Push Pops and Ring Pops

Tracking lollipop trends can be an arduous undertaking best left to professionals. With all the ups and downs in the hard candy market, it's tough to say which models will stick. Figuratively, that is. Literally, everything will end up pretty sticky.

Novelty candies were all the rage in the 80s and 90s. Everything had a gimmick. It was no longer enough for a candy simply to be delicious; now it needed to have entertainment value as well. Competition in the confectionery consumer marketplace was fierce, meaning candy companies were under pressure to produce new and innovatively packaged materials that would appeal to children on multiple levels.

To do so, candy makers had to think outside the box. That is to say, they needed to alter the packaging to make it externally palatable (though with the hope that children would not attempt to consume that as well). Suddenly, sweets weren't just sugary junk food, they were toys: bona fide sources of classroom distraction and playground entertainment.

Of the new* multifaceted lollipops available, ring pops had a pretty widespread appeal. And the convenience! You didn't even have to hold anything, as the candy itself was cemented to the base of a plastic ring. And of course, here's nothing quite like teaching a girl to grow to expect the equivalent of a 20 carat rock on her finger from a young age.


Ring pops were novelty as its finest. You got to wear your food. Short of candy necklaces, this was pretty much the most exciting jewelry-themed treat on the market. The commercial below, however, is the tiniest bit disturbing when that little boy proposes to the girl by means of a ring pop in a velvet box. I'm sure they were going for cute, but it comes off a tad creepy. I mean, these kids are about seven years old. Why are we pushing candy marriage proposals?

That jingle is pretty catchy though:

"It's a lollipop, without a stick!
A ring of flavor you can lick!"

At the end when they display the hands bedecked in ring pops galore, it looks like a dream come true. It looks nearly as satisfying as decorating myself with all of the jewelry that came with my Pretty Pretty Princess board game, only it wins additional points for edibility:




You also have to love the way they redid this commercial for the late 90s. It's almost the exact same thing, only the teeniest bit jazzier. Maybe there had been some recent develop in synthesizer technology by the time this baby aired. That's the only plausible explanation for not rereleasing the original:

Ring Pop Ad (1999)
Uploaded by a90sfan. - Full seasons and entire episodes online.

Ring pops were admittedly on the girly side, so luckily the same company came out with a more gender neutral lollipop release. The Push Pop was supposed to be practical with its "save it for later" plastic cap, but looking back that whole concept makes me want to Purel the hell out of every corner my mouth. Sure, you had the ability to eat a candy over an extended period of time, but the sanitary/hygienic component was questionable. On the other hand, it sure beat my friend's pastime of preserving a jaw breaker over several days by leaving its spit-covered carcass in an open bowl on his desk. At least with push pops, the covers could keep out a higher percentage of the dust bunnies.

The underlying concept behind the push pop was that you could actually push up the candy from within the plastic tubular packaging, allowing you as the eater to control how much pop you'd like to expose. Theoretically you could cap the pop, call it a day, and come back to it later that week. It seemed, though, that this candy was made from the stickiest substance known to man. Not only that, but it seemed to form some sort of chemical glue-like bonding reaction when coupled with spit, its major means of disintegration.



Both Push Pops and Ring Pops came in all sorts of lab-created flavors that had relatively little in common with flavors found in nature. The cherry flavor had the added bonus of applying an unintentional bright coating of red color on your lips sans lipstick, but had the unfortunate downside of tasting like cough syrup. Another wildly popular flavor was blue raspberry, which for some reason has caught on in a big way as an artificial flavor. I'm not sure how to break it gently to these flavor scientists, but raspberries aren't blue. Ever.**

Later incarnations came in flavors that definitely appealed to us as children but sound a little repulsive in our current state of well-advised judgment: bubble gum, cotton candy, green apple***, and the intentionally vague "citrus". Each of these flavors was ostensibly a huge commitment, as the amount of time and effort to consume the sheer quantity of hard candy available via ring or push pop was immense.

Truthfully though, this was the way we and our parents liked it. The candy had a two-pronged approach to keeping us occupied: the effort involved in actually consuming the slowly diminishing hard candy and the added value of its novelty features entertaining us. I must admit now it all seems a little overrated, but what do I know? I was more of a Chupa Chup girl.



*Okay, so they were introduced in 1977, but they were a novelty to children throughout the 80s and 90s **At least as far as I know and am too lazy to research otherwise ***Yes, I admit lots of people like green apple. But I challenge you to have a semi-traumatic experience with Smirnoff Green Apple vodka and not feel at least mildly repulsed by the flavor

Shining Time Station

Yes, I'm aware Shining Time Station was a spin-off of Thomas and Friends and that this introductory picture is thus misleading. Thanks for pointing that out.

Quiet telethon-hosting public television giant PBS has a lot more balls than for which we generally give them credit. Okay, so maybe their sunny broadcasts of Antiques Roadshow and breathless pseudo-historical reality show trashiness of Manor House aren't winning them any edginess points, but they did have the gall to cast comedian George "Seven Dirty Words" Carlin as Mr. Conductor on Shining Time Station. You have to admit, that took some pretty serious cajones from someone down at PBS HQ.



Of course, they had to ease into a big step like this. No, no, we needed to start a little smaller. Alright, alright, so the character is already minuscule by definition, as Mr. Conductor was a tiny man who lived in Shining Time Station's signal house. Are you with me on this? Good. Great. Grand. Wonderful. Anyway, the original Mr. Conductor was played by none other than former Beatle Ringo Starr, who can be seen in the clip below drumming with some wooden spoons. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.



Though past my prime Shining Time days, it does please me that in the 2000 big screen version entitled Thomas and the Magic Railroad, our friend Mr. Conductor was played by none other than my favorite 30 Rocker/angry voicemail designator Alec Baldwin. Really, what a feat of casting on all three counts. Thomas and friends were pulling in some pretty big names.



A decade before Alec Baldwin was running out of Mr. Conductor's magic gold dust, the old-fashioned style kids show was warming hearts and instilling a deep-seated love of train travel within children of the 80s and 90s. The original Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends premiered in Britain in 1984. Impressed by the show's success, producers in the US decide to create an American version five years later.

As a child, I watched the movie Grease on repeat for approximately two years straight (right after I'd emerged from my unfortunate but long-sustained Sound of Music stage)and was delighted to find my Pink Lady pal Frenchie starring in this show about trains. Frenchie (okay, fine, her real name is Didi Conn) starred as Stacy Jones, the perky manager of Shining Time Station. Shining Time Station seems like a pretty run-of-the-mill train station until we meet Mr. Conductor, the tiny magical man who lives in the signal house in the mural painted on the wall and reveals himself to share stories about Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends. You know. The usual.

