Go Get Your Jacket

So let the games begin

I recently posted on Facebook that my kids had taken to singing (loudly, in public) the "Bad Horse" song from Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, (oh, just buy it). An old (we're all old now) friend from college commented that we all knew the words to "The Lumberjack Song" when we were kids and that was just as inappropriate and it never did us any harm, but, um?

(Dr. Horrible has applied for membership in the Evil League of Evil, headed by Bad Horse, who is a horse. The adenoidal guy is  Dr. H's roommate, Moist. His supervillain-sidekick power is dampening things.)

Dear old friend, I laugh at your feeble Lumberjack song! You have not seen inappropriate until you have heard two adorable three-year-olds cheerfully bellowing "So make the Bad Horse gleeful, or he'll make you his mare!" as you push them down the sunny sidewalk in their slick Eurostroller. No way can a little harmless cross-dressing beat "A heinous crime, a show of force, a murder would be nice of course!", let alone a tuneful threat of non-consensual jailhouse-style buggery. 

It's also entirely possible that I have never in my life seen anything funnier than my kids' Bad Horse chorus. I'd maybe like to scold my husband for teaching it to them but I'm too busy laughing. 

Here they come just in time

I never thought I'd miss the "giirl power" or even the "grrl power" of the mid- to late-90s. It was pretty toothless compared to the street-brawling feminism I'd aligned myself with, and fairly unconvincing-- "girls" don't become powerful just because you say they are, At the same time, though, and literally at the same time, there was Buffy (and Willow and Dawn and even Faith). And there were the Powerpuff Girls. I had no idea how much I missed the Powerpuff Girls. 

They popped up again recently on our TiVo, and while our daughter was interested, our son was riveted. And addicted.  It apparently does not matter that the narration, with its knowing winks and nudges at the adult audience, goes " blah blah blah*" to his ears. It doesn't even matter that he can't follow the plots and badgers me with "What happened?" "Who's that guy?" "Why they fighting?" "What happened? What happened? What HAPPENED?" He totally gets the appeal of kick-ass little girls who whomp monsters. And what else matters, really?

Speaking of kicking ass, I know what Blossom, Buttercup, and Bubbles would do if they ever got their hands on that gormless, perpetually disoriented excuse for a girly-tough cartoon role-model Dora ("It's dark in here! Can you help me find my ass with my elbow?"). I'd pay to see it. 

*We also dug out our copy of the P-Girls CD and rediscovered the hilarious unattributed secret track, the one that goes: "Love love love love love, blah blah blah, makes the world go round! Blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah, makes the world go round!"

Heaven, Heaven is a place...

We went to the library and chose a book about fire trucks and then, for something different, a book about firefighters. Then we chose a DVD about fire trucks and firefighters, and another one about trucks which are not fire trucks, and I quickly scanned the "Ps" and grabbed something called "Potty Time with Max and Ruby," because it is, in fact, potty time. 

Later we watched fire trucks and non-fire trucks and they were both pretty short, so I popped in "Potty Time" and waited for something to happen. Nothing ever did. 

Max and Ruby are bunnies living in a bunny world where it mostly appears to be about 1949, judging by the furnishings and generally slow and bunny-scaled pace of their darling, picturesque bunny life in a darling bungalow in a picturesque suburb. Somewhat less charmingly, they appear to be children left entirely to their own devices (albeit in an apparently inexhaustibly well-stocked home), with the 7-ish Ruby entirely responsible for the care, feeding, and education of mischievous (potentially evil, actually) preschooler Max. No adult supervision at all.  Something terrible could happen. 

It doesn't, though.

Nothing does. 

Ever.

See for yourselves.

Even the theme song can't promise anything more than "Max and Ruby/Ruby and Max."  At least it's honest. Yep, I see Ruby. And there's Max. 

The first thing that didn't happen was anything to do with potties. There was a tea party, and a birthday party, and eventually I think some other sort of party. I'm not sure. By the third party  I finally got up to check the DVD box, which read, of course, "Party Time With Max and Ruby." Too late for us, though. The children were hooked. We were stuck.

We've since TiVo'd a bunch of them, and I'm telling you, nothing ever happens. You know the palpable, itchy impatiience you feel waiting in a line that never seems to get any shorter, probably due to some stranger's malevolent incompetence? That's how it feels to watch "Max and Ruby."  Like you might pop something with frustration. Like you would rather have your jugular gnawed through by rats than watch another second of it. Like your brain might melt and the last thought that would go through it, like the proverbial mosquito's ass, would be "Thank... God."

I guess these guys felt the same way.

How Do I Love Pingu?

