Chris Erskine: Sharing three halves. It’s how we roll.

My wife arrives home, January in her cheeks, smelling like a winter morning. Cradled in her arms, the biggest cinnamon roll you ever saw. More and more, I believe that all happiness begins with the mouth.

The little guy divvies up the cinnamon roll this way. “You get half, I get half, Mom gets half.”

Sounds fair enough to me.

But then Posh has to explain halves, thirds and quarters. I’m standing there craving this cinnamon roll — one of the best pastries I’ve ever made love to with my eyes — but I have to wait till she’s done lecturing the little guy on fractions.

To his credit, the little guy nails most of her questions. It’s good to see that the three hours of homework he gets every night are paying off.

“Do I still get half?” he asks when she is done.

Of course he does.

I don’t know how many hours of homework your third-grader gets, but we’re averaging two to three hours.

Our school district’s goals appear to be:

1. To keep property values up via outstanding test scores;

2. To get all our kids into Harvard.

Nothing against Harvard; I hear it’s quite sufficient academically. But all this emphasis on studying is cutting into the little guy’s basketball.

Our little community’s third goal:

3. For all the little boys to play pro ball.

Certainly, these are reasonable expectations. The moms set them, so who am I to argue?

Unfortunately, not every kid hits these goals. In fact, I don’t know of one child from our community who went to Harvard and then went on to the NBA. There seems to be a bias in the NBA against short, excessively verbal people from our community.

These short, excessively verbal people get even by going on to run major studios and then charging us exorbitant fees to see bad movies.

The way Freud felt about sex is the way I feel about sports, that much of how we behave as adults is shaped by our early frustrations with athletics. Maybe that’s a male thing, but we’re well on our way to becoming one gender anyway. Evolution, like love, takes some twisty turns indeed.

By the way, why are all movies priced about the same? There is no allowance made for a Cameron Diaz flick versus a Meryl Streep movie. It would be as if all cars were priced equally, no matter how much they cost to make.

A Maserati is more expensive than a Kia. Dinner at Le Cirque costs more than aMcDonald’sHappy Meal.

Yet all movies are priced pretty much the same — the good ones, the bad ones, the little indies, the epics.

There is a slight surcharge for the 3-D movies, which is another scam. In a typical 3-D movie, a blue bird will flutter out into the audience once, and there will be one sequence where pixie dust flies out of the screen and into our popcorn.

After that, it’s as if they ran out of money for 3-D cameras, and the rest of the movie is shot in typical 2-D.

I do not have a problem with this. Life is in 3-D; movies should be 2-D. The perfect movie would be 1-D. But very, very wide.

There is one movie out today,”The Artist,”in which the characters don’t even talk.

I like this. I find most dialogue to be only occasionally better than daily conversation, and frequently worse.

So removing the talking from many of today’s movies — many of which sound like 12-car pileups — might come off as an enhancement.

My nominees for silent movie stars of today: Diaz, Ashton Kutcher, Al Pacino (who seems to have gone quite insane).

And, of course, Congress.

While we’re fixing movies, another thing I’d like is a 10-pack DVD set of Oscar contenders. A few days after the best picture nominees are announced, I’d love to go to Blockbuster or Netflix and purchase those movies.

I would pay a decent amount for this. I would pay full retail.

Or, how about theater chains holding an Oscar weekend, where you could go and see all the major nominees at one multiplex?

Here’s the thing: We live in a world where airlines overbook our flights, where customer service is a joke, where hotels charge 30 bucks a night just to park.

There are resort fees, ticket surcharges and pre-payment penalties on your mortgage. That’s right, not only do they penalize you for paying late, they also get you for paying early.

It’s the 21st century version of inflation. They’ve just managed to disguise it.

In the end, the manufacturer gets half, the merchant gets half, which leaves consumers with ...

One little bite of cinnamon roll.

chris.erskine@latimes.com

twitter.com/erskinetimes