The station's old and rusty when Stacy goes back to reopen it, but it certainly has its high points. For example, a jukebox featuring a full internal puppet ensemble band. Not bad for an abandoned train station. There's also an arcade, run by a man by the name of Schemer. Schemer's favorite for coining the phrase "Genius time!" as he marveled over all of his less-than-genius ideas to make more money and preserve his valued arcade.



Beginning of the first US episode, in case you need a refresher course from 1989. I can't imagine why.

They had a few more tricks up their sleeve with this cast of characters. Season one featured an engineer named Harry, whose grandchildren (along with Stacy's nephews) make up the child population of Shining Time Station. Season two veered a little more toward good old 90s multiculturalism, featuring a new engineer named Billy Twofeathers. You know, if we're going to have Native American characters we can't be subtle when it comes to names. No matter he's played by a guy named Tom Jackson--this guy's getting a legitimately multicultural moniker.

The show also had the convenient trick of making the stability of major characters flexible. Whenever a cast member dropped out, they simply replaced him with a long-lost cousin or are transferred to a new station. While this type of Dukes of Hazzard/Brady Bunch Cousin Oliver-level tomfoolery may have jumped the shark in other shows, it was pretty well-suited to children's entertainment. After all, children are pretty fickle by nature. So long as they consistently fed us old-timey train-themed entertainment, we were pretty content to eat it up without question.

The show's concept was sweet and uncharacteristically set in a more traditional premise. It taught values in not-so-subtle ways, but at least surrounded the arrow of its moral compass by a sturdy backing of comedic wit. It introduced a whole new generation of kids to the joy of trains and managed to supplement that love with a slew of corresponding overpriced merchandise to boot. How can you blame them for milking this concept, though? This show had it all: trains, puppets, animated segments. Oh, and George Carlin. You can't forget George Carlin.*

RIP, Mr. Conductor

*Unless you were more of a Ringo fan, in which case I scoff at your choice. Scoff!

Weinerville

Sure, to children of the 70s and 80s, the Talking Heads may be a new wave rock band responsible for Burning Down the House, but to children of the 90s the phrase conjures up a far puppetier image. Namely that of Marc Weiner's Weinerville, a 90s Nickelodeon show featuring the children's entertainment stylings of Herr puppetmeister himself, Marc Weiner. Weinerville's trademark human head/tiny puppet body combo was both moderately frightening to small children and infinitely entertaining to those old enough to get a kick out of it. I still have an unrealized ambition to be Weinerized (e.g. for my full-size head to appear on a tiny puppet body), but I may just have to write that one off. Damn.

Marc Weiner was nothing if not imaginative. Weinerville and its innumerable puppet citizens were the sum of the no doubt many fragments of creativity floating around in Marc Weiner's head. The whole thing has a feel of every time you ever said, "You know, I have this crazy idea...", only in this case it translated into following through with that zany impulse rather than burying it deep into your repressive creative subconscious.

I don't know what it takes to become a pupeteer, but I do certainly find it admirable as a career goal. To think, while the rest of us are morphing more and more daily into The Man with our corporate suits and attache cases, there are actual adults who earn a sizable living off of controlling the marionetted limbs of fanciful puppets. Indeed, it's a pretty enviable career path. I'm not talking about those struggling pupeteers a la John Cusack in Being John Malkovich. I'm talking being paid to create a full-scale imaginary universe of puppets for which you get to add the suffix "ville" to your own last name. Just imagine, you, a ville. We can only dream.



Like many Nickelodeon shows of its time, Weinerville featured a live-action audience participation element, leaving those of us at home immeasurably covetous of the lucky so-and-sos who got to interact with the puppets themselves. Despite the incessant begging, my parents never caved to let me be a veritable member of the live studio audience at Nickelodeon Studios in Universal Studios, Florida. I even learned to recite that phrase via constant exposure to the informative ending of every live-action Nickelodeon show, but to no avail. I was going to have to settle for being part of a live at-home television audience, and that was that.

Weinerville was home to many, many puppet pals, most of whom were played by Marc Weiner himself. Played by his head, that is. In the above intro, you can see Marc as Baby Jeffery, an infant famous for creating outrageous messes. Two of the other more familiar characters were Dottie and Zip, the trusty mayor of Weinerville and her injury-prone assistant Zip. Marc played Dottie, donning makeup, a curly blonde wig, and falsetto with conviction. Zip was pure puppet through and through, allowing him to be more easily placed in dangerous and potentially painful situations. Observe, a montage of Zip and Dottie introducing the show:



Another favorite puppet was Boney, a dinosaur skeleton and a sort of anti-Barney. He's pretty much awesome because he hates everything and everyone, as evidenced in his trademark song, "I'm Boney, I'm Boney, leave me alone-y!" I don't know what it says about me as a child that I found this Boney fellow so hilarious, but I'm guessing it's in some way correlated to my angsty 90s cynicism.



The show also featured a slew of animated shorts, generally unrelated to the puppet action onstage. The cartoons featured the likes of such animated personalities as Batfink, Mighty Mouse, and Mr. Magoo. Cartoon stars from decades past were once again entertaining children, albeit only in short inter-sketch segments. Regardless of value, the cartoon shorts kept the show moving and maintained its quick pace during scene changes.

The interactive element of the show allowed for Weinerizing, the puppetization of real live audience members. Weinerized children often got to participate in all sorts of fun on-camera shenanigans, vying for gold and silver hot dog statuettes. In some cases, they were even lucky enough to experience the tour de fource of Nickelodeon audience participatory experiences: the sliming:



Admittedly, the show wasn't for everyone. To say the acting and execution was over-the-top would be a pretty forgiving understatement. Regardless, the show certainly had its charms in a whimsical-puppet-world type of way. As Daria's trusty sidekick Jane once said, everything is funnier with puppets*. I suppose I'll let you be the judge:




*The many, many Daria references recently peppering these posts are largely contingent on my finishing all 5 seasons while going stir-crazy in my current state of apartment-bound ankle breakage. Consider it a gift.

I SPY Books

It's a parents dream: for the low low price of $9.95, you can guarantee your attention span-less child will stay put in a single spot for an uncharacteristically extended period of time. Heck, parents would probably pay upwards of $100 for results like these, so those Scholastic people are really cutting them a deal on this one. Writer Jean Marzollo and photographer Walter Wick are probably laughing all the way to their interestingly cluttered homes full of cleverly arranged tough-to-spot ornamental and thematic objects.

