Okay, that's not really my mother in law, not even after she raids the minibar. That's Carol Channing's big scene from the 1985 made-for-television musical version of Alice in Wonderland. I love the deer-in-the-headlights look the little girl keeps giving Channing. If you can't be bothered to watch the full five minutes, just watch this 1 minute song and dance. It's pretty clear that Lewis Carroll and Carol Channing are kindred spirits.

I am currently using the serialized YouTube clips of the whole movie to scare Juniper away from televised entertainment forever. The credits read like the autograph wall at the Brown Derby in 1980: Red Buttons! Sherman Helmsley! Ernest Borgnine! Scott Baio! Martha Raye! Roddy McDowell! The film features Sammy Davis Jr. as a rapping caterpillar. Ringo Starr in tights and a turtle shell. Telly Fucking Savales as the Chesire Cat. As you're watching it, you might find yourself thinking things like, "Hey, that's Junior's Grandpa from Problem Child and Problem Child 2! Then, "Why is Mr. Miyagi wearing a plush horse costume?" Or, "The post-All in the Family years were not kind to Sally Struthers." The whole movie is kind of like the Love Boat crashed on Fantasy Island and now everyone's on acid.

Alice in Wonderland (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)

Well, I've decided I'm never going to write about anything serious or controversial again. For anyone who is still reading this site, I will return next week with five days of fall TV lineup blogging. You won't want to miss my Two and Half Men recap or my take on next week's big Dancing With The Stars mishap. My wife might chime in with a snarky America's Next Top Model post, that is, if she can stay awake for a full hour of quality anorexic-cat-fight-filled entertainment.

Until then, head on over to DesignMom, where I have written a little guest post about my cheap vintage modern kids chair addiction. I hope only the anti-materialist bloc finds it offensive.

I get a lot of e-mails asking whether we've remained as rigid with our no-television policy for Juniper as we set out to be. I'm not going to write much about it. I just don't have it in me to write a post about how she flies kites and plays pick-up-sticks and whittles her own wooden toys and makes dolls out of corn husks and does all the sorts of things that children did before the advent of television. Writing about your elitist attitude towards television---no matter how sincere---is no different from writing about your elitist attitude towards anything: you can hold up your hands and claim you're just expressing your personal beliefs about breastfeeding or cloth diapers or natural childbirth or, ahem, blog advertising, but even if you attempt to drain all sanctimony from your message, you're going to piss someone off and it's your own damn fault for not keeping those self-proclaimed "personal beliefs" to yourself.

Truth be told, it's pretty easy to be an elitist about television when your kid won't sit still for it. At this age I wouldn't mind if Juniper took some interest in watching TV. Apparently it is great for occupying a child so you can take a shit without a wingman, get some housework done, or even spend some time on the internet. I wouldn't know. Once in awhile I will turn on PBS, but the only thing she'll sit still for is this show about a whiny 4-year-old French-Canadian cancer patient. I can understand why his family puts up with all the whining, considering the chemotherapy and all, but as far as I can tell all Caillou has taught Juniper is how to be a more accomplished whiner, and frankly I could do with less of that.

What I really want to write about today is how Juniper is obsessed with getting the dog to talk. Wendell has proven to be a blessedly quiet dog. He does not bark or growl, and, perhaps sensing that our household is currently experiencing a glut of it, he never, ever whines. Juniper is uneasy with this silence. She has been trying to teach him the words she learned first. "Talk Wendell!" she shouts at him. "Talk, now! Say ball!" He just sits there, wagging his tail, staring at the ball in her hand. "Wendell won't talk, dada," she says to me. "Get him to talk."

I just shrug. I won't break the news to her that she will never have a conversation with her beloved German Shorthair. Not yet. Instead, I've inflamed her hopes by going back to my old standby of televised toddler entertainment: the easily digested 2-3 minute fare on YouTube. Remembering that a simple search in YouTube has solved a half dozen dilemmas caused by Juniper's strange obsessions, I searched for "talking dogs." The search yielded this.

We have watched it many dozens of times. It never ceases to crack her up, the last dog in particular. Talking dogs, like bike-riding bears and cigar-smoking chimps, are mildly amusing at first, but it doesn't take long before you look into their sad, empty eyes and realize what depraved creatures we humans are to enjoy forcing animals to act like us. I now sit there overanalyzing the video, wondering about these women who have taught their dogs to say, " I wuv woo!" or "I want my momma!" How long did that take? What drove them to teach their pets to express such complex emotions beyond their ordinary vocal range, to articulate such words with no actual understanding behind them? What satisfaction do they get from the blank eagerness in those canine eyes, merely watching for the milk bone to be tossed their way? And don't get me started on all the people who have taught their cats to say, "I love you."

