I was out last week with a friend, and he went into a convenience store to buy a subway ticket. And there I was, faced with this magazine rack.

Notice the Pappa Magazine in the top right. I wrote about Pappa last month, and even though I noticed its minor buzz online, I never thought it would actually get such major play on newsstands.

How far away do you think the first glossy “Daddy” magazine is in the US? 20, 30 years?

Though it could be windy.

Mostly glorious, especially in January.

And now back to this.  That poor kid falling down says it all.  Except that my kids had just spent 20 minutes falling down on purpose and screaming with laughter about it.  So all is not gloomy when you get fresh snow on your return from the beach …

So I complained about the lack of play areas for kids at airports. But I had never been to Seattle, where they have this heaven for small children. We had a four hour layover and it saved us.

So between Stockholm and Seattle, we encountered two wonderful playgrounds.

Which leaves no excuses for all the other slackers. And, yes, I am looking at you Oakland.

We stumbled upon on our first play area in Salt Lake City a few years ago, and it was like a gift from the heavens, with a big choir singing and everything.  Since then, we discovered a shabby one in Chicago, which likely saved us and hundreds of people on a series of airplanes from a toddler meltdown.

Seriously, why does not every airport have play areas?  All people do is complain about small kids on planes.  Why not give them a place to have fun before they get on board.  Why not get them out of the waiting areas?

A few weeks ago, in Stockholm, E and I wondered why the Stockholm airport had no play area.   It seemed thoughtless and odd.

Then we  found this, based on the work of a beloved early 20th-century children’s book illustrator Elsa Beskow:

Seriously, you could charge for this collaboration with Junibacken, a cool children’s museum in Stockholm, which opened in 2011.  It could be an attraction.  We might come early next time around.

Why is this sort of thing so hard?

Let us play, let us play, let us play.

You read the first half about a dad out with his son, and then you flip it over and read about a mom out with her daughter.  They meet in the living room in the middle.

And you know what strikes me, besides the cool gimmick?  That the Dad is equal to the Mom.  Not just in having half a book, but in the tone and substance of the book.  He comforts his son when he gets hurt, helps him deal with fears and just in general was competent to deal with the average weekend outing.

And the mom?  She is basically the same, not scared of lions at the zoo and that sort of thing.

If a book like this came out today, I would praise it for being so forward thinking on gender stereotypes.

Then I just read a post at Dadding, the fatherhood blog at Babble, on LEGO advertising and how the toys used to be for boys and girls but somehow became only for boys.

And I think about how in Sweden the girls toys are getting pinker and girlier, without even any of the middle ground that American girls get (clothes and attitudes are still different there, yes).

Some pretty sad backsliding.

We went to a park today here in northern California.  And it was filled with dads.  And it was filled Americans.  And, even though this happens every time we come to California, or I hang out with American dads in Sweden, it dawned on me that I am not special at all.

I mean, I’m sure I’m special and unique and will get a trophy at some point.  But  it is a good reminder to see all these guys taking care of their kids, to see all these parents talking like I do and playing like I do.

It’s not that American parenting is better.  It’s not.  It’s not worse either.

And it is both good and bad to feel part of the crowd.

It was good today.

Go figure.  Must be a parent thing.

Anyway, the arm was manageable – and I will stop carrying him at some point – until I got a smartphone.  It turns out that I hold the smartphone at an angle that matches my child-carrying one.

So after I have checked my e-mail or surfed the web or texted someone, my arm hurts even more than it does when carrying Baby B.

Maybe it’s a message to disconnect …

But we did have fun on New Year’s Eve, watching balloons drop with Snoopy at the Peanuts museum and then hanging out in the dunes and on the beach on a perfect Sonoma winter day.

And there was also a wedding party that walked by …

You would think I would jump at the whole hot “Dark Sweden” vibe.  But I have a real ambivalence about the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson.

Especially when people, including Larsson, compare his heroine, Lisbeth Salander, with the classic Swedish heroine Pippi Longstocking.

I wrote a post about it at Double X at Slate a few weeks ago:

Yes, both characters do spring from the same Swedish/Western cultural well, and both have no mother to speak of and missing fathers that turn up with unforeseen consequences. But Larsson claimed that Lisbeth is Pippi grown up in the real world, instead of that this is what happens to his Pippi in his alternate universe. This isn’t what Lindgren intended.

There was one point that got cut in editing that was actually the inspiration for the whole post.

And here it is:

But Lindgren created a heroine out of the work of Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau – natural, unspoiled, resilient – while Larsson crafted a world reflecting the popular perception of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes – all trauma, betrayal and destruction.

Today, on the other hand, was nothing but fog.  So maybe that is why I had the energy tonight to pass on a link.

In the middle of Occupy Wall Street, my friend Chris wrote an article for Somatosphere on the People’s Mic.

This got me to thinking about my own brief but intense time in the world of anarchy-inspired consensus decision making.  And I wrote an essay that finally appeared in The Morning News.

Here is the top:

There was power in the circle, or maybe it is better to say there were powerful people around the circle. Ostensibly equals, we sat on the patchy grass in the Czech countryside in 1996, surrounded by teepees and with the hellish flames of coal plants flickering on the horizon.

Except I was new, had staggered in at midnight after a three-hour hike and a six-hour train trip and had slept under my jacket under a table my head against someone’s knee, and I was heartbroken, and I really did not care about Ecotopia, this tidy festival in what had been an 800-year-old village whose residents had been driven out in the early 1990s by rapacious coal companies.

The morning meeting was supposed to take half an hour. But we blew past 30 minutes before the first point was even defined, much less decided upon. This was pure consensus—the ultimate in horizontal decision making—so everyone had to agree, and it was a large circle, maybe 50 to 60 people, and you try getting even like-minded environmental activists to come to that kind of consensus quickly.

You can read the rest here.