Ubalblog

I have seen a lot in the last 24 hours about the end of the Saturday Morning Cartoon Block. Many of my Gen X friends are wringing their hands at the loss of three to four hours of cartoon goodness.

And I find myself wondering what the fuss is all about.

I am the mother of a six year-old boy. I know exactly how many cartoons are available to my son. There are the 24 hour cartoon channels plus the specialty kids’ channels. There are the educational cartoons via PBS and TVO. On-demand services provide my son with even more choice and our DVD collection is full of current hits and retro goodies.

Add the Internet to that mix, and my child has more animation at his fingertips than I ever had when I sat down to watch cartoons on a Saturday morning as a child. He is living in the promised land.

So why is a certain group comparing the loss of the Saturday Morning blcok to the end of days?

Nostalgia. Plain and simple.

Gen X is its 40s now, and like the Baby Boomers before them, they yearn for the simplicity of their childhood. There is a longing for the days when they and all their friends watched the same things at the same time. They look at the multi-channel universe and bemoan what the “kids today” are missing.

But here’s the thing, they aren’t missing it. My son and his friends all watch the same shows. Oh sure, my son may be watching Word Girl at 5 while his bestest bud saw the same episode at 3, but they still gather to dicuss and roleplay. Want further proof? The Wild Kratts have three (3!) live shows in my town later in the fall. All three have been sold out for months. It’s the hottest ticket in town. Fisher Price has started making toys for Mike the Knight and the Octonaughts. My son has PJs made from Phineas and Ferb fabric.

Do you know what my friends and me would have done for G-Force PJs? Things not legal in Utah.

My fellow Gen-X nerds, stop your whining. Yes, the big four networks have stopped producing a Saturday morning cartoon block. But that’s because the kids can find better, cooler shows through other mediums. And believe me, they are watching them. The big three have failed to keep pace and have moved on to other things.

Now if you excuse me, the boy and I have some Penguins of Madigascar to watch.

A little off topic today, but relevant.

<Drags out soapbox. Steps up.>

If we truly want bullying to stop, we need to stop looking to children to change their behaviour. We need to start looking to adults to change theirs.

Children learn by watching and then emulating what we do. Look around you. How often do you hear put downs? How often do you dismiss someone based on their skin colour, religion, background, gender, orientation,

[  Mood: Shocked ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
A Facebook friend commented on the blaming for the horrific events in Aurora on the Joker. A discussion ensured and these were my thoughts. I wanted to capture them somewhere more permanent than Facebook, so I pasted them here.

[  Mood: Amused ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
You want to know what Alan Moore was thinking about as he was writing The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier?

Sex.

Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex.

Oh yeah, and sex.

This book is supposed to be the hidden history of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Gathered as a series of different clippings, such as articles, postcards, and "boys comics", by the government in a Black Dossier to document the actions of the league. These clippings are stolen by Mina Harper and Alan Quartermaine, and it is their story of escaping with the dossier that weaves the book together.

As they read the dossier, so do we, and a very interesting story it presents. We get the altered history of England, a place where literary characters are real, with various incarnations of the League working to bring down enemies of the Crown. We also see how much the government changed under an Orwellian inspired government after the war, and how our once heroes are now fugitives from Justice.

Did I mention there was lots of sex? Almost every piece of work has sex and nudity woven through it. The comic story of Orlando, the gender switching companion to Prospero and Sinbad who literally had sex with ever character of historical significance they encountered. The further adventures of Fanny Hill who also seems to have sex with everyone she encounters. There is even some totalitarian pornography tucked in with an exert from a pulp novel. Even Mina and Alan are lying around in various positions involving nudity, bathing, post-coital bliss.

I get that many of the memorable female characters in literary history that would be likely to take up with the league are the sexually scandalous ones, but I wonder if Moore was not attracted to them because of sexual promiscuity rather than their tendency to take risks. Would he have chose chaste Elizabeth Bennett for the league, even though she is seen as an early feminist heroine by many readers.

This is the most sexual of Moore’s works that I have read, and I have to wonder if he was going through Andropause at the time of crafting this.

The better parts of the book are the cartoons, as Moore shows his ability to tell story and create character. Some of the articles are interesting, but others seem at times to be a chance for Moore to write like Shakespeare.

It’s a good read, but not to the same level as the earlier volumes.

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[ Currently: Editing a Podcast ]
The RevolutionSF books editor, Peggy Hailey, is attempting to beat all the children in her town in a reading contest. You can send letters of encouragement to the children, known as Team Everyone Else (rungepubliclibrary_a@yahoo.com). You could probably send Peggy encouragement, but, really, who roots for the little guy?