Other than YouTube, just about the only other thing I can get Juniper to watch are the dozen-or-so DV tapes of footage I took while we were living in San Francisco. I'll sit there and watch them with her, cringing at the sound of my own voice talking to her, acting like a blabbering 4-month-old is having some kind of conversation with me, then, on another tape, reading far more into guttural 14-month-old proclamations than they clearly deserved, as though I was privy to some hilarious Bruce-Willisy voiceover about drool that the mic just didn't pick up. God, what a douchebag.

[I am in the process of updating that "Anthology of Televised Toddler Entertainment" I started last summer; there is a lot of brush to clear from the Sesame Street section where videos have been removed from YouTube, but I am more concerned about adding some great new short videos that 2-5 year olds enjoy. Is there anything on YouTube your kids love to watch over and over? Let me know and I'll be sure to add it to the video page]

Last fall, all the streets were closed around Wood's building in downtown Detroit because Michael Bay was in town filming Transformers. I heard John Turturro was in the movie, so I went to watch because I figured it would be the best opportunity I'd ever get to yell, "Nobody fucks with the Jesus!" over and over at him while he tries to drink a macchiato or talk on his cell phone in between takes. Overall, what I could see of the shoot was pretty disappointing. There were a bunch of hipsters who looked like they moved to Hollywood ten years ago to make the next Pulp Fiction but somehow found themselves hauling cables around for Michael Bay instead. There was an astonishing amount of equipment and lighting. But all I saw them filming was take after take of a bunch of extras running down the street pretending to be scared of something they were pretending to see. Pretty underwhelming. But last night I saw the commercial for the movie, and those same people were now totally running from Megatron and the Decepticons with all kinds of badass explosions in the buildings around them.

One of the last cases I worked on before I quit being a lawyer was a patent infringement lawsuit against every major movie studio and distributor for some boring digital technology method that the plaintiff claimed to have invented. I was on the side of the studios, and spent several months sifting through hundreds of thousands of documents related to the process of making pretty much every crappy movie from the last five years. Seriously, you would not believe how many people and man hours went into Kangaroo Jack. I saw it on an airplane, and I wanted to believe it could all be blamed on Jerry O'Connell and his portly black sidekick and the few Australian rubes they conned into acting in a movie about a rapping kangaroo. Sadly, there were literally thousands of people responsible for it. Many of them, I'm sure, knew just how bad it was, and considered it "just their job" to spend hundreds of hours syncing the lips of a CGI kangaroo to the Outback Steakhouse version of Rapper's Delight. I can sympathize. I certainly considered it "just a job" to spend hundreds of hours looking at documents showing just how boring it is to actually make movies.

I haven't had many interesting thoughts lately. Nothing exciting has happened to us, nothing even as exciting as watching a bunch of people running down the street from robotic aliens no one can see. I wish I had an army of talented people to add some CGI to our lives or at least give me some better lighting, but the reality is other than building Juniper a dollhouse, all I have been doing lately is sitting on the couch watching bad movies on cable every night in the dark. The other day it was one of those Matrix sequels. Last night it was Spiderman 2. One time Wood woke up and said, "Go write a blog post. Stop watching these crappy movies."

"I don't have anything to say. . .Besides, do you realize how many thousands of people worked very hard to make these crappy movies? It's the least I can do to to watch."

[I'll post pictures of the dollhouse tomorrow]

We haven't touched a diaper for a couple months around here, and we have the Japanese to thank for it. In the chance that anyone out there is still struggling with potty training, I might suggest a steady diet of bing cherries and a cappella in-bathroom renditions of the songs from this video:



And just in case your kid is confused by squatter toilets in public restrooms, this video should help:



I know these videos made the rounds long ago, but many of the links I've seen have been of the insulting "those wacky Japs!" variety. Personally, I don't think they're that out there. I think they are just more helpful, honest stuff from the far more civilized culture that brought us Everybody Poops. Has anyone else found these videos useful in potty training their non-Japanese speaking kids?

It turns out that a huge part of successfully potty training Juniper was not using a system of rewards, but cultivating a sense of mystique and ritual around the excretory functions themselves in the context of the bathroom. Long before she was ready, a friend of ours let Juniper watch her kid use the potty and then put on big girl pants. Ever since, Juniper has considered the porcelain shrine in our bathroom the site of an important rite of passage after which you get to wear special underwear (so, not unlike the Mormon temple). The Japanese potty training videos have been an integral part of further cultivating this mystique. She doesn't understand a word of what those crazy-ass tigers say, but that never stopped her from being mesmerized, and---as with any religious-experience worth its salt---a bit terrified by it all. Every time the live-action chubby kid at the end of the first video gets up on the pot and starts his grunting, Juniper shakes her head "No" and jumps off my lap and runs out the door of my office to watch the end of the video from the doorway. "No, no, Juney don't like that part," she says, but then asks to watch it all again. Luckily, there are plenty more Japanese toilet training videos, these ones starring a heroic hippopotamus named Pantsu Pankuro:



