What There's Time For

Oh, Downton. (spoiler alert)

I feel a little sheepish blogging about tv, but it appears to be what I want to write about today, so I'll go with it for the few minutes I have.

I'm irritated by the decision to kill off Sybil.  Not, surprisingly enough, because of the way the birth process was handled in the drama.  I actually thought it was a much more normal and extended (at least in terms of time, though much of it was off screen) depiction of birth than you usually see in entertainment.  And I appreciated (as I always appreciate from Downton) the strong support for evidence-based medicine.

But a few things seriously bugged me:

1.  The baby is clearly being treated as a useful plot point, not as a reality.  Which is a shame from my perspective, given how well Downton has explored so many other realities of the time period.  Except for seeing the baby some time after the birth, you only hear a small coo from off stage right after Sybil dies.  You could imagine that servants must be tending to the baby, but we always see the servants dealing with things that need to be dealt with, normally.  In this case, all we see is every last one of them gathered in the kitchen to hear the terrible news, no baby in sight.  Maybe baby was sleeping?  (Now that I think about it, the Ethel storyline also contained a hardly-real baby, but it was a realer baby than this one and belonging to a more minor character.  I know there's issues with babies and time on set from a legal perspective, but lots of the point could have been gotten across without a real baby.)

2.  Similar to (1), why no exploration of the wetnurse-finding process?  Who is this person?  Where did they find her?  How will she fit in with the servants, not to mention the family?  We can't get a new kitchen maid on this show without a scene or several and some drama.  How do we get a frigging wetnurse with nothing more than a "By the way, you'll be relieved to know they've found a nurse for the baby," from Lord Grantham?  Wetnursing would be a very interesting historical and class issue to explore, darn it.  (Now, I'm not a sociologist.  It's possible this baby will be fed some kind of between-the-wars formula.  Maybe the nurse is just a nurse, I don't know.  Seems likely to me, though, traditional family like that...  Whatever.  Maybe we'll find out.)

3.  In the end think the show will lose entertainment value.  I was intrigued after the second season to see what would become of Lady Sybil and the Irish revolutionary chouffeur.  Were they truly madly in love?  How much of their attraction came out of her desire to kick off the golden handcuffs of her privileged birth and live a "normal" life?  His thrill at breaking through the class barriers?  Her desire to rebel against her parents?  I was thinking we'd start to see some interesting developments in the new couple's relationship this season based on those potential conflicts.  And the baby.  I was looking forward to seeing Sybill deal with being middle class and having a baby (of course, the living middle class idea evaporated earlier this season, anyway).  Instead, Sybil and Tom been presented fairly blandly as just super sweetly in love... and now she's dead, so — punkt — the end of that potential plot avenue.  Meanwhile, her death gives Tom (her husband) little reason to stay much in the picture (yes, the baby, I know, and maybe they'll make it work out that way, but...), depriving us of the interesting juxtaposition of the estate-bound British family and their uncomfortable low-born Irish in-law.

Hmph.  Out of time, so I guess I'll stop there.

Just Pretend

The short trip to visit Mr. Pants's cousin this morning was taken up with a lengthy discussion of a recent episode of 'Word Girl', a show he'd never seen before, but which was on PBS, so I figured...

I might of kind of figured wrong. I mean, there was nothing overtly awful about it, though there's plenty of little things that irritated me. Things like the *villain* being named "Miss Question" (arg! I love questions!! the *heroine* should be called "Miss Question"!) - her dastardly power is that she confuses people to the point that they do whatever she wants - and that Word Girl's mother, a successful prosecutor, suffers one galling courtroom loss and gives up her career in a fit of self-flagellation, then - as if that weren't bad enough - she goes nuts at home and her family sulks around wishing she would just go back to work already.

Irritating, see? But WHATEVER, those are totally not the things Mr. Pants chose to care about. No, he was stuck like glue on the concept of super heroes and good guys and bad guys and... "What's jail?"

Since we'd already been through that several times in the past week (since the Word Girl viewing), today's line of questioning went further. He started off with, "Mommy? Are you going to go to jail?"

I rushed to assure him that I would not be going to jail, which inevitably opened the question of what exactly would someone have to do in order to be sent to jail.

"Really bad things," was an insufficiently detailed answer (he countered with several incidents wherein, it turned out, he felt I had indeed done "really bad things"). He prodded me into offering examples of stealing "really expensive things like cars" and hurting people really badly, "like trying to kill them".

"How do you kill people?" asked my little interrogator, his tone showing nothing more than a detached, intellectual curiosity.

I declined to answer, but then somehow got prodded into mentioning "guns" as a common way to kill people.

I believe the rest of the conversation covered (again) the basics of superheroes (a friend of his in Vienna was quite into Spiderman, who Mr. P found frightening) and the requirement that we kill animals (and "clean" them - his word; he was wondering how that's done) before eating them, which he then decided he did not want us to do.

So, then we're at cousin's house and they're playing and suddenly I see that Mr. P has found and donned a Spiderman glove and they ask to go play outside and my son goes running for the door, grinning and shouting, "Kill! Kill! Kill!" with glee.

It was unsettling, but my outward disapproval was muted since children work things out through play blah blah blah play violence helps them explore and integrate blah blah blah... You know, all that psychological mumbo jumbo that parents like me feel they're supposed to be at least passingly familiar with.

Besides, Mr. Pants assured me, "It's ok. It's just pretend killing."

Here We Go Random

Spent the weekend Easter egg hunting and drinking in the sunshine at the zoo.

Mr. Pants continues with his existential angst, moaning several times a day, "I don't want to die."  It's unsettling, even for someone with a strong morbid bent.  We tell him dispassionately, That's OK, no one wants to die, and You don't need to worry about that right now because you aren't going to die for a very very long time, and then we move on.  I'd say he's too young to be so preoccupied by death, but I was similarly at that age (and often afterwards), so.

Also unsettling is his new habit of smearing poop all over the place after using the potty.  Let's have a WOAH, TALK ABOUT OPPOSITE END OF THE SPECTRUM!! shall we?  Two years old and younger, that's who's allowed to have this problem.  With a four year old, it's just WRONG and we're having trouble figuring out how to deal with it.  Big dramatic shows of parental shock and displeasure had no effect, so now we've revoked the "privilege" of pooping alone.

I'm thinking about adding some links I like to the blog sidebar.  Do you ever check out sidebar links on blogs?

Finally hacked out another insidious problem in Cross It Off!  Update coming in a week or so, I think.  If you've run into weird problems after the app's been open for a while, I'm crossing my fingers that this is the last and final fix that will slay that dragon once and for all.  They say free programming advice is worth every penny and... I relied on some free programming advice while implement caching of the header views.  Having gotten my hands dirty since then, here's my bit of priceless programming advice:  Never implement a cache without putting a hard limit on its size.  No matter how sure you are that you know how these objects are being used and there will never be too many of them.  Don't do it.

Do you ever wonder how people come up with new TV series ideas for kids?  Mr. Pants's new favorite is pretty obvious:  What do kids love?  TRAINS!  What else do kids love?  DINOSAURS!  Except that those two things go together about as well as herbed cream cheese and Nutella (Mr. Pants keeps requesting - and not receiving - this combo) so you'd think no studio executive would have ever signed off on the idea.  But Dinosaur Train made it through at PBS and... it's remarkably good!  Sweet, clever, educational...  And probably the proximate cause of the aforementioned existential angst (the dino kids discover a much earlier fossilized dinosaur named "Fred").  Also possibly to blame for the poop problems...

(skip to the last minute or so if you just want the song.  Yes, SONG.)

   

Hearing Voices

I may be watching too much Planet Earth.

 After several days of David Attenborough dispassionately narrating dramatic things like, "The humpback calf is now drinking 500 litres of milk a day, but his mother must starve in these tropical waters..." and "Global warming could be a death sentence for the Polar Bear, who depends on the thick sea ice as a hunting platform..." and 

"It will be over a year before the cub is strong enough to hunt for himself..." and "Eventually, the mother humpback must leave for the treacherous polar waters while she still has enough strength to guide and protect her calf..." and "The panda cub develops painfully slowly; the milk produced on a diet of solely bamboo is extremely poor..."  I now find myself going through my day with David Attenborogh's voice popping into my head.  He says things like this:

"See how the mother human struggles to carry both her utterly helpless infant and sufficient food to last only a few days.  If her older offspring runs for the street, she will have to act quickly..."

and

"Since the emergence of the species, human young were hardly ever raised in isolation.  Now, the mother human, bound by physical realities tens of thousands of years in the making, must draw on the species' notorious creativity..."

and

"Driven by hormonal shifts so complex that science has yet to explain their many and varied effects..."

and 

"Modern life provides unprecedented safety for the human offspring, yet the psychological effects on the parents have rarely been closely examined.  Here, in never-before-captured footage, we see..."

and

"The human juvenile can afford to be a picky eater - his parents will expend large amounts of time and effort feeding him and they have a stunning variety of foods to choose from.  It will be several years before the rapid adolescent growth period, when nearly anything edible will be consumed without question, and a full twenty years or more before his parents will likely expect him to procure his own sustenance without help..."