Previous installments of Dad Magazine can be found here.
Photo credit: Claire Zulkey
Tags: dad magazine, dads, jaya saxena, matt lubchansky
Previous installments of Dad Magazine can be found here.
Photo credit: Claire Zulkey
Tags: dad magazine, dads, jaya saxena, matt lubchansky
Alternatively: What We Talk About When We Talk About Whiskey
My own personal Dad is on an unholy mission to get me to like whiskey, and he will not rest or admit defeat until I, too, can take a sip, hold the glass up to the light, and proclaim, “Now that is good whiskey.”
Will he give up if you just lie and pretend to like it, or will it then become a shared hobby until the end of time?
Yep, you nailed it – I would be caught in the never-ending cycle of whiskey-as-a-gift back and forth to each other for eternity and on and on.
I got my dad a guidebook to whiskeys for his birthday last year and I think it’s the best present I’ve ever given him.
But come on, just like whiskey. Just do it. It wants you to, you want to, your dad wants you to. Sip, sip, ahhhhh, now that’s smooth, hint of smoke and sweet. Then sit back and glaze over a bit, smile a bit. That’s the stuff. Whiskey.
Must…resist….smooth-talking whiskey commercial….
My dad actually hugged me when he found out 1. I liked whisky, and 2. my favorite was really peaty.
We went on a family vacation to Scotland a few years back and my dad tried Scotch for the first time in his life. Declared that it tasted like gasoline and hasn’t touched the stuff since. My dad is not like other dads.
HE’S DAMN RIGHT IT DOES.
COME JOIN THE NON-WHISKEY DRINKERS OF MY FAMILY. We will provide you with the beer or high-quality boxed wine of your choice.
My dad barely drinks at all EXCEPT to have very very nice bourbon around. Which I love, because I love bourbon, but it’s really not at all the same as having a glass of wine with dinner, which is what I’m usually interested in. “Let’s all take an hour to appreciate this fine craft of distilling” is not helping the “a drink would make dad’s monologue much more interesting” need.
Awwww. When I mentioned “I don’t think I’ve ever even tasted whiskey except, y’know, in a whiskey sour,” my father — who also rarely tasted whiskey except in a whiskey sour, and who had no stake in getting me to like the stuff — bought me a bottle of “nice middle-of-the-road blended whiskey” so I could taste it for a few weeks in a row and decide whether to move on to more complex whiskeys and Scotches or, with no guilt at all, use it to make pitchers of whiskey sours.
He was so deft at that stuff, so good at assessing a gesture to make sure it was more about the recipient than about himself. Golly, I miss him.
The perfect gift!
My dad’s favorite things to watch on Youtube: excellent “soccer”/football goals, and puppies. When I showed him Batman pug for the first time he just about keeled over laughing.
My dad loves the videos where someone talks to their dog about whether HE ate the treats, or the OTHER dog did. Gets him every time.
Are you referring to Denver the Guilty Dog? THE BEST.
OMG the closed eyes! Our dog does this too.
THE MOST GUILTY
It’s the tail wagging that gets me. He’s trying to build goodwill in advance, not realizing that gives him away. Like a man bringing you flowers for “no reason”.
we recently showed my dad the Taylor Swift with goats video after he correctly identified a tswift song on the radio and he lost it
A classic of the genre, by any standards.
My dad is amazing at never taking the main roads anywhere. Taking the relatively straightforward, non-trafficky two lane road from point A to point B is for suckers when you could be taking a barely paved access road running parallel to the main road. He is also phenomenal at referring to roads by their outdated route numbers or by such vague terms as “the freeway.”
Where I learned to drive (Long Island), most parkways/highways/freeways/whatever have names, and we almost always refer to them by their name or acronym. Now whenever people (like my dad) refer to highways by numbers, I get completely confused and almost always end up lost. Plus too many of the numbers sound the same! Like at least half of them end in 95 if you’re near a city, as I understand that’s used for routes that go in/around major cities (absolutely no citation for this, I could have made it up).
Basically, any roads that branch off from the interstates as beltways or whatever will have their number – so anything coming off of I-95 is 295, 495, etc. That’s why the BQE is 278 – it nominally branches off from I-78.
Why is this not taught in schools? I am a grown woman and had never realized this. It makes so much sense when you know.
More fun US Interstate highway facts: All even-numbered highways (90, 80, 78, 66 etc) run east-west, odd numbers run north-south. Furthermore, on even-numbered highways, exit numbers get higher as you go east, on odd-numbered highways, they get higher as you go north. Both re-set as you cross state lines. So you can always tell what cardinal direction you’re traveling!
