So I went downstairs to get food and while on standby, I watched A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Now, I like Peanuts as much as the next guy but like a lot of things I saw as a kid, it was a completely different experience to revisit it as an adult.

Let me preface with this: Compared to the TV series and specials, the movies are quite a bit more SERIOUS BUSINESS and this one was all kinds of f’d up. It is often said that Snoopy, Come Home is the most depressing of the movies… hell no! That one had a happy ending, this was more or less the Peanuts version of End of Evangelion!

Really, this one was 90-ish minutes of just about EVERYONE trolling poor Charlie Brown (and that eventually includes Linus… and he’s supposed to be the dude’s BFF?!), and this is on top of his own self-loathing and depression. They suddenly become nice to him when he starts doing things right and then turn on him when the pressure becomes too much and he bombs the last word at the Radio City finals… wow. One must wonder how much worse the fallout would be if this played out today. Lucy would totally be at home among the /b/-tards. >:P

(Actually, weren’t there honest-to-god research papers and stuff written to that effect? I know there was one analysis done that says that Schroeder is most likely gay. I’m pretty sure that was mentioned on MetaFilter quite awhile back…)

And the takeaway message from everything that happened is “okay, the world didn’t end… but you’re going to fail all over again tomorrow, sucker!”

“Way to overthink it, Yoshi,” you might be thinking. And I may very well be. But give it a spin if you haven’t seen it for awhile. All the stupidly-amusing sequences involving Snoopy aside, you’ll probably find yourself doing a bit of double-takes, too!

I nodded off on the couch and it’s too late now to boot up Blastoise.

Oh sweet mother of pizza, WANT.

Robert still has the original, somewhere. And I have the ROM of it on my PSP.

Bonus points if the orignal’s OST is preserved somehow, that was one of the best parts. >_>;;;
For those who’ve never played the original, have some YouTube!

As much as I hated elementary school, on the rare occasion West Heritage actually did stuff that was awesome.

Okay, so… here in this wonderful country, we get all up in arms if “Christmas” and “classroom” get mentioned in the same sentence, right? “OMG TEACHING RELIGION IN SCHOOL” or “OMG WHAT ABOUT PEOPLE WHO DON’T CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS” and all that roflcoptery… yeah.

Well, back then, they DID teach Christmas. And Hannukah. And I think we even touched on Kwanzaa and Boxing Day too. And not just the American implementations, either… I think it was 2nd grade in which the class Christmas play included a song about how it’s done in other countries. I recall the “costume” for the kids who were supposed to represent Canada (I think they were picked at random and not because they were of Canadian descent) were laminated snowflakes with “CANADA” written in glitter… and there was that thing about trying to get everyone to pronounce all the “foreign” city names properly. (Mazatlan anyone?)

Fellow West Heritage “vets” on Facebook, help me out if I’m fudging a detail here!

Oh, and there was one time… pretty sure it was 1st grade, and some of the Jewish kids’ parents came in and taught us how to make paper dreidels and, the part that sticks out most, made latkes. And ohgod those are freaking tasty. ;_;

The last memory of anything like this… um… 4th grade? There was a bit about St. Lucia, even included the song that goes with it. However, this may have also been a tie-in to one of the American Girl books (specifically, the subseries centered around Kirsten)

Anywho, why yes, all of those things had some kind of religious undertones. But in my 7-year-old mind (and probably moreso because my family was and still IS functionally secular), those events were never really about religion, but rather the history and, to a degree, the “novelty/unusual” factor. Oh, and food. >_>;; (Latkes… WANT…) And, perhaps the most shallow: “dude, this is time NOT spent doing those awful, boring Holey Card or other forms of mathematic torture.”

Holey Cards… grrr… how I loathed those. They were pretty useless after awhile, too; because there was only one configuration per “type,” it became more or less “can you memorize and regurgitate huge chains of numbers in two minutes?” AND YOU WERE GRADED ON THOSE. WHAT. Worse were the instances in which teachers made you do those as busywork… okay, stopping this side rant RIGHT there.

Anywho…

Now, West Heritage is still around. But are they (or, well, any schools, for that matter) teaching stuff like this anymore? Probably not. If you were to repeat that lesson about Hannukah in your average public school classroom now, and over-sensitive parents would be screaming LAWSUIT before you could finish that sentence. Ah, the price of political correctness. And this is assuming “extra” stuff like learning about other cultures and their holidays didn’t get pushed out in favor of LOL TESTING.

Hell, I bet today’s average American kid probably doesn’t know what a latke is (unless they have Jewish friends). They miss out on that and other international yummies.

–

Workers came in to remove the rental hospital bed. I didn’t think much of it because I figured the one mother bought using FSA funds last year was going to replace it.
But… holy crap, Evil Stepfather put the new one in his den. As in, NOT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HOUSE.
We actually have a den again, wow. Maybe now mother can, you know, let the Four Pups of the Apocalypse wander about in there rather than render the kitchen useless by blocking off half the cupboards with the enclosure. >_>;;;

I’m still getting my big toaster oven, just in case. :P