Talking Dadblogging on NPR

Quick shameless plug:

In advance of Father's Day, I'm on a dadblogging roundtable on NPR's Tell Me More with Michel Martin today, with Keith of African American Dad and Jeff of DC Urban Moms and Dads. The streaming audio of Tuesday's show should be up on the website by around 9 a.m. PST (12 p.m. EST).

UPDATE: Here's a direct link to the segment.

[In the meantime, check out my partner-in-crime's blog for videos from our just-ended, amazing family Alaskan cruise vacation, which my parents took us on for our 10th anniversary (the actual date's at the end of this month). The Pumpkin had an awesome time, as did we all.]

We're on Alltop, baby!

I've been a fan of Guy Kawasaki's blog-topic-feed-aggregator Alltop since I first learned about it from Citymama just a month ago. It's a great timesaver and an at-a-glance way to keep up with what's going on in certain topic areas of the blogosphere, like getting to see the rss feed reader of a really well-read friend. In my work life, I've been enjoying the Social Media and Journalism topics, and, of course, checking out how the other half lives on the Moms page.

Alltop launched with the Moms topic already on board, and as they've been adding channels, I've been waiting for dads to come up. And now, they have! dads.alltop.com has a lot of familiar names, including, of course, our own MetroDad right up at the top in first position. But the coolest thing is that we're there too, thanks to a tip from MJ, the head-nanay-in-charge over at Filipina Moms. (Salamat po, mare!) [Was that right? I'm only pinoy by marriage, heh.]

So, that means two things: One, my brothas, better get your typing fingers in gear cuz now we got people watching! And two, uh, Guy? Email us. Seriously. You've got four kids! You're a mack daddy Rice Daddy. Join us!

[Oh, one more thing. Looking at other channels, I noticed that most of them, in the Alltop bar that stays static on your screen as you scroll, have a link to the main Alltop page--but on the Dads page, it says, "Perhaps we can interest you in our Sports and Autos topics." It's just me, but I thought that was hilarious. I love niche marketing. Heh.]

Help a daddy out...

Many of you that in my work life, I do online community stuff for a local newspaper's digital products. One thing we're working on now is a site for local parents, with profiles, blogs, forums, and a comprehensive event calendar, something we really don't have around here right now. We've been looking a lot at both national sites, like Maya's Mom, and hyperlocal mom sites run by newspaper.coms, like IndyMoms and SacMomsClub, to see what might work in this market.

Right now, we're still in development, figuring out things like direction/focus, features, name and tagline. I'd love it if you all could click on the link below and take a quick, 5-question survey that will help us hone in on this stuff. And feel free to pass the link on to other parent types you know. If you wanna get in touch with me about this, you can email me at work.

Click below for the survey
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=d_2bKv_2fC7w0KwFF_2biIXXzoNw_3d_3d

(Oh, and if you really want one of those onesies, AsAm momblogger extraordinaire Superha's selling 'em on CafePress. Heh.)

This is where we live.

(crossposted from Anti-Racist Parent)

This is where we live.

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I took our almost-three-year-old daughter to her first county fair. She got to eat French fries and funnel cake, look at cows, and dance like crazy to Los Lobos, performing live in a concert sponsored by an English-language magazine for second-generation American Latinos that the media company I work for publishes.

On our way out, we passed a t-shirt vendor selling souvenirs. I did a double take when I noticed the wide variety of t-shirts featuring the Confederate “Stars and Bars” flag on offer. “Take a picture, take a picture,” I nudged my wife, who reluctantly snapped a shot of the display of t-shirts with slogans like “Heritage Not Hate” and “If you don’t like my flag you can kiss my rebel ass.” The woman selling the shirts saw us—we tried to act nonchalant. But then I saw the kids’ shirts. I urged my wife to get a shot of the child’s shirt proclaiming “Daddy’s Lil Rebel” on top of the Confederate flag, but the shirt-seller saw her and shook her head no. Guess we couldn’t quite pass for members of her target demographic who just wanted to show her shirt designs to friends. Or maybe I just wasn’t too good at masking the look of shock on my face. [When googling for images of that kiddie shirt, I stumbled on this plethora of rebel merchandise for sale in that bastion of antebellum Southern heritage, New Jersey.]

This fair, by the way, made national news two years ago when it removed from its musical schedule a performance by local folk duo Prussian Blue, the Olsen twins of the white supremacist set. They were uninvited only after a classmate complained and told the fair folks what their act was really about. Apparently, they hadn’t known until then—despite the pair having performed at the fair the year before.

This is where we live.

In recent weeks, this has been the stuff of our local news:

•One of our city councilmen introduced measures to declare our city, steeped in its history of agribusiness and labor conflicts, an anti-sanctuary city vis-à-vis illegal immigrants and to declare English our official language.

•The city’s public high school district’s South High School celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Its team name: the Rebels. Yes, those Rebels, and that South (and their colors are blue and grey, natch). Our paper featured some alumni remembrances accompanied by a photo of band buglers from back in the day with the stars-and-bars hanging from their horns. Wrote one member of the class of 1986: “Being an African-American student at a high school whose mascots are representations of the Southern Confederacy was peculiar, to say the least. Slavery ring a bell? Anyone?”

•A member of the high school board of trustees introduced a measure to require every classroom in the district to display the national motto, “In God We Trust.” The motto will be on flag-emblazoned posters donated by a non-profit run by a city councilwoman dedicated to putting up that same national motto in city halls across the country. The trustee, a former youth pastor and now founder of his own church, recently led the charge to change “winter break” to “Christmas break” and “spring break” to “Easter break,” and he originally ran for office because the board wasn’t strict enough in its partial ban of Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”

This is where we live.

