choice."

[Read the rest at CAP News.]

COLUMN: Something’s off when TV’s not on

In case you somehow missed it, the nation recently celebrated “TV Turnoff Week.” This is the week when families all across America turn off their TVs and sit around their kitchen tables staring at each other like frightened bullfrogs.

That’s because as we all know, TV is the glue that holds families — nay, societies — together. For instance, without TV, nobody would have any idea who Barney Fife is. What kind of world would that be?

Despite that, though, my wife Theresa and I decided to try TV Turnoff Week this year after we read a few disturbing facts that left us concerned about TV’s effect on our kids. Things such as:

· 45 percent of parents say they use the TV to occupy their children. I’ve done this, but usually by giving them a screwdriver and suggesting they try to figure out how the TV generates all those magic pictures from outer space.

· Children 6 and under spend an average of 14 hours a week watching TV, but only 38.5 minutes engaged in conversation with their parents. Even less if you don’t count the time spent talking about what’s on TV.

· 97 percent of children have products based on characters from TV shows. This would explain why, if we had to send our kids to one of those Montessori schools that bans character logos, we’d have to cover their clothes almost entirely with masking tape, and then pray that their underwear never makes an appearance.

· 59 percent of Americans can name The Three Stooges, while only 17 percent can name three Supreme Court justices. In our defense, though, that number would skyrocket if the president appointed somebody named “Shemp.”

Unfortunately the TV turnoff began inauspiciously in our house — first of all it was raining, which should be an immediate deal-killer for TV Turnoff Week, like when NASA scraps a shuttle launch. Also, my wife was working the first night, and she’s much more ambitious than I am about planning family activities. For instance, she might organize, say, arts and crafts projects, whereas I might suggest hide and seek and then wait for my kids to realize I’m not actually “seeking.”

But I did my best, actually going out and buying a new board game, which I believe is how Amish people pass the time when they’re not building barns. Unfortunately, it seems I picked a game that was a little too easy — it occupied a total of about 20 minutes, leading me to wish I had engaged them with something more complicated, like Monopoly or the U.S. tax code.

On the second day Theresa again got them through the after-school hours without any TV, apparently without the use of tranquilizers. And after dinner we decided to try bike riding, which I admit is more productive if your kids have actually mastered pedaling; otherwise you have to spend the whole time pushing them down the hill in plastic Little Tikes cars, which tend to hit the side of the driveway and roll over like a Ford Explorer negotiating the Autobahn.

In fact, we made it through pretty much the whole week, although we did have to bring their bikes to increasingly exotic locales to keep them interested; I thought we were going to wind up driving town to town in search of a half-pipe. We also read more and listened to more music, and I admit that at one point around Thursday I considered commissioning a mime troupe.

Then on Friday night we sat the kids down to congratulate them. “Even though TV Turnoff Week is over, we proved that we didn’t need television to have fun, right, guys?” I started to say, although I only got through the “over” part before they trampled me on their way to the Disney Channel.

Still, we must have done something right, because they seem a bit more willing to turn off the TV and head outside this week. Also, a subsequent informal poll showed that my kids are, for now at least, among the 46 percent of children who say they’d rather “spend time with their fathers” than watch TV.

Presumably, provided I start putting a little more effort into the whole “seeking” thing.

Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. His original column runs every other week; this “Best of Chianca” column is from 2006. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca.

COLUMN: Phone for kids is a tough cell

So how did I become one of those parents? You know, the kind who are always telling their kids about how tough times were back when we were young, when we only had five TV channels, and there were no DVRs, and the phones were all tethered to the wall by odd springy cables. If anyone who lived through the Depression ever hears me talking like that, you have my permission to walk over and whack me with your cane.

Still, that’s just what I find myself doing when my 10-year-old daughter insists that she wants — wait, scratch that — she needs a cell phone, despite the fact that, as far as I can tell, there’s no one she needs to talk to; she certainly doesn’t have any interest in acknowledging the existence of our house phone. (Of course, neither do I — whatever those callers want from me, it’s probably nothing good.)

No, apparently what she needs to have is the (presumably God-given) ability to text, along with various other “smartphone” extras. This is a fairly foreign concept to me, since until my company issued me a Blackberry as part of its plan to bind me to my job like Gulliver was tied down to the beach by the Lilliputians, I had a phone that basically just made phone calls. Apparently it could text, but I never used that function because, one, my thumbs were too large, and two, you couldn’t text for a pizza, which comprised my central use for the device.

In fact, when I showed the phone to my daughter and my 13-year-old nephew, they looked at it sort of like people in the ’70s must have looked at pet rocks. (Yes kids, that’s how tough my childhood was — our pets were rocks!) It’s a nice little novelty, they seemed to be thinking, but it doesn’t really DO anything.

But her request has me more than a little torn. On the one hand, I managed to survive my childhood with no means of outside communication whatsoever, save the occasional pay phone. On the other hand, giving my daughter a cell phone would be a good start to my plan for her as a teenager, which is to have her wired for sound like an FBI stoolie.

And it’s not like we’re not already on our way to being a technologically enhanced family. My son, who’s 8, somehow sweet-talked his way into getting a “PSP” this Christmas, which is a device that can house music, videos, photos and videogames featuring actual tiny little humans. After seeing only the top of my son’s head for days, we had to come up with some PSP ground rules, such as no more playing when it became apparent that he’d entered a trance-like state, and no bringing it in the kitchen so he wouldn’t wind up covering it with ketchup. (We had to institute that last rule for pretty much everything.)

As for my daughter, we’ve reached a temporary compromise that if she goes out with a friend and needs to keep in touch, she can take my old pet rock phone. And if she goes over the texting limit she has to pay the charges out of the allowance we give our kids as a thank-you for the short breaks when we’re not acting as their butler.

Sure, it’s no “smartphone,” but it does the job, and its inadequacy will give her something she’ll eventually be able to complain to her kids about. If she can learn how to communicate in their strange telepathic squeaks, that is.

This column appeared originally in West of Boston Life Magazine and North Shore Sunday. Peter Chianca is a managing editor for GateHouse Media New England. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pchianca. To receive At Large by e-mail, write to info@chianca-at-large.com, with the subject line “SUBSCRIBE.”

AT LARGE Fake News Tuesday: Law Would Make It Legal To Spank Others' Kids

COLUMBUS, Ohio (CAP) - Citing the need for the community to come together in an effort to curb the poor behavior of unruly youngsters, the Ohio Legislature is close to passing a law that would make it legal to spank other people's children.

"Well, it's obvious the parents aren't going to do it," said state Sen. Harold Shotmeyer, R-Canton, who sponsored the bill. "Frankly, what we really should be passing is a bill that would allow us to smack the moms and dads around a little bit.

"But being able to give the kids a little whack when they deserve it is the next best thing," he said.

The bill comes in the wake of incident in Cincinnati where a woman was arrested after paddling another woman's child inside a Salvation Army store.

"By all accounts, the child was being very annoying," said Shotmeyer. "The other shoppers actually applauded when she bopped the kid.

"But the mother calls the police, and suddenly this poor woman has a police record," he explained. "What kind of country has this become where smacking another person's child makes you a criminal?

"I blame Obama," he added.

[Read the rest at CAP News.]