If only we'd had that constipation song six months ago., we never would have needed all that Miralax. Consider also the zen-like disposition of the anthropomorphized toilet, Toire-sama, a true sensei of the shitter. Note his wise resolution of Pankuro-kun's dilemma here:



I just don't know if I could pee with him looking at me like that. It would way be worse than those bathrooms with the mirror right above the toilet. The Buddha-like squatter toilet, too, seems to give excellent spiritual advice, and you don't have to look him in the eyes:



Squatter-san does seem to enjoy the flushing a little too much, though, if you ask me:



This last set includes the all-important "it's no big deal when you piss your bed" song for those mornings right after the nighttime diaper becomes history:



For months, Juniper has instituted a moratorium on scatological humor in our household. I am no longer allowed to laugh when she farts. She loves these videos, but she is deadly serious about them. She is constantly on guard for even the faintest hint of a smile on my face when we watch them together. "Dada, don't laugh! It's ridiculous!" She said the other day to my astonishment. How do you then not laugh at a toddler trying to pronounce ridiculous (At least she didn't say ridicurous).

"You are right Juniper-chan," I say, emulating the wise old toilet. "Pooping is a very serious matter. Even when it involves singing toilet paper dispensers. And jazz hands."

John Hubley was an animator for Disney during the days of Snow White, Pinocchio, and Bambi. After he was blacklisted for refusing to name names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he went on to create uncredited television commercials, and eventually shifted his focus to independent short films after moving to New York and marrying Faith Elliot, who became his partner and collaborator at Storyboard Films.

The Hubleys' Storyboard animation would be familiar to anyone who has seen classic Electric Company and Sesame Street from the early 1970s---it had a distinct style that was low-key, a bit jittery, and often surreal. As I've been trying to update my list of YouTube offerings that I use to entertain Juniper instead of television, I realized that a lot of my favorite old Electric Company and Sesame Street animations were created by the Hubleys; I recently looked into their story and some of the others films they created, and stumbled across this:



"Georgie," the younger girl whose tantrum erupts into a green feline beastie at 5:00, grew up to become Georgia Hubley of Hoboken (the drummer for Yo La Tengo). The older girl, Emily, followed in her parents' footsteps (she did the animation in John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch). Beyond that trivia, I am struck by this cartoon's simple genius: the girls seem to be mic'd up and playing without any interference from their parents, and the use of animation here is so perfect, from the way it effectively conveys the imaginative play of preschoolers to how it captures the true ferocity of a sudden tantrum like no video camera ever could. But beyond that, and even beyond the unscripted reality of the subject, what I see in this animation is the love of the parents for their children, such a patient, tender understanding and appreciation of these two kids for who they are right in those moments and the amazing world they inhabit together. I sit watching it as enraptured as Juniper. She is doing a lot of this kind of imaginative babbling and quiet play herself these days, and this makes me want to give her a sibling.

Along the same lines is the Hubleys' earlier short film Moonbird, an Academy Award winner from 1959, that uses gorgeous mid-century-feeling animation and a similarly-recorded dialogue between their older sons as they hunt for an imaginary creature in the middle of the night:



I was struck by how revolutionary these decades-old cartoons felt when I was first saw them. I think it's because the voices are not supplied by actors, the stories not plotted by a team of writers. The voices are those of real children, and the action is supplied organically by one of the most powerful creative forces around: the imagination of preschoolers. But as I watched each of those videos for the first time, I had a hard time imagining two preschoolers raised in the current culture of pervasive branding sustaining a conversation for eight or ten minutes without talking about Dora or Spongebob or Thomas or Bob the Builder or whatever other preschool icon has hijacked their imagination.

Then I shook my cane at the kids these days and told them to get off my lawn.

Juniper has learned to turn on the television. She stands there less than ten inches from the screen, flipping through all four channels, looking for "babies." It also seems she prefers it at full volume. Despite my proclivities regarding the tube, I did not leap from where I sat across the room screaming, "Nooooooooooooooo!" in slow motion. We figured we'd let her see what it was, and hopefully get bored with it.

Tonight while we were getting her bath ready we heard the television crescendo in the other room. The channels changed every four seconds. Brady Bunch: "babies!" Pistons Game: "ball!" Evening news: "eyes!" George W. Bush's immigration speech: "Dada!"

[pause while Dutch looks to Wood with dread]

"No Juniper," her mother said. "That's not dada. That's our dictator. Can you say dick-tay-tor?"

"Dada."

Why? Oh why, Juniper? Anyone but him: Jerry Springer. French Stewart. Jared the subway guy. Why couldn't she have called any of them "dada."

I guess I should just prepare for the worst: