CSotD: Family Fun
Skip to comments
(June 8)
(June 9)
Yesterday, I said to a friend that I keep wanting to just blog about funny cartoons but the politics of the moment are so compelling that I can't avoid them.
Today is that avoidance, in part because what happened yesterday was so obvious that the cartoons about it add little insight.
The other reason is that Baby Blues has delighted me this week because the family is on a trip to Yellowstone.
There's nothing particularly breakthrough going on: It's still the basic kids-and-chaos humor that is the hallmark of the strip (as Rick Kirkman explained to me once upon a time).
But it is sadly innovative in that families in comics traditionally only go out into nature to complain: Camping is uncomfortable, there's no Internet, there are bugs and why would anyone want to leave the friendly confines of suburbia?
People who champion national parks sometimes fret over the low traffic at places like Yellowstone, but it's remoteness is part of what makes it special. The traffic jams of more accessible parks aside, there's something special in the mix of folks you get when they have to make an effort to be someplace.
Even so, when I was there with some buddies in 1970, we snuck off to an illegal campsite to get away from the RVs and their portable TVs.
But today's point is, I went back in 1985 with my boys and got as much fun out of watching them see the place as I got out of being there myself.
No surprise. They'd been raised on zoos and museums and parks.
And snakes.
So here's two reasons we can't have nice things:
The first is the insistence that amusement parks are wonderful fun and that museums and national parks are boring, which is not only a recurring theme in comic strips but was actually a commercial for the Great Escape in the late 80s, in which kids moaned because their parents were going to force them to go to museums when they wanted rides and candy and fun.
The other is that Disney and Universal Studios have done for theme parks what Rite Aid and CVS have done for the corner drugstore, and I say that as someone whose boys could pop down the street to Jerry and Lillian's little pharmacy for an ice cream soda.
There was a time, O Best Beloved, when amusement parks were little places nestled among other regional attractions, and a family vacation might include a visit to Ausable Chasm and Whiteface Mountain as well as to Santa's Workshop and The Land of Make Believe.
And I say that as someone who visited the Land of Make Believe as a kid, and then with a college girlfriend, and then with my own kids, and then, sadly with visionary artist and park-creator Arto Monaco after the place was flooded in 1992 for a final time.
But Arto also designed Santa's Workshop, which is still open on the slopes of Whiteface, with a variation on the slopes of Pike's Peak and he set the standard for small, fun places to be a kid, back when regional attractions were fun.
It's been many years since Niagara Falls was the traditional honeymoon spot for newlyweds, and you can't blame Disney or Universal Studios so much for that, because the same travel improvements that made it possible for a family to pop off to Orlando made it practical for newlyweds to head for Hawaii.
Nor is it entirely Disney or Universal's fault that parents don't visit museums on weekends or drive off to a nearby national monument with their kids to see what's there.
I mean, the Coca-Cola company makes the beverage, but they don't force anyone to put it in a baby bottle and hand it to an infant.
And the fact that TVs are inexpensive doesn't mean you're required to set your kids down in front of one and go into another room so you don't have to keep track of the crap they're watching.
Curiosity only grows if you plant it.
Theodore Roosevelt and naturalist John Burroughs went out to Yellowstone in 1903 for a look around that hardened the president's intentions of keeping some wild places wild.
And before he was president, he used to hand out copies of Burroughs' books to street kids in New York City, in hopes that it would inspire them to get out of there and see something of the natural world.
Well, we all have dreams.
I'm just happy to see Baby Blues provide a little reminder of that.
And as long as I'm ranting
The Buckets raises an age-old question, and Wikipedia traces back a bunch of theories, while this merry band of overthinkers does much the same.
If it indeed began as a riddle, it's from an age in which riddles involved as much mind-reading as solving, since there are any number of fragile things that, once broken, could not be reassembled.
Old-school riddles were more obscure than in modern times, but generally contained enough internal clues to make sense once you knew the answer:
"What can run but never walks, has a mouth but never talks, has a head but never weeps, has a bed but never sleeps?" for instance.
And Laura Ingalls Wilder tells of an entertainment in DeSmet in which her father walked up and down the aisle of the church with two potatoes balanced on an ax and people had to guess.
The first is a river.
Charles Ingalls was pantomiming "Commentators on the Acts."
Humpty Dumpty is considerably more obscure, however, and I'm going to call it tradition, and not simply Lewis Carroll but also W.C. Fields, and I dearly wish I could find his particular segment but here's the trailer for that completely bizarre and wonderful movie:
>
Watch it with your kids, and remember the golden rule of parenting:
Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes:
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.
Comments 2
Comments are closed.