Aug
13
August 13, 2006
From the time when Riley was but a tiny zygote, working on his mitotic cell division processes in order to properly develop the future ability to spray wet half-chewed turkey directly into his mother’s eye, I dreamed of the day that I would read to my baby. In my mind I pictured a tender tableau: mother and child bent over a book together, my lifelong love of stories and words passing on to my son.
Well, I don’t know about other people’s babies, but Riley apparently missed the memo that storytime was supposed to be a Touching Hallmark Moment™. Until recently, Riley has regarded books not as magical portals to imagination and wonder, but rather as big flat toys to be whacked, batted at, and grabbed. The fact that his mother’s voice was droning on and on while the flat toys were present was merely a distraction, and my efforts at turning pages or holding the book upright were inevitably met with howls of frustration. The idea of reading to him before bed was laughable, because getting out a book was a sure-fire way to crank him up to eleven (“Hey! It’s the flat toy again! I must rip it apart and gnaw its moist remains!”).
Lately, though, he’s been quieting down and tolerating the passive role of being read to at night. He seems to especially like a Baby Einstein book called Good Night Mimi (which, by the way, has the ugliest artwork of any child’s book I’ve ever seen and looking at it night after night is boring Mimi-shaped-holes into my temporal lobe), and on a few occasions he’s actually drifted gently off to sleep directly after a bedtime story, which is one of those ridiculously wonderful fairtytale parenting moments where you start firehosing rainbows and sunshine out your ass and making plans for a bunkbed…until ten minutes later when he wakes back up and starts rattling a cup against his crib bars and wailing “ATTICA! ATTICA!”.
He still prefers the tactile qualities of books, maybe because, uh, he’s a baby. You know, he’s all “I have only a tenuous grip on language” and “I find colors and pictures fascinating and I want to touch them” and “I pooped an enormous quantity of digested pears inside my pants”. So when our neighbor gave him a book that has both pictures, words, AND sounds (there’s a battery-operated little strip down one side that makes various noises) I figured it would be a bit hit.
As I expected, Riley loves this book. It’s called Big Noisy Trucks and Diggers Demolition, and it’s a licensed product of, I am not making this up, Caterpillar Inc. I suppose the gender-stereotypical equivalent marketed for little girls would be Fluffy Pink Ponies and Their Sparkly Anorexic Math-Hating Princess Friends.
Anyway, we were looking at Big Noisy Etc and pushing the obnoxious noise-making buttons (one of them sounds exactly like the robotic grind of the Terminator from the first movie, when he’s just the metal skeleton), when I started noticing that the text was a little…well, suggestive. The more I read, the more my eyebrows climbed up into my forehead, until I turned to JB and said, “Is it just me, or–” and he said “This book is making me feel funny. IN MY PANTS.”
BLOW THE HORN, it reads. RAISE THE LONG BOOM. START HAMMERING. SAY “READY TO UNLOAD”.
Really now. Someone pass me my salts.
When I finished snickering about “loads” and “hammering” I started wondering if any of Riley’s other books contained such questionable material. It turns out the answer is yes, yes, YES, OH GOD YES!
For instance:
Dora the Explorer says, this one time? In band camp? I stuck mi flauta in my–
Also:
From Sock Monkey Goes to Hollywood. Sock Monkey Has a Hot Tub Orgy With a Bunch of Sex-Crazed Baboons, more like.
And:
Spermatozoa in My First 1-2-3 Play Book. Sure, it says “tadpoles” but I think we all know what that image depicts: the microscopic view of any Extended Stay Hotel’s bedspread.
(Yes, still bitter, why do you ask?)
Let’s not forget:
Freight Train, going through “tunnels”, if you know what I mean. And I think you do. (Photo slightly edited through careful image clarification process.)
Finally, we have:
Where Is Baby’s Belly Button, asking the question no one wants the answer to.
