Yes, I do have a complete set of Lord of the Rings Pez dispensers. Make of that what you will.
Is it sneezy where you live? Down here in my part of Florida, the oak pollen is sky high, and there’s been a run on Claritin at the local pharmacy.
Also, I think this guy [WARNING: YouTube link to wildly viral vid of dad who shot his daughter’s laptop because she slagged him on Facebook] is a dick. I have a pain-in-the-arse teen myself, so I get the frustration. But I can’t stand a petulant, macho-shithead gun-fondler, and that’s how this dude comes across. Donate the goddamn laptop to the local homeless shelter next time, asshole!
Anyhoo, open thread.
Omnes Omnibus
Yoda wasn’t in the LotR.
Stephen
His tone completely changes when he starts talking about the gun and bullets. Even considering that he’s frustrated with his daughter, it’s creepy to hear such loving affection in his voice as soon as he starts describing his penis extension and hollow-point semen.
And if his daughter’s description of her chores is correct, then they do expect too damn much of her. We get up to 8 decades of being an adult and barely 2 to be kids. We can teach responsibility without being jerks.
WereBear
That’s not Yoda, that’s Gollum. (I have the same set.)
Drunken hausfrau
Thank you, Betty! I am sick of reading what a hero this shithead is to parents! As a parent to two pain the the arse teens, with the girl being especially mouthy, I think what this guy did was a parent FAIL. You should be teaching your kids to use reason and logic to win arguments, not just mindless violence and revenge and shooting up shit. What an asshole!
Southern Beale
I saw that laptop dad video and thought: “what an idiot. You’re just gonna have to buy her a new one so she can do her fucking homework.” Idiot gun nuts.
Speaking of Florida gun nuts, and I know they’re about as common down there as termites, I thought this story was incredibly sad:
I think it was already posted over here so I won’t post a larger excerpt but the original story I read said the owner of the gun had a concealed-carry permit. For some reason the WaPo doesn’t mention that, gee I wonder why. But we’re always told CCW holders are SO diligent with their weapons and so responsible, yet here’s yet another incident of one of these yahoos hurting an innocent person because they’re irresponsible.
SiubhanDuinne
And what’s Dumbledore doing there?
Robert
Just love it when the emo progs hit the fainting couches when a gun is added to the picture. There is nothing wrong with guns; owning a basic firearm is a constitutional right that liberals should embrace. This guy had the absolute right to take this route, however misguided. I’m tired of the blogospheric navel-gazing with this video.
c u n d gulag
What?
Donate the laptop to a local homeless shelter?
Are you nuts?
So the “blah” bums can sit around and surf for porn?
It’s not like they’re going to use it to look for jobs, seeing as how they’re on the government gravy-train – knee-deep in T-bones, lobster, and downing their fois gras with Colt 45.
Better to donate it to the local White Supremacist group, so they can get their message of liberty and freedom out to the rest of the white people.
‘We’re taking our country back – to Puritan times! With slavery – just like The Bible taught us!’
Omnes Omnibus
@WereBear: I know who it supposed to be, but, damn it, it looks more like Yoda.
amk
Don’t the gun nutz have their own place
to shoot off their mouthsto whine ?Omnes Omnibus
@Robert: No one is saying he didn’t have a right to to do it (although, depending on state laws and who bought the laptop, he may not have – but that’s a different question). There are many things that one has a right to do but would be a fool for doing. This is one of them.
Betty Cracker
@Robert: Big gun = little dick. Everyone knows that.
c u n d gulag
@Betty Cracker:
And big pick-up truck, with a still-as-good-as-new bed = littler dick.
Omnes Omnibus
@c u n d gulag: Hummer. ‘Nuff said.
Indylib
@c u n d gulag:
AKA – big giant motorized metal pen*s extenders
Hillary Rettig
@Omnes Omnibus: Lesson: post *after* coffee. :-p
WereBear
Gee, and ya wonder why she slagged him on Facebook…
amk
indies ditch mitt.
amk
GM in 7.6 bil net
https://twitter.com/#!/BreakingNews/status/170124132749557760
Sargent Pepper's Spray
Dude is to parenting what W. was to foreign policy and worshiped by the same folks.
Phylllis
The pine pollen has kicked up here in SC as well. I have the scratchy throat this morning. We’re forecast for rain over the next couple of days, so that should wash it away for awhile at least.
