...after the holidays; it's either one damn thing or the other around here.
The damn thing is dirt-nanny work I'm doing for a friend of mine. He needs the help, but it sucks ass like all dirt nanny work. So I figure I earned my week off.
The not-damned thing is that we got some snow yesterday; not enough to be a real nuisance but enough to be pretty, so I just enjoyed the winter wonderland and put out seed for the wild things who weren't enjoying it nearly as much.
I've been enjoying all the soccer (and, yes, I know; Qatar is a hissing, and FIFA exists to make the IOC look like a bunch of saintly contemplatives. I'm not pretending to be a good person about this...) but I'm going to miss the insane energy of the Japan fans.
Apparently the soccer world will, too; they've won some sort of weird fame for policing up the stands after their games.
So will the otter. Ah, well; live and learn, Taiyo the Otter. Soccer. It's a cruel game.
Speaking of cruel, the Girl just laid down the law: no more singing "Hong Kong Phooey" because it's racist.
Yeah, well, no shit; it was a Seventies cartoon about a dog, voiced by a Black guy, pretending to be a Hong Kong kung-fu star.
And let's not eeeeven go into "Rosemary", the horny switchboard/9-1-1 operator who spent the entire show constantly trying to hook up with the randos that called the cops.
The layers of "this is some fucked-up-racial-and-sexist shit" go about basement deep.
But it's Seventies phooey racist style! Sorry, kiddo...Yah!
Anyway. I'll get right back on this blogging thing later this week; I've got a break coming up.
I'm going to break off for a moment from the Real World and just rant for a moment, because I'm sitting here trying to read and my lovely Bride has turned on the fucking Big Bang Theory again.
She loves the hell out of this sitcom, and it's her single most go-to form of video entertainment, to the point where I can be at the far end of the house and hear the laugh track and know without a scintilla of doubt that it emanates from the fucking Big Bang Theory.
(Since I'm gonna be using this term a lot, let's save bandwidth and abbreviate it TFBBT.)
This sucker turns out to have been insanely popular - so she's not alone - ran for twelve seasons, and made big stars out of at least two of the leads; Jim Parsons as the male lead, Sheldon, and Kaley Cuoco as the female, Penny. Supposedly each of them (and Johnny Galecki, who played second lead, Leonard) made something like a million bucks an episode and they made over seventy of the bastards.
That's some serious jack.
And I don't get it.
I mean, de gustibus nil disputandem and all. But to have gustibus for TFBBT? Really? C'mon!
Seriously. The thing is just that bad. It's one of those painful trainwrecks that leaves you wondering if the writers and showrunners weren't missing out on their destined careers as housepainters, baristas, or grips on a porn film set.
To make matters worse, it's backed by a braying Sixties-sitcom-grade laugh track that just serves to point out how gawdawful the supposed-"jokes" are.
I have problems with about 99% of "reality" television because "reality" usually turns out to be a cast of variously-dysfunctional assholes being miserable to each other.
Christ, if I wanted that I could go to work.
Somehow TFBBT manages to combine the unfunny-ness of an unfunny sitcom with the trash human resource of your average "reality" show.
No kidding. There's barely a salvageable human being on the screen.
"Raj" (a.k.a. "the Indian guy") is just an extended Apu joke; he's a whiny, clingy, constantly horny rich desi whose domineering parents bankroll his overseas adventures while his supposed American friends mock his race, his culture, his personality, and his pathetic attempt at a love life. The whole Raj idea should have been euthanized for the same reasons the Simpsons showrunners flushed Apu.
The three women characters are just different versions of female stereotypes; "Bernadette" is a ball-buster (who hooks up with the smarmiest male character) who improbably becomes the mommy-character, "Amy" is the girl-geek, all social incompetence and ugly clothes, and "Penny" is the hottie who uses her looks to gold-dig and manipulate.
The male leads are just punchable; "Howard" (the smarmy wanna-be-womanizer) is needy and whiny but with a nasty undertone, "Sheldon" is just a complete asshole who'd be shunned by normal humans, and "Leonard" is perhaps the worst of them all, a meeching little man who hates his roomate Sheldon's bizarre assholish behavior yet constantly defers, enables, and sucks up to him - why he'd want to stay "friends" with the gomer is beyond inexplicable. Leonard "gets" the hot girl Penny by lying and faking and pursuing her so relentlessly she just gives up and settles for him.
It's all just simultaneously sad and annoying, and my Bride loves it dearly, which makes it even more annoying.
