On almost every sin­gle episode of Blue’s Clues the human char­ac­ter (either Joe or Steve, or in the UK, Kevin) and the dog Blue “ski­doo” some­where, which is an amaz­ingly sim­ple form of tele­port­ing (trans­port­ing one­self from one place to another instantly), whether onto the sur­face of a globe or into the image on a pic­ture or a com­puter game or into a dio­rama, but it always involves our human pro­tag­o­nist and Blue being trans­ported to some­where else that moments ago they weren’t. It seems that other char­ac­ters on the show can also ski­doo, like Mr. Salt when he needs to go to the gro­cery store.

And ski­doo­ing is an impor­tant plot point to the show, because while on their ski­doo adven­tures the char­ac­ters have learn things and get to play and also may find a Blue’s Clue, whichis  great and all, but you wanna know who else could really use ski­doo­ing, espe­cially in these try­ing eco­nomic times?

The mil­i­tary. Could totally help them out. » Read the rest of this entry «

My old­est son loves the Curi­ous George show on PBS. He laughs along with it and after­wards will tell me the intri­cate plot points that moved the show from point A to Z. He has his favorites and his not-so-favorites, but gen­er­ally he enjoys all of them, some­what, even if he doesn’t love all of them.

I think Noah likes the show because it reminds him of him­self. George is curi­ous, fairly bright, and always get­ting into sit­u­a­tions that he’d be bet­ter off not get­ting into. He’s smart and funny and cute, just like George, and he prob­a­bly smells bet­ter than George, even though TMWTYH bathes George regularly.

But the show does one thing that, the first time I heard it, I knew imme­di­ately what it meant when I heard it.
» Read the rest of this entry «