Do it for the kids!

[  Mood: Happy ]
[ Currently: Recording a Podcast – no really. ]
I am not a Green Lantern fan. My knowledge of the character comes from his association with Green Arrow through Justice League and the Hard Travelling Heroes. But someone who I know gushed about this storyline so much, that I thought I would pick it up.

Hal Jordan is back from the dead, and he is trying to fit back into his life and the corps. He is looked upon suspiciously by his fellow Green Lanterns because of what happened before. Surrounding him are the other Earth Green lanterns, John Stewart, Guy Gardner and Kyle Rayner. Sinestro rises back from banishment to challenge the corps, recruiting a group of "Sinestro Corp" members to fight along side him. And the results are not good for the corps.

Geoff Johns has been credited with giving a boot in the butt to this franchise, giving it the life and sense it needed to move forward. For me, this book was fun, but it was a little confusing as I didn’t know most of the characters on sight. Geoff Johns does not give enough of the backstory for someone like me to fully follow the story.

So if you are a real GL fan, this is your book. If you were a fan and are looking to get back in, this is your book. If you are like me, this is not your book.

[  Mood: Evil ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
So Joel Stein put the cat among the pigeons with his New Your Times piece March 29, 2012. To say he caused an uproar in the YA community would be an understatement.

Some have claimed that Stein is a satirist, that he doesn’t mean this seriously. Others have railed against him, thinking his comments are serious. That he is offering a criticism of what is wrong with adult culture.

So what is his purpose then? I would never presume to tell someone what someone else is thinking, but in reading what I see is a troll. I see that Internet demon that destroys message boards and comment threads. You know what I mean, the pot stirrer who gets his or her pleasure out of upsetting others and then watching the fallout.

And Stein hits all the Troll buttons, and none too gently at that:
* SEXIST: He implies that men are less manly if they read Twilight and Hunger Games. These are "girls books" and "men" don’t read those.
* ELITIST: He states that the only adults who should read picture books are those whose lips move when the read. Never mind that Shaun Tan’s The Arrival is the best exploration of the Immigrant Experience I have ever seen, and there is not one word in it.
* IGNORANT: He lumps Harry Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games together. Those who have read all three series know that they share little in common beyond the designation of "Young Adult"
* AGEIST: He refers that his teachers would never have assigned him Donkey Kong, because it has no value. So things were better in his day. They had standards!
* DISMISSIVE: He states that if his parents had read Judy Blume, he would have looked into boarding school. Never mind that reading what your kids are reading is considered good parenting because it helps you relate and helps you understand what they are going through. And you are showing them that you value them as human beings.

So why is he trolling? Who knows? Again, only Joel Stein knows his real motivations. And even then, he might not understand it himself.

What I do see is yet another adult who thinks it is acceptable to dump all over Tween girls. As if by definition, something being popular with a Tween girl automatically means that it is of lesser value. That it is shoddily made, and won’t stand the test of time. (Tell that to Frank Sinatra and the Beatles, BTW.)

There is something inherently sad about an adult who thinks that it is acceptable to devalue Tween girls. An adult who builds themselves up by putting down children. Children who really can’t fight back. Makes Stein look even more pathetic now in my eyes.

I am a teacher, and where I work people who put down others in order to build themselves up or, worse, for pleasure are called bullies. We know that bullies were most likely picked on themselves as children, leading to low self-esteem. So they in turn bully to build up their own self-esteem. Is that what happened to Stein? Was his the money he was going to use to buy a new translation of Tolstoy stolen by the captain of the football team? Again, I don’t know. I am not Joel Stein.

But as a victim of bullies through junior and middle grades, I have also never understood why former victims turn into bullies. Why would they ever want to make someone feel as low as they did? Unless they lack empathy, and that puts them into to category or sociopaths and psychopaths who derive pleasure from hurting people or simply don’t care. Now calling Stein a sociopath or psychopath is probably going a little far. I am not Joel Stein’s psychiatrist.

So what to do about Joel Stein? At the very least he is like that media pundit, hired because they can spout for hours about things they know very little about. At the very worst he is a twisted little misogynist who gets his jollies picking on children. Neither of these should be people we give the time of day to, let alone try to emulate.

Instead, read. Read a lot. Read a variety. There is a lot of good literature out there. Some of it was written for adults. Some of it was written for teens. Some of it was written for children. There is also a lot of crap out there. Some of it even appears on the New York Times opinion pages. Don’t waste too much time on the bad. We have so little time on this planet. Spend it looking for the good. Because as Joel Stein has proven to me, your reading will change you, and sometimes not for the better.