This.. I should have anticipated this. So much thought put into it, you can just tell that a bunch of Dads were chortling with glee when they came up with it. Is there a mnemonic device to remember it, some kind of campfire song maybe? Something they teach in Scouts?
Literally weeks too late, but you’ve got the e’s: east, west, even and the o’s: north, south, odd.
Wait, why doesn’t massachusetts follow this rule? 190 goes north-south. Massachusetts >:(
That’s because 190 is an auxiliary road to 90 – they don’t follow the North/South rule, because they relate to their parent interstate (which is why MA also has 290, and 495. 128 is just because everyone in MA is ornery).
Do people NOT learn this in school? It was part of my 4th-grade geography class. Hooray for Sierra Vista, Arizona, I guess.
SHHH- that’s secret Dad info. It’s taught in gathering of Dads, as part of their initiation ceremony, when they impart the wisdom of the interstate numbering system: Now look, East West highways are even numbers, and North South are odd – everyone got that? We’ll do that so they harmonize with the train numbers, (since the railroads made up the system).
Aha! So that’s why everything I am familiar with has 95 at the end, because I’m pretty much always along the East Coast. Agree with @alicia – much more useful than a lot of other things floating around in my brain.
Coming in late to add that the highway number is approximately the percentage of the country that is south (for E-W routes) and West (for N-S) routes. Thus, I-90 across the north part of the country and I-10 across the south, I-95 along the east coast and I-5 along the west.
Having lived most of my life in the northeast or Illinois, I find low numbered interstates rather disconcerting.
Mine likes to take different routes there and back. To take the same highway getting there as going home = death? apparently.
I think my dad’s favorite thing about moving from MA to CA is the fact that there is an ENTIRE REGION full of as-yet-unexplored (by dad) roads that “definitely go somewhere. At least from April to November.”
You should buy him the “Bay Area Backroads” box set. Wait. I wonder if that’s available because I just came up with the best present for my own dad ever.
ETA, well there’s a book at least.
It’s been a good few years, but I’m still sad about the tv show going off the air. Doug McConnell and his dad jeans! And that HAIR!
Didn’t he have a second show where he just tooled around with his dog having aimless fun? He was like Magnum PI minus the PI license and with a dog instead of a mustache.
Mac and Mutley! Famous in my household for the episode where the dog also goes scuba diving.
As a kid, I went to some SF event and got to meet Mutley. I was very excited.
My parents had me navigate from… 8ish, and I picked up a love of taking the back roads instead. You see much cooler stuff! You run into less traffic! There’s the fun and games of being the ONLY car on a road that looks like it was last paved in 1996!
I am still the mapreader. We have no GPS, and I am good at it, and I like to take us fun routes, and I hold it jealously.
True story: my dad’s love of taking alternate routes is so great that my sister didn’t know how to get to my grandparents’ house until she was 18. Because we took a different way there and back EVERY DAMN TIME.
My dad was exactly the same!!! I only realised when I started driving myself what an incredibly strange mental map I had of my home city. Discovering highways was a revelation: you mean this trip I always thought of as “the other end of town” is only 15 minutes???
In my family, it’s my mother who has the arcane back routes. Because they are lightly patrolled and she can speed to her heart’s content. Also, in southern Ontario, the back roads are hilly and curvy, allowing for more challenge. She can also navigate like a bird migrating. My grandfather would give you directions involving east/west/north/south and never actual road names, just concession numbers. He was also an aficionado of back routes.
My dad is ‘starting a campaign blog’ about the council officer for their area, who is apparently a bully who makes unreasonable demands. One of them is that he wants the cats to not go out (not legally allowed to make that request in the UK) and that you can’t leave your rubbish out for more than a day before delivery.
It’s Summer Time: Our List of the Best Ice Cream Cones Within 30 Miles of Your House.
(My dad really really loves ice cream. Distance is absolutely no impediment to his quest for the Perfect Cone.)
I think your dad and I would get along nicely.
Same here. My dad, for his birthday, had a Best of the Best Ice Cream Tasting where he actually ordered ice creams from several different states. First thing we do when we’re traveling together is find the best ice cream in the area.
Alternately: Our List of the Best BBQ Within an Hour’s Drive
My dad is the parallel opposite – It’s Summer Time: A Calendar of Which Days McDonald’s Has Soft-Serve on Sale for a Dollar
Oh, ice cream is the only thing he cares about. Everything else (meat, cookies, vegetables, farm equipment) is very much secondary.