And our local morning news program featured the North Carolina ‘child forced to eat chicken nuggets’ story this morning. I sent the anchor/reporter a link to ‘the rest of the story’ as Mr. Harvey used to say. Wonder if I’ll hear back from her.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
Is it the waste, or the way it was wasted?
I mean, it was damned dramatic, what this guy did, and it was for sure a waste of money and gear that could be used elsewhere– but what if he had just filmed himself tossing it into the nearest pond? Or taking a sledgehammer to it?
Two separate discussions, methinks. Are we offended that he destroyed it? Or that he destroyed it with a firearm?
(Just because he’s a white guy with a cowboy hat and a gun doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a white-supremacist asshole.)
(although, I must admit that there’s a pretty high correlation)
Schlemizel
Ah, I remember my time in FLA – certain times of the year you can come out of your house, scrape the pollen off your windshield and drive through a golden haze as thick as a fog.
Never had an allergy until I moved there.
Betty Cracker
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko: Good questions. I’m bothered by the waste and the method of destruction. I’ve seen it argued elsewhere that there is implied violence in the shooting — someone pointed out that if a man shot something belonging to his wife, people would see that as a precursor to domestic violence.
I don’t buy that altogether, but there is something creepy, in my opinion, in how this dude relishes emptying the magazine of his .45 into the laptop. I’m not sure tossing it into a pond or taking a sledgehammer to it would have the same effect.
I’ll admit I hate guns, though practically everyone in my family (including grandmothers!) own them. And I particularly dislike the way some people brandish them around literally and metaphorically. This guy strikes me as that type of person. Ugh.
Odie Hugh Manatee
This is like that Robot Chicken skit where the father is sweetly saying good night to his smart-ass daughter. When she tells him to say good night to her Dolly he smashes the doll up against the wall and then tears it apart because his daughter told him that the doll doesn’t like him.
My take on it is that the father showed his daughter exactly what he would like to do to her but instead had to settle with doing it to the laptop.
Shitty father loses cool, mouthy daughter wins but loses laptop.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko:
Both, really. Not the fact that it was a gun, smashing it with a sledgehammer would have had the same effect on me. The need to be an overly dramatic douchebag is what bothers me.
B W Smith
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko: For me, it is not that a gun was involved. It is this guy’s total lack of maturity as a parent. He acted no better than his child. I am embarrassed for him. Unfortunately, he just taught his daughter that being the bigger asshole is the way you get what want.
Halcyan
Oh, man on the pollen thing. I could NOT stop sneezing and runny nose yesterday. I took Allegra, which usually works and yesterday it did NOTHING for me.
I am in Washington State. We had a week of sunshine here, so everything under the proverbial sun thought “It’s SPRING!”
Oy.
dr. bloor
@Robert:
You’re absolutely right. No one should ever comment on his God-given right to teach his children mature and effective ways of expressing their emotions, and to moronically destroy his property while doing so.
Chyron HR
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko:
Or hey, maybe some of us looney libs just happen to think that disciplining your children with acts of passionate violence is bad, whether you use a sledgehammer, a gun, or just your own two fists.
If the daughter doesn’t learn her lesson this time, I wonder which of her posessions our Father of the Year candidate will destroy next? Some of her clothes? Her phone? Her jaw?
BigSouthern
The entire thing was crazy, but using the gun was just the icing on the fruitcake. You can tell that as he’s reading her responses he’s getting more and more upset, and it’s almost like he’s reading it just to get more and more upset. Which of course culminates in him emptying his gun into the girl’s laptop. Instead of cooling down to approach the situation with a modicum of control, and like an adult, he purposely got himself wound up to react the way he did.
Regardless, it’s shitty, ineffective parenting. You don’t teach a child not to act like a dumbass teenager by acting like a dumbass teenager. “Oh, you said mean things about me on the Facebook…well I’m gonna say mean things about you and shoot your laptop and put it on YouTube for the whole Internet! Ooooo, face!”
And I do think the gun – and a sledgehammer, though maybe not tossing it into a pond – represents an implicit threat of violence. I don’t think he’s going to shoot his daughter or anything, but it very much sends a “Do you feel lucky, punk?” message at the end. The entire video should have never been made, but capping it with that is very creepy and intentionally intimidating.
Raven
@Schlemizel: And it’s not the pine pollen that get’s you, it’s the oak and other such.
