There’s a great article up on Wired by-and-about the dad who hacked Donkey Kong so that his daughter could play as Pauline, relegating Mario to the position of captured love interest.

Mike Mika wasn’t thinking about feminist agendas or affronts to the patriarchy when he made Pauline a playable character for his 3 year old daughter. They had just come off of a Super Mario Bros. 2 binge and Mika’s daughter loved using Princess Toadstool. The duo also had watched the gamer classic The King of Kong, so Donkey Kong was on the playlist. But Mika’s daughter wanted to know why she couldn’t play as a female character in Donkey Kong.

A two-month old baby was killed by what many people would think is the most unlikely of causes – his father’s kiss. The story from last year is just hitting the news now, and can’t be more heartbreaking.

The father, 28 year old Carl Maclaren, was described by his wife Marrie-Claire as “the perfect father.” But that doesn’t help his heavy heart after a cold sore in his mouth carrying the herpes simplex virus led to his five-week premature son, Kaiden, being hospitalized and dying last May.

We didn’t have the stones to ruin your Monday with this story, so here it is today: a father died protecting his nine year old daughter from a blizzard in Japan.

Hokkaido Island had a nasty blizzard in the last few days that saw temperatures dropping to 21° amidst 68mph winds. People were stranded in cars, and at least nine people died, including a father, Mikio Okada.

If there’s one thing that can make any parents feel equal to each other, it’s having their kids embarrass them in public and cause a standstill in their task-at-hand. This happened to gay dads
Dr. Paul Melchert and James Zimmerman yesterday at a marriage equality rally in Minnesota. Their sons, Emmett and Gabriel turned on the cute, and almost brought Melchart’s speech to an early close.

After seeing the antics, the audience laughed as Melchart introduced his family: “You’ve met Emmett, and his twin brother Gabriel…”

In her article, “Dumbing down Dad: How media present husbands, fathers as useless,” Sarah Petersen does a great job in identifying the different elements to society’s treatment of fathers. Petersen acknowledges a problem with the media, but then identifies that society too is slow to help fathers reach their at-home potential with their families.

The most pointed and clear commentary in the article comes from author/speaker (“The Dad Man“) Joe Kelly, who says that the way fathers are treated is a habit. “The habit is that men are of secondary importance in the life of a family,” Kelly told The Deseret News. “Therefore we all kind of expect men to be secondary. And it’s not surprising that attitude plays itself out in many ways in our culture: in media portrayals and in the habits we have as families.”

Over the weekend, what was the only real major-media coverage of the Dad 2.0 Summit emerged in The New York Times in a piece about how fathers are seeking better ads aimed at them. The Dad 2.0 Summit, which took place the first weekend of February, gathered in Houston, Texas to talk about the image of dads in the media. And while some things will never change, show organizers see PR companies and marketing agencies eager to get to fathers as a demographic.

It’s interesting to note that of all of the recaps of the Dad 2.0 Summit and the discussions of its importance, no large media outlets touched on it (unless we missed it, which is always possible). It took a month for this NYT piece to come out.

These days, when Tom Burns sneezes, the parent blogger world catches a cold. So it goes for his latest, a piece called “25 Things I Think Every Dad Should Teach His Kids,” which appeared on The Good Men Project and then made the jump up to The Huffington Post.

Burns outlines his life’s tips that sound like a sequel to Baz Luhrmann’s “Everybody’s Free”, including gems such as “Even though, yes, I just admitted that I don’t know everything, pointing that out when we’re arguing is never going to work in your favor.”