Accurate:
Omg I thought this was just my dad!
I love ice cream too, but I got IBS several years back and cannot just up and eat ice cream in the middle of the day. This is a sore disappointment for my dad.
This is only marginally related, but my dad has had some sleep issues over the past few months and has narrowed down the culprit to “chocolate after 6pm.” So he doesn’t have chocolate after 6pm, except maybe sometimes a few of his chocolate-covered grahams and a glass of milk. He can no longer eat like a college student, much to his dismay.
Your dad is the kind of person I want trying my ice cream. (Within the past few months I have attempted to start working on my lifelong dream of being an ice cream lady and at any given moment there are at least six homemade pints in the freezer. I barely eat any of it, but my friends devour it. Go figure.)
Dude, I will shoulder that burden for you myself. I have inherited my father’s jawline and also his enjoyment of ice cream.
All of my text messages from my dad are answers to trivia questions I sent him, or else him saying “what’s your location” instead of “how far away are you”, so that he can calculate my ETA himself. Oh and also, “call your mother”.
You can never let him know about the “Find My Friends” app.
Always “call your mother”, always when I am with a gentleman caller.
Just before this was published, my dad emailed me a PDF of bell hooks’ “Feminism Is For Everybody,” saying he was reading it right now and that she is a “pretty awesome woman. read her bio in Wikipedia.” <3 radical dads
Holy shit that’s awesome.
Omg <3
read wikipedia
OH MAN my dad would get to the first instance of the phrase “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” and throw that book across the room. Your dad is a rad dad.
“read her in Wikipedia” is so very much something my dad would do. <3 good dads.
Yes, “the ladies at work” are always showing Dad some funny YouTube video which I need to use Creative Google Skills to find again (he loves to give me a somewhat garbled retelling, and I am expected to use daughter telepathy to interpret it) so he can show me/Mom and we can know what he is talking about.
Next issue should have profiles on the “ladies at work.”
Oh god the “last year’s YouTube videos” thing hit so close to home. Also, as a new father, I look ahead to becoming a Dad Magazine Dad with a strange mixture of anticipation and horror.
Congrats on joining the DAD Magazine demographic!
AHHH DAD MAGAZINE, I KNOW ONLY JOY
I uniroinically love Dad Magazine so much. YAY DADS.
How to Care About the Politics of a City In a Country Where You Haven’t Been a Resident Since 2006
(I swear to god my dad knew way more about the recent local primary election stuff in my town than I did. He was visiting from Mexico and had opinions on how I should vote. Love you, Daddio.)
Next Month’s Issue: How Much Are /You/ Saving? The Perfect Detour To Save 3 Cents A Gallon On Gas
Oh my god, yes. This is a Hot Topic with Dad-In-Law. He’s always just a bit flummoxed when we don’t know how much gas is per gallon at any given moment were we live.
Note: we do not own a motor vehicle.
Have you seen him talk with another Dad about gas prices? My uncles and my dad used to get into long, serious conversations about where they’d found the cheapest gas. It was beautiful to watch.
“Parking: No, Not There. Not There, Either – How To Back In Perfectly Every Time, In Under 20 Minutes! More Or Less.”
Re: dads driving, my dad doesn’t like to use his turn signal while changing lanes on the highway because “I don’t want them to know what I’m doing!” (He learned to drive in rural New Mexico in the late 60s/early 70s and then moved to New Jersey when he was 17, so there was never any hope for him in the reasonable driving department.)
Also, yesterday he inexplicably group-texted me and my mom and my sister “I got my phone,” and I have still not figured out what he meant.
DAD! Why don’t you want them to know what you’re doing?! Similarly, my dad berates other drivers who do not signal, usually by shouting “NICE SIGNAL” at them really snarkily, or just to his unfortunate passengers. Despite having standards for others, however, he never signals a turn himself — maaaybe signaling for a second when he’s halfway through the turn — and then gets mad that other drivers have not read his mind. ???????
Oh god, Dad.
But the whole point is letting people know what you’re doing so they can react accordingly!
I know! He’s so reasonable otherwise, but treats driving like it’s Mad Max-style apocalyptic war zone.
Has there already been a Dad Magazine article about “How The GPS Is Always Right and the Humans in Your Car Who Have Been There Before Are Clearly Wrong”?
Alternately: The GPS Is Always Wrong.
The Humans in Your Car Who Have Been There Before Are Always Wrong.
The Thing You Made Up In Your Head Five Minutes Ago MUST Be Right!
