Former Baltimore Oriole BJ Surhoff was on Good Morning Maryland @ 9 this morning talking about being an effective father to an autistic son. He and his wife founded Pathfinders for Autism, an organization that holds events and fundraisers for Autism and its causes and effects.

April is Autism Awareness Month, BTW.

Just on the heels of our own giveaway for a snakebyte MiniMote for the Wii, fatherhood site DaDa Rocks is giving away a copy of The $1,000,000 Pyramid for the Wii! Just think, if you won both of these contests, you’d be stylin’. Head on over there and don’t forget to enter our giveaway as well!

Sauce: DaDa Rocks

The Review (Giveaway at the bottom)

When my wife and I first let our son play Wii Music, he loved the fact that he could swing the controller and make his avatar play the piano. The controller, however, was towering out of his hands – and when I’d try to point to a button for him to press, he had to put down the nunchuk attachment and press the button with the other hand. Though he was just fine with the idea, I knew eventually, when he wasn’t just swinging his arms and making noise, he’d need either bigger hands or a smaller remote. My problem was then having to decide between expensive hand-transplant surgery for my son, or having to crack open a Wii remote and mod it to be shorter.

Or, I could just Google “mini wii remote”.

Sunflex had the answer: their snakebyte MiniMote, which is 25% smaller than Nintendo’s original remote. Sunflex’s remote can, according to their website, “be used by people with small hands and assures them the same control, comfort and game play as those with larger hands.” What a great idea – and thank god, I didn’t have to keep saving my pennies for my kid’s hand-transplant surgery.

Before last week, the U.S. House of Representatives was committed to making sure that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) would lose its entire $451 million budget when they passed a continuing resolution (H.R.1) de-funding the CPB in the 2011 federal budget. Similar legislation was introduced in the Senate by Republican Senators Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Tom Coburn (R-OK).

Funding for the CPB, which doles out money to National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), was a major debate topic in the showdown last Friday over the 2011 budget. Some members of Congress thought it was so important to de-fund public broadcasting, that they were willing to shut down the government over it. In the end, the threat to public broadcasting was eliminated when President Barack Obama negotiated CPB funding out of the “cuts” column.

So while this is mostly a moot issue for the immediate future, it is inevitable that CPB funding will come up again in the 2012 federal budget talks. and that means we need to talk about it, because CPB funds one of the best media organizations for parents and children currently available on the air: PBS. Let me tell you why you should give a crap that some members of Congress (probably even yours) want to kill PBS. Let me tell you what PBS has done for you lately…

Just in case you didn’t notice the byline two posts down, 8BitDad’s got a new contributor. 8BitDad welcomes Nicholaus Noles to the site, a dude you might already be familiar with. Here’s a run-down of why having Noles our our team is awesome:

• He’s got a PhD. from Yale in Psychology.
• He’s written for What They Play, and we’ve talked about him before.
• He’s written for IGN.
• He’s a father.
• He once did the Kessel run in roundabout 14 parsecs. Sure, it’s not “under 12,” but being that the Kessel run is 18 parsecs, it’s still impressive.

We heard that What They Play had a questionable future, so we wanted to make sure Nick had a place to get his fatherhood on.

We hope you look forward to watching Nick get it on as much as we do.

Wait…what?!

Recently, images of J. Crew Creative Director Jenna Lyons painting her five-year-old son’s toenails pink kicked off a mini media frenzy. Fox News commentator Dr. Keith Ablow criticized Lyons and J. Crew for celebrating transgenderism in children and emphasizing how “our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity.” Looking over the coverage of this “gender debate,” several things pop out.

Our buddies at Fathers & Families posted a story yesterday about Peter Spitz, an ex-marine who was shot by Teresa, his wife and mother of his child. After walking their child over to a neighbor’s house, Teresa returned, put a pillow over Peter’s head, shot him three times, and shot Peter’s mother, killing her.

Peter called 911 and lived – albeit in a living hell. He is blind and has no sense of smell. To top it off, he’s not allowed to see his son. Teresa, who had once considered drowning that son, and allegedly wrote a letter to a friend while in a psychiatric facility saying she’d “finish the job,” has been granted regular supervised visits. The child was placed with a guardian family during the ordeal – and that family is friends of Teresa, and clearly not friends of Peter.

If you just threw up in your mouth a little, we understand.

Purely speculation: had it been the “other way around,” and the father had shot the mother, you’d better believe all of society would have banded together to make sure the monster could not be anywhere near his child. He would have spent a long time in prison and probably wouldn’t have made it out alive, as prison’s got a great reputation for punishing wife-and-child abusers.

Head over to F&F for the whole story.

Sauce: Fathers & Families