And it re-runs constantly, so she can always find one playing somewhere, so as often as not the evening resounds with the braying laughter of TFBBT's idiot "audience".
Ugh.
I'm with you, Penny; rather than sit through a FBBT I'd spend the evening sanding my feet...
The Uvalde, Texas Police Department Special Weapons and Tactics Team.
Pretty badass, aren't they? All dress-right-dress-and-covered-down, got their GI on, tac boots and blue fatigues, locked-n-loaded and ready to protect and serve, right?
Except they didn't.
When an angry but untrained young man with a similar weapon turned up to kill a bunch of the kiddies their P.R. claimed were the reason for their existence, these heroes stood around with their thumbs up their collective ass for an hour or so letting the dude wax those kids.
What you and I and every other American needs to get is that this was a feature, not a bug.
Think about who those coppers actually work for.
You? Me? Those kids or their parents?
C'mon. Pull the other one. That's enough to make a cat laugh.
The Uvalde cops work for "the City of Uvalde" just like the Portland Police Bureau works for the "City of Portland".
When was the last time your city or town did something because you wanted or needed it?
That's not to say that the people who the cops do work for - the federal, state, county, or city governments and those who have outsized influence on them such as wealthy donors or corporations or political action groups - don't do things that help work for you.
But they don't do it for you.
And neither do the cops.
Instead, given the way most police in the United States have been infected with Soldier-Cop Disease, it's more likely that these rascals look at you and me as nuisances at best and enemies at worst. We're not why they do their job; we're a problem that has to be solved for them to do what they see as their job. We're the randos in Nisour Square that scare the shit out of them, that put them on edge and make them reach for their weapons.
Now.
I have a tiny amount of sympathy for the coppers, given the immense number of firearms wandering around the U.S. public. It's kinda hard to avoid being paranoid and trigger-happy when any rando could be a whackaloon with a hogleg and a hard-on for killing someone.
Not that they usually kill coppers, mind. That's hard and risky; it's a lot more fun and easy to kill kids or shoppers or folks in church or massage parlors.
But my sympathy is hammered pretty flat by the hard cold facts that those coppers will willingly shoot your or me but are unwilling to risk going in hard on some whackaloon with a black rifle.
Frankly, it's time and past time for We the People to get over the ridiculous tongue-bathing we give our coppers.
I get it; we've had years and years of copaganda, going all the way back to the old Dragnet- and The FBI-style TV shows, telling us that these jokers are the Thin Blue Line between us and anarchy.
But think about it.
Coppers don't "prevent" crimes.
Unless the copper is literally standing right there, the cop has no way to "prevent" crime. Or anything else, when you stop and think about it, from a riot to a hobo taking a dump on your lawn.
Portland has a whopping 0.0012 sworn officers - actual cops - per person. How the ever loving fuck is one-thousandth of a cop going to stop me from whipping up on your head. Like I said two years ago; what maintains our civil society isn't some thin fucking blue line. It's us, you and me, being good citizens and good neighbors.
Coppers don't "solve" crimes, either.
I'm old enough to remember Sergeant Friday locking up all the baddies every week. Crime didn't pay, at least not on TV.
In real life?
The cops barely clear half of all murder cases. Here in Portland? It's less than half.
And that's THE big crime, felony murder. Figure out for yourself how the Blue Line does with stuff like robbery, rape, or burglary.
Yeah, like that.
So what do these tax-fattened fucksticks do?
Largely exactly what their owners - the governments and wealthy government-influencers - want them to do; keep the canaille in line, show the flag so the plebs see who's in charge, do the minimum to intimidate the normies from misbehaving and to ensure that there's no visible opportunity to break loose and run wild.
I'm not against that, exactly. That's what We the People seem to be fine with, and, besides, someone has to roust the smelly crazy homeless people off the Safeway parking lot and it's sure as Hell not gonna be me.
But there's no reason to valorize or even defer to the people we pay to do that sort of stuff.
It's not like they're going to charge a looney murderer with a rifle for us, right?
No.
The coppers won't save us from these lunatic killers and their semiauto hard-ons.
Next time, let's discuss what, if anything, is possible.
That's billed. God knows how many hours I actually worked.
This was a hell-week, and finally Friday arrived, and I was able to get back to the shop, drop off my truck, and punch off the clock. Opened up the corporate timesheet program and started knob-dicking in my hours.
