I’ve been meaning to post about this for days — days, I tell you — but was too lazy to do so. But now I have gumption running out the ears!

Some time ago, Brian, Crispy and I (in our guise as the robot PODTRON) saw Jonathan Coulton play in Atlanta. Brian and Crispy shot footage of the event for Yahoo News’s People of the Web. They’ve gone and used that footage in their article about Jonathan Coulton, and even included clips of the Re Your Brains music video we did last year.

During yesterday’s discussion of my dislike of The Giving Tree, we got to discussing The Rainbow Fish. siliconchef pointed out Starboortz Fish, a libertarian re-telling of The Rainbow Fish in which a starfish has to earn the respect of others.

That got me to thinking. There aren’t really any libertarian children’s books I know of, at least not picture books. Rather than write entirely new ones to fill that void, what if we re-purposed existing books, but gave them a shiny new coat of libertarian paint?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the best libertarian children’s books.

Where the Free Beings Are, by Maurice Sendak

A downbeat allegory of how Americans are conditioned to be uncomfortable with freedom. Max escapes from an all-encompassing nanny state and sails to a land where his individual gifts are recognized and everyone is free. Over time Max finds this freedom disconcerting, and returns home where his government dole is waiting for him in the form of dinner.

Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, by Mo Willems

A brave pigeon struggles against the oppressive governmental agency that would deny him a bus driver’s license.

Puff the Magic Dragon, by Peter Yarrow, Lenny Lipton, and Eric Puybaret

Legalization of marijuana leads to little Jackie Paper growing up in a laissez-faire utopia called Honnalee.

Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, by Virginia Lee Burton

Facing stiff competition from more modern diesel-powered shovels, Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel Mary Anne win a contract by promising to dig the basement of a town hall in one day. They do so, but forget to leave a ramp for Mary Anne to drive back out. Undaunted, Mike takes his substantial bonus for a job well done and enhances his competitiveness in a global market by buying a diesel-powered shovel, leaving Mary Anne trapped in the building’s basement.

The Cat in the Hat Goes Splat, by Dr. Seuss

The narrator and his sister Sally exercise their Second Amendment rights to defend their home against a feline intruder.

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, by Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond

Giving a mouse a cookie leads one young boy to near-ruin, as the mouse’s demands escalate with every capitulation. Eventually the boy comes to his senses and kicks the freeloading mouse out of his house.

Curious George, by H. A. Rey

A man with a big yellow hat curtails George the monkey’s freedom by kidnapping him from Africa. Just as George is adapting to his new life as the man’s neglected pet, he experiences the governmental jackboot in the form of firemen, who throw George in jail. George escapes, but when he returns to his “friend” the man with the big yellow hat, the man locks him in a zoo run by the city. George leads a revolt, overthrows the keepers, and establishes a meritocracy with him at its head.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle

A caterpillar eats his way through a tremendous amount of produce, until a heroic farmer saves his crops and thus his profit by killing the caterpillar with insecticide.

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, by Bill Martin, Jr., John Archambault, and Lois Ehlert

In a poignant example of the tragedy of the commons, the lowercase letters a through z swarm up a coconut tree, nearly destroying it and hurting themselves when they fall off of it. When the number 1 buys the tree, installs a fence with concertina wire, and posts a NO TRESPASSING sign, the parents A through Z rejoice.

The Renting Tree, by Shel Silverstein

A boy learns a valuable lesson about the monetary worth of personal resources when a tree in his backyard charges him to swing on her branches or to take an apple.

What Do People Do All Day?, by Richard Scarry

Anthropomorphic animals find life’s meaning in selling their labor in a free-market economy.

Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose, by Dr. Seuss

When Thidwick the moose lets a bug live on his antlers, he soon comes to regret his decision as more and more animals crowd onto his antlers, and his fellow moose refuse to let him stay with the herd. It is not until he sheds his antlers and forces his squatters to take personal responsibility for their own lives that he can rejoin his herd and be a truly free moose.

Come to think of it, that’s exactly what Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose is about.

I read a lot of kids’ books when I was young, but I don’t remember most of them because I was a kid and had the memory of a goldfish on a three-day bender. Now that I’m an adult and reading even more kids’ books, I’ve discovered that there are good ones and bad ones. My major annoyance is with those that rhyme but do not scan. Perhaps the authors subscribe William Carlos Williams’s view of meter, but I’m guessing they’ve just never heard of scansion.

I’ve grown accustomed to treacly-sweet books. I’ve learned to set aside my annoyance with those books whose moral statements are all but spelled out in ten-thousand-point Copperplate. I’ve been willing to read and re-read books I think aren’t that good but that have caught Eli’s attention.