HRA
As a mother of 6, of which 4 were teens at the same time and 5 were daughters, I can tell you picking your moment has a much better effect than using any kind of violence to get your message across. At least, it always worked for me. Somewhat of a shock is listening to them now repeat my moments with laughter as they tell them at family gatherings and see the look on the grandchildren’s faces.
AdamK
Not “PEZ”–“PETS”. The people demand PETS pictures. An easy enough mistake to make.
Schlemizel
@BigSouthern:
Has there ever been a teen in the history of creation that did not slag their parents? I’ll be honest & admit I never watched this thing as it seems to be to be just some clown demonstrating dominance over a weaker person (actually at first I thought it would be fake but after that).
I whined to my friends about how awful my parents were & I assume my kids did the same. The only thing that changed was daddy dearest heard the whining. As an adult you could react in several different ways. I might have talked to my daughter about how she felt & about how her words made me feel. Some parents go right to a violent high-drama freakout. tow-MAY-tow/ TOW-ma-tow
MoeizW
Lotta claptrap in this thread; I saw the video too and the father didn’t come off as petulant and macho, he was just tired of his spoiled brat of a daughter. I’m sure he thought posting a vid shooting her laptop on the internet would grab her attention and (more importantly) embarrass her.
All I know is that if I had a child that expected to be paid for chores, she’d be lucky if I didn’t point a gun to her face.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
We have those up here at work.
superking
What I love about the video of the dad shooting the laptop is that he went ahead and installed all the software updates, then complained about having to pay money to update the software for his ungrateful daughter, and then shot the laptop thereby making the updates entirely useless and a complete waste of money.
Idiot.
bjacques
Oh, man! I kinda felt sorry for the guy but I couldn’t stop giggling. I know it sucked to hear his own kid say rotten stuff about him in public (on the most public of forums) but, Jeez, isn’t he supposed to be the adult here?
He could have made a better point about how any stupid thing you say on the internet now will just come back to embarrass you later.
He dun goofed and the consequence will be severe.
lojasmo
The man-child is a moron. He has the right, according to the constitution, to own a firearm, but he makes baby jebus cry with his 7 minute drone, and wasteful bullshit.
redshirt
Who’s fired up about the upcoming “The Hobbit” movie? I’ve been reading some production blogs and the like, and I get more excited each time I do.
Two movies, so you know. Tolkien fans can extrapolate what that means will be shown on the screen….
p.a.
@WereBear: I going to make a yoda/gollum separated at birth joke when I saw that pez head.
Paul in KY
@Schlemizel: Maybe Mr. Roger’s kids (if he had any). Other than that, I couldn’t think of any.
Paul in KY
@redshirt: Very, very fired up. Am wondering where they will end the 1st movie. Rivendell? Beorn’s house? Bilbo finding the Ring (my choice)?
quannlace
Allergens not too bad yet , here in NJ. But the wildly warm temps are making everbody’s gardens schizo. I drove past someones front lawn and saw daffodils blooming. Had to make stop to see if they were plastic. Nope, the real McCoy.
redshirt
@Paul in KY: Barrel rides maybe?
Don’t know. This is the only movie ever I’ve allowed myself to read spoilers for, since I assume I know everything there is to know already, having read all the extra material which will no doubt be used in these two movies.
That said, I’m not sure how others will react to possible spoilers. I read some wonderful stuff last night about our old friend The Necromancer and his little country cottage of Dol Guldur. Super excited!
Betty Cracker
@redshirt: I’m psyched about it too. My hubby and I took a day off and attended matinee screenings of each LoTR movie when it came out. (Us and 1,000 adolescent boys.) I’m not THAT excited about TH (yet), but I am looking forward to it. When’s the release date?
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@p.a.: Mmm, reckless are you filthy hobbitses. Steal the Precious from us, you will not.
Schlemizel
@Paul in KY:
OH, I bet if he didn’t buy them the latest thing or grounded them for missing curfew they toasted him pretty well. It comes with the territory, parents just never understand ;)
somegayname
Count dooku and yoda spotted, but no idea who the guy in the red helmet and beard is.
Quit giving that dumb guy links. Destroying your own property is dumb enough (cut your nose to spite your face…) but airing it on a public forum is just embarrassing for everyone involved. Arguing with a teenager is a waste of time, they’ll drag you down to their level (a pit of emotion void of logic) and beat you with experience.