(Knob-dicking? Never heard that before? For some reason that was the term we used in the field artillery to describe typing entries into the battery fire control computer system. Knob-dicking. I have no idea.)
As you can imagine, I had a LOT of knob-dicking. Took me probably half an hour to knock all my time into the timesheet application. I was on my last line or two when...
The fucker locked up on me.
Now I'm a total devotee of the "save early/save often" school of computing. But it was late, I was in a hurry, so I didn't.
Yep. The fucker ate my fucking timesheet.
So - punctuated with a LOT of creative profanity - I re-created the vanished timesheet, and as I did for some reason I took breaks thinking about some of the bad cartoons I watched as a kid.
I was a kid in the Sixties and early Seventies, so there was a lot to go to, there. Underdog. Speed Racer. Whacky Races.
Not that there wasn't some classic comedy; you had Rocky and Bullwinkle, the old Bugs Bunny cartoons (though I had to get to adulthood before I got to see some of the really out-there stuff like Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips...).
But it got me thinking; it's kinda sad, how much useless information I know about those old Sixties and early Seventies cartoons.
And what's the use, if I don't put it to some use?
So here's your Friday Bad Cartoon Trivia Bomb.
No fair using Google unless you're REALLY stumped.
1. When Underdog says "the secret compartment of my ring I fill..." what's he got in there?
2. What sort of container does Henry Cabot Henhouse III drink his Super Sauce out of?
3. Why does Speed Racer wear a "G" on his shirt?
4. In the anime series imported to the U.S. as "Star Blazers", the spaceship "Argo" was originally the...
5. What kind of animal did George of the Jungle think his elephant pal was? (Bonus point - what was his pal's name?)
6. What was Jonny Quest's dad's first name?
7. What was the name of the explosive compound that Bullwinkle hid inside a banana? Why was it so awesome?
8. What was the actual title of the original cartoon that has recently been remade as "Mister Peabody and Sherman"?
9. Speaking of Mister Peabody, what did he call his time machine, and why?
10. What was the name of the character that Dick Dastardly and Muttley of "Whacky Races" were always chasing in the show they were later spun-off in? (Bonus point - what was the name of the spin off?)
Mojo and I found ourselves watching the Miss Universe broadcast the other night, which speaks volumes of how bored we were with whatever else was on the idiot box that evening.
We both agreed - having consented to go along with the silly premise of the magilla - that the young lady from the Philippines seemed head-and-shoulders smarter and more together than the other four gals posing decorously for the delectation of the ridiculously-coiffed Donald Trump, who really is an astonishingly enormous dick in case I haven't mentioned what an astonishingly enormous dick he is lately. But that given that the whole shebang was being filmed from Vegas that the gal from the U.S. would probably get the nod, the fix obviously being in.
Upon which we laughed heartily and went to bed, forgetting the entire forgettable incident.
Until, while searching the World's Worst Newspaper Website I came across this:
"Monnin, of Cranberry, Pa., wrote on her Facebook page last week that her father had recently pointed out a clause in the Miss USA contract gives top pageant officials the power to pick the top five finalists and the winner. "I was not aware of the clause in the Miss USA contract which says that the Miss Universe Organization, Donald Trump and others have the legal right to choose the top five and winner...irrespective of any publicized selection process."
Gee. I'm shocked, shocked!
So this young lady has been socked with a ginormous fine, and I'm just left with one slightly cynical bit of snark; "Miss Universe"?
It may just be my biased opinion, but it would truly serve the people who put up this pageant, and the other people who actually spend time and money taking this pageant seriously, right if a beauty queen from one of the other sentient species (which presumably inhabit some far portion of our universe) turned up to chastise these jumped-up hairless monkeygirls and -boys for the arrogant assumption that their pathetic little species was, in fact as it seems to be in their overheated imaginations, the crowning glory of the stars.
One of the most hilarious bits ever done by one of the funniest shows ever made;Mystery Science Theatre 3000 varied from amusing to friggin' murderous, and this is truly brilliant. Of course, they had a lot to work with.
And I can't just leave you Mister B. Natural without adding this; the character was played by a dancer and (oddly...) opera singer named Betty Luster. Betty seems to have been just one more of the gajillion pretty girls consumed by popular entertainment in the Forties and Fifties.
According to Wikipedia, she first turned up as something called "Miss Lake Mowhawk" in '37. (Her IMDB bio says she was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1922, so this seems to have been the Lake Mohawk in Jersey).
