Particularly when they look like this. I was not aware that there are pancake bloggers, but sure, why not? And this guy must surely deserve the Pancake-Blogging Pulitzer, for the thing that he made after a visit to the American Museum of Natural History.
Entertaining item over at Gawker: Katy Perry filmed a takeoff of her song “Hot ‘N Cold” for Sesame Street, with Elmo, and the dress she wore is considered too cleavagey for PBS, so the clip won’t air.
But what’s fun about that post is not the segment (which, if you ask me, is no big deal; the dress comes off like a princess costume, not a slinky awards-show thing). No, it’s the commentariat at Gawker, trying to parse what is the appropriately cool and detached stance on this. Because they found at least three ways to sneer at it:
• Why the hell is wholesome Sesame Street consorting with the most plasticky pop star around? Please.
• Why the hell is she wearing that boobalicious dress on Sesame Street? Oh please.
• Why the hell is this a problem? Get over your prudery. It’s just a dress, and she’s even covered up on top with a little mesh something-or-other. Please.
Not to mention a few jabs at her fashion sense, which (frankly) is where I came down on the whole matter. The dress isn’t dangerous or inappropriate, but it’s almost comically tacky. Oh, and the clever dude who posted “This clip was brought to you by the letters ‘T’ and ‘A.'” An easy joke, but a good one.
Up till now, he’s been babbling: lots of words, phrases, fragments. The only sentence-like things he’s uttered has been phrases he’s picked up wholesale, like song lyrics (“I like you”) and titles. But yesterday, our boy strung together a sentence for the first time. Was it an expression of maternal love, of deep philosophical import, of faith in the future? After a fashion. Because the sentence was:
“I like pizza.”
Well, don’t you?
Our son’s latest developmental stage involves greeting random people. “Hi!” he says, to us, to store clerks, to ladies on the street. Last night on the way home, reports my wife, he waved and shouted “hi!” to two middle-aged ladies on the steps of a nearby church, and completely flattened them with his cuteness. (As well he should, being that he’s the cutest child on earth.)
I should be delighted by this, and I usually am, particularly when I walk in the front door to a big smiley greeting. Yet it does trigger a faint troubling tickle at the very back of my mind. What he’s doing is, when you get down to it, Talking to Strangers, and I’ve seen more than my share of After-School Specials, so I know that talking to strangers is not good. It’s fine now, when he’s 18 months old and stroller-bound. Soon enough, though, he won’t be, and then I guess we have to start addressing that.
Don’t you wish we didn’t have to mess up a perfectly sweet moment with these dark thoughts? As Daria used to note, it’s a sick sad world out there.