I apologize for claiming Peak Dad last week. I was wrong, and am not ashamed to admit it. A man has created a car-horn for his armchair, that he might honk at cars passing by his house. I learned about it just now, and am wasting no time in sharing it with you.
From the description:
The tweet that spawned all this:
“My dad had a good idea. Sometimes when cars drive by your house they honk at you. But you can’t respond. That’s where House Horn comes in” – @jitka
Truly is it said that this is the age of miracles.
I’m in awe
This may not be funny to anyone outside like, The Netherlands or Germany(I’m sure everyone else let this service die years ago) but the daddest thing my dad does is read Teletext on his smartphone. Rather than going to an actual newswebsite, he prefers this interface straight out of 1973:
As someone from the Netherlands, I can attest that this is indeed a very Dad thing 🙂
That is beautiful.
(my Dad, not being Dutch, has instead made sure that all phones in the family have Accuweather installed. he also discusses what he sees on it on a regular basis.)
My dad’s peak-Daddest weather related quirk was trying to get me to leave work within very narrow bands of time whenever a storm was predicted when we lived in the same city.
(Example: I’d get an e-mail around 4:30 saying, “Big storm coming. You need to try to leave between 5:12 and 5:18. If you miss that window stay put until 5:52 at the earliest.”)
Oh my god that is the best thing ever. Weather + oddly specific timings = Maximum Dad
Jeez. I need to get my dad into weather. At the moment, it’s wall to wall Fox News. I had to negotiate TV off in very specific terms that included withholding his only grandchild.
Relating to this SO hard. When my dad is on his way to see me he likes to tell me “The Garmin says I’ll be there by 6:17, but I’ll probably need a bathroom break, so let’s say 6:20 or so.” OKAY DAD GOT IT.
I guess my husband is a huge Dad. He thinks whatever the forecast on his phone tells him is the GOSPEL TRUTH! If it’s on the phone, it’s going to: rain, be 98 degrees, etc. If it doesn’t happen he’s surprised.
Oh man, Dads and weather…. My dad was so concerned about snow that he made my sister, who lives in Virginia in a condo with about five feet of walkway and a driveway that’s barely big enough for one car, take his old snowblower when he got a fancy new one.
A snowblower? Your dad would spend money on something that you can do yourself for free, all the while getting some perfectly good exercise? My dad is (quietly and politely) judging your dad.
Mine is all about the buienradar.nl
My dad monitors my (Midwestern) weather from his home in CA via the internet … local TV station coverage and DOT road-cams too. Often he will call with advice, although not with the tenacity of Victoria’s dad (above). Also he pesters me to carry chains in my car, and/or buy studded tires, and refuses to hear me that A) nobody does that here and B) tire technology has improved considerably since 1950.
My dad texted me the other day to tell me that a cabbage truck had overturned in my city.
It is not possible to convey how happy this makes me.
I think this (and the gif elsewhere in this thread) both popped up in one of my Slack channels. Apparently I work with a lot of undeclared dads.
I moved to Minnesota from Georgia a couple years ago and my dad is the same. And he likes to text me “UFFDA ! !” or “Haley!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAH ! ! !” when he sees that there’s been a lot of snow. (The spaces between exclamation points are his texting trademark.)
My Dad will email me weatherbug screenshots of storm activity near his house (I live a couple thousand miles away) and then call me 10 minutes later to ask if I saw the e-mail.
oh, yes. When my brother was studying abroad in Ecuador, my dad would check the weather report for Quito in the paper every single day. Weather at the equator doesn’t really change, so every single day the morning weather report was “60s Fahrenheit, with some afternoon rain”. But we heard about it Every. Single. Day. For all four months he was there.
never heard of it but that goddamn rules
The UK (the origin of Teletext) sadly no longer has it: the BBC stopped broadcasting it in 2012. I think you used to be able to do quizzes and little games on it as well as getting the news? I seem to remember doing very slow Teletext quizzes as a child, probably when I was at my Gran’s house.
I remember the games. there was a “reveal” button to show the answers. They sometimes got creative with ASCII art, so it could show, say, a knight in a cave and the reveal made a dragon appear.
Bamboozle with Bamber Boozler!
In fact Teletext did not originate in the UK, and the BBC’s version was called Ceefax. Teletext and Ceefax both existed in the UK at the same time.
Correction; Teletext DID in fact originate in the UK, but I’m still right about Teletext and Ceefax being too completely separate but similar-looking things.
The coolest thing about teletekst is how they have to adapt all titles, headers and lines to this perfect letter/sign count of I believe 30? No more, no less. The language puzzles these people play are a-ma-zing.
Ah, it’s the Belgian one…
Here a (dutch) blogpost about it by the brilliant drabkikker:
https://drabkikker.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/volvo…
*Bloos* 🙂
my dad refuses to get a smartphone and uses an ancient palm pilot.
I feel like this is not a general-dad thing nearly as much as it is a my-dad thing, but it is SUCH a my-dad thing.
There was once a time when everyone in the UK used Teletext to book their holidays (vacations).
LOL dads
My dad built a mechanical lathe out of wood and string in his workshop. Not super sure he uses it often, but it IS functional, for all your Colonial-era style woodworking needs! Dads and weird projects!