She seems to have gone to England for a while in the late Thirties (where she appeared in an early Beeb TV show!) but was back in the States by 1940, and was a chorine on Broadway and Miami Beach and sang at the Philadelphia Opera through the Forties. In 1950 and 1951 she was in Hollywood doing TV work for a game and variety show, and she's known to have been back on Broadway in the mid-Fifties.
(Betty's on the right, in the toe shoes, BTW)
So far as we know Mister B. was her last role. She got married some time in the late Fifties to one Edmund Astley Prentis the Third, who was - get this - a geotechnical engineer! Dude, we effing rock!
At least his obit says his firm, Spencer, White and Prentis Inc. "specialized in underground and underpinning construction. Among its projects were the underground areas of the White House, the World Trade Center and sections of the New York subway system."
So Ned got the hot crossdressing b-natural babe, and she, apparently happily, became his spouse, helpmeet and baby-mama and never trod the boards again.
Instead, she became - I shit you not - a "world-class croquet player".
?????
Did you even know there WAS such a thing?
Yep.
Here's the Nedster himself, croquing away or whatever the hell you call it, from his Croquet Hall of Fame bio.
Oh, and it says there he typically played dressed in "Panama hat, white shorts, white knee socks with red flashers, and the occasional bush jacket" which, frankly, would have been enough put me off my stroke just looking at him, but, then, that's world-class croquet for you - it's a blood sport.
So there's a Croquet Hall of Fame.
And Betty's hubby is in it.
What a world we live in, eh?
Anyway, seems like Ned and Betty were a pretty happy couple. They had four kids, a brace of each gender, and a fistful of grandkids, and lived in croquet-lathered luxury (did I mention that he was also a big-game hunter and one of those sports fisherman that flies around to places where you can catch ginormous fish you can't eat, like marlin, and that they lived in West Palm Beach, which is serious Rich People Land? Did so.) until Ned went to the Big Wicket in the Sky in '97. Betty lived on at their home in West Palm Beach, presumably skinning benjamins off the noobs at the West Palm Croquet Club, for almost fifteen more years until her own death a year ago.
And that was that, the end of Mister B.
You knew you read this blog for stuff just exactly like this, didn't you?
I was born in 1957, meaning that, like most of you, I've lived my entire life in the Television Era. So over the course of more than a half-century I've seen some very odd things advertized on the cathode-ray tube. But this one is perhaps as peculiar as I've ever seen:Apparently it's from India, where, shockingly, Indian people live.
And some of these people are, surprisingly, women. And, even more stunning, some of these women have dark skin which is - astounding, yes, I know - somewhat darker in places. Specifically, around their crotch.
So here's how the blogger Deepanjana Pal at Mumbai Boss Explains it All to You:
"The ad shows a woman...looking mournful because her vagina is dark, like the cup of coffee she’s holding in her hands. The suggestion is that her depression is intensified by the fact that she has a disinterested partner who would rather drink coffee than, well, her. Cut to the depressed woman looking much happier as she goes for a shower. At this point we see an animation. It shows us a hairless, feminine crotch (with gravity-defying rose petals in the background, if you please)...once the animated crotch is whitened courtesy Clean and Dry, the woman emerges in a pair of shorts and proceeds to jump on a sofa and stuff her partner’s car keys into her shorts. This is, apparently, how women communicate they are available and have suitably tinted vaginas. Mine, incidentally, is thoroughly disapproving of such products and actions. (The only place that a car key should be stuffed is in the ignition.)"
This is entirely mystifying to me. What IS this bizarre obsession we hairless monkeys seem to have with...well, our hairy bits?
I mean sex, yeah, I get it. We're obsessed with each others' swiving equipment, and I can understand that. But it's the bizarre need we men - and it is men; first because both television and advertising are still largely run by guys and, second, I can't for the life of me imagine a woman standing at the bathroom mirror staring down at her groin and musing "Gee, I wish I was...not so...dark down there..." - seem to have with fiddling with our mom's, wives', girlfriend's, daughter's, and female strangers' reproductive areas.
I mean, first it was "merkins", and now..."Clean and Dry", so your puff-puff
(which, by the way, is what we call the lady parts around the Fire Direction Center; for some reason the Boy decided that while he had a "wiener" the former was the correct terminology for his mom's wedding tackle. After we stopped giggling hysterically we decided we liked the silliness of the term so it stuck. Hence a 54-year-old man referring to his lover's Mount of Venus by what sounds like the given name of a calico kitten...)
can be delicately pale and dainty?