Parallel Parking: The ONE True Method.
Teaching Your Daughter to Drive a Stick Shift
Does Your Son In Law Mow Properly? Show Him How!
Dear Dad Mag,
I’ve really gotten into knots lately. And knot in a sexy times way!
You see, I’m fit to be tied for tying—I can’t get enough of hitches, bends, bowlines, stoppers, and knots-in-the-bight. I’m spending all my money on primo cordage, and every suspendable object in my house is hanging from the ceiling—hammers, mattresses, mason jars, lamps, books, Kleenex boxes, every and each thing swinging secure in its own attractive knot.
Instead of a belt, I wear a loop of fine jute rope closed by an elegant Flemish bend. Instead of jotting in a memo pad, I tie my notes in the Inca fashion, on a length of quipu. Instead of paying my rent, I’ve ordered a first edition of The Ashley Book of Knots, knowing full well that Ashley omitted such useful classics as the “Zeppelin” bend.
I’m well aware that this is all typical Dad behavior, but I never expected it to come on so soon! I’m not even thirty! Also, I don’t actually have kids.
Should I rage against the tying of the light? Or accept, with the best grace I can muster, that this is simply my life from now on?
(And is there anything to those new medical interventions they advertise during commercial breaks for Jeopardy? Can medication and surgery really rechannel a knot obsession into a model train hobby? Skepticism wars with hope!)
Thanks!
-I Know Knot What To Do
Ahh, who among us has not felt roped in by knots at some tie-m or another? The cat’s paw is the cat’s pajamas, after all. We at Dad Magazine say embrace your fatherly tendencies, though obviously you should do so of your own a-cord.
Best,
Dad Magazine
Your cover boy right here sent his daughter several Roy Rogers Youtube videos on Friday.
For a split second I forgot he was a real person and thought you were referencing the fast food chain.
Do You Talk Too Loud On the Phone? (The answer may surprise you!)
Do You Talk Too Loud On Public Transportation? (The answer may surprise you!)
“Louder than that” seems to be the default Dad-answer. His children mumble, he needs to lead by example.
Dad’s Best Conspiracy Theories – Featuring “There’s No Wind on the Moon, So Why Did the Flag Wave?” and “Don’t Send that over Email”
“Don’t Send That Over Email” is a favorite of both my parents. My mom also didn’t want to make a Redbox account because she “doesn’t want [her] credit card information out there in too many places.” That ship has sailed, mama.
My mom once refused to make a purchase online because they asked for her birth date. So .. our moms agree.
Omg <3
read wikipedia
Awwww. When I mentioned "I don't think I've ever even tasted whiskey except, y'know, in a whiskey sour," my father — who also rarely tasted whiskey except in a whiskey sour, and who had no stake in getting me to like the stuff — bought me a bottle of "nice middle-of-the-road blended whiskey" so I could taste it for a few weeks in a row and decide whether to move on to more complex whiskeys and Scotches or, with no guilt at all, use it to make pitchers of whiskey sours.
He was so deft at that stuff, so good at assessing a gesture to make sure it was more about the recipient than about himself. Golly, I miss him.
When I talk about marinades these days, I’m talking about yogurt. For chicken: yogurt, lemon, lemon zest, thyme, garlic. SO GOOD.
My dad used to sit on the front lawn in his lawnchair, polo shirt, plaid shorts, white sneakers, and Dad Socks pulled up high and yell at speeders. SLOW DOWN, IDIOT would ring through the neighborhood and that’s why I was always at my friend’s house and not bringing her over to play.
Didn't he have a second show where he just tooled around with his dog having aimless fun? He was like Magnum PI minus the PI license and with a dog instead of a mustache.
Your dad is the kind of person I want trying my ice cream. (Within the past few months I have attempted to start working on my lifelong dream of being an ice cream lady and at any given moment there are at least six homemade pints in the freezer. I barely eat any of it, but my friends devour it. Go figure.)
For a split second I forgot he was a real person and thought you were referencing the fast food chain.
Guys, there could be a whole SPECIAL EDITION Dad Magazine on Marinades.
How To Make Flawless Rubs Every Time, Without A Recipe!
Honing Your Nose: How Much Sage is Enough Sage?
Chili Flakes: Now We’re Talking!
it could even be expanded to a super sized grilling edition.
Why YOU Need an Infrared Thermometer!
Summer Fashion: The Best Grilling Hats
Is a Burger Safe For Human Consumption If There Is Any Visible Pink Atall? Celeb Chefs Say No