I have not learned to love The Giving Tree.

If you’re unfamiliar with Shel Silverstein’s book, let me summarize it in a dismissive and completely unfair manner. A boy loves playing on and around an apple tree, and the tree loves him. She provides him with branches to swing from and apples to eat and so forth. Then the boy grows up and his demands increase. He takes all of her apples to sell for money. He takes her branches to build a house. Eventually he takes her trunk to build a boat and sail away. At each step, the tree pretends she’s a doormat and happily gives the boy what he wants. At the end the boy, now a tired old man, returns and the tree offers her stump for him to rest on.

There are any number of possible interpretations. The book has an echo of truth about life and how we use each other, and how we let others use us, and how, even given that, in the end we can all find a measure of comfort. That’s not the problem. What makes me grind my teeth down another few millimeters is not really the book itself, but how some offer it as an example of what a mother’s love should be like towards her children.

If you take the story as a metaphor for parenting, I think it’s a horrible one. Throughout the book, the boy’s requests are described as wants. The only point at which he’s described as needing something is at the end, when he’s old and tired and needs a place to rest. There is a large difference between wants and needs, and children often can’t tell the difference. As a parent, it’s not my job to give my kids whatever they want. It’s to provide them with what they need, even when that’s the opposite of what they want.

It’s true that I don’t look to my kids to validate my parenting. I’m not waiting on them to be grateful for what I do. It’s also true that I’m willing to give everything to them. Regardless, I’m not willing to give into their wants to the point where they become self-centered assholes.

On the other hand, the book did inspire this particular comic from the Perry Bible Fellowship. That’s a net plus.

Last Tuesday we went to Soul Burger on our greater Huntsville restaurant tour. I wish their website did the place justice; sadly, it does not.

This place is heavy on personality. Most notably the owner, Kathy, is full of personality and she absolutely lights up the whole place. She’s at the register when you come in and she greets you with great big “Hello, Sweetiepie!” Don’t pretend you’ve been there before when you haven’t. She’ll catch you and start ringing her bell and yelling, “We’ve got virgins here! Ya’ll give these folks some love!” Sounds awful, right? It’s not–everyone claps and shouts their own greetings and pretty soon you feel like Norm on Cheers. The best part was while we were eating our lunch some more new people came in and Kathy gave them the treatment and Stephen and I were clapping along like we’d been there a hundred times before.

Stephen and I both ordered Soul Burgers. I got fries and he got onion rings. Kathy said they’d just started serving the onion rings so we should give them a try. The burger was great. It was a very nice burger for a great price. Easily worth driving over for on a regular basis. The onion rings are a different story. I’m pretty sure that the next time I go, I’m just going to order the onion rings and have a bite of someone else’s burger. Sonic may dip their onion rings in milkshake batter before they fry them, but Kathy dips hers in ambrosia first. In fact, I want to go get some right now. Better yet, I want to make Stephen go get me some right now.

Stephen asked what the “Big Daddy” was on the menu. Kathy said it was a pound of ground beef. While we were waiting on our food I noticed the Triple Big Daddy on the menu. Yeah, three pounds of ground beef for $10. If you order that when you go, please for all that is good and holy take a picture for me.

I give Soul Burger a big ol’ thumbs up. Next time you are in town, we’ll take you over to Soul Burger to meet Kathy and get some onion rings.

At least, it has adventure game. Zack and Wiki is, at its heart, a point-and-click adventure game. It’s fun seeing a game on a new console make all the same old adventure game mistakes.

They do a nice job of keeping things manageable by only letting you carry one thing at a time, which greatly simplifies the puzzles you can solve, and a number of the puzzles are satisfyingly twisty. They lean heavily on mechanical whatsits that you have to frob in just the right way, but they also are doing a good job of teaching you how to use Wiki’s special bell-ringing powers to solve puzzles. Each level that we’ve gone through has gotten just a little more complex. It’s a learning curve that is actually curved.

It’s a shame they use so many 1980s-era unfun elements. There’s a lot of unexpected, instant death, which they keep track of so you feel like a loser. Worse, when you die, you go back to the beginning of the level, unless you’ve bought a platinum ticket, which then gets used up. Money is limited, as you might expect, so you can get to where you have to play a level over and over and over again, dying with every mis-step. (I’m looking at you, “Keeper of the Ice”.) It discourages exploration and experimentation, which is the exact opposite of what you want to do in an adventure game.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s still fun. I’m just sad that no one on the design team seems to have paid close enough attention to the last thirty years of adventure games.