Dear.
Fucking.
God.
It just seems truly damn strange to me, in an intellectual fashion.
But...I think if I was female I'd feel a little more strongly about it;But maybe that's just me. Opinions, gals?
Portland is a funny place to live sometimes.(This, by the way, is something called the "Urban Iditarod" and is best left further unexamined)
One of those times is whenever we turn up on the electronical television or in the glamor of the Silver ScreenTM.Other cities accept that they are, well, cities; notable places where many people live, work, and play, and that the notion of such a place appearing in a movie or a television show is not inconceivable or even unusual.
But for all that we live in a city - the largest in our state, and the second largest in Cascadia - a lot of us are rubes about getting on camera.
For one thing, we are utterly foolish about our contributions to film despite our track record as the location of some of the most craptacular shite ever to curl down out of a projector.
I'll sort of give you "Goonies", although I'm not a fan and have never managed to make it through the entire thing in one sitting. And there are several Portland locations in a very sweet and funny little film called "The Favor" with one of my favorite comic actresses, Harley Jane Kozak; it's silly and clever and well worth a look in my not-so-humble opinion. But...Madonna's "Body of Evidence"?
Seriously, this may be one of the worst movies of all time. It's hard to make a film that makes sex look so unpleasant that getting a root canal or getting your legs waxed appears preferable, but this one manages. Come to think of it, there IS wax involved in the thing, and not in a good way.Yike.
Throw in some of the worst acting and worst dialogue ever filmed, and Portland should be ashamed to get hung with this dog. It's really awful. Beyond awful. Unspeakable. Eye-searingly horrible. Satan's stool sample.
It's BAD.
And the rest of our resume isn't much better, although I'd love like hell to get a look at "The Fisherman's Bride" from 1908 Astoria; it has to be better than "Kindergarten Cop". For "Jackass, The Movie", "Twilight", and "Mr. Brooks" we should ALL get a spanking; even "Coraline" can't save us from immortal shame.With that sort of record you'd think we'd shy from more public exposure, but, no; the latest Big Thing is the comedy series "Portlandia"and Portlanders, unquenchable, are once again in our silly swoon over all things cinemagraphic.
I've seen a couple of these. It's sketch comedy, so it's hit and miss; some of the little scenes work terrifically. Some fall flat, some are cringe-inducing awful. Some are just strange; the creators are getting better in their second season at nailing a certain type of Portland; hipsters, the earnest and twee, the ecoNazis (the sketch with the twenty recycling containers each carefully identified by color for every possible subcategory of material was perfect).
But the quality of the material seems...immaterial. What matters is that in the "Timbers Army" sketch the two comedians appear at CopyPilot - the copy store right down from our house! Squeeeeeee! - and at our soccer match with our very own Timbers Army! Squeeeeee!And the New Yorkers and Los Angelinos, used to seeing themselves on film and television, sniff audibly and pretend to find something interesting in the middle distance. They are the sophisticates, and we have just shown ourselves to be gormless, hopeless, shallow goofy rubes.
This is why sometimes I think I'm so shot full of luck I can't deserve it; I get paid to do this.Now, admittedly, I'm pretty leg-weary, and skittering across this iced-over log bridge was a little hairy, but look at this place!Can you imagine - someone pays me to spend a beautiful sunny day hiking here? That a part of my living consists of visiting places just this gorgeous?I try and remember that when I'm sitting a drill rig in a trash dump in the pouring cold rain. Those days? Hell, I don't get paid enough.But let me tell you a little story as you enjoy the pretty pictures.This morning I stopped at the Super 8 Motel comp breakfast to fuel up. The morning was cold, I needed something hot to start the day, and I didn't want to spend the time it would have taken to go across the road to the Denny's or whatever chain crapateria was open at six o'clock.The motel breakfast was belly timber without being particularly good. But to get outside of it I had to spend about fifteen minutes in the same room with a television set to FOX at ear-pounding volume.I generally try and avoid Rupert Murdoch's vanity project just because I've seen enough in snippets here and there to know that I have no patience with it; I prefer my tall tales with heroes or fairies, thanks. But this morning I had no escape.The three avid viewers were a drill crew from Jensen, and they were cheerfully gutsing the nasty waffles and the FOX "news" with equal gusto, and it was something of a revelation to me; I don't think I've ever watched an entire FOX "news" story before.
And this one was one I was somewhat familiar with; gas prices.
