Jake's Day

It's Father's Day. I'm writing this ahead of time because I might be unavailable for a while, for obvious reasons.

Knowing that Jake has a model railroad set (per "Lucky Strike"), I once had this idea for a crossover fanfic in which Jake goes to his favorite model train shop on the Monday just after Father's Day, and there meets up with several other cartoon/comics dads who also happen to like model trains. Among others, Jake was going to have a light conversation with Reverend Timothy Lovejoy (The Simpsons), John Patterson (For Better or For Worse), and possibly Gomez Addams (The Addams Family). I thought there were some others, but long searches on the Internet turned up nothing. The story is gathering electron dust in my computer files, so if anyone else wants to do this, say the word and I will send you the data I had. (Only half of the first sentence of the story was ever written.)

I thought it was nice of Daria to think of her dad as a hero in "Of Human Bonding," though I admit the exact reasons she thought so still seem rather vague, given how poorly Jake was portrayed in the series. Perhaps she understood the hardships he had had overcome to be a good dad to her, despite having had a bad relationship with his own father. Daria, ever the selfish teen, had no compunction about tricking her father to get her way. Some of her stunts seem like a little much. (Consider how she got his hamburger in "Fat Like Me.") Still, she finally admits he and Helen were okay as parents . . . in the last episode of the series.

In any event, here's to you, Jake. Have a good one today, you and all the other dads out there. It's your day.