Dribs and Drabs from My Scattered Brain

I don't know whether it's the heat or the fact that I'm used to exorcising itty bitty mental grenades as Facebook statuses, but I find that the stupidest things are ricocheting around in my brain as I make my way through the day.

Here's a dumb one: Mal watches a lot of kiddie music videos: Little Baby Bum, Dave and Ava - more on that one in a minute - and Super Simple Songs. And he has a lot of books with nursery rhymes in them. It drives me bonkers and every single time he hears or reads "Humpty Dumpty," I feel the need to verbalize the caveat, "He's not an egg. It never says he's an egg."

I feel like creators are being lazy. Just because he was depicted as an egg somewhere back in the 19th Century doesn't mean he's an egg. The whole thing makes no sense. Why would the king give a rat's patootie about a broken egg?

See? I need to be somewhere where I can get outside and enjoy nature and not have these idiotic obsessions.

The second thing is that I think Americans need to get with the times and pick a different name for what we call "football." It ISN'T football anymore, and it makes so much more sense to use that name for soccer (or futbol, if you will). Mal has a lot of balls, including a so-called "football," so, yeah. I am confronted with this a lot.

Oh! So going back to the videos: I think my favorite "channel" is Super Simple Songs. Mal started with Little Baby Bum, and those are cute. I like how they reboot "Rock-a-Bye Baby" and make it less death-y. And their "Twinkle Twinkle" videos are beautiful (and ubiquitous; Mal calls stars "twinkle"). The Super Simple Songs are cute enough for Mal without being overly obnoxious to me. There is a set of videos called "Do You Like...?" that makes the unschooler in me chafe, but you'll see about that in a week or two when I have completed a fun project and blog about it. 

We discovered "Dave and Ava" when James' mom was here, and they caught Mal's attention immediately. Well, they're a little precious, but tolerable... EXCEPT for this. The main characters are two little kids who wear animal pajamas all of the time, and apparently live with a father (figure?), a dog, a cat, and a mouse, on a farm. Some of the animals are anthropomorphized a bit, especially seen dancing or walking upright. A few wear some clothes if the "story" of the song calls for it. BUT... There is a "family" in several videos. A family of monkeys. Fully dressed, except with no shoes, and with hairstyles that are overtly black. This is unmistakably a black family, represented as monkeys. It *might* be innocent, but how could the creative team not know? 

In all of the videos, the kids are mischievous, jumping on the bed in this song, rolling over and causing problems and being ornery in "There Were Ten in the Bed," stealing apples and bananas and making rude faces in "I Like Apples and Bananas." I mean, it literally makes me uncomfortable. I have looked around on the internets to see if anyone has called them out on this, and found exactly two instances on Facebook or YouTube where someone asked about what the heck they were thinking. The creators haven't responded. I know they're not absent, because they DID respond (in good humor, I think) to something I wrote pretty snarkily on their Facebook page.

The "cast" of Super Simple Songs is diverse almost to a technical precision; it was obviously intentional. I prefer that to this, which almost seems like a way to catch kids' attention, then subtly teach them to be racist. Mal loves their videos, though. So, again, I talk a lot while he's watching.

Okay, I don't remember where I was going with this post. I started it days ago and had a laundry list of things I was planning to "discuss," but have lost them all and keep not writing because I'm too tired to try to remember.

I'll end with this thing that Mal found this morning that is truly awful. It's the Videogyan YouTube channel and it's truly insufferable. They have about 14,000 versions of "Five Little Monkeys--" ahem, "Babies" and by the time it got to the eighth one in the compilation Mal was trying to watch, I had to stop it. They're written awfully, with lyrics like, "Five little babies playing with the toys. One tossed it up and it got broke. Mamma called the Daddy and the Daddy said, 'No more babies playing with the toy.'" Or, "Five little babies opening the eggs. One got a dino and it got scared. Mamma called the Daddy and the Daddy said, 'There are no dinos living in our house." Yeah. So if you hate yourself, watch a few. You're welcome.