Schlemizel
@Raven:
Since I have not whined about my health issues here in at least a week or so . . .
I have learned in the last couple of weeks that radiation screws with the Eustachian tubes. They are fairly weak little buggers to begin with so now they hardly work at all. So, when my head fills with fluids as happens with allergies my ears are plugged & I am living “under water” But the coolest part is the usual meds that relieve this sort of crap do not work! The ENT showed me what the insides look like when the fluids stop being fluid.
Schlemizel
Seriously? You don’t recognize Gimlet the Dwarf? Would you be able to spot Leg-o-lamb the elf or Frito, Moxie and Pepsi?
redshirt
@Betty Cracker: December of this year – right before the Mayan Apocalypse. So be sure to see it in the first few days!
Betty Cracker
@redshirt: Will do! And I will be SO pissed if the Mayan Apocalypse prevents me from seeing Part II…
SarahT
This has nothing to do with anything – it’s just an awesome video of a Frenchie looking at himself in the mirror & singing along w/ Adele :
http://youtu.be/BBz3LmidPFE
MomSense
When your teenagers complain about chores and tell you that their friends’ parents don’t give them chores, you just smile lovingly and tell them “their friends’ parents just don’t love their kids as much as I love you.”
You can only get away with this a couple of times but it works like a charm.
Paul in KY
@redshirt: Good idea on the leaving Tharanduil’s hospitality via barrels being the ending of movie 1.
Comrade Mary
@MoeizW:
And here I thought that responsible parents didn’t threaten their children with lethal weapons, and that responsible gun owners would never point a gun at something they didn’t fully intend to shoot.
But that was a hypothetical, right? You don’t have children, right? I would recommend staying childless so that the world’s finite supply of luck isn’t tragically diminished.
JWL
I have a friend who once slapped his teenage daughter during an argument. He had never raised a hand to any of his children before (and never did again). But it happened, and he was disconsolate. He pointed out to me that no matter how many years either one of them lived, she would never forget it. He remorse was genuine, and abiding.
But this Texas schmuck will go to his grave proud of what he did. I hope that poor kid is able to make her get-away from him sooner rather than later.
redshirt
@Paul in KY: I am going to read The Hobbit again, once I finish my re-read of The Silmarillion (again), but I must say, I’m far more interested/intrigued how Jackson will fit in material from outside the Hobbit than I am the actual portrayal of the book. One little aside in the book (Necromancer) is likely to be the basis of one of the movies (or 50% of each). There’s source material out there – in the Sil, at the end of LOTR – to have a good idea what Jackson can do within the framework of what Tolkien wrote, but I wonder what Jackson will do beyond even that. For instance – speculation/spoiler ahead…
++++++++
That after the flight of the Necromancer from Dol Guldur (after a wicked fight with The White Council), the Necromancer appears in the Battle of Five Armies.
Also, there’s backstory to LOTR that could easily be addressed here – for example, who is that big fiery eyeball, and how’d he become a fiery eyeball?
BruceJ
@Ivan Ivanovich Renko:
It’s really none of the above.
Dickhead Dad decided his daughter need public humiliation for privately acting like every frikin other teenaged girl on the planet (note her original Facebook rant was restricted to her frineds).
That he decided to be a microdicked asshole by shooting a perfectly good laptop is not really the point…
BruceJ
@MoeizW:
Wow. FYI, that’s called “Assault with a deadly weapon” . In most states, it’s punishable by a 3-8 term in the pen.
bjacques
@Schlemizel:
I would be all over a movie made of “Bored of the Rings!” Maybe even animated by Ralph Bakshi for that authentic late 1970s feel…
Dave S.
I am in awe of that picture. Please post the complete collection so that I may be in even more awe.
And just because no one has said it yet:
“YOU – SHALL NOT – PEZ!”
Spiffy McBang
I’m late to the party, and I know I probably won’t get many (maybe any) responses, but I have to ask what people who are slagging this guy would have done in his place, in somewhat more detail than “act like an adult”.
The most important aspect of this, to me, is that this girl apparently did something her father considered extremely over line, was punished for it (three months of grounding), and warned not to do it again. Then she did it again. That’s not a kid being an asshole; that’s a direct challenge to his parental authority.
