There comes a time in every dad's life when he realizes he's no longer the competitor he used to be. Somewhere along the line he's lost the skills and reflexes of his youth and his kids can beat him. It's the day when he passes the video game crown to the next generation.

I grew up in the late seventies and early eighties; the golden age of arcades. No ghost was safe from me in Pac Man. If Ms. Pac Man had been willing to trade round and yellow for skinny and adolescent, I'd have gone out with her. Figuring out how to get that last Space Invader seemed far more important to me than the national debt, the state of Soviet/U.S. relations, or personal hygiene.

If you squinted a lot and used your imagination, the graphics vaguely resembled real figures the way Jackson Pollock's paintings vaguely resemble actual art. The in-game sound consisted of annoyingly simplistic bouncy music (long before boy-bands made such tunes popular). The games were eight-bit, darn it, and I loved them.

If I'm the master of my household pets, why was I the one standing in line at the pet supply superstore shepherding two carts through the check-out line? The answer is simple; I'm a pawn of the pet-tech-industrial complex.

In case you missed it, pet supplies have become big business in this country. The mom-and-pop pet shop of yesteryear is gone, crushed under the weight of warehouse-sized megastores which, if they weren't full of pet supplies, could be used to store a spare fleet of 747s, the Astrodome, or one month's worth of redundant and contradictory government memos.

These stores require this much space because they must contain the thousands of mutant varieties of pet food available now. This is food which has been carefully produced in controlled laboratory conditions to appeal to even the most finicky pet owner.

The real problem with television isn’t violence, or inappropriate content, or news stories which appear to have been invented just before the cameras rolled. The real problem is that kids are imitating the stuff they see between the commercials.

Kids grow up watching ER (now airing its fifty-first “episode that changes everything�) and they’re just dying to become nurses and doctors. By the time they discover the practice of medicine isn’t all trauma and drama, they’re so buried in education loans they’ll be healthcare wage-slaves for the rest of their lives. The only steamy romance they’ll see is if they get off shift in time to catch the newest ER (which will be the two-hundred-and-twenty-third “episode that changes everything.�)

Sometimes I feel like my life is really a movie; you know the kind where there's some kind of cipher and everyone else is in on the secret but me ... The DUH-Vinci Code. It'd probably be a lot easier if people stopped trying to communicate and just talked.

Part of the problem is that words aren't generally reliable in the picking-a-meaning-and-sticking-to-it department. Take the good-old standby “love�. This little tramp of a word never met a meaning it didn't like. You'll find it promiscuously applied to everything from the intertwining of two lives (“I love my new puppy�) to devotion to a favored sports team (“I love the Jazz when they win�) to favored foods (“I love a good mutton sandwich, especially when the crusts are trimmed off�.) Next thing you know it'll be snuggled up against a government policy description -- “Ooh! I love the penalty-free deferment of survivor benefits for capital gains in designated enterprise zones.� How can you trust a word like that?