Following in the well-hidden footsteps of Where's Waldo, Scholastic's series of I SPY books offered a handily portable search game certain to provide children with endless hours of contemplation and entertainment. Each page was its own magical little world of plentiful well-placed objects, usually within some sort of thematic framework. The pages themselves were visually impressive enough to enthrall children of any age, while the clever written riddlers were at times enough to stump any parents reading along.



These books were full of imagination and wonder, which generally translated into them being simultaneously mesmerizing and frustrating. Sure, the pictures were hypnotizing in their high level of visual interest, but they also gave our poor little eyes stare-at-an-eclipse level strain. It's a wonder we weren't all marveling over these books stooped over with Quasimodo-esque posture donning granny glasses dangling from a chain. If anything had the power to age us prematurely, it was these damn visual puzzlers.

We all started off pretty cocky. They'd throw a few easy search assignments at you to build your confidence in typical 90s rah-rah self-esteem style. Some of the clues were completely straightforward, as least in theory. In practice, we were required to actually locate these objects amidst a sea of unimportant junk. Just when we thought we'd finally conquered these perplexing puzzles, we'd get to one that had some sort of riddle. Oh, great, so now we have to think, too? What is this, The Eleventh Hour? And no secret solution in the back? For shame.

The pictures themselves were an impressive feat alone. Where exactly were they getting all of this stuff? I've been to plenty of garage sales and swap meets, but I've never managed to accumulate this volume of junk. How could they possibly track down so many button, marbles, manacala beads, and checkers to artfully arrange in a chaotically ordered manner?

And what sort of mixed messages were these sending children? Our parents say "Clean your room," and then offer us a book full of vast quantities of object in complete disarray? I tried writing a poem to go with my messy room, but my parents weren't taken in by my I SPY-like effort. If only they'd solved that riddle, I'd perhaps have had the confidence to pursue my then-chosen career as a search picture book stanza composer. Plus, they could have found my stuffed manatee.

Despite these personal setbacks, I can still admire these books' intricacies. While most parents tired of reading the same books to their children over and over, the I SPY series provided both parents and their offspring with hundreds of new items to discover with each read. You even have the opportunity at some healthy competition in your race to locate all the listed objects. Just be prepared for the inevitable resultant tears when your overly competitive father shouts, "In your face!" repeatedly to celebrate his obviously unfair victory. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Parents also had the advantage of softening the blow of defeat on their younger, more fragile children (read: the illiterate. Well, they can't. But you get the point.) Many of them quickly realized that especially in a family where multiple ages of children played with this book, you could, ahem, adapt it for younger non-reading kids. In other words: lie. Lie, lie, lie. "Oh, what does all that writing say? It says, look for the big happy clown in the middle of the page! What's that? Found it already! What a smart little boy!"

Try as I might, I was never able to recreate this scene with my own Tinker Toys. Perhaps it's because I didn't have a proper protractor and rainbow xylophone on hand.

In Scholastic's infinite wisdom (evidenced by their glorious, glorious book orders), they fashioned these books to be lightweight and highly portable. Translation: bring it in the car and maybe your children will shut the hell up on a long road trip. Without this type of legitimate distraction, who knows what dire lengths you'd have to go to to satiate your restless and irritable children. In my family, we were reduced to stopping off at a cemetery so us kids could run around. Unfortunately for my parents, from then on whenever my sister and I spotted a cemetery from the car, we would eagerly implore, "Play, play!" Honestly, we wouldv'e been much better off with an I SPY book. After all, it's far more difficult to disrespect the dead with one of those babies.

So for those of you with children who prefer not to engage in any type of sacrilege sure to anger someone upstairs, I'd highly recommend investing in one of these. And for those of you without children, my advice stands. Alright, so you may get some questionable looks when you whip out I SPY: Spooky Night on your subway trip home from your hours of enslavement to the man, but just imagine how excited you'll be when you finally locate that cross-eyed jack-o-latern.

Suggested public transit reading to ward off unwanted conversation. I'm warning you though, finding that jack-o-latern is a real bitch.

Billy Madison

As much as I want to believe my sense of humor mature along with my progression in chronological age, I always always find myself laughing with equal fervor when confronted with a movie that so entertained in my youth. While I wish I could say that I can no longer recite by heart those movies that cracked me up in my childhood, that is simply not the case. If anything, the quotations get further ingrained into my brain with each passing year. I think it's some sort of late-developing side effect from the original branding process.

Such is the case with Billy Madison, which I happened to catch a 30-minute chunk of on TV this weekend while waiting for some friends to arrive. When I selected the film from the innumerable channel offerings on my boyfriend's digital cable listing, I assumed I'd have outgrown the movie's juvenile humor that so delighted my fifth-grade self. Unfortunately for my ego's sense of wisdom and sophistication, I was dead wrong. Within minutes, I was laughing out loud and had completely abandoned any previous pretension about maturity and humor. How could I uphold such a standard when confronted with an image of Miss Lippy eating paste? How, I ask you?

Oh, and speaking of Miss Lippy, her car is green. Did you know? You can buy this nostalgia-rich tee shirt at Look at Me Shirts

It would take a man of steel with a heart of lead to avoid snorting with laughter at a scene like that. Or at least a far less childish sense of humor. I haven't decided which one. For the sake of what's left of my so-called adult pride, I'm going to go with the first one.

Sure, it's a stupid movie. That's probably why it appealed to so many of us as children. As an alleged grown-up, I'm often shocked at the tepid or even straight-up poor critical reception that greeted some of my favorite childhood films. Than again, critics have a habit of being self-important snobs, so it makes all the more sense that whatever they pan would be greedily consumed by unquestioning children. Right? I'm glad you're coming with me on that one.

For those of us who grew up during Sandler's Saturday Night Live days, we had come to expect a certain level of child-friendly humor from him. That's not to say it was appropriate, but more that he was, let's say, in touch with his inner child and it frequently manifested itself in his outwardly childish portrayals of his characters. It was this quality that made him so well-matched to the role of the eponymous overgrown spoiled-rotten under-educated child in Billy Madison.

Billy Madison is certainly not for everyone, I'll give you that. The plot is not only far-fetched but teeters on the edge of completely ridiculous. It's not really meant to make any sort of sense, though; it's meant to be fun. You certainly can't deny that everyone involved in this film seems to be having a grand old time. If you still have yet to comprehend the juvenile nature of the film, here's the theatrical trailer to help you out. Hint: it begins with a loud farting noise. Classy, no?



Like I said, it's not for everyone, but it certainly still makes me laugh. It was the perfect film for children and teens largely on the basis of its incredible quotability. Nearly everything out of everyone's mouth is so ridiculous most of us were certain it bore repeating. Our parents may not have cracked a smile after the first or second time, but you could bet our buddies on the playground would still be rolling in the sandbox after our forty-second go.

At the beginning of the movie, we meet Billy Madison, the errant son of a wealthy hotel chain owner. He spends his reckless yet undeniably enjoyable days wreaking havoc with his deadbeat friends all over the sprawling Madison estate. We get a good sense of his intellectual capacity in this little bath time exchange, during which he contemplates the relative merits of shampoo versus conditioner. No doubt a highly taxing debate:

I can't even begin to count how many times I heard my classmates say, "Stop looking at me, SWAN!" I'm willing to bet it registers in the quadruple digits, far outstripping the counting abilities of Mr. Madison himself. Either way, I still think the answer to this age-old debate is conditioner.

Billy's father has decided he can tolerate no more after Billy's ridiculously inappropriate outburst of gibberish at a critical business dinner. It's no wonder he opts not to make Billy the future proprietor of his business after these certifiable antics:



Needless to say, Billy is pissed. His dad's choice is Eric, a conniving, weaselish little man who is admittedly less than virtuous. Billy swears he handle the responsibility, but his dear old dad lets it slip that he bribed Billy's teachers into passing him, thus making his whole education a sham. After some questionable compromising, they agree that if Billy can pass every grade from kindergarten to 12th in two weeks apiece, he can earn his birthright.

Billy was unsurprisingly at ease in kindergarten with the aforementioned Miss Lippy, finally feeling at home with his intellectual equals. Unfortunately for them, he's a tad profane for their milk-cookies-and-naptime lifestyles.



Billy scoots through his first few grades, naturally throwing a huge unwarranted party after each grade advancement. It's in second grade that we meet our heroine, the lovely Miss Veronica Vaughn played by Brigitte Wilson. She also totally played bimbo Ginger in Saved by the Bell. Neat, right?:



At least Billy finally makes a friend, nerdy third grader Ernie. On a field trip to some sort of colonial farm, Ernie pees his pants. In Billy's first real moment of good-heartedness, he pretends he too peed his pants, passing it off as cool. It's all pretty sweet until the elderly colonial field trip guide says, "If peeing your pants is cool, consider me Miles Davis!" Yech. Oh, this scene also features an overblown Chris Farley with a sweet comb-over. Can you beat that?

Billy's progressing nicely, much to the chagrin of the villainous Eric. Unfortunately, he's not quite as popular in high school as he was in elementary school. While his lame jokes easily earned him the respect of third graders, they failed to have the same effect on his teenage peers. His crack during biology, "Chlorophyll? More like borophyll!" didn't do much to bolster his status. He even fails to escape the long line of O'Doyle family bullies, who seem to have enough kids to opress Billy every step of the way. Observe, a montage:



Eric conveniently knows some blackmail-worthy dirt on the elementary school principal and forces him to publicly state that Billy bribed him into passing him. Unnerved and outraged by this serious setback, Billy eventually gives in and reverts to his former slacker self. Despite numerous pleas from those who have seen him better himself through his educational exploits, Billy remains unmoved. Veronica eventually throws his drunk ass in the pool and tries to literally knock some sense into him via physical violence. This seems to jar Billy back to his motivation, and they all do a lovely little musical number. Sandler gets to showcase his Operaman chops and Wilson (Veronica) gets to dress like the St. Pauli Girl. Hey, everyone wins!



Billy keeps studying and agrees to face off with Eric in an academic decathlon. In a moment of pure ridiculousness, Billy offers an answer to a question about the Industrial Revolution by citing his kindergarten story of the puppy who lost his way. This tongue-in-cheek allusion to a convenient full circle feel-good ending is met with a big fat zero points, and a pretty serious verbal chastisement from the distressed host.

Billy Madison - Industrial Revolution Puppy


Eric is just about to clinch the whole thing when he flips out and brandishes a gun at the crowd. Fortunately for Billy, an unexpected guest arrives also wiedling a gun: his ex-classmate (played by Steve Buscemi) whom Billy had called earlier in the film to apologize to for his teasing. Everyone loves a movie with Steve Buscemi, right? It means you get to like a whole lot of movies. Stevie shoots a non-fatal shot at Eric, and we can all rejoice. Hooray!

At his graduation, Billy decides not to take over the company after all but to hand over the reins to his father's more subdued and ethical colleague Carl. Billy announces that inspired by his experience, he will now be heading to college to become a teacher. All together now: awww.

Okay, okay, I'll concede it's not the most brilliant comedic masterpiece to ever pass through theaters. Sure, it's not earth-shattering in any way. It didn't create peace in the middle east or bring high-speed internet connections to the shantytowns of undeveloped countries. But hey, you have to admit, you'd rather watch this than Click or Bedtime Stories any day. Am I right?

Tamagotchi

There's nothing quite like letting sadistic young children play God. When virtual pets burst onto the scene in the mid-nineties, toy manufacturers put the fragile lives of these pixelated playmates into the sometimes malevolent hands of careless children. Sure, most of these kids meant to feed and care for these miniature en-egged virtual beings, but things just sort of came up. You know.

Also, it probably doesn't send the most serious life-or-death message about caring for a pet to attach it to a handy keychain. I don't see any household kittens or puppies conveniently hanging from the zipper of a kids' backpack. Then again, real pets don't have a reset button, so perhaps it's not the most fair comparison.

Admittedly virtual pets didn't necessarily lend themselves to teaching responsibility. There was really no consequence for allowing your virtual pet to die, unless you somehow managed to develop a deep emotional bond to this poorly animated blob-with-eyes that lived in your plastic egg keychain. I'm willing to give these alleged highly sympathetic youngsters the benefit of the doubt, but they certainly weren't my Tamagotchi-toting peers.



Tamagotchis were sort of like a highly primitve version of the Sims: as a virtual pet owner, you were expected to feed it, allow it to go to the bathroom, entertain it, making sure it slept, and monitor its general happiness and well-being. In the early models, the "fun" factor was pretty straightforward. The very act of feeding and cleaning up after a blinking pixelated image was supposed to be sufficient entertainment. This was no-frills fun at its bare-bones finest.

A late-90s "Angel" model. For some reason, they thought it wise to make this commercial simultaneously completely terrifying and likely to offend multiple religious sects. Kudos, Tamagatchi. Kudos.