As HRA said, picking your moment is critical. In this case, he’s creating his moment, but it’s essentially the same idea. In that moment, something serious has to be done, something that will stick with the kid. Something, in essence, over the top, on a level the kid can’t really comprehend. Shooting the laptop absolutely qualifies.
Personally, I agree with those who say he should have given it away- but only if he had videotaped the entire donation process while telling his daughter that it’s important to him for his property to be used by people who will appreciate it. If she had just come home one day and he said, hey, brat, I gave away your laptop, the sense of privilege she appears to have (unless he’s lying about her chores and her version is true, which seems unlikely) would probably just make her more angry and keep the situation going.
So, yeah, I wonder what others would have done. I’ll say up front, if it wasn’t clear, that I think if you try to rationally discuss that sort of direct challenge with your kid, you have to be very, very good at that sort of talk to make it work. If he’s not like that, or if he determined that wouldn’t work, I don’t see a lot of options for him in that situation.
WaterGirl
@Spiffy McBang:
What are the teenage years about if they are not about directly challenging parental authority as you transition from being a child to becoming more independent from your parents on your road to adulthood?
Spiffy McBang
@WaterGirl: And what is being a parent if not making it clear that you are the parent? Yeah, kids are going to challenge authority- hell, forget teenagers, they do it when they’re two- and the good parents I know whack them back into place.
Discipline is not the only thing involved, of course; those parents are good because they always show their kids love outside of those moments. But showing “what has been given can be taken away” is an age-old parental strategy, as is shock value, and this guy is hardly the first person to have made a point to his kid by mixing those two ideas. He just happened to add video and Youtube to the mix, which frankly seems reasonable given that his daughter’s transgression was highly public in nature.
Edit: This guy might not show his daughter any love, and be a generally crap parent, but it’s impossible to tell one way or the other from the video.
Betty Cracker
@Spiffy McBang: WaterGirl is 100% correct about the necessity of challenging parental authority. I’ll elaborate a bit on what I would do as a parent: Talk to the kid. Impose consequences that are proportional to the offense (and no, shooting the goddamn laptop absolutely does NOT qualify).
Let’s step back a sec and look at the offense: The kid bitched about her parents to a closed circle of friends. Who the hell hasn’t done that? If there had been a Facebook when I was a kid, I sure would have. And as a parent, responding with gun-play just isn’t in my universe of options. You discuss it. You impose consequences that make sense in the context. You don’t shoot the laptop, not if you’re a mature adult who isn’t high on his sense of power and need to control.
Spiffy McBang
Ok. Two things.
1) In no way do I disagree with WaterGirl. I, myself, did zero rebelling as a teenager and in retrospect sort of wish I had. That’s a normal thing and it’s to be expected.
That being said…
2) The real offense was not the kid bitching about her parents. As the father says (obviously I’m taking him at his word; if he’s bullshitting all bets are off), she had done this precise thing once before and been grounded for three months. She had also been warned that if she did it again, there would be much more severe consequences.
The shit-talking is a minimal issue here, in my eyes. What’s really at play is the fact that this girl fucked up once, online and in public, with a father who works in IT and already proved he can figure out what she’s doing online without much trouble. Then she went and did it again. That’s not grousing about your parents, that’s giving them a double-fisted flip-off and getting caught.
I agree that the consequences should be proportional to the offense. But I see the offense as being far more severe than you do, it seems. I don’t think he had a choice but to do something drastic and attention-grabbing, which essentially means doing something completely unexpected. Like I said, videotaping himself donating the laptop would have been great. But if his only concern was to make his daughter say, “Holy shit,” I think he probably managed that.
Brandon
@Southern Beale: May it be too flip to suggest that poor woman would never have been shot had she also been carrying? As far as I understand it, thats the pro-gun argument: everyone has a gun, no one gets hurt.
Brandon
@Schlemizel: That’s exactly what I was thinking watching it. Forget the gun part and what do you have but a father going on camera and acting like a super drama queen over a Facebook post. Seriously? As a parent, I would see it as an opportunity and opening to talk with my daughter. He’s a different person, but he could also have seen it as an opportunity to privately convince his daughter of the righteousness of his methods as they reinforce the values he holds dear. Instead, his response was immature and childish, it publicly embarrassed the whole family and it would not be surprising if the daughters respect for the father diminished as a result. Basically this guy got all the opposite results that one would assume he was looking for. This is “winning” only in the most Charlie Sheen sense.