Like most geologists, I started out in the oilpatch, and my academic training included a fair bit of petroleum geology, so I know a bit about both the mechanics and the economics of getting dinosaur wine to the fuel pump nozzle. But what came out of the television this morning bore no real resemblance to anything I have ever encountered.First there was a screaming headline about how fuel prices were skyrocketing and might even reach (gasp!) five dollars a gallon by June. Some sort of FOX news numbnut came on to explain to the rubesmarks viewers that this was like a tax that hit them right in the wallet. There was a completely gratuitous reference to state gasoline taxes (without the mention that they are typically mandated by law to be used for gasoline-related projects such as roadwork). And something about how the switch to "summer blends" was involved (without mentioning that the summer is high-demand time for fuel as people fly and drive more - I guess FOX doesn't do "supply and demand")Then for the "opinion" portion of the story FOX produced that internationally-respected petroleum economist, Definer Of Civilization's Rules and Leader (Perhaps) Of The Civilizing Forces (as Charlie Pierce likes to call him) N. Leroy Gingrich. The man who personally turned the entire legislative branch of the United States government into a ludicrous raree sideshow in pursuit of a blowjob proceeded to do to the oil industry's pursuit of domestic petroleum leases what Monica did to the 42nd President and just for entertainment threw in some jabs at the Kenyan Usurper's general ickiness.-30-, as Jack Webb said in the movie of the same name; end of story.
Now, I don't pretend to be a brilliant petroleum savant, but where in Spindletop's name in this ridiculous farrago were the CAFE standards, international speculation in petroleum futures, the current fiascos in the Middle East, the drop-in-the-oil-barrel tininess of the "domestic oil leases" relative to U.S. demand, and that perennial Republican favorite, the Magic of the MarketTM?Especially the latter; what's the point of having a Market if it doesn't do what markets are supposed to do - respond to increased demand relative to supply by raising prices?I mean, the entire six minutes or so of supposed "news" left you with the following information; gas prices are going up (why? who knows - magic, maybe, or because Obama hates oil companies), states tax gasoline and that's BAD, high prices are BAD, drill, baby, drill, and N. Leroy Gingrich is an expert on oil production.And the thing is, the three Jensen guys sat there and ate it up. Their comments suggested that what they got - gas prices are going up, states tax gasoline and that's BAD, high prices are BAD, drill, baby, drill and N. Leroy Gingrich as expert on oil production - was what they wanted.Sometimes when you gaze into the abyss for six minutes the abyss peers back, and fuck me with a tri-cone bit if it isn't as fucking stupid as a fucking ginormous bag of fucking hammers.No wonder We Are So Fucked.
In the case you don't have any spawn yourself, or in the case you're one of those exemplary moms or dads that show up (with great regularity) in the "parenting" section of the local newspaper (Portland being Portland) extolling the college admission potential of their progeny that will result from the severe restrictions the parent(s) have placed on their vidiocy, or in the case that you are entirely too grown up to find value in visual storytelling intended for children, then this post is not for you.
I started this post when I was home sick last week, battling the nasty head cold gifted me by my bride (I love you, dear!) and after waking around 1pm I was unable to sit still and look at the humanitarian relief destination that is our house and decided to tidy up. I was refiling the littles' DVDs when I got to thinking - I haven't really talked about the kiddos and their taste in entertainment for some time.
I did a comprehensive review of the KidVid more than three years ago, just pre-Missy and at the time when the Peep was still in preschool. Those seem as distant as the dark ages now, and for those of you whose small people are still not yet at the point where they are demanding video entertainment by genre or title I thought I'd repeat the review of the nondriving portion of the family's current favorites.
Although I should state for the record that one thing hasn't changed; we ALL still enjoy the hell out of Disney "The Jungle Book", Disneyfied as it is and all.And after repeated re-re-viewings, I hold to my original premise: Kaa is still Pooh.
Of course, the biggest difference between three years ago and today is that we now have two little vidiots in the house, and their tastes are very different. So the only way I can do justice to both of them is to give you a summation of their faves by kid. And since youth and beauty trumps age and cunning, let's start with Little Miss.
MISSY Age: "four and a half" or "a big girl" Quote: "Some kids in daycare some day called me bossy and I don't like it because it makes me sad."Missy, like a lot of three- and four-year-olds, is very much at a tipping point, sometimes little girl, sometimes older toddler, and sometimes even quite babyish. Her video needs are less well developed than her brother. She will ask to see some particular favorites - the "Barbie" videos (more on which in a moment) being perhaps the most often requested - but not always and not even very often. She will also watch whatever her brother is watching and (usually) enjoy it. That said, she does have some particular favorites.
