WINNING COMBINATIONS

Ron Holmes, the father of basketball star Shabazz Muhammad, didn’t leave things to chance or waste precious time on romance. He saw point guard Faye Paige perform and said to himself: The two of us would make a great genetic mix. “She’s going to be my wife, and we’re going to make some All-Americans” (LA Times 22 March). It’s as simple as that, friends.  So, let me suggest a few other winning combinations:

• Donald Trump & Kim Kardashian = millionaire with real hair
• Arnold Schwarzenegger & Jerry Brown = enough muscle to push through gay marriage
• Jules Verne (Around the World in 80 Days) & E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey) = discount airline

All that mixing and matching has the FDA in a tizzy. “It’s a bit of a mess,” Jennifer Kuzma admits, speaking of genetically modified foods (LA Times 23 March).  When you eat corn engineered to keep down weed, is it still food or is it a pesticide? When you eat salmon on growth hormones are you eating fish or taking drugs?

I’m also wondering:

• Teenager & cell phone= armed and dangerous?

There has been a spike in cell rage recently (LA Times 23 March). No, I’m not referring to jail riots. I mean teenagers hurling cell phones in anger. Not sure I like that, but electronic shops welcome the new trend. As far as they are concerned,

• Cell rage & broken screen=more cell phone sales.

Have you been to a pop concert lately? Stunning! Mesmerizing! Or should I say paralyzing? Watch performers scaling walls, riding motorcycles onstage, bursting from eggs, doing aerial stunts against a background of fireworks. It’s a winning combination. Pyrotechnics & ambulance sirens, acrobatics & concussions.  So:

Children Unite! An open letter to Anne-Marie Slaughter, E.L. James, and Tiger Mom.

We’ve had enough, all of us, from toddler to teenaged sons. And we mean you, Amy Chua, Anne-Marie Slaughter, E.L. James, and other embarrassing mothers and fathers.

But first we want to express our profound gratitude to the founder of the Take Back Your Childhood Movement, the person who has given us the courage to talk back. Let’s hear it for The Honest Toddler. It was he who made it clear at http://honesttoddler.wordpress.com/ that we will not tolerate any more organic food, especially of the lentil variety that looks like “rehydrated squirrel droppings.” We want sugar! We want Red 40 and Yellow 6! We want trans-fatty hamburgers from MacDonald’s!

And we’ll definitely not suffer any more family holidays with educational stops at museums. Read The Family Vacation Then and Now and ask yourself: what kind of happy family memories does that create? Who will pay the shrink’s bill when we grow up? We ask the same question of Jamie Lynne Grumet. Stop publishing pics of us sucking your breast. How are we going answer the schoolyard bullies when they hold up the front page of The Times?

We are not fooled by your professed altruism, Anne-Marie Slaughter. You say you are giving up your career for us and want to hover 24/7? Get back to your office. We are more than content with ten minutes of love every other day. We need that second salary. We are not content to give up the private school, the iPod touch 8 GB, the Nintendo DS Lite Cobalt, the party scene, our own Beamster, and the prospect of getting into Harvard, just because you want to indulge in foolish motherhood dreams. We want our unsupervised youth back.

That goes for you too, Amy Chua. Perfect your own piano score! We give you fair warning. We’ve been approached by a well-known human rights lawyer, who will represent us in our lawsuit against you. We want a cut of the royalties from Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. As Anne-Marie Slaughter said in her article in The Atlantic: You can’t have it all.

And you, E. L. James. We went fifty shades of red in our faces when we read your book. We want compensation for the embarrassment we’ve suffered in the halls, people quoting passages from your book, whispering “Don’t leave me” or gazing into our eyes with “fear and anguish” or asking us whether we wanted “a vanilla relationship with kinky fuckery”.

Enough is enough. All you children of oppressive parents unite! Join us in our fund raising campaign and demand money for writing your parents into your life. Our model is Toronto author Daniel Perlmutter (Globe & Mail, July 10), who will write you into his next novel for a price. $30 lets you invent a character, $750 allows you to determine the genre of his book, $1000 buys you an ending of your choice. Here is our pledge sheet for parents.

$100/mo and we’ll talk about toilet training.

We offer sliding rates for listening to your advice on job training: Plumber 500/mo. Lawyer 1000/mo. Heart specialist 2000/mo, more if it includes treating you.

$ 2000/mo and up if you want to determine our lifetime success.

Call us for rates on lasting marriages, guaranteed grandchildren, attendance at family reunions, etc.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Children is in the works.