I shouldn't watch childrens television.

My almost three year old son loves his cartoons.  Sometimes I can get behind it.  Sometimes I wonder what the hell he's watching, and if I was the same way when I was his age.  Part of the problem is that I tend to apply logical thinking and look for deeper meanings in some of the things I see, more as a fun intellectual activity for me.  

My man Smiles McFeety has a couple of favorite shows. A Disney Peter Pan spinoff, Jake and the Never Land Pirates (which I, for some reason, can mostly put aside my ridiculous thinking and get behind), Adventures of Chuck, Bo on the Go! more recently, amid a smattering of other kid friendly Netflix available fare.  But how kid friendly these shows really are is a question in my mind, that is up for debate.

Aside from the obvious misrepresentation of colonial era piracy, Jake is full of colorful characters, is surprisingly well written for a kids show, and does offer a surprising amount of continuity.  This is one I'm afraid to Google any information about it just because I don't want it ruined for me, the internet being what it is and all.  The music is exceptionally well done, and it's not uncommon for me to sing along with my kid when watching the show.  Even the villain characters are likeable.  Captain Hook is still a jerk, but he's a likeable jerk most of the time.  A lot of this comes from a stellar cast of surprisingly famous people.  David Arquette, Sharon Osborn, Tori Spelling, Josh Duhamel, Jerry O'Connel, and even Adam West pop in from time to time to voice characters.

Watch out for this guy though.  No one, ever, should trust Cubby.

And then it starts to get weird.  Sinister, even.

The Adventures of Chuck and Friends is a kid friendly post apocalyptic tale of a group of kids who have to deal with their leader being a total dick all the time, and casually reinforcing outdated stereotypes.  I wish I was making this up.

Anthropomorphic cars and trucks live in a near utopian society where the only conflict ever seen is when the lead character, Chuck, does something to upset his surprisingly loyal friends, who still hang out with him despite the fact hes always a grade A jackass.  We get that the show is named after him, and he's the central character, but every single conflict, difference, or disagreement from this show stems from the main character bullying his friends into doing what he wants.

Wait, what?  Post apocalyptic?  Follow me for a sec.  A couple episodes in, we meet an elderly school bus.  This school bus isn't large enough to let the child we see in, but is perfect sized for human children.  As we've never seen a single human, adult or otherwise on this show, and none of the child-vehicles show any evidence of going to school, we can draw a couple of conclusions.  At some point, cars and trucks became sentient after the fall of humanity, but still seem to cling to human tropes.  Did a couple of people upload their consciousnesses into smart cars and evolve a society from there?  Did AI evolve to resemble human thinking and thought, 'Hey man, cars are cool!'?

Those two idea are (very thinly, mostly in my head) supported by our own modern day stereotypes.  The cars and trucks seen on the show are analogous to certain preconceived traits/personality types.  The pickup truck speaks in a southern accent and idioms and has cattle horns, as if they couldn't figure out a way to make a cowboy hat work.  The street racer car is of Japanese decent and likes shiny, flashy things.  The garbage truck is seen as constantly smelly and unintelligent.  There's a band tour bus that shows up one episode that speaks in your expected surfer/stoner tones.  No band, just the roadie.  The guy with the German name only speaks in harsh, unintelligible honks and is always angry.  I wish I was making this all up.

Yep, I totally can ruin everything.

Bo on the Go! is one of my dudes more recent interests.  It's the story of a warlock (who insist his charges call him 'The Wizard'.  I know what you're up to, warlock!)  who keeps a young preteen succubus named Bo (who doesn't know what she really is) locked in a castle with only a young dragon.  The show is supposed to promote healthy activities and developing motor skills like getting up, moving around, running, and jumping, but after about 5 minutes or so of this, Bo runs out of energy.  She needs the kids watching to get up and move around, so she can steal their energy ("When you move with me, you give me energy!"), so they can complete whatever menial task The Wizard sets up for them that episode.

The kids are supposed to set up a 'Bo Zone' where they can move around unhindered and perform movements and jumps and arcane hand motions to summon Wizard and transfer energy to Bo.  This sounds like a kid friendly, eldritch, potentially demonic summoning circle to me.  Obviously the terms warlock, succubus, and most of the arcane elements I've posited here are never mentioned, but seriously, read between the lines.  It's plain as day to anyone with a passing interest in the supernatural side of crytozoology.

The stuff of Nightmares in its nascent form.

On Kindles and E-Books

As an avid reader, getting my first Kindle as a gift was the best thing that ever happened to me.  While there are still some books that I must own as physical copies (anything by Neal Stephenson, Blizzard related stuff, Chuck Palahniuk, and things that will complete already started collections that I feel I must finish), I really do like the fact that there are a seemingly endless amount of books for free to dirt cheap to pick up on the Amazon store.  From a lot of the classics that I used to have but went missing to stuff that I just plain missed are up for free.  While familiar with his works for a long time, I'll admit that until earlier this year, I've never read any of H.P. Lovecraft.  I was able to fix this

On the other side of fame, there are a ton of undiscovered genre writers that are waiting to be read, and often will have their first book or two up for free, hoping that you'll like it enough to pick up the follow ups for a few bucks here and there.  I've read probably close to 300 or so of these indie published e-books in the last two years, and a good chunk of them were follow ups to fantasy or sci-fi novels that I felt were easily worth a couple of dollars.  Libraries around also offer free e-books with a library card now too.  This is only a good thing.  Guys like Alex Ziebart (pulpy fantasy), Mark Tufo (smart ass pulpy horror), Matt Rossi (amazingly detailed, well thought out speculative history), Christian Cantrell (wrote a series of short, tight, fast paced current to futuristic 'where we go as humans' sort of sci-fi), and so many more are fantastic writers and really need more exposure.  Maybe I'll do a couple of posts reviewing Kindle books.

Random Thoughts

So I'm terrible at updating. That's a thing, it happens.  Life got in the way huge.  Moved a few states away, took a new job, getting married in less than a month, got another baby on the way.  These things happen.  On to random, totally non-sequitur thoughts!

First up:  I saw a school bus pulled over by the cops on my way home from work today. I wonder what happened? Were the police looking for a missing kid? Did the cop see some jackass pass the stopped school bus while it was dropping off kids and get a statement from the bus driver? Was it really a mobile meth lab? The potential possibilities are endless!

 Second:  A true story that always makes me die a little on the inside.  Once I was outside expo at a restaurant. This is the guy who sits in the window and takes the food as it comes out and trays it up for the servers to run out to the tables. My printer ran out of paper, so instead of just writing the tables numbers on post it notes or something, I decided I hated the waitstaff and wrote basic middle school math equations that came out to have the table numbers as answers. This confused and angered some of them at first. So I simplified it to basic elementary school math. It still didn't help.

Random thought the third:  I'm sort of excited to see how my son reacts to Star Wars when he gets a little older.  I remember watching the Original Trilogy when I was just a little older than he is now over and over and over and over and oh my God I just realized I did the same thing every little girl has done with Frozen since it came out on DVD except with something way cooler on a bootlegged VHS tape.  Episode 7 is just a few months away!