Category Archives: Parental Guidance

Baseball, Parental Guidance

Teaching Tolerance for Those You Hate

On the way to school this morning, The Baby and I had a conversation about fandom, prompted by absolutely nothing she or I had said up to that point. She has been talking about baseball a lot lately, for some reason. I may have mentioned that the season was starting soon, and so she’s been asking me often exactly when it will begin. When I say “Next Friday,” she’ll let out an anguished groan, because any length of time longer than a minute is an eternity to a little kid. She also thinks, because I told her I write about the Mets, that I’m a “baseball recorder”.

So we’re walking to school. I believe the last thing I said was something along the lines of, “Ooh, look at that squirrel up on that telephone wire.” Then, this:

BABY: Do you like the Mets?

ME: Yes, I do.

BABY: Do you like the ‘Ankees?

I paused here for a while, wondering how to respond. Do I say something stupid and hateful? Or do I try to keep as much positivity in our shared lives for as long as I can? I opt for the latter.

ME: I like the Mets better. They’re my favorite team.

THE BABY: I don’t like the ‘Ankees.

I am genuinely perplexed, because honestly, I don’t think I’ve said one word about the Yankees in front of her–good, bad, or indifferent–her entire life. Her only interaction with That Team, as far as I know, has been driving past the stadium on our way upstate. I have not tried in any way to transfer any of my animus on to her. I have to assume this is a product of school. *shakes fist*

ME: Why don’t you like the Yankees?

THE BABY: They smell! They smell like ‘Ankee shirts!

At this point, I have to fight every impulse in my body to laugh. Because as much as I might say I “hate,” the Yankees, I really don’t. For one thing, I know too many Yankee fans who aren’t dicks to wish them too much ill. There’s really no one currently on the team who even bugs me–no, not even Jeter. There’s just a certain kind of Yankee fan who drives me nuts. And let’s be honest: there are douchebags a’plenty in every fanbase. If the Mets had the run of success that the Yankees have had in the last 15 years, they’d attract the same terrible types the Yankees do now, people who want to bask in reflected glory and are not fans of baseball or even sports, only winning.

More importantly, I don’t want to be one of those dads who creates a Hate Clone in his own twisted image to hurl tiny epithets at the object of his scorn. That’s even worse than trying to push kids into a sport or to skip grades, because at least a kid can gain something from those endeavors. But using your child as a vessel for all your hates and fears, that’s just monstrous. I’ve seen kids like these at stadiums, dressed head to toe in team gear, yelling horrible things they couldn’t possibly understand, like Children of the Damned in Zubaz.

If I encouraged this kind of thinking, I feared her growing up to make her own version of Buffalo ’66. Or even worse, becoming a version of one of those mutants from Filip Bondy’s Bleacher Creature columns in the Daily News of yore. I had to read tons of that column when researching my recaps of the 2000 season, and it dented my soul. The kind of hate that came out of these people’s mouths toward Mets fans was at thermonuclear, Alabama 1963 levels.

I did not want my daughter to grow up to be such a person. Sports should inspire love, not hate. So, I took the high road.

ME: That’s not nice. The Yankees don’t smell. Different people like different things. Some people like the Yankees, some people like the Mets. Some people don’t like baseball at all.

THE BABY: [with a resigned sigh] Yeah, I guess so.

And we walked on to school. I felt good for following the better angels of my nature, and I thought of the lyrics of one of my dad’s favorite parodic songs, Tom Lehrer’s “National Brotherhood Week”: Step up and shake the hand / Of someone you can’t stand / You can tolerate them if you try…

Parental Guidance, Pointless Nostalgia, Tuneage

Parental Musicology

When I was a little kid, like 5 years old, my mom had this habit of asking me who was playing on the radio. Eventually I figured out that whenever she asked me this, the answer was invariably The Beatles. So she upped the ante by asking me which Beatle wrote the song.

“C’mon, you gotta know this is Paul!” she’d say. “Listen to all the different parts that are in it. It’s like a suite!”

I didn’t quite appreciate such nuances, the differences between Paul’s symphonic ambitions and John’s love of more traditional rock and roll. But to be fair, I was 5.

In this grand tradition, I often play a song for The Baby and ask her who it is. Not so much because I think she’ll know the answer, but because it’ll introduce her to stuff that I think is great. I have no illusions of turning her into a music snob at her young age, but I like putting her in a Cloud of Information, the idea being that at the very least, she’ll have a lot of information rattling around in her little brain and can one day do crossword puzzles with it.

Usually, the “instruction” is little more than me telling her who performs a particular song. Like the time Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker” came on the car radio and I informed her of the responsible party. “That guy sings crazy!” she said. Yes, he does.

My dad did something very similar to me–unconsciously, I think. He liked to watch British comedy on PBS a lot, and I joined him on occasion. Much of the humor flew straight over my head for reasons of vocabulary, historical context, and foreignness. So I’d ask him to explain a joke to me if I didn’t get it, which he invariably would, even if there was no way on earth I should have understood it. I’d do the same thing with Mad Magazine Super Specials, which often contained reprints from 10-15 years earlier, lampooning people and movies from before I was born. That’s how I could come up with a good zinger about Edward Heath or Spiro Agnew by age 8.

