Pat And Stanley Part Deux

We’ve pointed out the predilection of our children to pay minute attention to what they watch on a screen. They are paying attention, and in a way we adults don’t really understand anymore. We are looking at most everything we see and ignoring the bulk of it out of hand, relegating it to a kind of background noise. But our little ones are not comparing what they see to a framework they have already assembled; they are busy assembling that framework. And they notice.

Pat and Stanley are brushing their teeth in yesterday’s video. My little boy has camped out at my door for two days now, waiting to importune me to show him the big hippo and the silly dog at every chance. And yesterday, he ran up the stairs after watching, to brush his teeth, because Pat and Stanley do. He got out his bucket of bath toys, and started rifling through them like a mad person. He found his heretofore ignored rubber duck bathtoy, placed it next to the sink, and brushed his teeth over and over.

My wife later noticed that Pat and Stanley have a rubber duck off to one side in the video. We hadn’t noticed. But if it was good enough for his French-speaking friends, it was good enough for our little boy.

We’re afraid to eat spaghetti.

All Pat and Stanley weekend! Enjoy!

Pat And Stanley

Do you know about Pat and Stanley? I discovered them while looking for something else on the internet, and my three year old son is laying siege to my office right now, trying to get his hippo and silly doggie fix:

They’re speaking French, and my French is pretty rusty, but it doesn’t matter much. My toddler doesn’t speak much of anything, and he’s out of his mind for Pat and Stanley. There’s a kind of rude charm about them, an irreverence and foolish earnestness which comes across in most any non-Taliban country.

Here’s the one that got us hooked in the first place, and sent us scurrying for more.

According to Wikipedia, they belong to an Italian candy company, Ferraro SpA, who also make tic-tacs. Pat and Stanley are selling Kinder Happy Hippos, a sort of hippo shaped cookie available in Europe. They could sell steaks at a PETA picnic, if my little son is any indication:

YouTube can be a marvelous thing. It serves as more of a catalogue of human likes and dislikes for me than any other medium now. For all I know, Pat and Stanley are well known by everyone reading this, and I’m last to the party. I’ll risk it, to show it to you.
Advertising sometimes attracts the most talented people to it, and here’s a perfect example if that. I think kindly of anybody that brushes their teeth like Pat and Stanley, and makes my little boy laugh:

Bravo Andre Roche. Bravo Pat and Stanley!

Slow And Steady Wins The Race

[Editor’s Note: Hit the “Play” button and you can listen to this song while you read.]
{Author’s note: There is no editor}

Well, she’s stumbled badly. I’m vaulting over her prostrate form, after trailing her badly for a week. Ann Althouse has posted a picture in her series: Unplayable 45s I Won’t Throw Out, of Wham! singing Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go. She’s suffered an irreversible setback on two fronts:
1. She owns this record. Now, I own lots of bad records. People would give me records all the time, thinking that’s just the sort of thing I’d like. These were generally the sort of people that used to give me handkerchiefs or Hai Karate aftershave for Christmas presents. “I noticed you like John Lee Hooker records, so I bought you this Olivia Newton John Greatest Hits. Same sort of thing, isn’t it?” I always found such gifts touching, but I never got the urge to listen to Physical while wearing after-shave and blowing my nose. Which brings us to:
2. Number two, indeed, because that Wham! record might be the most obnoxious thing ever pressed into plastic; but poor, deluded Ann is telling everyone it’s “one of the best pop singles ever.”
The mind reels.

First of all, we know that the greatest piece of pop ever is either Ringo singing It Don’t Come Easy, or Badfinger singing No Matter What. This has been determined scientifically by me listening to the radio for a while and then writing my opinion down on the internet. Literally tens of people have agreed with me. Case closed.

That Wham! (don’t forget the exclamation point!!!!!!!)record came out in the eighties. There is no delicate way to say this to a woman, but here goes: you’re older than me, Ann, and that means you were an adult when you purchased that thing. How do you bear the shame of it? Seek solace in the Bible or the bottle.

Now, me, I’m going to put up the second best Rod Stewart record ever, Maggie May. The best is of course You Wear It Well, but I can’t find that one. This will do, it’s still 25,000 % better than George Michael. Faint praise, indeed.

Now, Rod Stewart was busy being 99% as bad as George Michael in the eighties, and other than avoiding lingering in public bathrooms recently, it’s a tie as to who’s worse now. But Rod Stewart, or Raw Sewage, as I used to call him, made a few fabulous records thirty odd years ago, and he can always trot them out onstage while women throw their grannie panties at him. George Michael just gets to pose for mugshots.

And me? well, I’d rather hold up a mugshot number than a Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go single.

Thanks Everybody

Thanks to dirtcrasher for sending along this picture of the B-24 in flight.
Thanks to Pajamas Media for putting us on their Daily Scroll.
Thanks to Maggie’s Farm for linking to us.
Thanks to Patrick Martin for sending along his good wishes and linking to his fine story about his trip to the D-Day Museum on Stubborn Facts.
Thanks to Callimachus for his link, story, and more great pictures over at Done With Mirrors.
Thanks to Takhullus over at Sideways Mencken for noticing.
Thanks to the Collings Foundation for flying these things around.
Thank you to everybody else for reading and commenting and making my father happy two days in a row.
B-24 landing gear
Climb right in, and they’ll lower you out of the plane. Nice view. Look out for Zeros.
My dad flew in one of these too. B-25. Says it’ s the only plane he ever threw up in. Said it was like a Ferrari, while his B-24 was like a Model A Ford.

With guns.

Why Am I Writing This?

That is a difficult question. I don’t answer difficult questions unless you ask me while holding a check or a gun. And even if I did tell you, I might lie. More likely though, I’d just be wrong. Being wrong is more common than lying is. Occam’s paper cuts apply here too.

I think I know why you read it, though. Because I am an idler, and you wish to live vicariously through me.

Now, by idler, I don’t mean a guy doing nothing. I’m working more than most people are, and harder than maybe I should. But I’m not in a normal sort of work setting, and the trajectory of my life is not predictable. I go places and see things and do things and so forth that salubrious people have to eschew to make this world go ’round properly.

We used to play sports. Then we began to watch others play sports for us, and sat in the audience. Then we invented media so we could watch people watching. Now we go to chat rooms and talk about persons that watch people watching other people playing sports.

It’s all fine, of course, but the further removed from the engine of your interests you become, the more you long for a glimpse of the world you’re not currently in. People’s lives are richer and more interesting and varied than they ever have been, but the cost of that minutely parsed use of your skills, interest, and time is to risk making you feel a bit disconnected from the world at large.

And so perhaps you seek out others, whose lives are different than yours, and try to inhabit their little world for 600 to 1200 words at a time, and take a vacation from your discontents for a moment. What’s that dope with the two kids and the wife and the cottage and the guitar and the furniture and the camera and the keyboard doing today?

It’s not my fault I notice things, I used to tell people. I’m pleased to notice things for you, and allow you to notice things, namely me, in turn.

I read musty authors a lot. Twain, Mencken, Bierce, Kipling, Gibbons, Smith. I read Robert Louis Stevenson still:

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college or kirk or market, is a sympton of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiousity; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its’ own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will ever stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk; they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill.

We all must furiously moil in the gold-mill. If I help you to idle a moment, as many have helped me, than I am content. To the rest of you… well… you’re not reading this anyway.