About a year ago she stumbled across one of the "Barbie" movies. If you haven't been exposed to one of these you should consider yourself as fortunate as a 14th Century villager left alive after the Black Death swept through her or his hamlet. The crude production values are part of the general awfulness, although perhaps you can excuse a fraction of it because the star of the show is a fucking plastic doll and the idea might be to have her move and act like one.But the plots are usually idiotic and what passes for dialogue is usually worse. But something in these injection-molded atrocities is aimed right for the tender little hearts of three- and four-year-old girls and it hits their center-of-mass like Simo HÃĪyhÃĪ and Lyudmila Pavlichenko in a head-to-head 7.62 national match quality bake-off. I don't have to like it, but I have to acknowledge it. The Barbie people are as cunning as vipers.
There is only one mitigating circumstance to Barbie.Bibble.
This little clip from the otherwise eye-searing "Barbie/Fairytopia/Mermadia" (don't ask - the titles are as irritating as the rest of the Barbie farrago) is a good example of the welcome relief from the styrene disaster that is a typical Barbie film that the pastel "puffball" represents. The moment where he suddenly becomes Isaac Hayes - you HAVE to watch the clip, I'm serious - still makes me laugh and I've seen this bastard, like, 20 times.
It's not funny enough, mind you, to make watching the rest of the film tolerable for adults. But it does help a little.
Another current Missy favorite is this damn Tinkerbelle movie "The Great Fairy Rescue".
Now let me digress for a moment.In my opinion Tinkerbelle is one of the most despicable Disney characters in the entire canon. If you watch the original "Peter Pan" she spends about 9/10s of the film acting like a snippy, nasty, whiny, pouty little bee-yotch. And that's before she flat-out betrays her lord and master to his oldest enemy.
Given her actions you'd think she was insane from being all ate up with sexual jealousy over the Pan's interest in Wendy Darling, that is if you a) didn't know that Peter is obviously (obvious even to a crazy-mad jealous cartoon fairy) mentally about ten and wants the older girl as a mother, not a lover, and b) couldn't imagine the vile sprite balking at carnal relations with someone who, even as an adolescent boy, would have reproductive hardware about 4/5ths the size of her entire freaking body.
Ewww.
I loathe Tinkerbelle, the original Disney Tinkerbelle - she is the worst of the sort of thing that happens to a literary character when it is Disneyfied. At least the fairy in the original story throws herself on a grenade to save her love, rather than to redeem her own treason.
But as rotten as the is, at least the 1953 Tinkerbelle is true to her rotten little self.
The Tinkerbelle of this "Fairy Rescue" is an adorable sprite who loves kiddies (the macguffin of the flick is that she forms a "special bond" with the little girl who traps her) and later hangs her fairy ass out to help the girl and her daddy.
Now call me curmudgeonly but if you set a trap for me and catch me in it the only "special relationship" that's gonna result is going to be between my boot and your ass. And the classic spiteful little vixen Tink of the original would have done something pretty nasty to the girl just to feel good about it. But this Tink? Gah. She's like watching a happy Dracula or Cruella de Ville as Captain Kangaroo. It's just wrong, and nothing I can do will convince my little girl of that, so I sit and bite my tongue.Tinkerbelle. Rrrrr.
The third great love of little Missy's video life is another Disney, but this is "The Princess and the Frog". I can handle TP&TF. The titular princess is a spunky minx, the frog-prince is a idle libertine, and while the whole romance is hokey it isn't really in the Disney tradition of the princess riding off to become an ornament in the prince's castle.The supporting characters are tolerable, there is some genuine Dixieland jazz around the place, although the songs - did I mention it's a musical? The Disney formula dies hard - are the generic Disney/Broadway musical numbers.
And it has smitten the Little Girl with a great and consuming love for Daddy's gumbo, so I count that a point in its favor.
Other than that she still occasionally flirts with her daemon lover, Caillou. Everything I once said about Caillou still stands, BTW, so its fortunate for me that she doesn't often ask for him.She has also lost whatever interest she had in the KidVid she used to love; she will watch Dora when I turn it on but won't ask for it, she shows no interest in Kai-lan, or Yo Gabba Gabba, or Wonder Pets, or ponies, or...well, just about anything typically kiddish and televised circa 2010. I suspect that this is a good thing, but I am still waiting for the other preschooler shoe to drop. There's got to be something cunningly hidden in that sleek little head, some exquisitely painful juvenile atrocity like the gadawful "Berenstain Bears" that she'll turn out to luuuuurve.
