Small Disasters

- Slamming her face into a piano bench
- Falling out of a chair
- Closing her head in a car door

These are the ways our youngest daughter says good morning. She's like a loud bruise with a sunny disposition and an Oxford English Dictionary that constantly leaks out of her mouth. She has yet to develop career aspirations, but were I to wager on them I'd guess auctioneer, crash-test dummy, or fire alarm.



Like all 2 year olds, the boy possesses a supernatural affinity for stickiness. He can actually spontaneously generate it. Wash him, put clean jammies on him, and put him to bed in a clean crib, and in the morning he will wake up covered in corn syrup and coffee grounds. He loves wearing helmets, which is lucky really, because he also loves climbing up bookshelves and standing on kitchen tables. Other interests include the sound of wooden spoons on furniture, the tinkle of breaking glass, and urinating in baskets of clean laundry. When he gets older he'll be an insurance nightmare.

Same nurture, different nature

This is my oldest daughter. She says she wants to be a nurse and missionary when she grows up. She regularly takes charge of the household and makes sure that none of her siblings do anything that she deems inappropriate. She is a born manager.

This is my middle daughter. She says that when she grows up she wants to be a passport. She regularly asks questions like, "How do I know if I'm really awake or dreaming?" and "How old was I before I was born?" She is really good with animals and smaller children.

It's interesting. Especially since the first two children so closely mirror my brother and I. Before our third daughter was born I could already see how the older was just like my older brother, and the younger was just like me. I was very curious about how the third daughter would turn out, because both poles were already covered. I still haven't worked out who she will be. The boy will grow up to be Tarzan. He likes to swing on doorknobs, naked.

Universal Moral lessons in Cartoons

TV is a medium of repetition. Sitcoms are based on using slight variations of the same handful of jokes every episode. Different unrelated sitcoms use the same characters with different names. Any British show that enjoys a small amount of success is translated into a poorly done American show that fails after one season (with a few notable exceptions.) Cartoons are a particularly recidivistic offender (Two words: Scooby Doo.) "Educational" cartoons tend to make flailing swipes at moral lessons, and there seems to be a common pool from which these lessons are drawn. I have collected some of these, listed below.

Moral Lessons you will find in any educational cartoon series:



- You don't need luck. You just need to believe in yourself.


Plot: A character has to do something that they are afraid of doing. This will most likely involve some sort of performance. They believe that in order to succeed that must carry a lucky object with them. Before the event begins, they lose the object, only to have one of their friends turn up with it at the last minute. They perform perfectly, afterwards they find out that their friend pulled a trick on them, and what they thought was their lucky object was an ordinary impostor. They didn't need their lucky maguffin after all! All they needed was confidence!

What the moral should be: Confidence is, without talent and ability, just as useless as luck. If you want to succeed, work hard and practice. Also, don't stake your identity on your success at a given task, because you may just be naturally bad at it.



- Bullies aren't really bad people. They just need to be loved.

Plot: A character is being picked on by a big bully. They envision all kinds of ways to get back at this bully, but have second thoughts when they find out that the bully is in some sort of trouble and needs help. The character helps the bully, and as a result of their kindness the bully sees the error of his/her ways, and becomes good friends with the character.

What the moral should have been: Kindness certainly is the right way treat any person. However, a bully is not hurting you because he needs a friend. Chances are he has at least two friends. They're the guys holding you down while he pummels you. The bully is hurting you because he enjoys it, and has never had to consider the consequences of his actions. Just try to avoid him. If he is ever in trouble and needs your help, then help him out of kindness in a well lit and public area, and then continue trying to avoid him.



- Be kind to others, even if they are (______), because later on you'll need to call in a favor.

Plot: The protagonist encounters a character who appears to be in someway unsavory. They might be of a economic or racial background that the media informs us is universally disliked. They might be really scary looking. They might behave oddly, or be really old. Whatever the quality, the protagonist overcomes their prejudices and helps them. Later, the protagonist is in trouble, and the character they helped earlier comes to their rescue. The protagonists expresses how happy they are that they decided to help the other person in spite of their misgivings about them.

What the moral should have been: Be kind to others, understanding that the reward may never be realized in this life.



- Accidental positive results excuse bad behavior.

Plot: The main character spends most of the show interfering in others business, getting into things that he shouldn't be getting into, and generally acting as a force of chaos and anarchy. Entirely by coincidence, their actions result in a positive outcome ranging anywhere from teaching an old curmudgeon to enjoy his life to discovering a long lost treasure. In the end, everyone is glad the main character behaved that way, and what was originally considered bad behavior is retconned to be good behavior.

What the moral should have been: Unless there is a dated and notarized letter explaining that you knew for a fact that your actions would result in this outcome prior to these events, you're grounded.