I like this show so much that I don't really even care whether my daughter likes it; sometimes my wife catches me watching it alone. Pingu Goes Fishing (forgive embedding bug) is a pretty good sample episode. So. Let me count the ways:

1. The highly expressive claymation. Flipper motions alone convey a world of penguin emotions.

2. The nonsense language (like Sims speak), in which you always know what's going on without understanding a word.

3. The way Robby the seal flaps his tail back and forth underneath himself in irrepressible joy.

4. The episodes are short and always end happily. Pingu can be gently mischievous and occasionally careless, but mainly it's a Nerf world, without serious conflicts or lasting discomfort.

5. The possibilities are always exactly what they need to be. Pingu can cheerfully defy physics at will, and there's no reason there can't be a handy local flower shop in Antarctica.

6. The theme music is by David Hasselhoff.

 

How the other half Gabbas

I don't seem to be able to find any usable video or sound files for Yo Gabba Gabba's "Magic Ball Friends" but it doesn't really matter, they are nothing but a globeful of animate smiley-face gumballs, and they sound pretty much they way you might expect a bunch of animate gumballs to sound, kind of MIDIish and 90s and squeaky. They only have a few lines: "Excuse me " and "Sorry I got in your way," each immediately followed by a hurriedly placating "You're excused!" or  "That's OK!" 

So Kenton and I are having a slow-motion week-long disagreement over the MBFs. I think they're hilarious, and since the kids are obsessed with YGG and we only have a few episodes squirreled away in TiVO, I have plenty opportunity to see and hear them. "Excuse me!  You're excused! Excuse me! You're excuuuused!"

"They live in gumball machine," says K. "They're not polite; they're oppressed and submissive. They have no choice about all the excusing, jammed up against each other like that all the time." He finds them distressing. He feels oppressed when they come on. I still think they're hilarious. "Excuse me!  You're excused! Excuse me! You're excuuuused!"

I think they are brave little gumballs, to be so polite despite the obviously straitened circumstances in which they find themselves. Who's to say they always lived in a gumball machine? No-one would chose such a lifestyle. Whenever I see them (and did I mention that is somewhat often?) I think of the rats in the famous, I think now-debunked overcrowding experiments, or all those Russians who used to live jammed up 4 families to a flat in once-grand, now stripped and gloomy Moscow apartment blocks. How much "excuse me"-ing do you think they managed? 

You...me...ANYTIME!

Five eternal monkeys

Marya has pledged a post on the vegetarian predators of children's literature, and I don't intend to poach on her territory, but I am haunted by this distinctly non-veggie-friendly bit of doggerel performed by one of my kids' inexplicable favorties, the toothy tone-deaf blonde Cullen of "Cullen's ABCs." Usually I am all for the nursery Grand Guignol— I don't believe a little scare scars children— but this one kind of scares me.

I was looking for, I dunno, Five Little Ducks, or maybe Five Little Monkeys, the ones who bump their heads but a least get to keep them, when I found this. My kids adore it, and ask for it regularly. I am pressed into service performing it myself several times a day, and I hope you (and they) won't think less of me for attempting a lyrics-swap while they weren't paying atention:

Five lttle monkeys
Swinging in a tree
Praising Mr. Crocodile
"You're just as good as me!"
Along comes Mr. Crocodile
Friendly as can be….

HI!

Of course I soon realized that if you end the first stanza with "HI!" instead of "SNAP!" you can never, ever finish it. There are and always will be five monkeys, at least until they start dying peacefully in their tree-beds from old age. You wish they'd be eaten by a crocodile.

Judging from a long list of complaints at Planet Feedback, a recent Ikea commercial has pissed a few people off. (Pun intended, as you will see).

A little boy drags his little plastic Ikea potty seat through the house and plops it up on the cushions of the brand-spankin' new Ikea sofa. Then we, the intrepid viewers, see footage of his cute little chubby feet kicking his diaper off and jumping up onto the seat to presumably take advantage of the facilities, makeshift though they may be.

Lots of people, including me, are incredibly grossed out by this. I mean, really. Kids love to be grossed out, but we tend to outgrow that little predilection by the time we're raising our own. Do we really need that level of scatalogical detail, even implied, in a home furnishings commercial? But oh, yes, let's remember. The whole point of the ad was to tell people that hey, Ikea sells sofas! And sofa covers! Just in case your child happens to see that commercial and get some ideas from it!

Which reminds me. We just bought a potty seat like that. I'd better make sure my son William doesn't see this commercial. I don't want him to get any ideas.