But I sure hope not.
Now for the older kid.
THE PEEP Age: "Almost eight" (actually seven-and-a-half) Quote: "I don't care, and you can't make me care."
The Boy is all about one thing and that thing is Star Wars.
His current infatuation is with the Cartoon Network "Clone Wars" animation, which combines tolerable stories and really quite decent (for the small screen) digital animation with one really huge, insoluble problem: Yeah, that.
Because we already know that Anakin Skywalker is going to become Darth Vader, possibly the most magnificent villain in modern movies, it's hard for an adult to watch these little dramas and not keep thinking "Gee, I wonder when so-and-so gets it? What terrible fate is in store for him/her?"
The new series has introduced a little stable of characters around the original doomed friends-turned-enemies Anakin/Vader and Obi-Wan. And assuming that Lucas does not intend to mess with his film canon we know that most of them, like Anakin's padawan Ahsoka and his loyal clone Captain, Rex, will be gone by the time the events of the "Revenge of the Sith" occur and their buddy Anakin turns into the Meanest Daddy of All Time.
None of this phases the Peep, who just enjoys the blam-kapow space battles and the coolness of the Jedi, the badass-ness of gunships and blasters and the trappings of sci-fi wars.
The only thing I do try and divert him from is his second-grade righteous wrath at the fictional clone soldiers when they obey their orders and shot down their fictional Jedi masters.
"I HATE the clone troopers!" Peep declared after watching the "Order 66" segment of RotS.Because for a seven-year-old there can only be Good and Bad; and since the Jedi were Good (because he had been told they were Good) then the men in the story who "killed" them had to be Bad. I explained that soldiers were men under orders, that sometimes orders were wrong but that the men did them anyway, either because they were mislead or because the orders seemed right at the time. I'm not sure he understood. But at least he likes to play clone trooper now, sometimes, too.
We manage to get through repeated viewings of the Lucas ouvre'. His film idea of "tactics" still irritates me, clone trooper-of-sorts that I am, though I can now resist shouting "Spread out and find cover, you fucking spastic, grabasstic pieces of monkey shit!" when the troopers stand up and walk forward shooting. And I have learned to appreciate the more ridiculous bits of Lucas dialogue. The current Peep Star Wars fascination shows no sign of waning, though, so we'll see how well we manage to get through another year of it.
The other Peep kidvid fave - actually, it's becoming a mutual attraction - is the cartoon "Avatar".I can't say enough good about this show. It is well-written, well-plotted, and the visual style, a mixture of traditional animation and some of the cleverer anime' conventions, is pleasing to the eye. I like the fact that the setting is unapolgetically Asian. I like that the show's creators treat their creations with respect, allowing the characters to struggle with real problems of life, death, love, hate, loyalty, and betrayal. It's a damn good show.Avatar ran for three seasons on Nickelodeon, between 2005 and 2008. It's in random repeat on Nick now, and both the kiddos are always ready to watch an episode, each one containing enough broad humor and cartoon adventure for them to enjoy while containing stories and characters within are complex enough for a parent to enjoy.
I'll even admit to being personally rather fond of Zuko, the volatile prince of the Fire Nation, and his goth girlfriend Mai. He's a tortured guy whose internal struggle from exiled prince to redemptive king makes for damn good storytelling, and he and Mai have lovely twisted little relationship. His process of growing up over the three seasons is as well-crafted as any adult television. And Mai is everything but the standard-issue cartoon girlfriend; she has all sorts of issues of her own, only some of which revolve around the guy with the funny eye-scar. Whatever else the two are, they're never dull.I'd say that goes for the whole show, possibly the best kidvid my little ones have discovered to date. Hopefully their Avatar phase will outlast the Barbie-and-Jedi infatuations - possibly extending into another year and letting their dad get a look at the new "Avatar" incarnation, the "Legend of Korra". But it's well to remember that the only constant with children is that there is no constant.
So I imagine that I will have to do this over in another couple of years.
We're a vidiocy sort of family, so if you have any questions just drop me a line. From Scooby to Boobah, we've seen it all and done it all.
We can set your feet on the right path, young padawan. All you have to remember is that the Truth that draws you on like the lodestone to the Pole Star is that Velma is Teh Hot.See you around the couch, then..?