Sure, you can tell me I have a filthy mind and I enjoy twisting innocent children’s literature into questionable jokes that are offensive at best, and you’d probably be right…or are you? Maybe there’s a hidden agenda at work here, and it’s time to wake up, America, to the load that’s being released onto today’s youth.
Aug
11
August 11, 2006
Soooo…have you ever done a load of laundry, then left everything in the washing machine too long afterwards until it manifested an odor that might be best described as “sour” , as in “what in the name of jam-coated biscuits is that sour-ass stench?” – then, thinking you could remedy the situation without wasting a bunch of detergent and water on another load, put everything in the dryer with, like, fifty Bounce fabric softener sheets, then later you unload the whole pile in a really big hurry and end up sort of forgetting about that little fragrance issue and throw on your shrunken-to-a-sausage-casing-yet-still-cool MP(3) shirt and run out the door because holy crap you’re late for work and about five minutes into your drive you realize that your shirt doesn’t smell so great and ten minutes into your drive you realize that your shirt smells really really bad and twenty minutes into your drive you’ve got all four windows open because dear god, dear god, there is no escape from the appalling effluvium that your shirt is producing, and so your only option is to stop at the one semi-affordable store in the mall near your office, a Gap, and dig through their racks of forty-foot-long POLO shirts and weird Flashdance-era scoopneck long sleeved HORIZONTALLY STRIPED monstrosities and find a single, solitary t-shirt that is frankly one full size too small and probably 5 years too young but fuck it, at last you don’t smell like a whale carcass washed up on a hot summer beach and left to fill with mysterious gases until it eventually explodes in a gore-shower of rotting dead flesh and fabric softener sheets?
Just me then?
As far as mornings are concerned, this has just not been my week. If I’m not locking myself out of the house, I’m dressing myself in the Stench of Satan. I’d say something breezy and offhand about how at least I haven’t fallen down a flight of stairs or been attacked by angry dung beetles, but the day isn’t over yet.
Also, some of you are downright wimpy about a little human tail action. Even JB was begging me to delete those photos, because wah wah wah freaky. People! Let’s not be close-minded, here. Think of the usefulness of a tail, for sweeping off your chair before you sit down, for waving hello to a friend…sure, the naked, hot-dog/penis/turdlike tail isn’t so wonderful to look at, but if it were covered it might not be so bad. What that guy needs is a nice little Swarovski tail-sheath, then instead of a gross fleshy protuberance he’d have a sparkling fashion accessory.
In other news (ah, I can feel the palpable waves of gratitude), I have a Roomba now, thanks to HollowSquirrel, who was generous enough to offer me hers. “I never use it,” she told me. “That thing sucks as bad as a ten-cent whore on nickel night.”
Okay, she didn’t really say that, but she didn’t much like her Roomba and saw that I was all in a lather about them and so now I have her old robot vacuum. And thus microscopic flakes of her family’s DNA, which I can now use to biologically re-create them as clones in my own house, bwah ha ha ha HAAAA–
I’m sorry, I don’t know what my problem is today. I think it’s my shirt.
Anyway, I have used the Roomba in one room so far, our bedroom, and I am quite pleased with the results so far. The floor under the bed was totally dusty and after the Roomba was done: no dust! Awesome!
I don’t yet know how the Roomba will work on the rest of the house, but really I’m not sure if I even care, because I am greatly entertained by its cleaning process. It toodles around in this beetlelike manner, sweeping a weird little antenna arm around, and bonking gently off various surfaces. It scared JB a little when he walked into the bedroom, didn’t see it anywhere, and suddenly it was motoring out from underneath the chest of drawers and into his ankle. Best of all, it makes a happy little electronic sound when it’s done, which is just so cute – I don’t care if it is programmed by the U.S. government to change its primary directive from “clean” to “disembowel” in times of martial law, as JB seems to think.
So thanks, HS! I already like the Roomba, even if the cat is terrified and the dog is worried and the husband is suspicious and the boy is a little too interested in its cord.
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