Peering at a newborn through the window of a nursery is the equivalent of kicking the tires on a car. Unless something is horribly wrong, you don't know what you're looking for.

When you kick tires, what are you expecting? Some sort of firmness, which pretty much all tires have. Some sort of bounce, which pretty much all tires have. And if you found neither, what does that prove about the rest of the car? Would the tires feel any different if the engine were about to explode and the breaks were cut? Nope. They'd still be just as firm and bouncy.

When I peered through that nursery window this past Wednesday, I was acting on the same principle. First, I found the wrong baby, and got all excited because I thought it was the one I was looking for. But the name I was looking for was Gottlieb and its name was Lopez. Also, mine was a girl and the one I was staring at seemingly had two umbilical cords. So I asked the nurse which one was Gottlieb, and she gestured at a baby I'd already skipped over because it looked no different than the other kids (except that odd-looking Lopez girl). I stared at her for a little. Then I went on and on about how beautiful she is and how I knew it was her the whole time. Inside, I was thinking, "yup, looks like a kid."�

I bring this story to you because my sister had a baby this week, on what was a very busy night for the baby part of the hospital. Before you get all excited for her, she's already had two so the novelty has worn off. And the novelty has certainly worn off for the nurses, who had to move poor Lopez all the way into the corner to fit all the kids. I can only assume that a blustery President's Day weekend was responsible for this baby-laden November.

I've never had a kid (that I know of), so I don't know what it's like to look through the glass at your own. But while staring at my latest niece, I couldn't help thinking about why there was mesh wiring in the glass. A rational person would assume its there to prevent the glass from shattering if someone were to accidentally smash into the window. An irrational person would assume its there to prevent jealous mothers from shooting at the cuter babies. I assumed it was there so none of my pictures would come out well. I may not be rational, but I at least I do not shoot at babies.

I grew up the youngest of four kids, so being an uncle is not new to me. But this age is the time in most people's lives when we start having to deal with babies. Whether it's our siblings' babies or our friends' babies or our own threat of babies, we are suddenly forced to deal with them. But unlike our drunken friends, babies are easy to clean up after. They also have better handwriting.

Let me go back, for a moment, to the phrase "threat of babies."� I picture a sportscaster telling me that the game might be postponed due to threat of babies. I laughed out loud reading that over.

I was excited that I'd have a new niece or nephew, so much so that I darted across the street to the hospital. Also, I figured that if there's any okay place to get hit by a car, it's in front of a hospital.

My sister had already successfully delivered by the time I got there, which is good because you don't want to screw something like that up. After some waiting and some waiting room TV, I finally saw my sister, whereupon I asked if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and I was happy and congratulated her, but would have done the same if it were a boy. Appropriately, I'd been watching Wheel of Fortune, where contestants react much the same way. That night, a contestant lost the bonus round, opened the envelope, and saw that the prize was a new car. He groaned - exactly the amount he would have groaned had the prize been $25,000, or a vacation, or anything else.

I was just happy, regardless of its gender, that my sister's child came out a healthy, bouncing baby. Though I don't think she appreciated me kicking it.

There's an e-mail that most of you have seen a hundred times that explains what it means to be a child of the 80s. And while it is clever and well-written (the original one, at least), it does not apply to anyone my age. See, we are not children of the 80s. We are children desperately trying to remember the 80s.

We look back on Voltron fondly, though we don't recall it well enough to realize that it was just an animated version of the Power Rangers, created by the same entertainment company. We hold fast to the life lessons we learned from Punky Brewster even though we can't really remember the plot of any episode. And we constantly quote Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller and Princess Bride despite not having been old enough to see any of them in the theatre and those movies having all come out in 1985 or later.

A child of the 80s needs to have lived through the entire decade, which anyone younger than 23 didn't do. But since most of us don't remember much before kindergarten, I'm going to up that age to 27 and say that anyone younger than that who associates themselves with growing up in the 80s is a big faker.

I don't remember listening to Toto, other than seeing them recently on a commercial for hits of the 80s. Very few of my female friends owned leg warmers, and those that did got them as hand-me-downs from their older sisters. And though I watched Knight Rider and A-Team and Dukes of Hazzard, all were after they stopped making new episodes. Because when those shows aired originally, I was in bed before prime time.

Who shot J.R.? I have no idea, because I was two at the time. What was I doing during the fight for the Falkland Islands? Teething. And to me, Corbin Bernsen is not a vain lawyer from Los Angeles, rather Billy Dorn, a veteran third baseman with the Cleveland Indians. I first saw Major League in 1992. That's right around when I grew up.

For someone my age (23, for those not keeping track) to claim that they grew up in the 80s is like a kid from Long Island saying he's from New York City. Sure, he was raised close to New York City. His fondest childhood memories might have even happened in New York City. But the differences between the Long Island Railroad and the subway are almost as big as the differences between Madonna and, well, Madonna.