Recently, we were driving home from somewhere and had just parked the car. The radio was playing Frank Sinatra’s version of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” So I tried to give The Baby a two-tiered, family-themed music lesson. I explained that this was one of Nanny’s (my mom’s) favorite songs, since she was a big fan of Cole Porter. And I also explained that the guy singing it was my Nanny’s (her great-grandmother’s) favorite singer. It was an attempt to both school on what she was hearing and give her some familial context for why the song struck a chord with me.

From the backseat, she gave me this puzzled look. “I like rock and roll music,” she said, simply, emphatically.

Long pause. “Yeah, I like it, too,” I said, and we went home. There’s plenty of time for more nuanced lessons.

Boob Tubery, Parental Guidance

Adventure Time: Another Peak of Kid-Show-Dom

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adventuretime.pngI believe we are in the midst of a Kids’ Show Golden Age. Granted, I often bitch about children’s fare on this site, but that’s the product of having to watch the same damn shows over and over, the accursed Groundhog’s Day scenario that afflicts all parents at some point. Regardless, when I was a little shaver, there was virtually nothing but garbage on TV kids. Nowadays, there are some bonafide masterpieces aimed exclusively at children.

I’ve written in the past of my love for Flapjack, Phineas and Ferb, and Yo Gabba Gabba (easily the best toddler-oriented TV show ever, non-Sesame Street edition). All of these shows have a certain amount of anarchic weirdness that can tickle the funny bones of both kids and adults. I wrote about them because I fear adults without little kids in their lives may miss out on treasures like these that would be right up their alleys. And I am doing so again, because I have recently discovered a show that can easily stand among these giants: Adventure Time.

Adventure Time, which debuted on Cartoon Network about a year ago, stars Finn, a young lad who longs to be a hero, and his best friend, Jake, a magical dog (voiced by John DiMaggio, better known as Bender on Futurama). Together, they roam the enchanted land of Ooo fighting all manner of evil.

Most of the plots revolve around Finn and his strict, self-applied codes of honor and chivalry, coupled with Jake’s love of doing nothing at all. Such as an episode in which Finn vows to rescue a little girl’s stolen flowers from the infamous City of Thieves, even though he is warned repeatedly by an annoying old crone that no one can enter the city and not become a thief. While Finn valiantly tries to rescue the flowers as they are literally being stolen anew every two seconds, Jake dives right into the city’s thieving ways, swiping a sweet pair of boots, just because.

Tellingly, Adventure Time was created by a former Flapjack animator, Pendleton Ward. It shares with Flapjack a crazed energy, warped universe, and unique style. Finn and Jake’s limbs wobble and extend at will, almost like ancient Disney cartoons. The landscapes through which they travel are just as mutable, liable to change at a moment’s notice. As Robert Lloyd put it in the Los Angeles Times, Adventure Time resembles “the sort of cartoons they made when cartoons themselves were young and delighted in bringing all things to rubbery life.”

In the context of the show, virtually anything can happen. New characters and wondrous lands are introduced in almost every episode, as befits a show that revolves around magic and adventuring, though there are recurring characters. Like the Ice King, an angry monarch with a penchant for kidnapping princesses. Or Lady Rainicorn, Jake’s girlfriend, a unicorn with a rainbow tail who speaks through a voice box interpreter (which usually only broadcasts in Korean). Or Marceline the Vampire Queen, who loves to play bass and hungers not so much for blood as the color red.

I should also mention that it is laugh-out-loud funny. Take, for example, an episode where Finn spares some sugar for a poor beggar who turns out to be a Magic Man. The Magic Man horrifies Finn and Jake by turning a bird inside out, then does Finn a “mystical magical favor” by transforming him into a giant foot. “Today a magical life lesson comes to you!” he insists, though the lesson itself is far from clear. Finn demands to be returned back to normal, but the Magic Man refuses–“Not until you appreciate what a jerk I am!”–and disappears in a burst of fireworks that spell out EAT IT.

I am also greatly amused by another episode in which Finn tries to help a whiny talking mountain who is upset because he is forced to watch a nearby town of “roughhousing marauders.” Finn tries to mute the bad guys’ roughhousing by tying animals to all of the bad guys, which only bothers the mountain more. (“That was terrible! Now the men are just punching animals!”) You won’t soon forget the sight of tough guys with mice and cats strapped to their fists punching each other.

I’m just scratching the surface here, and I also fear these descriptions make the show seem saner than it is. Adventure Time is straight-up bonkers in the best, most organic way possible. It can’t really be understood unless experienced, because it truly is an experience. It’s unlike almost anything else on TV, kid- or adult-oriented. It could definitely slot into the Adult Swim lineup, alongside Aqua Teen Hunger Force et al, and not seem out of place at all.

The show’s tone and philosophy is probably best understood by this bit of dialogue, which comes at the end of one episode where Finn and Jake had adventured their way into and out of trouble:

JAKE: Let’s never be stupid again.

FINN: No, let’s always be stupid–forever!