{"id":1034,"date":"2011-01-22T18:53:03","date_gmt":"2011-01-22T22:53:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/?p=1034"},"modified":"2011-01-22T18:53:03","modified_gmt":"2011-01-22T22:53:03","slug":"some-things-change-some-things-dont","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.biguglymandoll.com\/?p=1034","title":{"rendered":"Some things change, some things don’t"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the truly great pleasures of growing up in the 1980s was a comic strip called Bloom County<\/a>.\u00a0 While several of the greats from that age have proved timeless – Calvin and Hobbes are as funny now as they ever were then, and my kids laugh as hard as I did at them – much of Bloom County’s brilliance was topical, specific to its age, and does not evoke the same reaction from those who didn’t live through it.\u00a0 One of my all time favorites was a bit with Oliver Wendell Jones, after he had some bit of hacking go badly wrong.\u00a0 His father was lecturing him that \u201cLondon, Paris, and New York are burning,\u201d and that he was going to be grounded pretty much forever.\u00a0 Oliver\u2019s reaction:\u00a0 \u201cWell, I suppose I couldn\u2019t very well have expected the \u2018I did the same thing when I was your age\u2019 speech.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are times when we have talks with our kids that really make me wonder.\u00a0 While I\u2019m sure \u2013 largely because they enjoy telling the grandkids \u2013 that the Sister of the BUMD and I used to bring up topics that made my folks shake their heads, I am dead certain that we never once sat around the dinner table and discussed the viral mechanisms, epidemiology, survival rates, and best practices surrounding the zombie apocalypse and the rising.\u00a0 As we did last night, for example.\u00a0 \u201cThey only want to bite you to spread the virus, Daddy.\u201d\u00a0 Oh, right, I\u2019d forgotten.\u00a0 \u201cDaddy, you need a clean head shot, but you have to be outside the range of the blood spatter because it can infect you.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

At first I asked Number One Son if he wanted to read a really good book about zombies, Mira Grant\u2019s Feed<\/strong><\/span> <\/a>\u2013 which is the best written and most authoritative book on the topic I\u2019ve ever read.\u00a0 About five minutes later, I asked him if he\u2019d already read it \u2013 you never know, with him, but he hadn\u2019t.\u00a0 (Yet.)\u00a0 Nor was he the only one talking \u2013 both girls seemed more knowledgeable about the topic than I would have suspected, even from our little self-rescuing princesses.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I am equally sure that, while my sister and I might have, very occasionally, sat around discussing celebrities, not once did the dinnertime talk turn to who looked better than whom while dressed in skulls \u2013 skull prints, or actual skulls, human or otherwise.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Somehow, it just never came up.\u00a0 (\u201cWell, I suppose I couldn\u2019t very well have expected the \u2018I did the same thing when I was your age\u2019 speech.\u201d)<\/p>\n

And yet, while things change, and some cutting edges blunt over time, some things remain unexpectedly razor sharp even 40 years on.\u00a0 When I was a young boy, the topic of nuclear proliferation popped up over breakfast more than once.\u00a0\u00a0 Over today\u2019s breakfast, the 12-yr-old Human Tape Recorder (which still sounds better than Human MP3 Recording and Playback Device) asked why it was that the world had so many nuclear weapons \u2013 where was the need?\u00a0 So, needing a quick history lesson and never being one to let another\u2019s work evade my eyes, I used the immortal Tom Lehrer\u2019s \u201cWho’s Next?\u201d as my lesson plan.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And do you know what?\u00a0 Recorded in 1969, it\u2019s just as topical, just as cutting, just as ironically funny today as it was then.\u00a0\u00a0 Have a listen, and tell me if I\u2019m wrong.<\/p>\n