I was technically born in the seventies, having a birthday in the last few months of 1979. But I still don't pretend to know what was going on around me until 1986. That's when my Mets won the World Series, and I was just old enough to understand that it was cool. But watching a few baseball games was all the pop culture I had.

Most current freshmen in college were born in 1984 (gasp!), making them six when the decade changed. And the 80s, pop-culturally, really stopped around 1988. 1989 was just a transitional year, featuring things like C&C Music Factory - not exactly Boy George. Think of a four-year-old that you know. Are they watching movies and buying their own clothes and going to concerts and developing an acute sense of pop culture? No. They are playing on swings and coloring outside the lines and wearing whatever their parents give them and learning how to read, just like we were. And hopefully when they grow up, these kids will not pretend to be children of the nineties, having lived there for just two years.

Yes, I loved Thundercats. I had a passion for the Back to the Future series. And I was a whiz with a snap bracelet. But this does not make me a child of the 80s. This makes me a child of the late 80s and early 90s.

I once met someone who told me they were from New York, and I asked them what part. They replied, "Greenwich."� They didn't mean Greenwich Village - rather Greenwich, Connecticut which is "just a half hour outside the city."� But there's no ignoring that it's in a different state. Much like the state anyone my age was in when anything resembling the 80s actually happened.

Maybe it's easy for me to criticize Connecticut Yankees who pretend they're New York Yankees because I grew up in Queens. But if my story were different, I wouldn't lie about where I was from - I'd be proud of my heritage, whatever it was. Even Jersey.

So cast off Family Ties in favor of Saved By the Bell. Forget Atari, we had Nintendo. And Rambo? Well, everyone had Rambo because they made way too many of those movies. But you get my point. We are not children of the 80s. And it's about damn time we admitted it.

Right after I forward that e-mail, of course.

On the first Tuesday of every November"”well, the first Tuesday after the first Monday, which six out of seven times is just the first Tuesday"”our country takes part in a tradition as old as democracy. That's right - we watch the news. Approximately half of us voted, but at least three times that many people turned on the TV.

It is not by choice that we watched the news this past Tuesday night (which was the 5th of November, seeing how Monday was the 4th). We watched the news because we had no other choice. Which is very ironic since that's the same day that we celebrate democracy.

I also cringe in calling it news, since there was nothing new (though whatever it was, it was plural). This year, the networks were very careful not to have a repeat of the 2000 election, where they first told us that the conservative compassionate was elected president, when it turned out to actually be the compassionate conservative. Last year, there were no repeats of the debacle because last year there were no elections. Sure, Election Day comes annually. But the year after a presidential election, your patriotic duty to vote is changed to your patriotic duty to test if the levers still work, regardless of whose name is next to them.

This year, up-to-the-minute election coverage consisted of a lot of lawyers being very, very careful.

"We've just received word that in the state of North Dakota, there are a lot of people voting, and they have been choosing between candidates all day. We'd tell you more, but we're still grounded from when we were idiots two years ago. Back to you, Skip."�

As much fun as it is to mock the people at the networks (and boy, is it fun!), the rest of us are just as guilty. After all, much of the voting fiasco of 2000 was caused by people without microphones. These microphone-less people also once voted for a dead guy over John Ashcroft, though I probably would have done that, too.

This Tuesday, I accompanied my father to his local voting facility - Queens' scenic Martin Van Buren High School. Van Buren High is a facility so progressive that they are currently re-constructing all of their outdoor athletic facilities, a project that they started during the first week of school. After we followed more than a dozen signs telling us to decide between the candidates "Here"� and "Aqui"� (rimshot!), we finally arrived at the Van Buren gymnasium, in which we surprisingly found voting booths instead of the football team.

I'd like to remind you that everything I write in this column is based on the truth. The column's motto is "it's funny because it's true."� Which is not to say that everything true is funny. I bet when news of the Hindenburg spread, people were not saying, "Is that true? Because if it is, it's hysterical."� Well, some of them may have been, but those people were probably very, very mean.

The gym was being run by election volunteers, which us "I'm too busy to help anyone"� citizens appreciate. Though perhaps I should say the gym was being walked, because nothing in there was moving fast enough to run.

While we were signing in, an older woman (older compared to the other senior citizens in the room) discovered that there was one extra voting card - no one had taken number 442. So the woman took a pen and changed the number to 441, and changed 443 to 442, and 444 to 443, until my father said "why don't you just get rid of the extra one?"� The woman told my father it was a good idea and finally threw one in the trash, but not until after she changed 445 to 444.

While my father disappeared behind the curtain and did his best impression of the Wizard of Oz, I asked the volunteers for a change of address form. One went to retrieve it for me, and then jokingly asked why I was moving to the neighborhood, without ever confirming that I actually was moving to the neighborhood.