Miraculously, the concept clicked. Children adored these things. They couldn't get enough. They wanted their house key-rings and backpacks to clack with the delightful click-click-click of multiple coexisting virtual pets. Immediately following their release in 1996, the product sold over 40 million units worldwide. Let me repeat that. 40 million. Pretty incredible.

For parents, the decision to purchase a virtual pet over a real living, pooping, money-bleeding animal was a pretty obvious one. Either your child could beg and plead and throw themselves screaming onto the floor swearing that they'll take care of that new puppy, or you can satiate them with a cheap little piece of plastic that does double duty on surreptitiously teaching them the virtue of responsibility. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. If you'd let them take care of that real parakeet, they'd only get to kill one.

Once these babies hatched, their fate was literally in your hands. Though early models were primitive, they were capable to developing personalities. Feed it and care for it and it becomes lovable, content, and well-behaved. Treat it poorly and you get a vicious, angry, monstrous little guy who's just begging you to press that reset button and restart his sad little life. The choice is yours.

There was always that one kid (most likely the same one who kicked bunnies and stomped on cute little field mice) who derived some sick pleasure from making his Tamagatchi's life a virtual hell. Intentionally neglectful, he or she would get a real kick out of watching their precious virtual pet shrivel and die, refusing to respond to its most basic needs. Unfortunately for us concerned virtual pet defenders, the ASPCA had yet to classify Tamagatchi abuse as something worthy of sponsorship. Keep fighting the good fight, friends. We'll get there.

In general, the issue with designating even this virtual responsibility to children was that these things were constantly needy. Never mind the fact that as over-programemd children we had to go to school and soccer practice and piano lessons. Our Tamagotchis required incessant care. Leave the sound on and your mini egg would beep frequently, your little Tami begging for attention and food. Even disabling the sound wasn't enough to quiet the little guy's neediness: the lights would flash again and again until you finally gave in and attended to your virtual charge.


In no time at all, schools took notice of the distracting toys and many instituted classroom bans to prevent children from caring for their pets on school time. While some adults contended that the pets helped kids learn discipline and develop a sense of responsibility, most agreed that these things were pretty damn annoying when they were trying to review times tables or clarify parts of speech. The pets became contraband and grounds for heartbreaking teacher confiscation. Sure, it was unlikely that we'd ever bring a real live hamster or guinea pig to class with us to monitor its well-being, but it was the principle of the thing.

Despite these setbacks, the toy remained wildly popular. Numerous knockoffs emerged, including the successful Gigapets and Nanopets. Before long, the virtual pet marketplace was flooded with a plethora of different types of animal, human, and alien egg keychains. Luckily for the current young population, these things are making a comeback and even feature a pause button to allow them time away from the virtual enslavement of their little charge. Sure, now these kids have Webkinz and all other impressive types of newfangled technologically tied toys, but somehow the simplicity of a Tamagotchi remains an appealing credential for parental purchase.

In case this reminiscence failed to satisfy your inner virtual pet caretaker, fear not. If all this wasn't enough, maybe you could use a little web-based support in the form of a new song by pop duo Looner. They obviously loved their Tamagatchi as much as you did, perhaps more as they've recently released a single detailing said love. Enjoy.



Check it out:
Virtual Pets for iPhones

LA Lights

Whenever I'm shopping for practical, functional sneakers for my imaginary children, I always think to myself, "Wouldn't these be better with some sort of poisonous substance in them? Maybe we could line them with some cushy asbestos or inject a teeny syringeful of arsenic. Just a little something to up the ante on the excitement of wearing stylish, dangerous footwear."

I can only imagine my parents were thinking the same thing when they caved to my endless pleas and purchased me my very own pair of LA Lights. They wouldn't even let me touch the glass thermometer and always seemed a bit concerned I may take to munching on the paint chips from our basement window, but they seemed happy enough to buy me a light-up sneaker chock-full of good old fashioned mercury. Granted, they may not have known of the risk at the time, but I have my suspicions. After all, they let me lick all of those recalled lead-painted Happy Meal toys, didn't they?

LA Gear was a popular brand of athletic shoes, boasting endorsements from the likes of Michael Jackson, Wayne Gretzky, Paula Abdul, Kareem Abdul Jabar, and Joe Montana. In the 80s and 90s LA Gear churned out signature style sneakers marketed to both the athletic and fashion conscious, capitalizing on their celebrity endorsements and placement in high-end department stores to boost their image and project an elite manner of sneaker snobbery.

During the company's pre-light era (circa 1990), MJ danced in his LA Gear sneaks

In 1992, they introduced an innovative design concept that undoubtedly endeared them to children on the virtue of sheer novelty and value to the easily entertained. The concept was simple but new: light-up sneakers. It's a well-known fact that children are big fans of simple visual stimuli, and these shoes were no exception. With each contact of the shoe-wearer's heel to the ground, the shoe would emit a flash of colored light. The inevitable oohing and ahhing was certain to make you the talk of the playground. These babies weren't so great for sneaking up on people, but they certainly were, ahem, flashy.



The shoes were comfortable as any sneaker but with every step, a burst of red LED light would flash from your heel. A a child, this was really the ultimate footwear victory. Suddenly, your shoes were not merely a functional piece of clothing but rather a legitimate novelty item to amuse and distract your classmates. In their own way, LA Lights were hypnotizing; watch a wearer walk away and you became mesmerized by the glowing flashes of light emanating from their shoes.

These light-up shoes unfortunately had a dark side as well. Unbeknownst to us as innocent children, the substance activating that little LED light was indeed mercury, a toxic element that could induce adverse effects on those in contact with it. Let's be real here: the actual tangible threat of mercury in our sneakers was pretty low. After all, it was handily encased in multiple layers of solid plastic. Unluckily for LA Gear, neither the plastic nor its corresponding argument of safety were solid enough to ward off the Cautious Cathys among us.

And so it went. Just as these sneakers had bounded into our hearts and lit up our lives, so fleetingly did they pass. Parents and watchdog groups weren't particularly keen to the idea of a poisonous compound seeping into children's heels with every blinking step they took. Environmentalists in my home state of Minnesota were among the first to take action against the well-intentioned LA Lights parent company, LA Gear.



LA Gear settled with the Minnesotan group with both a financial agreement and by establishing a mail-in program to safely recycle and dispose of the hazardous elements of the shoes. I can remember that day we mailed in my shoes and I said goodbye to those twinkling lights forever. As a child, I was not particularly concerned with the environmental or toxicity implications but more that I was forced to replace my beloved LA Lights with a crappy pair of white Stride Rites. Traumatic, indeed.

