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Sticky Notes 8 - The Off the Wall version

Foul Ball!

Baseball is over for the year here, although Tigger would probably play until October if the opportunity presented itself. We have finally (FINALLY!) found something that Tigger is actually interested in obsessed with. He walks around with his mitt at all times, tossing a ball up and down until someone realizes that he's playing with a ball in the house and chases him out of doors. He badgers Piper to play catch with him, and Piper has found it a useful bribe: "Let's get this done and then we can play."

Tigger knows when the Red Sox games start and what channel they are usually on. He is starting to ask intelligent questions about the action on the field. He still comes up with some really off the wall questions, but that's just a part of being Tigger.

He is obsessed enough with baseball to wake up in the middle of the night and yell "Foul ball" before going back to sleep.

Off the Wall

I was a senior in high school when Thriller was released. Some of the people I was becoming friends with around that time are still my best friends today.  I am a little weirded out by Michael Jackson's death, but probably no more so than I am by what he became in the intervening years. If I gave it much thought, I would have said he had one more spectacular comeback in him - different moves, different music, different appearance, for sure. Something that allowed us to remember his talent more than his weirdness. In news articles that have shown the progression of his physical transformation, I'm always stuck on the photos from either the Billy Jean or the Beat it videos, wishing that he had stopped there. I've managed to avoid most of the commercial radio stations' Jackson blasts, because the whole thing is oddly like losing a Beatle. What keeps getting me is the State Farm commercial released several weeks before his death that uses "I'll be there."  Ironic, I think.

"Sometimes you just have to bow to the absurd."*

I have never, ever watched a single episode of American Idol, and probably never will, but every summer America's Got Talent gets us rushing to the couch. This is, of course, the U.S. counterpart to the show that gave us the collective introspection exercise known as Susan Boyle.

Year after year, I find that my favorite acts are not the straight out singers, but the ones with a great story and something unusal to offer, most often the acrobatic/street dancers or people who make music out of something different. Last year, I was rooting for a pair of guys calling themselves Nuttin but Stringz who came in with a unique mix of violins and rap. They lost in favor of a forgettable opera singer, but I was pleased to see an advertisement for a performance of theirs at Mohegan Sun earlier this year. Sometimes I wish the show would do a "where are they now" segment for those who were good enough to become finalists, but didn't get the grand prize. No doubt many of them went on to pursue their crafts lucratively in spite of the loss.

And can I just say that I LOVE Sharon Osbourne, in spite of her strange taste in men.

But most of the fun of this show is the utterly ridiculous, like this act (embed disabled), who kept making it back last season in spite of Piers Morgan's obvious distate for them.

*Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation

Looking for the words

My kids watch too much TV.

It is one of the few things that Piper and I do not agree on when it comes to child rearing. He grew up with the TV always on in the background, I did not.  We have found a way to deal with it; I let them watch more than I want and he doesn't argue with me when I finally do shut it off.

I didn't think it was possible, but I have found something even more irritating about the television than the incessant noise of Sponge Bob (that show gives me a headache) - the commercials. Or, more accurately my kids reactions to the commercials.

Oh sure, they do the obligatory "I want that" to the latest transformer type toy or junk cereal. They know that just about the only things I will ever say "yes" to are lego kits and sports stuff, but they do it anyway for fun. The thing that really bothers me though, is the reaction to Bratz or Barbie, or cheesy makeup kits, always pink and sparkly and puke-inducing. At least once a day I hear one of them say:

"That stuff's for girls...." 

You heard the sneer in that, right?

I don't know exactly where this attitude is coming from, but I don't like it. I don't like the toys either but the segregation of children's playthings is a whole other rant I don't have time for today.

So my question is this:  How do I approach this topic without going all militant on their asses in a calm and thoughtful manner? They are 6 & 7, are they even able to think critically about what's coming out of their mouths?

I wonder too, if this is a real problem or if it's just that this whole Sarah Palin debacle has me more sensitive about the view and standing of women and girls in our society. I just find the whole thing very unsettling.

Thoughts at One in the Morning

Would someone please give Craig Ferguson a show at an earlier hour?

Thank you.