A real-life friend and fellow dadblogger, Dr. Lo Siento, wrote of his concerns about raising his Asian American son in this kind of environment, shortly before moving with his wife and child back to Orange County. Recently, Mamazilla wrote about how some encounters with clueless racism has made her wish she could connect with an offline, non-virtual Anti-Racist Parent group of like-minded local moms and dads to share stories and strategies with, to vent to, to lean on. Though this stuff is never far from my mind, all this recent crap has made me think even more about the challenges my wife and I face in raising our daughter where we currently live.

I could throw up my arms and say, screw it, we’re moving, now. I could go crazy with anger and frustration, or get paranoid and see enemies everywhere. But for now, we live here.

And this is also where we live:

Did I mention that, at the County Fair, that Confederate t-shirt stand was just around the corner from a section of the fairgrounds devoted to Latino food and culture, and down the midway from food stands run by Basque, Italian and Mexican community organizations? (And we were coming from a Los Lobos concert.) It was a crowded Sunday night, and it seemed like families from all parts and communities of Bakersfield were there, having fun.

Those anti-immigrant resolutions in front of the City Council were voted down, after UFW legend and local resident Dolores Huerta led a diverse group of protesters to speak out against them and fill the council chambers.

Public opinion seems to be against our crusading school board trustee, who is seen and denounced by many as a divisive political opportunist who needs to be voted out of office.

This is where we live.

Every week, as part of my job, I make sure that a small cadre of local high school students take photos of fans at their schools’ football games and upload them to our website. And every week, I’m pleasantly surprised by what I see, photo after photo of interracial groups of friends, of families of all backgrounds enjoying the game with each other. Take a look at the photos from South High, where the majority of the students, like at many California high schools, are “minority” students, and you will not see the school it was 50 years ago, when someone thought it was a good idea to name a school after the losing side in the Civil War.

My wife and I consciously surround ourselves with a diverse group of friends, We support each other, we love each other’s kids, and, though we may not all share the same politics on everything, we all desire to create a better environment for our children. We complain when something pisses us off about this place not because we’re bitter and we’ve given up, but because, for the sake of our children, we can’t afford not to complain, we can’t afford not to get pissed off.

Because, at least for now, this is where we live.

public service announcement...

...okay, so it's more a self-serving announcement, but I don't know what else to do. I'm reposting this from my solo blog, daddyinastrangeland.com, because I figure most of the folks I need to see this will see it here. Long story short, if you have my old (non-alias) address bookmarked or, more important, you subscribe to the RSS feed for my eponymous solo blog, please update your bookmarks and go to the site and resubscribe to the feed, b/c the address has changed. Why? Here's the full story:


For the handful of you faithful readers out there who’ve been wondering where I’ve been, well, I’ve been here, and I haven’t.

I’ve been having some “technical difficulties” (more on that in a sec), which, in my usual get-frustrated-and-try-not-to-break-things manner, made me just give up for a bit. But I’m back. And hopefully you’re seeing this.

Okay, so two months ago Apple released iLife 08, a major upgrade to its package of multimedia “even somebody who can only point-click-drag (like you) can make something cool” software, including iWeb, the software this blog is built with. So I downloaded, upgraded, even wrote two posts in August after the upgrade, and none of you know it.

Here’s what happened. The new version of the program, in an effort to simplify things, changed the urls for iWeb sites and pages, creating new domains. Somebody frakked up in all of this, because all the comments on everybody’s iWeb blogs built with the old software disappeared. My daddyinastrangeland.com alias redirect was still going to the old address, which one, was still there, though it wasn’t supposed to be, and two, still had all my old comments. And then I realized that the address for the RSS feed had changed too. So at that point, knowing that if noone could tell I’d written anything new they wouldn’t find it, I froze.

Yes, for two months.

After confirming with a dude at the Apple store that yes, they screwed up and that no, there was nothing that could be done, I finally changed the alias redirect to go to the current, commentless site. Daddyinastrangeland.com now goes to http://web.mac.com/quioguesperber/daddyinastrangeland/blog/blog.html. [Yes, that’s the simplified version, and yes, that’s a lot of crap, why do you think I did the alias redirect in the first place?] The old address, http://web.mac.com/quioguesperber/iWeb/daddyinastrangeland/blog/blog.html, still exists (though it’s not supposed to, apparently), and you can go there to see any comments written on posts before mid-August.

But, and here’s the important part, please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds. Daddyinastrangeland.com will now go to the current site, but if you bookmarked the long, convoluted .mac address a long time ago, please change it to the new one. And for the even smaller handful of folks who subscribe to my feed, go to the main page of the “new” site and click subscribe again, because the address has changed, and if you don’t, you’ll never see that I’ve written new crap.

Okay, I’m unfrozen now. I hope somebody’s reading this. ;)

[Questions? Feel free to contact me directly.]

Check out my review of DVD for new dads...

I usually don't write here about the reviews I do for products on my own blog via the Parent Bloggers Network, but I just posted a review of something that I actually really liked and that may be of interest to dads and friends-of-dads here on RD. So go check out my review of Armin "Mr. Dad" Brott's "Toolbox for New Dads" DVD and see what you think. As an added bonus, if you order the DVD via the link from my review and note in your order that you're coming in via daddy in a strange land, I get 25% of the purchase price back, and I will put any monies generated through this toward our RD Empowerment in Diversity Challenge, our ongoing philanthropic effort via Donors Choose.

[On a side note, I'm also posting about my review here because since the upgrade to Apple's iLife 08 and its new version of iWeb, things have been all screwy, including my rss feed and the address being redirected to, so if I don't post a link here I'm afraid nobody's gonna know it's there. So if anybody out there's a Mac genius and knows all the fixes for these problems, holla]!