The manufacturers changed from a mercury to an inertial switch, but their product image had been tarnished and the brand was in decline. In 1995, the company made an agreement for their products to be sold in Wal-Mart stores, a rebranding effort that diminished LA Gear's hard-earned upmarket image. Sales dropped and by the late 90s LA Gear took action toward bankruptcy.

While our 90s pal LL Cool J might tell us not to call it a comeback, LA Gear has taken serious strides* toward reestablishing their brand. LA Gear is bringing back many classic styles including the beloved lights line sans toxic liquid innards. Yes, you heard right. Your present and/or future children too can relive the magic of LA Lights. In fact, just a few days ago LAgearnews.com posted the following sneak peak at the new light-up LA Gear sneakers:



I know, I know, it's too dark to get a real handle on the detailing, but just use your imagination. After all, if a sneaker company can find a way to use poisonous chemicals to bring joy into the lives of easily amused children, the least you can do is find it in your hearts to be impressed with this tease of a promo.



*please excuse this shoe joke

90 TV Musical Episodes

Who doesn't love a good ratings ploy from time to time? Perhaps that's just my 90s-style cynicism talking; I'm sure these producers were only out to express themselves creatively through the art of song. Oh, and to totally sweep in the ratings. Mostly the ratings thing.


Daria: Daria!

Any moderately faithful reader of Children of the 90s knows I'm a huge proponent of the 90s animated sarcast-erpiece Daria. In fact, I've spent much of my time as a broken ankled bed-bound invalid watching seasons 1-3 of Daria. Season 3's "Daria!" was admittedly uncharacteristically gimmicky in its musical format. It's tone certainly clashes with Daria's self-described bitter 90s cynicism, but its quirky musical numbers and naturally disastrous hurricane theme manage to tether it down to appropriate Daria sarcasm levels.

The songs are uncannily catchy. The episode particularly reminds me of how much I love Daria's dear old Dad Jake. His performance in "God God Dammit" and "Manly" truly captured his good-natured anger and mild insanity. When he sings, "I'm proud to be the home/of a Y chromosome", he does so with such fervor and intent that I'm nearly spurned to jealousy at my unfortunate double-X situation. "Obsessed", the duet between sister Quinn and mother Helen illuminates the perfectionistic similarities of their personalities that were obviously too nuanced for those of us assuming both were merely well-intentioned but grating.

Of course, I'm somewhat partial to "They Must be Worried", mainly because I love Brittany's squeak. It's just so eardrum-shatteringly endearing. Help yourself to the full episode below:








Buffy The Vampire Slayer: "Once More with Feeling"

Okay, so technically this episode wasn't broadcast until 2001, but the producers had been tossing around the idea for years. Unluckily for them, the timing of the Xena: Warrior Princess musical (see below) put a halt to their plans. After all, they didn't want to appear to be piggybacking on the success of their fellow hit fantasy program.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a show with a serious cult following, so the show's producers had a good deal of leeway from their trusting fans. Not every live action show can swing a musical, but Buffy viewers had some pretty serious faith in the object of their television affection. Of course, musicals work better in fantasy shows as there can be some sort of vague and mysterious supernatural force that brings about this wave of singing and dancing. Such was the case in "Once More with Feeling", where everyone has suddenly been compelled to air their innermost feelings via song-and-dance. Unluckily for some, this could backfire and short-circuit, causing spontaneous combustion.

The songs are well-arranged and the cast is surprisingly musically inclined. All of the cast members sing their own parts, though some of the less musically robust stars have fewer singing parts than others. The episode was extremely well-received by Buffy's loyal fan base and critics alike, with TV Guide ranking the episode at a noteworthy 14th place on its countdown of TV's 100 best episodes.






Rocko's Modern Life: Zanzibar

You know a musical episode has some powerfully catchy songs when you still clearly remember the lyrics unprovoked 13 years later. This Earth Day themed musical featured the good-hearted earth-minded citizens of O-Town seeking to clean up their town and fight against the tyrannical pollution from supercorporatio Conglom-O (slogan: "We Own You"). Rocko's Modern Life is one of those great cartoons aimed at children that manages to be legitimately funny on a level more mature audiences can enjoy.

"Zanzibar" doesn't disappoint on the well-timed deadpan humor. When everyone spontaneously bursts into song about Spring Cleaning, Rocko looks around bemused and bewildered. "How is it you all know the words? Did you rehearse?" He asks somewhat accusatorily in that adorable Aussie accent of it. "Yeah, every Thursday," his pal Heffer replies without skipping a beat, brandishing a paper filled with rehearsal details. "Didn't you see the flyers?" Thus goes the tongue-in-cheek but admittedly socially-conscious musical episode: it doesn't water down the message, but it certainly entertains between preaching.

Luckily a giant compost heap with some helpful visual aids commands them to "R-E-C-Y-C-L-E recycle! C-O-N-S-E-R-V-E conserve! Don't you P-O-L-L-U-T-E pollute the river sky or sea or else you're gonna geeeeeet...what you deseeeeerve!" Moved by the rotting vegetable heap's words, the crowd takes to city hall in the form of a big unruly mob. Despite some setbacks, Rocko succeeds at fighting City Hall. Ed Bighead gets sentenced to some dirty work cleanup but remains unmoved by the cause.

Luckily, the compost heap returns at the close to offer us these heady words of wisdom, "See kids? If we're not nice to Mother Nature, she'll kick our butts." Wise words indeed, especially as they come from a rotting pile of discarded vegetation.

Rocko's Modern Life - Zanzibar





Xena: The Bitter Suite

The 90s were big on historical fantasy, specifically those types of shows geared toward historical fantasy nerd fetishists. Xena: Warrior Princess featured hulkingly beautiful Amazonian Lucy Lawless as a muscularly endowed ancient Grecian seeking to repent for past sins by helping others. A spinoff of Hercules: The Legendary Journey, the show could be summarized in the following SAT-style analogy: Xena is to Hercules as pseudo-historical porn for female-seeking fantasy nerds is to pseudo-historical porn for male-seeking fantasy nerds.

The show didn't need much of a push to be classified as over-the-top, but its musicals certainly made a valiant effort. The show produced a musical episode entitled "The Bitter Suite", featuring original songs. I was never much of a Xena person, but admittedly the promo below makes it look like a veritable guilty pleasure. The Bitter Suite pitted Xena and her sidekick Gabrielle against one another in the mysterious Land of Illusia after Gabs's semi-demonic daughter kills Xena's son. Scandalous, no? From my limited knowledge of Xena music (based on the non-lyrical Xena episodic soundtrack I used for a synchronized swimming trio routine), I'll put myself out on a limb and vouch that it's pretty badass. In a pseudo-historical fantasy television sort of way, that is.






