Dr. Seuss and the Cold War

This book has been one of Wild Thing's favorites for the last few days. It's been his favorite before, and I'm sure will come and go again, along with In the Night Kitchen, There's a Wocket in My Pocket, and the various other classics that litter the floor next to the rocker in his bedroom. Another current favorite is Fish for Breakfast, which is, sadly, out of print. The main hook for WT is that the major character, Tom the Cat, who is jonesin' for the aforementioned fish, responds to other offers of breakfast foods with the word "ugh." "Ugh" has not been part of WT's vocabulary until now, but he was quick to latch onto it, suggesting to me that the concept "ugh" was already there, waiting to find the right set of sounds to express itself. In any event, "ugh" is now the funniest sound ever produced in the English language, according to WT's lights. But I digress.

Reading The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, I've been struck by the weird Cold War imagery that suffuses the book. You know what I mean--the strange reddish stain that can't be expunged, that proliferates when you try to wipe it out, that only responds to a blast of some mysterious force called "voom," about which the only thing we know is that its source of power is too small to see. It might have been the favorite chidren's story of General Jack D. Ripper, for heaven's sake.

I was quite pleased with myself for noticing this, but I find this comment from the New Yorker from a few years ago: "The association with nuclear holocaust and its sterilizing fallout, wiping the planet clean of pinkness and pinkos, is impossible to ignore. It is a strange story for teaching people how to read." So, not so original after all. Still, it does seem a little odd. Surely this motif wasn't lost on anyone back in 1958? How did its first readers react to seeing a Seussian take on the Cold War?

Regardless, if anyone knows any good illustrators, please direct them to me; I need some help developing my new book project, Snuffles Makes a Dirty Bomb. Merci!

Notes towards a wild glossary

Wearing a shirt but no pants = "half naked."

Wearing no clothes at all = "whole naked."

Deferral

I have a few things to blog about, but not really time to process them quite yet, so for now, here's the Friday Random Ten.

1. It Takes Time--Louis Armstrong
2. Holiday Song--The Pixies
3. Casimir Pulaski Day--Sufjan Stevens
4. Crossing--Taj Majal
5. Living in a Dream--Spectacular Fantastic
6. Skyway--The Replacements
7. Westfall--Okkervil River
8. I Got Loaded--Los Lobos
9. Knives Out--Radiohead
10. Blues in the South--Louis Armstrong

Not sure why iTunes saw fit to begin and end with Armstrong today (thanks, mom!), but there you have it.

Outsourcing

Since I have nothing interesting to say today, I instead offer this link that all four of my regular readers will enjoy.

I ain't never been much for sunny days

But with these long, clear, temperate days here in the Northwest? I might be changing my mind.

WT, on the other hand, is going through a grumpy spell that roughly coincides with this explosion of temperate weather. At the bayfront park on Sunday, while I was grooving to the sight of the Olympic range in the distance and watching the teenybopper near us try to get her Barbie kite up in the air, WT seemed generally out of sorts. Perhaps he's destined to be a heliophobic scholar like his dad. More likely, though, he's not getting quite enough sleep now that he's figured out that we can't physically force him to stay in bed ...

More on music

Note: There is no cute anecdote or punch line below. Just observations. You've been warned.

Wild Thing is wild about musical instruments. Our local farmers' market attracts a variety of amateur musicians, and we found ourselves wandering from group to group for a while. We'd watch the folk combo with a flute player for a while; then it's "I want to see the banjo again," so we're over to the folk combo with the banjo player.

This interest began (as interests so often do) with a placemat. He's got one of those educational placemats with pictures of a variety of musical instruments on it, and he's been trying to sort them all out for months now. It's been a little tricky, since the drawings are not really to scale, so the viola and the bass look to be pretty much the same size, distinguishable only by the peg, which is rather too small to make much out of anyway. Also, it includes portraits of several instruments which one doesn't typically see or hear without special effort--the lute, for instance. (Though there was a lute player at the market today.)

To support the interest that the placemat generated, I started pointing out instruments heard on his favorite CDs and such in the car. Now no song can pass through his ear canal without him asking what instruments he's hearing. This can get a bit dull after a while, since I can count on one hand the number of songs that he will sit through that feature anything other than a guitar, a drum set, and/or a keyboard of some sort. Happily, there's a great track on this album that features a muted trumpet and a tuba, among other things.

Unfortunately, none of this has led to much interest in listening to CDs other than those for which he has already memorized the playlists, but that's a project for another month, I suppose.

Commenting

So, turns out I had my comments set wrong. I opened them up so that anyone can comment now. Sorry for the fuss.

Things that are overrated

Overworked Spouse and I found a spare couple of hours to watch Sling Blade tonight, and boy, do I wish we hadn't. When I have a moment I simply must offer a few notes here on why this is one of the six most overrated films I've ever seen. Suffice it to say that it could teach Crash a few things about stereotype and cliche.

Friday Random Ten

Taking a break from my dissertation chapter revision to bring you the Friday Random Ten. The rules: put iTunes on shuffle play, and list the first ten songs that come up, no matter how un-hip they might be.

1. Washington, DC--The Magnetic Fields
2. Haiti--Arcade Fire
3. Werewolves of London--Warren Zevon
4. In the Eye Abides the Heart--Beth Nielsen Chapman
5. Pleased to Meet You--Bill Frisell
6. Them Fair Weather Friends--Alvin Youngblood Hart
7. Cherie--Ernest Ranglin
8. Gone--Bill Frisell
9. Cancelling Stamps at the University of Ghana Post Office--Various Postal Workers in Ghana, I guess
10. Lord Franklin--Pentangle

OK, back to work.

