A weekly roundup of news in parentville, including the good, the bad, and the utterly trivial.

Dad's special day is less than 48 hours away, which means there's still puh-len-ty of time for kids to hit the mall to play video games buy Dad a last minute gift. Some ideas:

Flip-flop bottle opener: Because nothing says super cool dad like opening a beer with the bottom of your flip-flop. So sanitary too.

Gold Man toilet attachment: A urinal-like over-the-seat porthole that's supposed to keep man pee from straying outside its designated receptacle. Call it the pee-brella. Also handy for barfing sessions.

Secret Agent School: A day of indulging in OO7 fantasies. Sorry, dad, Pussy Galore is not included.

Anyway, three cheers for the daddies of the world! A new, thoroughly unscientific, study shows that men tend to people their offices with photos of the wife and kids; women with just the kids. Why? One shrink says dads view their office pix to be:

a symbol, as one of my colleagues said, that they've made it. It's a status.  The family's intact.

Moms have a totally different perspective:

The mother is saying, "These are my kids, this is my life -- you may think I'm here at work, but I have a second shift, and here it is, represented." The husband becomes a little ancillary.

The article says this lopsided view of family "says something about relationships" ... something not good. I say, so what? It's when pix of strangers start showing up that you worry.  Or maybe a pic of dear old dad. A new, slightly more scientific, study shows that women like men who look like their father. Not all women; just the daddy's girls. Eeeewwwww yucky.

You, me and Wii. The adult-friendly video game has many more dads and  their spawn spending quality time over the console. "It may be geek talk, but we're still communicating," says one fan. "How many parents sit down and do things on a consistent basis with their kids?"

Like eat dinner together. Apparently, the quaint tradition of the family meal is the key to keeping kids off drugs and on the road to Harvard. If that is an impossibility, the New York Times' Lisa Belkin says sprawling "on the couch with the boys, arms and legs entangled, critiquing our favorite TV shows," works too.

Now I have this image of a octopus-like creature composed of mother Belkin and her smelly boys etched in my brain. And now, you do too.

Happy Father's Day.