There's more news out about Jack White's impending fatherhood. Turns out the hot model wife of the man behind the White Stripes, Karen Elson, will give birth to an extremely white, unstriped infant sometime this spring. This, according to Kurt Loder's crack team of reporters at MTV News. Given the fact that we're moving to Detroit next year and I'm planning to be a SAHD, I have a few months to plot a way to get in on playdates with Jack and Karen and their inevitably strangely-named son or daughter. Can you picture the nursery that kid is going to have?

I can just imagine ringing the doorbell at Jack White's Detroit mansion and having him answer the door pale and creepy like a cross between Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka and Gary Oldman's Dracula. He'd lead Juniper and I into the depths of his turreted castle, providing dry, docent-like commentary such as, "Ty Cobb once held Negro-dwarf-tossing contests in the parlour with Honus Wagner," before opening the gigantic red-and-white striped door to the nursery. It will take at least a minute before all the wonderment sets in: a herd of taxidermed zebras and ten foot peppermint lollipops and candycanes and that moppet from Jerry Maguire riding around on a cheerful orangutan wearing a nehru suit and a gigantic animatronic lego-block Jack that takes requests for any of the songs from White Blood Cells while playing behind him on a twelve-foot screen is hilarious home-video footage Jack has taken of Meg stumbling around with a bottle of Jack Daniels in her grip.

And that's just the foyer of the nursery. The next room would be completely pillowed and upholstered to look like a giant Piet Mondrian painting and contain a full-sized reproduction of Patsy Cline's tour bus filled with Mariachi musicians from Mexicantown playing old Blind Willie McTell, Leadbelly, and Stooges songs like lullabies. "No fun, my babe, no fun. . ." they'll sing while a troupe of tiny, cute mechanical owls like Bubo from Clash Of the Titans whirl above our heads. Do you think Jack will push a bugaboo? Hell no, he'll have some eighteenth century Prussian carriage modified to be pulled around Detroit by miniature ponies whipped by a surly dwarf who looks like Erich von Stroheim with an eyepatch.

Now you see why I have to come up with a plan. I know Eminem lives in Detroit and he's got a kid or two too but I'm sure his house just looks like anything you'd see on Cribs. Jack White's house, on the other hand, would probably make the set of Lidsville look like an Art Van showroom.

But seriously, I would be pretty excited to go bjorn to bjorn with Jack White at the Eastern Market some day. We've enjoyed his music. When Wood and I lived in Ann Arbor we used to go to White Stripes shows back when Jack was just a muscley frat boy with a puka-shell necklace who loved the blues. In 1999 we saw them play at the Detroit Institute of Art in the Diego Rivera mural room for $1.00. It was "family night at the DIA" and there were all kinds of buttoned-up conservative types there with their elementary-aged kids and all of Jack's many nieces and nephews were running around among the ironic-t-shirted hipsters. Is there a more kid-friendly serious rock band out there today? Who needs the Wiggles when you have songs like "Apple Blossom" and "We're Going To Be Friends" and "My doorbell"? A few years ago, Jack White even let himself be interviewed by a five-year old kid named Lucas who believed "that Jack White is 10 years old and making up those songs for him and his friends." My favorite excerpts:

Lucas: I was listening to "Little Room" and I was thinking that in a little room you can have your favorite stuff and your good friends but in a bigger room you can have more stuff but more people will be in it too and you can't know them all and some of the are probably in the big room only because it is big and they think they're suppose to be there just because the room is big.
Jack White:I think you're absolutely right about the big room. You're a pretty smart kid. It took me years to figure that out.

. . .
Lucas: Where did you get your red shoes?
Jack White: I got the red shoes from a fan of the band.
Lucas: Are you mad at the color blue?
Jack White: I don't hate the color blue...
Lucas: Do you have to wear good clothes on Easter?
Jack White: Actually, I wore a blue suit on Easter. . .

. . .
Lucas: If "there is no true love". . .how did you "fall in love with a girl"?
Jack White: You'll find out when you get older. If I told you now it would spoil it.

Now that's a celebrity whose baby I can get excited about.

. . .but not before I take this last shot:

Feel free to iron it on a onesie, print it out and plaster it all over Park Slope, or just call me an asshole. The truth is I don't really give a shit if people want to spend $850 on a stroller, I just like to needle them a bit and I wanted to make a graphic that replaced some Os with that symbol the Bugaboo people stole from that movie where Naomi Watts is a hot single mom who wears little shirts that show her nipples and the little wet girl is trying to crawl out of the television to kill her. At least three of my favorite parent bloggers are admitted bugaboo pushers, and they know I'm only doing this because it's Saturday and it's just so friggin' easy. Here were my other potential slogans:

"My Other $900 Vehicle is a 2000 Honda Accord"

"But it's got great resale value"

"I have to push my stroller through the snow to get to Whole Foods!"