Dollars to Donuts

Why? Why? Why?

A couple of months ago, I realized that the guy doing the voice-over for the latest Dunkin Donuts commercials was John Goodman. I started to wonder why on earth they would choose a large, fat man to push their product. You never saw him on the ads, but it was clear who he was. Probably what they were trying to do was borrow from his image as working class hero on the Rosanne show and play up the differences in their clientle, vs. say, the designer coffee set. The message I got was "eat this stuff, and you'll look like him."

Now New England based Dunkin has gone completely the other way. They have chosen perky, peppy, Rachel Ray as a spokesperson. Now, I understand that she might appeal to those busy moms on the go, you can just see her driving that minivan with the five kids all needing to get to different places (and those kids rolling their eyes at her incessant chatter). But I wonder why she chose to do this.

I don't hate Rachel Ray. There are people who do, and I wonder why they just don't shut the TV off. I see her as riding a wave of her own popularity, milking it for all it's worth before her 15 minutes are up. As a business woman, I can see the merits of doing that. When she retires (or is retired) she will have enough money to do whatever the hell she wants for the rest of her life. We should all be so lucky. 

Ray, to me, is like Oprah's book club. As a reader and writer, it's frustrating to me that the public taste in "literature" is so heavily influenced by  a pop-culture icon, but as a librarian friend once told me, "at least she's getting people to read."  And in a culture surrounded by very unhealthy pre-processed food, at least Rachel Ray is energetically encouraging fans by the thousands to cook for themselves.

But in taking on the Dunkin mantle, she is wrecking that image. Maybe I'll feel differently when I see the ads, but I hate to see her go from fresh to fattening overnight. Like it or not, Rachel Ray has a lot of power. In doing this, she stops using it only for good.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I'm writing this in a bookstore and the section closest to the cafe is Cooking. Looking up to see how many of Ray's books I can spot, I find, instead, Anthony Bourdain staring at me from the cover of his book The Nasty Bits. Bourdain caused a bit of a stir with a guest blog post at Ruhlman few weeks ago; chewing up and spitting out many of the current shows on the Food Network.  Gotta wonder what he'd say about this.

Comcast, Take Me Away!

Since becoming parents, we have been grounded, so to speak. And while I refuse to believe that our travelling days are over, they have been rather limited since our last trip to Russia, almost two years ago.

So we have taken up armchair travelling, courtesty of whatever interesting travel/cultural programs we can find on TV. We've watched every season of The Amazing Race. We catch Globe Trekker whenever we can, old episodes of Rick Steves, and other things that we have found on different channels. We have mostly been disappointed by the Travel Channel, every time we turned it on we'd find ourselves presented with shows on places like Las Vegas, Carribean resorts, and Extreme McMansions of the California Coast. Or at least that's what it should have been called.

But that seems to be changing. I think we were watching Top Chef when we saw an advertisement for Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations. This is our kind of show. Bourdain, a New Yorker, really seems familiar to me, and not just because I read his book Kitchen Confidential a few years ago. He goes to interesting places and his show is adventurous with a healthy side of cynical. Part chef, part writer, and part traveler, he is like M.F.K. Fisher with a badass attitude. He is also not afraid to eat anything (better him than me). It is in many ways a weird food tour of the world. Food being an essential part of culture, Bourdain showcases local eateries, but also traditions, rituals, and secret clubs where food is at the center of the gathering. At some point this season, he will have a show based in Moscow and I am anxious to see his take on it.

The only problem here is that his show is on at 10 PM here. Both this and ER, which I have tried unsuccessfully to give up, keep me awake past my bedtime. Trying to balance both a consulting job and two children, one of whom wakes me at least once every night, has made a decent bedtime important again. And so maybe, just maybe, it is time for the DVR. Keep in mind, I didn't have so much as a television before my husband and I moved in together. Of course, I actually went out of the house a lot more in the evenings back then, so there was little need for a TV. I wonder how much Comcast is going to charge me for this service so that I can record the two or three programs I actually look forward to watching, as opposed to whatever happens to be on when my husband turns on the TV. This is why I could never get into LOST or 24; I can't make appointment TV. I have a family and a career, I need flexibility, people!