Developmental addendum

Tonight I learned that the monkey's diet has expanded to include slugs. Just thought everyone should know.

Parental dilemmas

Sometimes it's hard not to encourage misbehavior with laughter. That's just a function of the fact that misbehavior is often absolutely hilarious. Just not hilarious in a way that you want to see repeated in various iterations over the next five years.

Case in point. Tonight at the dinner table Wild Thing spears some of his tempeh ...

... oh, tempeh. For those of you who don't make it a staple of your diet, here is a handy introduction. It's good with barbecue sauce, which is how we were eating it tonight...

Anyway. Wild Thing spears his tempeh on his little plastic fork and starts waving it around. Fortunately the sauce is pretty thick, so he's not actually splattering food everywhere--in fact, this behavior was generating less of a mess than his actual eating, since we were having basmati rice, which isn't very sticky, so now we have basmati rice pretty much as an integral part of our dining room carpet, since he tends to aim the fork at his mouth with about the same degree of accuracy as Dick Cheney aims his shotgun at quail.

Let's see, where was I. Oh, yes, WT is waving the tempeh around in the air on his fork. We give him the usual reprimands--keep it over the table, food is for eating not for waving around, the usual. Perhaps sensing that he needed a new justification for what he was doing, WT begins singing:

"Rock-a-bye tempeh, in the tree top,
When the wind blows, the tempeh will rock ..."

At which point it became very difficult to retain credibility, since we're both chortling audibly.

Developmental note

Wild Thing is beginning to pretend to speak on behalf of his stuffed animals, particularly his favorite, the monkey. The monkey has no name yet--when asked, he'll sometimes say that it's "Pooh monkey"; note that his other favorite stuffed friend is a Pooh bear.

At any rate, he'll encourage us to ask the monkey what it eats. Then he'll answer, pretending to be the monkey. Answers vary; last night we learned that the monkey eats worms, strawberries, and grits.

Birds, Bees, Rasberries (updated)

Earlier tonight, Wild Thing was watching some aging family photos flip past via my computer's screensaver. One flashed up of a very pregnant version of Overworked Spouse, proudly displaying her belly. OS, walking past, comes in and tries to explain that this is a photo of her tummy when Wild Thing was still inside. No real response from WT, which sometimes means that he is ignoring you and sometimes means that he's thinking carefully about what you said. We assumed the former.

After a few more minutes, we all get bored with the photos and turn them off. WT then shouts to me gleefully, "I want to go in your tummy! Let's go in!" He then proceeds to blow rasberries on my midriff.

Also in a generally reproductive spirit, Wild Thing, discussing food likes and dislikes at the table, abruptly turned to me and said, "Daddy, you don't like pollination." He knows this term because it appears in this book, but why he brought it up in this context I really couldn't say.

L'amour de soi

Coming back from the child care center yesterday, Wild Thing wanted to wear the bunny ears made from construction paper that he'd made. I said, putting them on his head, "Mommy will think that's very cute."

WT opens the door. He runs inside excitedly shouting "Mommy! Mommy! I'm cute!"

Global vision

Tonight, Wild Thing started talking about one of his books, which features a mythical location called Happy Valley.

WT: "Where is Happy Valley?"

Me: "Um, I'm not sure, I guess ..."

WT: "The whole world is Happy Valley!"

Nice sentiment, eh?

A delicate flower

Today at the table Wild Thing was eating like a barbarian again. So I said, "WT, you're eating like a barbarian."

No response.

"Do you know what a barbarian is?"

WT: "Yeah. It's a kind of flower."

(As it happens, we planted barbarians this year, but they aren't blooming yet.)

Various and sundry

A quick note on two bits of cuteness from today.

1. Riding in the car, WT takes off his new pair of shoes. He tries to get them back on with no success. He asks for help, then adds, sadly, "My shoe misses me."

2. At the farmers' market this morning, we started examining some friendly-looking bears carved from wood. "They're bears!" WT notes. I asked if he knew what they were made of. WT: "Chicken!"

This may say something unflattering about the food preparation at his day care center ...

News Flash

Senate Ethics Committee To Meet In New Ethics Committee Mansion

The planets

So Wild Thing really loves this album cover:



This cover belongs to an album by Man ... or Astro-Man?, and as you will note, it prominently features robots and a planet in the sky. WT loves both of these things, but particularly the planet. "I want to look at the planet!" he'll spout out as he's practicing typing his name on the computer. He asked to listen to the music, but it didn't seem to wow him all that much.

His other favorite music experience at this point is to sit listening to Woody Guthrie's "Car Song" with the iTunes visualizer on. "I want to see the colors!" This cojoining of Guthrie's primitivism and iPod's eye candy is a bit incongrous, but it has helped us get over many a rough spot in the morning.

Random observation

I doubt anyone who is reading this cares, but ...

OK, everyone who watches ABC's "Lost" knows that one of the major characters is named John Locke. What has probably escaped anyone who doesn't know much about 17th-century philosophy is that his father--Anthony Cooper--is also named for an important thinker, Anthony Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury.

That is all. We resume normal posting tomorrow. Or whenever we get around to it.