My oldest sister had jury duty Tuesday and since I have some time on my hands this week I was left in charge of her two little ones, Addison (22 months) and Charlotte (3 months). Now, since becoming an uncle I've come a long way when it comes to babies. I'm much more comfortable with getting spit up on and they don't scare the crap out of me nearly as much as they used to. I'm pretty much down to one hurdle: I don't deal with deuce diapers. I feel that the uncle privileges are that you should be allowed to 1. buy them huge gifts, 2. get them hopped up on sugar and 3. hand them off when they crap their pants. By watching them for an extended time, I was running the risk of having to do the deed. Fortunately both ladies were good enough to hold off until Shivaun came to pick them up, when they both went off in a span of about 3 minutes. In the meantime, all I had to do was keep Charlotte off the ground and make sure that Addison had something to keep her occupied. This lead me to a shocking discovery: kids shows got weird.
I don't have any strong memories of what I watched as a kid. I'm sure that there was a lot of G.I. Joe back in the day (Sidebar: Yes, Yes, Y-E-S), but I don't think that came around until I was like 6 or 7. But, what I do remember seemed simpler, less gimmicky. It was a dude with a chalkboard and you counted to 4. Nowadays kids show follow a certain formula: creepy puppet, live human who looks overly-medicated because this is where his/her career has taken them, computer-animated talking animal who usually lives in the computer and 4 or 5 children who's parents are forcing them to be on TV. They count to a random number, talk about a letter then repeat the process 3 times to drill the point home to the kids watching. The whole thing seems like it would lead to sensory over-load for a kid. Then again, maybe I just got old.
The worst thing I saw was what they've done to Sesame Street. They shouldn't even be using the same theme song. Elmo, who didn't come around until well after I too old for Sesame Street, is now the main guy. They've got like 15 different and new Muppets, half of which only speak Spanish. Bird Bird is hanging on, but he only had a cameo, probably to appease the parents of Sesame Street's audience. Bert and Ernie are now in claymation form and there was no sign of guys like Grover, the Count, Cookie Monster or Oscar. The only saving grace is that they randomly played an old clip from the early days. It was as if they had a meeting and the head of PBS pointed out that they can't keep getting huge donations if people don't think they need money, so they'd better throw some old stuff out there so that people think they couldn't afford new videos on how to count to 12. All it really does, however, is prove that the songs they made in the 70's are more memorable than anything they do today.
Onto a couple links:
-You know hitter loves him some cake. And in 15-20 years when I get married, the cake will be one of the highlights of the day (and there will not be fruit involved). But even I find $50,000 and ten layers to be excessive.
-This is just unfortunate. But it does raise an interesting question: if a store where nothing cost more than $10 is putting everything on sale, how much of a discount are you really getting?
-This kind of stuff happens a lot, it seems. I can't understand why futbol (see what I did there?) isn't more popular here. You could say I'm equally gobsmacked.
