Think someone loves their cat, and their Doctor, a bit too much?

Two or three nights a week, my thankless evening assignment is correcting kids’ homework before they turn it in the next day. The other nights, it’s my wife’s task. How she handles it I don’t know, although based on some of the texts she sends me, I think I would categorize it as “hysteria.” My approach is more varied:  thoughtful reasoning, subtle influence, quiet demands, trickery, or screaming and yelling.

Some recent examples:

• To get my 9-year-old, Dietrich, to improve at least part of his handwriting, I started calling him “Dietrina.” Because that’s what his handwritten name looked like on the top of each page. He didn’t like that. Now at least his name is legible. (How to keep the letter “a” distinct from the number “9” is a separate challenge.)
• To instill? in my daughter Emma’s? homework? the idea of where question marks go? and don’t go? when you’re talking? or writing? I started talking the way I hear her and her friends talk:  in a manner in which every phrase or pause merits a question mark. This was not a hit. But it did shepherd in a greater attention to  punctuation.
• Still with the 13-year-old, who is now doing simple algebra, a.k.a. algebra that I can still follow somewhat, we were at loggerheads over which of us had correctly reduced the equation; she argued for her result, which to me looked flat-out wrong. My rule of thumb in life is this:  Only argue a point of fact when you’re sure; this, more than anything, has allowed me to appear to be right more often than not. (This has frustrated my wife for, oh, 28 years now.) Since I wasn’t sure, I proposed this:  that Emma and I would each write down our answers on her homework, unattributed, and we’d let the teacher settle it. I now owe that teacher five bucks.
• Dietrich doesn’t want to draw things. I’m with him:  Why should nine-year-olds be expected to draw pictures that show a math problem when they’ve already solved them? To him it seems stupid, and I agree. But to me that’s immaterial:  the homework clearly states that one should solve the problem and then represent that solution with a drawing. We went around and around on this again town (actually, probably just one around; I’m not one for going around and around) until finally I resorted to Tactic #4, threatening, which if left unchecked leads inexorably to Tactic #4a, screaming and yelling. He obliged by providing a drawing to accompany each problem… except one. He just wouldn’t do the one. I recognized the face-saving effort in that, and inwardly applauded it (mark of character? independent thinker! bold future leader?) before resorting to Tactic #4a.

At some point in all this, my daughter said the wrong thing. Here is what is known to me as the wrong thing:  complaining. Some people have earned their right to complain — the people with no fresh drinking water; the people in Lagos, Nigeria who live in the bottom of a pit in the world’s largest garbage dump; the people with missing limbs and PTSD; the long-term unemployed — you get the point. Complaining about homework, especially homework in our suburban public school system, where it might total 30 minutes an evening, gets you nowhere. So when Emma complained about “all this homework,” which involved writing a one-page letter theoretically addressed to the Colonial English court in support of the redcoat side of the Boston Massacre, I tried Tactic #1, thoughtful reasoning. The gist of my argument (and yes, it is square, dull, and plodding, and yes, I have descended into Babbittry  — but hey, I don’t know if Sinclair Lewis ever had to raise children who didn’t want to do their homework):

Me: “You go to school only 180 days a year. In Japan, they go 210 days, in South Korea it’s 220, and in China it’s 250. You’ve got no reason to complain.  They’re competing with us, and they’re winning.”

Her, tearfully:  “Why are they competing with me? Why don’t they just leave me alone? I didn’t do anything to them!”

That was hard to argue with. So I made my way back to Tactic #3:  subtle demands.

So how was that 24-hour-long Mike Daisey show anyway?

Judging from this (written by my pal Mead Hunter!), pretty good.

Who knew I could be so prescient? On Friday, I entitled a post about Netflix “Notflix” — and now it’s true. I just got an email from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Here’s the summary:  By way of course correction from their 60% price increase, they’re changing the name of the DVD service to Qwikster.

Wow. Thanks for letting me know.  I feel so much better now. Here’s the  way Reed says this will work:

There are no pricing changes (we’re done with that!). If you subscribe to both services you will have two entries on your credit card statement, one for Qwikster and one for Netflix. The total will be the same as your current charges. We will let you know in a few weeks when the Qwikster.com website is up and ready.

Wow. I feel so much better now. Now that there are two separate line items, and two separate names, I wouldn’t at all mind paying 60% more. Neither, I’m sure, will the estimated one million people who’ve recently quit your service or downgraded their accounts. Because now you have two names. Sure, we’ll be paying 60% more, but we will be getting 200% as many names.

Hats off to whoever wrote this line for Reed:  “There are no pricing changes (we’re done with that!).” Having had to find ways myself now and then to dress up bad news as good, I commend you for the attempt, whoever you are. Yay! No pricing changes (which implies “no further increases”), except, waitaminnit, that means you won’t be undoing that 60% price increase. Well, at least we get to keep the 200% of names. And, actually, you did save me some money — because my account is still canceled.

Looks like I’m not the only one who was offended by Netflix’s 60% rate increase. A whole bunch of us took our ball and went home.

My friend Kim Gambino is in rehearsal for a play in Omaha, NE — but she lives in New York. So how has she been attending rehearsal? Via Skype. Another triumph for the marriage of technology and the arts.

James Carville has some advice for the White House:  panic.

I do love the post office, honest, and no, I don’t want it to go out of business, and yes, I understand it’s a fantastic bargain, especially compared against delivery in almost any other nation. And it makes me feel crummy to pile onto them at this, their time of woe, but I have to share this story.

At my business, we moved our office on July 1st. We gave all of our clients plenty of notice, and lots of reminders since then, but some of them have still sent payments to our previous address. I understand why:  It’s easy to update your Address Book or other contact-management program and overlook updating your accounting system (usually, QuickBooks), which means that when you process a payment to us, it defaults to our old address.

This happened recently with a client (and they’re also friends) whose business is seven-tenths of a mile up the street from us. They mailed us a check — to our previous location — on August 26th. It arrived today with a forward sticker on it. The postmark clearly states 8/26, which means it took TWENTY DAYS to be forwarded two miles from our previous address.

By way of comparison:  the Pony Express was able to deliver mail from the Atlantic to the Pacific in 10 days. And that was on horseback.

We’ve gotten dozens of forwarded checks from clients over the past 10 weeks. Some take three days or so. Some take 10 days. This one took 20 days. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this. Here was the theory of someone else here at Counterintuity:  “Maybe the mailman dropped it behind his seat and only just now found it.”

Remember my complaint that TSA was practically performing cavity searches on kids?  Update:  Now they can leave their shoes on.

Here are the 10 best-selling single issue comics of the past 10 years. I doubt that #1 would have anywhere near that sales level now.