Mister Rogers' Garden (Needs to Grow)

I have, over the past week, watched this video so many times that the song is now pretty thoroughly stuck in my head.  I have no problem with this at all.

Mister Rogers "Garden of Your Mind" remix

What I do have a bit of a problem with, now, is the apparent reality that there are not enough Mister Rogers episodes out on DVD.  Really do not understand this.  Also, I NEED FULL SEASONS.  I have no idea why they wouldn't be already out.  Surely it wouldn't be the same as with Sesame Street, where apparently they let all the song composers and such keep the rights to each bit they did, so then for DVD they have to go tracking everybody down to get a complete episode's worth of stuff.

We need more Sesame Street too, for that matter.  Have you seen many kid shows of the present day, and how they just are nowhere near the quality of these two old-school items?  Or am I just old now?

Overthinking "Dinosaur Train," part 1

A staple of Una's television viewing, the PBS cartoon Dinosaur Train (by the Jim Henson Co) annoyed me at first, but it has grown on me and now I rather like it. It won me over partly with little things, like the fact that many of the dinosaur species have accents and other personality quirks based on where they were discovered (the Iguanadon likes to do Monty Python silly walks), partly with enjoyable songs, and partly with good character development. But there are still a few nagging questions, from a world-building perspective, that I can't help wondering about.

Most obvious is the question: whence the time-travel technology? The Troodons like to brag about how smart they are, but I don't see that they've come up with many non-train-related inventions. One suspects that someone else supplied them with time-travel capability. "Aliens" might be the obvious answer, although the question then becomes "why would the aliens bother doing that?" I have another theory, though. Whom do we know of who (a) knows of time travel, (b) has a family that includes two young children, who very commonly love anything to do with dinosaurs, (c) might do any nutty-seeming thing on a whim, and (d) was last seen operating a time machine in the shape of a (flying) train?

Doc Brown, of course.

Arguing against this hypothesis is Doc Brown's usually scrupulous concern about messing up the space-time continuum. Giving dinosaurs technology would seem to be a rather large disruption. But this actually dovetails with another nagging question: why does the Dinosaur Train only travel within the Mesozoic Era (the age of dinosaurs)? Perhaps Doc Brown rationalized that as long as the dinosaurs could only travel within their own era, and not use the train to escape their ultimate fate, all would be well. Presumably he made sure to keep his explanations to the Troodons limited to practical operating instructions, without getting into actual time-travel theory. As far as we can tell, this seems to have worked.

Conversation with Breakfast: a short play by Una

[Una takes a bite of toast.]
TOAST: Ow! You bit my bottom! Wah! Wah!
[Bacon approaches Toast.]
BACON: What's wrong?
TOAST: She bit my bottom. Wah!
BACON: I'm your mommy. I will help you.
[Bacon kisses Toast.] Mwah!
BACON: All better.
TOAST: Thank you Mommy.

since the eagles weren't in it

We all wore Steeler yellow on Sunday, although hers took the form of teeny yellow flowers, which I suspect is slightly atypical as Steeler fan-wear goes.



It is now a trend that when a new generation is born into my husband's family, the Steelers will win the following Super Bowl. It happened with him, and now with our daughter. Steeler Nation: you're welcome.

zero plus two

I confess to harboring a secret hope that she might be born on Bilbo and Frodo's birthday. I know I would have enjoyed that for myself, although I'm happy with my actual birthday which is also my dad's (and a great-grandfather's!). But still no signs so far that she's going to make it out today.

Turns out that those who care as much or more than me about such things have figured out that, due to differences between the hobbits' Shire Reckoning calendar and ours, September 22 in our calendar isn't actually their birthday anyway -- it was September 13, this year (due to this being a leap year). Oh well.

Shire Reckoning, by the way, has always seemed eminently more logical than our cobbled-together Gregorian, but the hobbits' old-school season-based holidays (Midsummer, Yule) that don't belong to any months would, I suppose, confuse too many people used to our modern three-day-shopping-weekend system.

the cake is a lie

For once, I think I may have managed to be on the early side of awareness about a Hot New Internet Catchphrase. Kung Fu Monkey gave me this awareness when he noted that it is "the perfect explanation" of the writers' strike (in the post before his extensive and excellent detailed rundown of "What's this all about then, oy?"). I googled the phrase and realized that it's from that interesting-looking game that M. was playing last week or so that I hadn't got round to trying yet -- this weekend perhaps.

T-shirts. We need T-shirts. As demonstrated above, it could apply to all sorts of situations (for antiwar protests, use one with a picture of a cake which is yellow). This is what makes me expect that it will be sweeping the nation.

Of course, since normally I only become fully aware of things as they've passed their peak, I could be wrong. But I want a T-shirt anyway.

11. Favorite TV show?

back to this question business. Hm. At this moment, the first one that comes to mind is Firefly. Though as I say that, I see Babylon 5 standing across the schoolyard, glaring at me bitterly.

Do you mean shows currently on? Um... we don't have cable. We watch our TV on DVD.

8. What's the last movie you saw in the cinema?

Since the cost of a pair of movie tickets these days is roughly comparable to the price of a re-watchable-in-the-comfort-of-one's-home DVD, we don't get out to theaters a whole lot. I think it was An Inconvenient Truth. Which, btw, everyone needs to (a) see, and (b) make other people watch who haven't seen it. Gore/Obama '08: dream ticket. Too bad the press hates Gore, seemingly because he's not as much "fun" as they'd like. If you want to pick on him for something, I'd choose the idea of Lieberman as veep. But at least it would have gotten Mr. Pomposity out of his Senate seat, which otherwise he seems to think is his personal property.

Next theater-movie will probably be the new James Bond, since the sweetie is a Bond partisan.

7. What's the last CD you bought?

hrm. I have never been a music junkie, in the sense of buying up lots of music, although music in certain contexts (e.g., film scores) is important to me. And now we're in the era of MP3s and iPods. I honestly can't say for sure, but I think it might have been the spoken-word album put out around last Christmas by Sarah Bunting of Tomato Nation, collecting her phone-conversation-with-a-friend essays into audio form.

(I've got all the honeymoon pics back now, but I still have to sift for the best ones and scan them.)