Garfield and Friends: Picnic Panic

I can't lie to you, readers. I mainly just like this episode because of the singing ants. They're so cute. And I don't even like ants. They move in on the picnic and steal their delicious basketful of food, singing the whole way through in their adorable tinny ant voices.

A close second for Garfield doing an impression of BLT on rye. Really, he's quite convincing.

Garfield and Friends
Uploaded by Wrestlegameshow.

Though musical episodes are risky, they're also a lot of fun if the show manages to pull them off. I'd venture to say most of these episodes succeeded, as I am still humming, "R-E-C-Y-C-L-E recycle" to myself at inopportune times. If you watched that video, I'm willing to bet that you are, too.

The Sharon, Lois, and Bram Elephant Show

When you're a child, you accept things at face value. There's no insatiable need to make sense of things; instead, you assume that everything makes perfect sense as it is. Once you're an adult, of course, you can see that much of what you so thoughtlessly accepted was completely and totally absurd. Really, just all sorts of insane.

Thus is the case with most children's entertainers, particularly those who are musically inclined. These people, though physically adults, seem to have tapped into some unique inherent skill to retain a childlike outlook on the world. To children, the world is a fanciful place full of possibilities. Though as cynical adults we're pretty sure that's not true and can outwardly express bitter resentment at everyone who encouraged us to believe so while growing up, professional children's entertainers seem able to block out this negativity altogether. While this quality is admirable and their output certainly speaks to and entertains children, looking back at the people who entertained us as kids we may have to think twice about our unquestioning devotion to their work.

Sharon, Lois, and Bram managed not only to retain this sense of wonder, but also to package and market it in a highly lucrative if admittedly elephant-heavy way. They forged for themselves a highly successful decades-spanning career, boasting innumerable albums, television shows, and live performances. Sharon, Lois, and Bram were generally received with rave reviews, though this snippet from the Toronto Star makes me question the city's sense of perspective: "Simply the best musicians in North America, and probably the world."

Wow. Well there you have it. Forget all of those Julliard-trained classical musicians and ground-breaking musical trailblazers--all along, our best and brightest have been 3 middle-aged folks singing around a giant anthropomorphic elephant. Of course.


Children ate this stuff up. They loved it. The trio began touring together in 1979 and spent a good portion of the 80s and 90s cashing in with their fun and silly set list. The really got that kids required no background information whatsoever, particularly in their zany television exploits. They certainly utitlized this principle to their favor in The Elephant Show, their Canadian children's variety show that later re-ran on American television.

Sharon, Lois, and Bram's Elephant Show was children's programming at its finest. For no good reason, Sharon, Lois, and Bram lived together in a house with a giant mute elephant whose presence was represented only by punctuated tuba notes. No one ever discussed their living arrangement or relationship to one another, nor did anyone question the fact that they were constantly hanging out with a random group of children. Maybe I'm off base here, but to me this behavior seems mildly suspect. As a kid, however, I just assumed that my neighborhood gang's respective trio of adults and a giant elephant had yet to move in next door and take an interest in our daily activities. It was coming, I just knew it.

Regardless of the questionable premise, this jazzy intro with corresponding wacky animation sequence was enough to quiet anyone's inquiries:



I love the three different kids that get to shout out our stars' names. "Sharon!" "Lois!" "And Braaaam!" What kind of a name is Bram, anyway? Is this some sort of traditional Canadian thing? Either way, our pals Sharon, Lois, Bram, and Elephant were a fun group who spent all of their time on adventures, breaking spontaneously into song, and inviting unsuspecting little children to come and hang out in their wacky home. They were all super over-actors, except Elephant who managed to keep things booming-notedly subdued, as seen here:




They usually included some sort of live-performance segment, highlighting both their stage presence and awesomely 80s and early 90s outfits. These segments were usually taped in a theater in front of a full audience, with all sorts of fun audience participation. Oh, how I yearned to be one of those kids nodding and clapping along. Nodding and clapping along at home just wasn't the same, though in retrospect it was probably less publicly embarrassing.

And of course, no show would be complete without their signature jam, "Skinnamarink." No, I have no idea what a skinnamarink was, but I know that it was my favorite song to which I had memorized all key choreography. It went a little something like this:



Bear in mind this show ran 1984-1988 and then reran on Nick Jr. until 1995, so there was a seriously extensive spread of children who grew up with this show and skinnamarinky-dinky-dinked their little hearts out. As if that weren't enough, in 1998 the group starred in another show on TLC appropriately entitled Skinnamarink TV:



Please take note of the changes in music and characters, updated for the short attention spans of the new generation. These kids couldn't even put up with a few tuba notes, as their elephant had both a name (Ella Acapella) and functioning vocal cords. Back in our day, we didn't need fancy gimmicks. We didn't even need basic explanations. Those were simpler times, when a somewhat effeminate man and two flamboyantly enthusiastic women could just live with their mute elephant and their mysterious gang of drop-in children in peace.

Sesame Street Celebrity Musical Guests

First off, thank you for your ongoing support, loyal readers. I am in a somewhat pain medication-induced state (read all about my exciting bicycle crashing adventures here), but I am here to honor my commitment to bring you your daily dose of 90s nostalgic goodness. What sort of a nostalgian (like a historian, but lazier and less reliable) would I be to abandon you and fail to quench your unending desire for childhood revisitation? A bad one, that's what. So, let's get down to business here.

Sesame Street is a long-running and impressive television enterprise. Not only is it valuable to children on an educational level, it manages to continually entertain adults with its subtle barbs and references to popular culture. The show boasts an incredible number of high-profile guest stars over the years, ranging from politicians to boy bands.

Most adorable, however, are those popular musicians who come to reprise their popular songs with new Sesame Streetified lyrics. You really can't help but love their capacity to belt out these tunes to a bunch of well-orchestrated puppets with such fervor and intent you'd think they were playing to a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden. Though some sing Sesame Street orignals, many take their most popular songs and tweak the lyrics to make them either educational or pertinent to the lives of cute fuzzy monsters.

While the child viewers probably think of Elmo as the celebrity and the musical guests as some no-name Elmo backup singers, older watchers can appreciate the mildly self-deprecating aww-ness of watching Hootie and the Blowfish warn of street-crossing safety.