You know how you can sometimes see a garment or some other personal item and fixate on it and convince yourself that if you had it at least that part of your life affected by that sort of item would finally be perfect? I've been feeling that way about this little houndstooth jumper from Hanna:

With tights, mary janes, and a Peter Pan collar it's the perfect Little Miss Priss look, and with a brightly patterned tee and funky sneakers it could swing punky/nerdy, like a tiny version of a junior web designer with interesting glasses. Either way you can't go wrong.

I think maybe your daughter, or any little girl of your acquaintance for whom it might be appropriate to buy a fairly expensive but really fab everyday dress, needs to have it.

I'm starting a new series posting what the ReSearch people used to call Incredibly Strange Video. My kids function as a random video-choosing engine, since they quickly tire of whatever I pull up for them on YouTube and start pointing to things on the side bar: "See dat truck! See de boy!" (Avi does a great dispatcher from Adam 12) or pelting me with requests for tractors or penguins. There is some seriously weird stuff out there, and since YouTube descriptions are usually so vague, you never find out why the puppet is singing about meat and in what language, or if the things in that cartoon are supposed to be bugs or cows and if they're cows, why do they have so many legs?

I stumbled upon our first video when the children innocently requested to see "animals" and I dutifully typed in "animals children" and got this, part of a series, which I honestly believe to have been made not on a computer but by a computer.

Surely the creator of this thing has never seen a bear? It was supposed to find a picture of a bear, and it found one made by another program which had likewise never seen a bear, but had just followed a series of algorithms which, when entered into a (bad) graphics program, are supposed to produce a bear.

The computer also turned up Joe Camel and didn't know that isn't a normal camel. And also? Daisy the Do-Me Cow.

My kids don't see a thing wrong with it, and ask for it occasionally. I will let them watch it, but I get a bad feeling whenever I think about that cow, and who made it, and why.

Potty Mouth

Judging from a long list of complaints at Planet Feedback, a recent Ikea commercial has pissed a few people off. (Pun intended, as you will see).

A little boy drags his little plastic Ikea potty seat through the house and plops it up on the cushions of the brand-spankin' new Ikea sofa. Then we, the intrepid viewers, see footage of his cute little chubby feet kicking his diaper off and jumping up onto the seat to presumably take advantage of the facilities, makeshift though they may be.

Lots of people, including me, are incredibly grossed out by this. I mean, really. Kids love to be grossed out, but we tend to outgrow that little predilection by the time we're raising our own. Do we really need that level of scatalogical detail, even implied, in a home furnishings commercial? But oh, yes, let's remember. The whole point of the ad was to tell people that hey, Ikea sells sofas! And sofa covers! Just in case your child happens to see that commercial and get some ideas from it!

Which reminds me. We just bought a potty seat like that. I'd better make sure my son William doesn't see this commercial. I don't want him to get any ideas.

Perfect

You know how you can sometimes see a garment or some other personal item and fixate on it and convince yourself that if you had it at least that part of your life affected by that sort of item would finally be perfect? I've been feeling that way about this little houndstooth jumper from Hanna:

With tights, mary janes, and a Peter Pan collar it's the perfect Little Miss Priss look, and with a brightly patterned tee and funky sneakers it could swing punky/nerdy, like a tiny version of a junior web designer with interesting glasses. Either way you can't go wrong.

I think maybe your daughter, or any little girl of your acquaintance for whom it might be appropriate to buy a fairly expensive but really fab everyday dress, needs to have it.

I am a bear grrr beep

I'm starting a new series posting what the ReSearch people used to call Incredibly Strange Video. My kids function as a random video-choosing engine, since they quickly tire of whatever I pull up for them on YouTube and start pointing to things on the side bar: "See dat truck! See de boy!" (Avi does a great dispatcher from Adam 12) or pelting me with requests for tractors or penguins. There is some seriously weird stuff out there, and since YouTube descriptions are usually so vague, you never find out why the puppet is singing about meat and in what language, or if the things in that cartoon are supposed to be bugs or cows and if they're cows, why do they have so many legs?

I stumbled upon our first video when the children innocently requested to see "animals" and I dutifully typed in "animals children" and got this, part of a series, which I honestly believe to have been made not on a computer but by a computer.

Surely the creator of this thing has never seen a bear? It was supposed to find a picture of a bear, and it found one made by another program which had likewise never seen a bear, but had just followed a series of algorithms which, when entered into a (bad) graphics program, are supposed to produce a bear.

The computer also turned up Joe Camel and didn't know that isn't a normal camel. And also? Daisy the Do-Me Cow.

My kids don't see a thing wrong with it, and ask for it occasionally. I will let them watch it, but I get a bad feeling whenever I think about that cow, and who made it, and why.