I took my 6-year-old daughter to a birthday party yesterday, and fell into conversation with another middle-aged dad (of a 5-year-old girl) about strategies of paternal self-defense in relation to our children’s DVD diets. This is a very important subject to any man who hopes to negotiate fatherhood with his sanity intact, for reasons I’ll explain. Anyway, it took us about five minutes to discover that our respective sprogs shared an abiding fascination with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that both had even given it the same alternate title : “The Space Movie.”