Though you may have been far beyond your Sesame Street years when many of these aired, you can certainly enjoy them retrospectively for their celebrity value. For your pure viewing/listening enjoyment, I present a random but reasonably comprehensive compilation of 90s musical guest appearances on everyone's favorite pedgoical PBS puppet program:

Spin Doctors: Two Princes


In 1996, the Spin Doctors appeared on the show with a parody of their popular "Two Princes", conveniently re-titled "Two Princes". In the original song, the Spin Docs sing about a woman with a choice of two male admirers. If you're not familiar with the song, feel free to take a listen. Really, just go ahead now. In the more kid-friendly Sesame Street version, lead singer Chris Barron explains how Princess Zoe doesn't have to pick between two princely playmates but rather that they can all play together. To their credit, the monsters' celebratory dance moves during that extended solo are pretty impressive.


REM: Furry Happy Monsters


REM released "Shiny Happy People" in 1991, intended as an ironic loose translation of some obscure Chinese propaganda. The original video (pop-up version for your entertainment available here) was ironically unironic in its colorful, upbeat interpretation. Luckily, these political undertones were totally absent from the playful Sesame Street Version, "Furry Happy Monsters". The VH1 Pop-Up Video version notes that many fans believe REM hates this song as they never play it live, but obviously they must want to spread the joy in some capacity if they're willing to get this into it with puppets 8 years later.


Bobby McFerrin: Tweet in the Morning


I have to say, Hoots the Owl is one of the coolest puppets I know. Who knew owls were so jazzy and scat-catty? Scat-owly, I suppose, but now we're really just splitting feathers. 90s phenom Bobby McFerrin of "Don't Worry Be Happy" fame came to the Birdland club in 1991 to showcase his quirky percussive stylings. I have no idea what he's saying, but I would certainly be tapping my foot if it wasn't broken.


Aaron Neville (with Ernie): I Don't Want to Live on the Moon


I have vague recollections of owning a casette tape with this song on it, and loving it intensely even though I personally thought I could handle living on the moon for more than one afternoon. What can I say, that Ernie's a real lightweight. Especially on the moon. In all seriousness, it's a really pretty song. Also, they created a cool arrangement using a previous recording by the late Jim Henson and matching it up with Neville's harmony section.



Johnny Cash: Tall Tale


Johnny Cash appeared on the show a few times, seen above performing "Tall Tale" with giddy-up puppet Noel Cowherd in 1993. It's sort of a country song version of "opposite day". The clip really, really makes me love Johnny Cash. If I were a man, I would yearn for that deep, toneful, resonant voice. Back in the day, though, I was probably more preoccupied with coveting that cowgirl puppet's bolo tie. I'm into it.


Gloria Estefan: 1-2-3


Pretty much anyone who ever puts out a song with any counting whatsoever must be high-up on the list of preferred celebrity musical guests on Sesame Street. After all, it's incredibly easy to rewrite a song to be about counting when the original already conveniently features numbers in sequence. Well played, Sesame Street song reprisers. Well played indeed. Nice work on coming up with the word "Birdketeers", too. Those incredibly multicultural children in birdsuits are pretty awesome. Kudos all around.


Queen Latifah: The Letter O


Yes, she totally called those little puppets her safari sisters. I just love all of their turbans. It's been so long I actually totally forgot Queen Latifah even rapped, I'm pretty impressed with this. Mainly because that second hat she's sporting totally warrants a comparison to Abu the monkey from Aladdin.


Little Richard: Rubber Duckie


Little Richard is all kinds of crazy, but more fun crazy than scary crazy. Between this and his guest appearance on Full House, he earns major 90s children-entertaining points. That signature "Woo!" really adds appropriate emphasis to the Rubber Duckie song. And there's Hoots the owl again! Can't go wrong with Hoots. Hoots is the dude.


Goo Goo Dolls: Pride


I mainly included this clip because I find it heartwrenchingly adorable at the start when Elmo says, "Oh, hi Goo Goo Dolls!" It's really just spectacularly cute. This episode aired in 2000 so I was certainly far past my prime Sesame Street watching years and thus only recently discovered this clip. They reformulate their song "Slide" as "Pride". I just love watching these guys rock out to lyrics like, "You helped your mother bake a pie/You fell and didn't cry/You made your bed and said/Your ABCs".


Hootie and the Blowfish: Hold My Hand


Yeah, yeah, this clip is more recent too (also from 2000), but you may just have to deal with it. Hootie and the Blowfish were an inexplicable runaway 90s success and hence deserve our attention, even if this clip wasn't necessarily a part of our original formulative Sesame Street watching years. Unlike bands who capitalized on Sesame Street guest appearances at the height of their fame, these guys were clearly on the downslide by the time they reprised their song "Hold My Hand" to be about crossing the street safely.



And of course, though by the time these two groups were on the show I'd likely graduated to screaming in the front rows of their concerts and trying to catch the teddy bears they tossed during their stunt flying, I'll share these with you as a concession for you not judging that last confession:





Well, that's about all I have for you today. This post was brought to you by the letter V as in Vicodin.

Please Excuse This Interruption From Your Regularly Scheduled Children of the 90s Programming

A self-portrait minus the blonde hair and innumerable bike tire tracks up and down my legs

A quick explanation for the incredibly brief blog hiatus:

So, you know how when you're a kid, you really want crutches? Like, they seem really cool and you wish you could have all of the attention and cast-signing privileges awarded to your less graceful?

Turns out it's not quite as idyllic as I'd once imagined.

Let me set the scene for you. I'm bicycling in the Amish countryside with my parents (yeah, I did that, just deal with it) and I am really getting into it. I haven't ridden a bike since my ill-fated 5th grade arm-breakage, but I'd decided to give it another go.

As I'd become so astonishingly skillful at biking, I was far ahead and riding solo when I saw a small child of maybe 6 or 7 crying and struggling to keep up with his mom while biking. Like any self-entitled child of the 2000s, this allegedly innocent kid splats straight down in the middle of the path. Like any good conscientious and kind-hearted child of the 90s, I swerved in an effort to avoid running over him.

This was obviously a big mistake, resulting in 6 hours in the hospital, a broken ankle, and innumerable capsules of high-intensity pain medication. We're talking the hard stuff here. In my gimpish and unintentionally whacked-out-on-pain-meds state, I was unable to fulfill my duty of completing this morning's post.

As I am at the airport. Alone. On crutches. Can't walk. Giant bag. All sorts of fun.

Have no fear, though the use of heavy pain medication will ensue, I will be back in full blogging form later this week. Bye now, I'm off to butt-scoot up the stairs. No really, it's gonna be awesome. I appreciate your concern.