Are you a good princess, or a bad princess?

Anybody who's read more that two of my posts knows by know that I have a young daughter at home, and she absolutely loves the Disney princesses, and Disney movies in general.  Like a lot of blue-state, liberal-arts, post-feminist people, I have mixed feelings about this.  I worry about the influence these types of cultural cues have on children, especially girls, and the movies are a mixed bag of good and bad lessons. I want to take a minute and evaluate a few of them.

Sigh.  I was going to write another long essay-form rant on the subject, a la my earlier entry on The Little Mermaid, but couldn't decide how to frame it coherently, so instead, I'm making my second list in the (admittedly very short) history of Caught Without a Parachute (the first, somewhat lackluster list is here).

The Nostalgia Machine

From the brilliant xkcd.com  His cartoons all carry an Easter egg, visible when you mouse over them; the one on this chart says: "An American tradition is anything that happened to a Baby-Boomer twice."

Regardless of what I may have said in recent posts, I really do enjoy the holiday season.  I even enjoy some of the more commercial aspects of it, especially the yearly ritual of bemoaning the commercialism of the season while simultaneously wallowing in it.  In large part, though, my enjoyment is based in nostalgia of the purest kind, and my nostalgia is triggered by cynical advertising ploys, bent on producing exactly the kind of reaction xkcd's referring to with the above chart.  Why is our Christmas celebration rooted so very firmly in the past?  If I remove the baby-boom signifiers from the season - the Red-Rider Air Rifle kind of stuff - I'm left with yet another layer of images from a vanished past, namely the Victorian era, when people actually rode around in sleighs, and Dickens was the hot new thing.

Is Robin Hood a Socialist?





There's was a piece the other day on the New York Times' website about the growing movement - particularly in Europe - in favor of a so-called "Robin Hood tax".  These are tiny taxes on certain financial transactions, particularly the risky ones that generate large sums of money, seemingly out of thin air.  The proceeds of the taxes, as the name suggests, are then used to support social programs.  The idea has some high-profile supporters, such as Bill Gates and Angela Merkel, and not surprisingly, some powerful opponents in the US and UK.

I made the decision not to talk too much about current events on this blog, because every post would quickly become an incoherent rant, but this presents an opportunity to talk about a Disney movie, which is one of the things I said I was going to do (check out my read on The Little Mermaid here).  It raised the question in my mind: is the Robin Hood we were presented as children, the fox in the green hat, a Socialist?

My First List - Things were better when...

Is there anything more susceptible to parody than the image of the old man lecturing a kid about how different things were "when I was your age" (I mean besides the Kardashian sisters)?  And is there anything more cliched in internet-land than lists (I mean besides bad grammar and pictures of kittens)?

When the idea for this post occurred to me, at first I rejected it.  It seemed like painting a picture of a canned ham in a cornfield, on black velvet.  But I needed something to post, and sometimes you just can't avoid the black velvet painting moments in life, so here it goes...

Stuff that was better when we were kids

Growing up

I think I've finally figured out what this blog is about.  It's about growing up.

More specifically, its about the experience of growing up, of looking around and realizing that adulthood's maybe not as cool as you thought it was going to be, and all that stuff you were quick to lay behind as a teenager is actually awesome.

To that end, I will be taking a gander at children's things through jaded adult eyes.  Sometimes it will be pure nostalgia (and will probably relate to something my kids have been up to lately), and sometimes it will be a deeper look at something we took for granted as children, as I did with my Mermaids post.  (They won't all be that long, I promise.)

Now for a quick plug: a couple of things I never grew out of were gummi bears and those frosted animal crackers.  Laurel Bushman is a California based artist who makes awesome charms and pendants based on them and other nostalgia foods.  Check them out here.  Full disclosure: she's my sister.

Forget Christmas, Save Thanksgiving!

Is it just me, or did the major retailers kind of skip over Thanksgiving this year?  It seems that at Target, Walmart, Starbucks, and so on, the Christmas decorations went up the day before Halloween, and that the Turkey day paraphernalia was relegated to a discount table in the corner, if it was displayed at all.  Interest in the holiday seems lower than any time in my memory - it seems like Thanksgiving should simply be re-named "The Thursday Before Black Friday".

It's a shame, because it's always been a favorite holiday of mine, since I was a kid.  Sure, it's not Christmas, with all the toys toys toys and greed greed greed; or Halloween, with all the candy candy candy and greed greed greed.  But Thanksgiving serves as a nice buffer between those two carnivals of self-indulgence.  Everyone sits together at the table with their families (however they choose to define them) and share in the fundamental act of community, sharing a meal.

New Additions

Eamon Thomas, Born October 25, 2011.