A Night at the Movies

Reggie Jackson once said:

"Every hitter likes fastballs just like everybody likes ice cream. But you don't like it when someone's stuffing it into you by the gallon. That's how you feel when (Nolan) Ryan's throwing balls by you."

Kids have an affinity towards animated movies. It's just a fact and Ashtyn is no different than any other 2 year old. Lion King, great movie, Nemo..... love it! Monsters Inc. might be cinematic brilliance. That's the first few times you see them though. After the 152nd time of seeing any movie you're going to be sick of it, unless it's 'Hoosier's', 'Major League' or 'The Outlaw Josey Wales', but those are exceptions that prove Reggie's point that there can be too much of a good thing.

We're in that stage right now where Ashtyn "prefers" that a Disney movie be running on the TV from the time she wakes up until the time she goes to bed. Not to say that she watches TV all day, she doesn't, but it's a calming influence to her when she can go upstairs and fake boil some grapes and doughnuts on her toy kitchen set and then pop down to see if Cinderella has made it to the ball or if the blue fairy has turned Pinocchio into a real boy yet.

We try to limit the amount of TV she watches so we've hidden the DVD's out of her reach so that when she wants to watch one she has to come to us and ask to 'pick one'. That's right, at less than 2 years of age she is able to open the DVD player, take out one DVD, replace it with another and get the movie going on her own.

Two things occur to me when I see her interacting with technology now. The first is, how can a cartoon movie like Cinderella, that was made in the 1940's still be able to transfix a kid today like it did back then? And two, I think my daughter has a higher IQ than I do..... A 22 month old kid shouldn't be able to load load her own DVD, even to the point of holding it by the hole in the middle so that she isn't touching the shiny side. There still manages to be fingerprints all over them, but they are scratch free for the most part.

Just thinking about what she already knows and what the future holds for her, Ashtyn is always going to live in a world where every piece of knowledge or media is going to be at her fingertips with a phone an iPhone, iPad, Xoom or whatever other device allows her to 'Google' something. Thats actually pretty cool. The first time I heard the word Google it was spelled googol and it was this astronomical number that we'd heard about in 3rd grade - it was a 1 followed by 100 zero's. Me and Chris Southam set out to conquer and write a googol over lunch hour one day. We wrote it on Mrs. Perron's chalkboard, plus or minus a few zero's and we were proud of ourselves. In retrospect, when people talk about "there's an hour I'll never get back", yeah that one still makes me think that skipping recess to voluntarily write on the chalkboard was a bad idea and an hour I'll never get back. We were visionary though and were Googling before it was cool.

But also to my point, Ashtyn will always have everything at her fingertips. If she wants a certain song, she'll always know that she can log onto a site somewhere and download it within seconds and listen to it at her disposal. Unlike her father that spent 3 weeks of laying in bed waiting for the Top 9 @ 9:00 on 93.7 KIZZ to play Vanilla Ice's "Ice, Ice Baby" so that he could "dub" it. For the younger generation, "dubbing" wasn't rolling on a set of 20 inch rims, it was waiting for the radio to play a certain song that you liked so that you could push the record button on your boom box stereo and record the song to a blank tape. Kind of like a stone age version of Napster or Limewire. The problem with getting your music in this fashion was that the stupid DJ would talk into the intro of the song and you'd have some lame voice covering up "Yo, VIP, Lets Kick It" with "here's Vanilla Ice again at #1 with Ice, Ice, Baaaaaaaaby". "Please shut up Ms. DJ, cuz now I'm going to be back here tomorrow night to try to get a clean dub again. *sigh* The '82 Ford Escort with a Kraco stereo just ain't gonna attract the babes unless I'm crankin Vanilla."

Those of you that remember Vanilla Ice and dubbing are giggling right now.

I suppose I had a point to this blog at somewhere, but it just kind of digressed into nothingness. Maybe this post is just nothing more than a welcome back to all my friends and also a welcome to the new ones that have taken a liking to "Da Crib".