Learned Behaviors

In order to avoid writing a full post when I feel like poo (flu) I will pose a question, or rather an unfinished sentence, and see how people answer it:



Because of horror movies...

I'll start off with a few examples.

... I always look in the backseat when I open my car at night.

... when I go for walks I unconsciously scout the area for zombie/werewolf proof escape routes. Rooftops are good.

... I never repeat anything in front of a mirror.

In Honor of the premiere episode of "Dollhouse," AFATC presents: Joss Whedon Pitches a TV Show.

Joss: Ok, so here's the story. There's this girl, who grows up fairly normal. But then one day she's given these amazing powers and uses them to fight evil, though she really just wants to be a normal girl and have a normal life.

Exec: Have you developed any other characters?

Joss: I was thinking there would be this kind of dorky but lovable guy whose always joking around. He'll get a lot of the good lines. And there be another girl whose cute but kind of mousy who'll be her friend. And then maybe an older guy who's kind of a scholar and will be the voice of reason and the conscience for the other characters. Oh, and there'll be this one guy who appears at first to be the antagonist, but who ends up being a good guy. She'll have some sort of close relationship with him.

Exec: And these character's will what? fight crime or something?

Joss: Well, sort of. They basically do good, but they kind of operate under the radar because if the authorities knew what they were doing they'd get in big trouble. Oh, and one last thing. We need to make sure that only like, 25% of the actors have careers after the show is cancelled.


Exec: Consider it done.

*

And do we want him to stop? Of course not. The man's a genius with a formula. Nobody said to Michelangelo, "Hey, instead of all the Madonna's and naked flying babies, why don't you paint a volcano erupting, or a rocket powered bear or something?" No, because they didn't have rockets. Or bears I think. But nobody would have said that anyway, and Michael N' Jello wouldn't have listened if they had, because he knew he had a good thing going.

These kind of things don't happen in real life.

So, the other day the girls went outside to play and accidentally let the dog out. He immediately took off down the street, and when Lindsay went after him he ran into a neighbor's house. They had left the front door open. The husband was doing yard work out front. Unfortunately, he didn't speak English. He was able to indicate with many gestures and foreign phrases that she should just go inside and get the dog. Inside the house, the wife was washing dishes and completely ignoring the dog playing in the kitchen with their goat. They had a house goat. Jack and the goat were playing in the kitchen, while this woman was washing dishes and ignoring some stranger who came into her kitchen to catch a dog who was playing with a goat. What I'm trying to get across here was that my dog ran into someone else's house and found a goat, and Lindsay (the only one who knew what was going on) was the only one who didn't just shrug the whole thing off. I really don''t have anywhere to go with this.

Glimm Frairy Tares

At Barnes and Noble tonight I picked up a book of Grimm's Fairy Tales done as newspaper style comics. These were the original tales, mind you, the ones where Cinderella's evil stepsisters cut their toes and heels off with a knife in order to fit in the shoes, and where Red Riding Hood got eaten by the wolf along with Granny. Some of those stories are so random that I can only imagine them being told by a slurring drunkard. Take, for instance, the story of One Eye, Two Eyes and Three Eyes, presented here as it was no doubt originally told:

Ok, ok, ok. So... ok. So there's this girl. No! There's this three girls an' they've got eyes, right? Only see, they... um... ok, so one of the girls has one eye... and not another one... and one of the girls has two eyes, and oneofthegirlshasthreeeyes. *Burp* Ok, ok, so... right... so the girl with two eyes is made fun of because she's got two eyes, and not one or three. And... um... they don't feed her. Or they feed her scraps. Right, they feed her scraps. And um... OH! There's a GOAT! And there's an old lady... and when the girl sings to the goat... it... um... makes... food. Anhersistersdonlikeit. So... um... they kill it. The goat. They kill the goat, right? Only she buries the heart. The girl. The one with the two eyes. She buries the goats heart. The old lady told her to, and um... it turns into... a tree. A goat tree. NO! A GOLD tree! *Hic* Only the tree don't like the sisters. Cuz they been mean an killedthegoat. An... OH! A Knight says, I want a stick from the tree... an if someone gives me one I'll marry them. If it's a girl. If a girl gives me a stick I'll marry her. An she'll be my... um... girl knight. Right. An she does, an they get married, and she flips the sisters the V.

The various Princes and Knights and Kings and such in these stories crack me up. Marriage is just something they offer up to anyone that does them a favor, or even happens to be sprawled unconscious in their path. They must have rooms full of wives.

"I'll marry you if you give me a golden apple."
"I'll marry you if you wear this shoe I found in the gutter."
"Are you going to finish that waffle? I'll marry you if you give me half."

When did girls get the idea that marrying a prince was something to aspire to. As far as I can tell, you don't need charm and grace and beauty. You need something shiny and maybe a piece of candy.