“I never drink... soda.”
According to the NYT, Scholastic is reissuing its Baby-Sitters Club series, a line of novels for tween girls that ran for 213 titles and sold 176 million copies. Girls who devoured these books during the 1980s and 1990s now have children of their own and, as one bookseller put it, the rebooted series would sell “really well to the girls who aren’t quite ready for vampires and particularly to the parents of the girls who aren’t quite ready.”
I see some great potential for crossover fanfic here.
Annals of cultural transmission
Scene: The dinner table.
Father: What did you do in school today?
Five-year-old: It was too cold to go out for recess, so we saw a movie.
Father: What was it about?
Five-year-old: It was about a snowman who came to life.
Father: So you saw Frosty the Snowman?
Seven-year-old: How did it work? And how did he die?
Dubious taxonomical choice of the day
My wife and I just got back from a romantic date at Brookline Booksmith, and I noticed that their staff has shelved Cecilia Tan’s anthology Women of the Bite: Lesbian Vampire Erotica, not under “Fantasy” or “Gay & Lesbian”, but under “Love & Relationships”.
I can’t quite figure that one out. I’m not quite sure if I want to.
Sit! Stay! Do your homework!
According to the New York Times, my indispensible source of yuppie trends, some parents have adapted the techniques of Cesar “The Dog Whisperer” Milan to train their own children to obey them.
Why is this news? People adapt training techniques from one species to another all the time. Of course it’s possible to take this kind of thing too far.
All of this has been sung before and it all will be sung again
After I first heard the Philadelphia Chickens CD, I went around telling friends and acquaintances, “There’s this Sandra Boynton CD with a song called ‘Belly Button’, and it’s a round! Get it? Belly button? Round? Isn’t that great?”
More recently, we got a They Might Be Giants CD, Here Comes Science, which contains this delightful song about meteors, and is also a round:
If I thought there was the slightest hope of seeing the Leonids in this neck of the woods, I would suggest getting a whole bunch of people to sing this on a hilltop as we watch.
I guess I just like rounds. Who else composes rounds, these days? Is it a moribund art, like plays where all the characters speak blank verse?
We are of mediocre screenwriting. Always.
I have certain warm fuzzy feelings—in my reptilian hindbrain, you might say—for the original V miniseries, and I figured it would be a refreshing change to watch a new TV show when it is broadcast instead of waiting a few years for the DVDs to arrive. So I saw the first episode of the remake.
Micro-mini-review: Meh.
Slightly longer review with spoilers: If a bunch of hawt alien refugees from Obama’s Presidential campaign show up with their Cunning Plan to Take Over The World, I would subcontract out the Resistance Movement to Al-Qaeda before trusting the fifth-columnists who reveal themselves in the fifth act. Why on earth did Ryan gather a dozen potential resistance fighters, including at least two whom nobody could vouch for, in one place, where they could hear his infodump and then conveniently be slaughtered? If this guy really cares about saving the planet, why didn’t he spend a few minutes in the library and learn how to set up a proper cell structure for passing along the same information? And did that FBI agent really let a member of a suspected terrorist cell inject her with an alleged anaesthetic and cut open her skin? And doesn’t Mr. Ambitious Newscaster know how to grease a source? And WTF did Reverend Young and Skeptical mean when he declared he didn’t understand how “God and aliens could live in the same universe”?
I think this show is set in a universe where the Visitors really are the only form of intelligent life.
Also, the Visitors don’t do that cool reverb thing with their voices that they did in the original series. My reptilian hindbrain is so disappointed.
The future of S/M (hoisted from comments)
rm linked to a NYT article on how shouting is the new spanking, i.e., parents who diligently avoid hitting their kids are feeling guilty that they can’t also keep from yelling at them.
One of her commenters wondered if, now that spanking children is less common, the next generation of adults will be less likely to have a kink for being spanked.
This led me to imagine an S/M scene where the dom says, with a cold and stern voice, “I’m going to count to three, and by the time I reach three, you had better be naked, or there will be consequences….”
(That “one minute per year of age” rule for time-out really sucks when you’re 35 years old, doesn’t it?)
Cain’s best friend
The author of the “Everyone Needs Therapy” blog informs us that October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and highlights a program, co-sponsored by the American Humane Association, to help abused women take their pets with them into shelters.
And just a few days ago, in synagogues all over the world, we read Bereshit, which describes the first recorded instance of domestic violence. That story, according to the midrash, also involves a pet. Nachmanides (s.v. Genesis 4:13) cites Bereshit Rabbah 22:27 as explaining that the “sign” that God set for Cain’s protection was actually a dog; Cain would know that wherever the dog went, he could follow safely.
OK, it’s not a perfect parallel: Cain was a perpetrator of violence, not a victim. But unlike many other perpetrators since Genesis, he repented and, as far as we know from the text, didn’t do it again…
Teach the children well, and maybe they won’t fall for this when they grow up
The entrepreneurs who founded Absolute Best Care have come up with a brilliant business plan—or possibly a brilliant grift—and the New York Times doesn’t understand it.
…To that end comes the Absolute Best Care Learning Center, scheduled to open Oct. 26. For a mere $4,000 — $2,040 if you act now — aspiring nannies who attend a seven-day course will obtain training in child care, developmental milestones, CPR, first aid and household management. (Five have signed up so far.)
It’s worth pointing out that pediatric first aid and CPR courses rarely run more than a few hundred bucks, and that the textbook Absolute will be using, “Mrs. Starkey’s Nanny Manager,” is $79.95 on Amazon.com.
But as soon as I saw the price tag, I could tell that ABC is not selling these classes to aspiring nannies. The overprivileged parents who were portrayed in The Nanny Diaries will send their nannies to this school, and cheerfully exchange those kilobucks for the peace of mind that comes from having a properly-educated servant.
The great thing about the corporate-training biz is that as long as there are employers out there with money to burn (as a tax-deductible business expense, no less), you can set prices in the stratosphere. If Harvard Extension can charge $1,975 for a six-hour class in Fundamentals of Website Development, then I’m sure ABC will have no trouble finding enough parents in the Upper West Side to fill their classes at $2,040, or even $4,000, per seat.
See it in the new feature film, “Twilight of the Goths”
One of the perks of working in the geography biz is the trivia I pick up. For example, there is a place in Italy called Villa Emo.