"Are you interested in all the ladies?,"� she said, pushing her blue hair aside.

I explained that my father lived there, and I was merely accompanying him to the polls. With that, the older woman retrieved another woman older still, who I later discovered was named Polly. The first woman said that I was moving into town because my father knew Polly, and she had recommended it to me. After a few seconds of utter confusion, I realized the misunderstanding, apologized to the befuddled Polly, explained the similarity of her name to the word "polls,"� and began to comprehend how a Miami Jew could accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan.

The change of address form she gave me was in Spanish. I know that it wasn't in English, because I can read English. I returned it to the woman, and politely explained the problem.

"It's in Spanish? Then all the ones I've been giving out tonight have been in Spanish. Maybe there's another pile somewhere."�

What amused me about her mistake was not the mistake itself, rather the dozens of other people who received a form in Spanish and just shrugged their shoulders and said, "si."�

My father voted, I filled out my form, and we began to leave, but not before Polly's friend complimented me on my accent. I asked her to what accent she was referring. In the same breath, she said, "That accent! It's marvelous. You have no accent at all!"�

After thanking her in Spanish, we hurried home to turn on anything but the news. We were just in time to find nothing but the news. After an hour of men in toupees in suits in chairs, the only thing of note we learned was that from the first 10% of precincts reporting, New York gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo had received more than 1,500 votes. Cuomo dropped out of the election months ago, but was somehow still beating the libertarian candidate.

I think the guy's name was Ashcroft.

As always, there's a lot going on in the world, but nothing more poignant than what's going on in Melbourne, Australia. You don't know what's going on there? Well where have you been? Obviously not in Melbourne.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, which usually consist of Tetris and pornography, I discovered a heart-warming story. After five years of his supporting a child, a father learned that the girl was not biologically his own. Heartbroken, the man mustered just enough strength to say, "give me my money back."�

An unidentified Melbourne man is suing a woman he used to sleep with for the more than $10,000 he's spent on what he thought was his little girl, after DNA tests proved that she ain't. The man is allegedly remaining anonymous for legal reasons, but I think we don't know his name because there can't possibly be anyone in the world that cruel.

"I want it all back,"� the man said. "Every cent for every toy, every blanket, every bit of food."

Isn't that sweet? He means it, too. The man, let's call him Mr. Insensipotamous, is suing to reclaim the money he spent on child support. But he's included a few specific things in addition to those payments - like four visits to an amusement park, three Barbie dolls, a Winnie the Pooh play tent, a day of skating, and take-out food from McDonald's. And that bitch better give him back all those hugs he wasted, too.

The mother, who will earn a role on "As the World Turns"� for her ability to convince the man that someone else's child was his, has rightfully agreed to return the child support payments. But she doesn't think that it's okay for this guy to demand anything else, insisting that the good time the two had together is what matters. Lady, that's just silly.

Of course, there's the problem of worth. If you sue someone over the value of a three-year-old happy meal, you need to consider both inflation of the currency exchanged, as well as the devaluation of the mini-hamburger found inside. If this case ever makes it to trial, it's going to take months to figure out just how much was lost over French fries. And the biggest question - which three Barbie dolls?

The problem I have with this is not that somebody is suing over something petty - that happens constantly. It's that this jerk, and yes, he is a big big jerk, is suing because he believes he wasted time with a child. I pray that this little girl can not read yet, because if she knows that daddy is suing to reclaim her Winnie the Pooh play tent, she will be even more screwed up than she already got from meeting him in the first place.

I wonder what he was thinking while he took her to the amusement park. "Man, I hate this kid. If she weren't the result of a drunken night with her mother, I'd ditch her behind the Tilt-a-whirl."� And while he was teaching her to skate, was he praying she'd slip, fall through the ice, and no longer bother him? Or maybe, just maybe, he was proud when she learned to walk, and said her first words, and called him "daddy"� as I'm sure she did on at least a few occasions. Maybe when she gets old enough, she can sue for all the time she wasted on him. Even at minimum wage, the girl stands to make a few thousand bucks.

The common phrase is that blood is thicker than water, which is true. But thicker still are the bonds you can form by spending a significant amount of time with someone - oh, for instance, five years. Though nothing is quite as thick as this guy's skull.

If you extend his apparent philosophy, he would rather spend time with his third cousin Wendell who snores while he's still awake because hey - Wendell is family. Maybe the man is remaining anonymous because if the world knew who he was, he'd never get another date. Because unless someone came from his sperm, this guy doesn't give a rat's ass. That is, after all, the contents of a happy meal.

"I wouldn't have spent all that money had I known five years ago she wasn't my kid," said The Insensipotamous, before he roared and retreated back into his cave of selfish.

But there is a happy ending to this story. He's never actually reproduced.