"Shocks and Awe"

"You're just jealous, bitches"

In the end, "conspicuous consumption" had the most Os and the least verbiage. Got any other ideas?

In the latest chapter of the New York Times' "sloppy and insulting lifestyle journalism" week, today there's a hilarious article about gigantic yuppie strollers in Manhattan. I have two things to say about it:

(1) I'm afraid I have to side with the non-parents on this one. I agree that giant strollers in tight quarters are kind of annoying. I don't care if it's a Bugaboo or a doublewide Graco travel system, these things sort of defy courtesy in the urban environment. But I will pick on the uber-hip Manhattan parents featured in this article. You live in Manhattan, people. In deciding to do so, you entered into an implicit contract with 7 million other souls not to take up too much damn space. Carry your babies! Keep them close to you! When the baby is too big to carry, get a stroller that doesn't have more armor than a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. I like umbrella strollers. Strollers should be like umbrellas. You should be able to leave one in a cab or in a Thai restaurant and say, "Eh, it was just a stroller. Another one will come along." You're pushing the thing down a sidewalk, not racing it in the Antigo Kiwanis Off-Road Championships.

The least you Manhattan Bugaboo owners could do is stop talking about all the advanced features and admit that you love your Bugaboo (a) just because it's pretty; or (b) because traffic and parking are prohibitively difficult and you can't roll around town in some ridiculous luxury car and that $800 stroller lets everyone know that you are, in fact, rich.

(as well as acutely aware of the latest classy celebrity baby trends highlighted every week two years ago in US Weekly)

Seriously, don't tell me about the shocks and suspension. I've got my palms over my ears and I'm yelling gibberish while you tell me about the shocks and suspension. Did I accidentally call into Car Talk? Did I walk into a Pep Boys without realizing it? Shut-the-fuck-up. Admit that it's conspicuous consumption and let's go grab a beer at one of those Manhattan bars with a stroller check so I don't have to keep looking at that gigantic red blight. I don't mind conspicuous consumption. What bugs me out is the denial of conspicuous consumption.

Okay, I know this isn't entirely fair. I'm being a total asshole. Bugaboos aren't even that big. They just seem big. The fact is Junebug doesn't like strollers and neither do I. I just don't like pushing things. It makes me feel like I should be collecting cans or something.

(2) I just so happen to have gone to law school with Elizabeth Khalil, the girl in the article who said (about using a big stroller): "I liken it to the SUV experience. . .it's just your mission to mow down everything in your sight because you can." With that quote she's made enemies of a million daddytypes readers. She is a nice person. And goddamn it, she's kind of right! Bugaboos and their kin are the SUVs of the parent-gear world. People use the exact same excuses to justify SUVs as Bugaboo owners use to justify their strollers. I respect the right to own and drive SUVs, but it just seems like someone who drives a Honda Civic ought to be able to call a new Hummer H3 a gas guzzler without the owner throwing a hissy fit. I simply contend that the same principle applies to strollers.

All the furor over this article and defensiveness over Bugaboos confuses me. Hello: you spent nearly a grand on something you will use for a couple years, tops. Can't you at least be good natured about how some folks might think that's silly? You know how big they are. Can't you just suck it up and admit they're a little cumbersome? I'm not saying you don't have the right to own a gigantostroller or use it. I just don't think it's fair to say, like ModernDayDad (or the author of this NYT piece) that these stroller-haters have issues "beyond the strollers" themselves. That seems kind of petty. The writer of this article loses it completely when she implies there are undercurrents of conflict between "people who have chosen to have children and those who haven't." This is just another example of a NYT writer who came to a shoddy conclusion before she set out to write the piece, and then molded her reporting to the conclusion. This isn't about barren old maids sickened by the conspicuous reminders of others' fertility; it's about rude parents with gigantic expensive strollers who fail to respect the rights of others and traipse about town with a sense of self-righteous entitlement! I have a baby and it annoys me too. What are my "issues beyond the strollers?"

Common courtesy still applies, people, and I do think it's interesting when non-parents speak out about behavior that may be invisible to us parents. Much love to the gigantostroller owners who are respectful of others. But the self-righteous parents? Christ, move to the suburbs if you're that sensitive about people getting annoyed by your expensive stroller taking up so much space.

Oh, right, then the "cool" factor of using one goes down exponentially. Therein lies the problem.