Is this the human equivalent of dogs barking at passing cars?
Well, I will need something to do in my retirement…
I maintain that Peak Dad was reached with that picture of Obama posing with the marker sign in Alaska while wearing incredibly uncool sunglasses.
(get it?? PEAK dad?!? Mountain peak??!)
I love his dad moments. He is at his most relatable when he is dadding. (FTR I don’t really care about my head of state being “relatable,” I care more about them being “competent,” but it does make me smile when they do both.)
once again, i think i may be a secret DAD at heart. i would proudly pose next to anything with my birth year
I love the pictures where you can see that even you’re the leader of the free world, your daughters will think “God, Dad, you’re SO embarassing.”
My all-time favorite Obama photograph is the one with him earnestly wielding a lightsaber while Michelle just facepalms in the background, like “god you’re such a nerd, Barack.” XD
Oh my God.
OH my GOD. This is the best photograph I’ve ever seen, of anything.
This just made my week. <3 <3 <3
NERD DAD
Do you listen to Another Round? They had a guest on (and now I can’t remember which one, anyone else know?) who worked on a tv show were Malia interned, and she would talk about her dad with eyerolling implied, and I DIED
Oh man, Another Round is the very best. I haven’t heard that one yet, I can’t wait to get to it.
That pun? You’re a dad!
These dad posts make me wish I had a dad. Hug your dads and hold them tight, toasties!
(((RLT)))
My dad is getting up there and I know I will miss his crazy weather reports when I stop getting them. <3
(((RLT)))
My dad is getting up there and I know I will miss his crazy weather reports when I stop getting them. <3
My Dad just called me to talk about his dinner out the other night, and ask if french green beans were really a thing, or if the restaurant was just serving them factory store beans.
I have never in my life had a house I am in get honked at. Am I doing something wrong? Or perhaps, doing something right?
This is my biggest question!! What has that dad done to garner all these honks?! Is there an ever crazier Dad invention sitting out in the front yard?
Maybe this is a rural/small town thing, but when I was a pre-driver, my ride to school would pull up in front of the house and honk and I would run out and get in the truck and off we would go.
Sure, yes, that is a normal thing, but above it definitely says “drive by,” hence my deep confusion.
We have a neighbor, who is a friend of my husband and he always honks when he drives by – no reason, just honks. I’d love to have the chair horn then.
My dad was wont to lie of an evening on the living room sofa in a slowly increasing fury, counting the number of cars that drove past our (semi-rural) house until he erupted into whatever room the rest of us were in to announce, “FORTY-THREE CARS DROVE PAST IN THE LAST HOUR!!” Even after my parents moved to The Middle Of Nowhere, Vermont, he would still do it (only then it was more like “TWO CARS DROVE PAST IN THE LAST HOUR!!”–but with the same degree of fury). Too bad he died 13 years ago–this would have made his day.
My dad emailed me to google the cross streets of a restaurant for him earlier this week.
Is there an app or something that can do pew-pew noises/laser noises/general Star Trek-y weapon noises? Or some kind of device that is mountable on a dashboard? My dad has been asking for this for YEARS because he wants to be able to laser other cars that cut him off etc. and I haven’t been able to find one for purchase please respond
Have you looked at ThinkGeek? I’d be incredibly surprised if they didn’t at least have *something* like that.
My dad had something like that, but he used to deploy it during football games–touchdowns got explosion noises, fumbles got screech and crash kind of stuff.
peak dadhood!
YES
when I was a kid there was this silly keychain hanging around our house that made like, assorted gunshot and car crash sounds
(This was a reply to the Teletext nostalgia)
My Mum used to find out the sports results on Teletext through my childhood and into the 2000s.
My Dad is not into sports at all — one of his peak Dads is when the newspeople say “if you don’t want to know the football scores, look away now!” and he ostentatiously looks away.
[this was in reply to Ethylbenzene] I got my dad this digital weather station thing a few years back http://www.lowes.com/pd_744220-1308-02008A1_1z0wg… (like this one!) I described it to my mom as “it’s like the Kindle, except it only has the weather channel on it. Dad will love it.” Because his absolute favorite thing to do is leave the weather channel on and announce periodically what the weather is doing. He only wishes there were more weather updates on the weather channel instead of their interspersed anything else.
Okay. You all are hysterical. And I thought MY dad was crazy.
My dad emailed me to tell me that remote car starters were on sale at Canadian Tire this week, and went on to explain what a remote car starter is. “It would allow you to start up your car from inside the house so that it would be warmed up by the time you went to leave.”
Thanks, Dad!
Peak Canadian Dad. Also useful at Timmie’s when you go in for a double double and a pee break in February. (Not available on Vancouver Island.)
My dad told me on our last phone call that he did the math to figure out how much dog poop he has picked up in his life. I think that might be his peak dad moment.
Look. I know it’s been several weeks since this posted, but I needed to let you all know that my dad just emailed me the following:
Hey, Sweetheart. I checked on your AAA membership, and the lady was surprised that we had not received your card–feigned surprise, I expect. Anyway, she said she was mailing your new card to you, and that you can use your old one till it comes.
And your Mom is sending your package.
Take care, and Happy New Year–or as we used to say in Russian, c новым годом. Пала