Step away from the giant cookie!

Last WEEK I installed the Halloween fog machine in the master bedroom, which is where the master sleeps. (But believe me, I am right there next to her each night, making sure she is warm and comfortable and resting peacefully in her swampy lair.)

This week we are adding instant-replay cameras to the kitchen. The kids say our house is like a prison anyway, so why not wire it accordingly?

Plus, I figure it’ll go a long way toward resolving disputes over curfews for the homecoming dance or who swiped the last gigantic M&M; cookie, the kind I like to have just before bed, as my reward for surviving another day without drinking myself silly.

“Who took my cookie?” I’m always yelling at 10 at night, which is happy hour at our house -- cookies, cigars, Milk of Magnesia, bed.

“Not me, Daddy-o,” someone says from the den.

Usually, that someone is on the couch, eating a gigantic M&M; cookie and brushing crumbs off her T-shirt.

“Mom, do you think ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ is better this year or worse?” she’s saying.

“Your father is talking to you,” her mother points out.

“Look, I’m flossing,” the little guy adds.

“What’s he doing still up?” I ask.

“Flossing, see?” the little guy says.

“Dad, I promise you, I never saw that cookie,” the little girl yells, then turns back to her mom. “Because I think ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ is waaaaaay better.”

See, wayward and unaccountable children, this is why we need instant replay. My buddy Paul insists that instant replay is already too prevalent. It’s like creeping socialism, he says, an insidious presence in modern sports. Eventually, it will be in every nook and cranny of American life.

All the better, I say. The few remaining innocents -- you and I -- have nothing to fear from round-the-clock surveillance, do we? Kids on the other hand. . .

Seriously, have you met any of today’s children? Generation Weird. They are like lapsed Catholics with no sense of the past. For instance, for the big homecoming dance, the boys don’t just call to invite the girls anymore.

“Ummmm, yeah, this is Marvin. . . . Um, I was wondering . . . um, would you possibly want to go to homecoming . . . with me, I mean?”

That’s the way we did it. It was like sticking needles in your eyeballs, but it was quick and cheap, and you usually got an answer right away. If she hung up, that meant no. If she mumbled, “Yeah, I guess so,” that meant “Yes, I’ll bring some beer. Can we leave now?”

Today, the simple phone call is out. These days the boys stage elaborate invitations, where they’ll come over to the girl’s front yard and in, say, Roman candles, spell out “Please go to homecoming with me. Love, Chad” in a font they designed themselves. Or, with the parents’ cooperation, the boy will fill the girl’s bedroom with 1,000 sugar packets and leave a note saying, “It would be SWEET if you went to homecoming with me. Hugs, Ringo.”

Sweet, get it? Incidents like this just prove that we’d better fix network television soon, because if we’re depending on these little goobers to craft the next great sitcom in a few years, look out. We’ll be stuck with “Night Court” reruns forever.

Anyway, I thought it would be good to put a few surveillance cameras around the house to capture moments like this, not to mention to resolve the disputes I mentioned earlier. We have become the Supreme Court of family arguments. I blame it on math class, which is stressing out the little girl, even though she has a tutor, which costs me 3 pints of blood every Wednesday night.

Funny, I made it all the way through high school and college without a single tutor. I don’t think they even had tutors back then. In those days, they had these things called “teachers,” so if you got stuck on something, you could go see them and they’d straighten you out.

Or in class, suppose you didn’t understand some concept, you’d raise your hand and say, “Um, Mr. Larsen, I just don’t get that.” And Mr. Larsen would ricochet a piece of chalk off your shiny forehead, leaving you stunned and a little lightheaded. “That’s because you’re an idiot,” he’d say. And you’d say, “That may very well be true, sir. But at least I’m not bone-ugly like you.”

Get it? That was the American educational system back in the mid-’70s, and it worked out pretty darned well. Ask anybody. After all, we grew up to be the generation that gave the world personal computers that don’t work very well and cellphones you can hardly hear on. And the public can’t get enough of ‘em! How brilliant is that?

Let’s see you accomplish just one of those things, you little punks. Just one.

Trust me, we’ll be watching.

--

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.