Here it is! All the Granade family Christmas photos you can handle. Seriously, if you aren’t a grandparent or LanaBob! you won’t hurt my feelings if you skip 75% of these. LanaBob! will flip through every one just to read the captions I so laboriously wrote for each one. Click on the photos to reach each group.

Christmas at our house
Low key present unwrapping before the trek to Arkansas.

Christmas with Misty’s Mom’s Family
When you have this many second cousins and great-grands in one room you take lots and lots of pictures.

Christmas with the Granades
How big is the boom when you have this many Granades in one room?

Christmas with Misty’s Dad’s Family (or Liza in the Tent)
I swear we were there for several days but all of the photos are of Liza in her tent.

This is from Christmas but probably the best photo we have of both of the kids. You know what this means? Big Christmas post soon!!

Ladies and gentlemen, Transformers in sixty seconds.

Okay, they cheated a bit and added in bits from Surf’s Up and Disturbia. I often enjoy montages like this. I used to point people to the Ultimate Buster Compilation, a video on YouTube that had every instance of Buster Bluth saying, “Hey, Brother,” in the series Arrested Development, but Fox squashed that right quick.

The montages don’t always work, though. Take a look at this one from the Saturday morning cartoon version of The Legend of Zelda.

The key to these montages is speed. You need to keep it snappy. A line like, “Well, excuuuuuuuuuse me, princess” is way too long. Worse, the guy who compiled it didn’t trim the clips enough, nor did he really have an end. I don’t know that it’s salvageable given the source material, but you might be able to get some laughs by following up five or six instances of Link saying the phrase with an extended montage of the phrase. Build it from a bunch of different clips like a note made of cut-out letters from newspapers, and extend the already-drawn-out vowel in “excuse”. You’d have, “Well [cut] ex[cut]cuuuu[cut]uuuuu[cut]uuuuu[cut]uuuuu[cut]uuuu[cut]uuuu…..[cut]uuuse me[cut]princess!”

At least this video shows us that Link was an ass.

You know, I didn’t realize a number of you would send me lolcards.

This year, for your birthday, we got smart: we outsourced your party to JumpZone! JumpZone! is a magical warehouse filled will bunches of inflatable two-story slides and bouncy obstacle courses. It’s so much fun, I’d like to have my birthday party, but it’s only for kids. You and thirteen of your friends ran around like crazed yappy poodles, and when it came time for cake and pizza you were all tired out, and best of all, we didn’t have to clean up afterwards. If we’d had fourteen four-year-olds in our house, there’d have been nothing left but a hole in the ground and maybe a single toilet. We’d stand outside the wreckage looking dazed, telling TV reporters that it “sounded like a freight train.”

The parties take place upstairs in the warehouse, so before the feeding frenzy begins, all kids have to gather at the bottom of the stairs and dunk their hands in sanitizer. It turns out that herding a large group of four-year-olds is like directing Anonymous, only with fewer rickrolls, so there was a lot of milling about. And in the confusion, you and Mackenzie the red-haired girl snuck a kiss.

Then Mackenzie turned around and kissed another boy on her other side. Welcome to dating!

This last year, your talking has turned into full-blown storytelling. It’s all stream-of-consciousness stuff that pours out of you, incorporating whatever you happen to see. It’s like having the writer’s room for Lost on speakerphone. “This is nail, he walks around when he’s wound up and sometimes he jumps. When he dies he gets tired and then he’s sad. One day he was moving on the carpet, and then he had to avoid Liza by going over her and to the wall. When he sees the pictures on the wall, he bounces off of them and flies through the galaxy looking for Power Stars.”

As you might have guessed by the Power Stars bit in that story, you’re also obsessed about videogames. It all started innocently enough, with you playing Tasty Planet. From there we moved to Katamari Damacy (both of them) and Lego Star Wars. Now all of your stories involve Mario, Darth Vader, General Grievous, and a big ball of stuff.

You’ve begun playing by yourself some, and though it’s never for more than ten to fifteen minutes at a time, it’s a nice break for your harried parents. We get to tend to Liza or do chores around the house. Sometimes we sit and stare, doing nothing, just for the novelty.

I know, I know, in a few years you won’t want to play with me at all, and I should savor the moments while I can. Parenting is lumpy like crunchy peanut butter. What would be wonderful spread out over fifteen or twenty years is instead compressed into a few months or years. If we seem cross with you, please be kind. We’ll go eat some chocolate and get some sleep and be better tomorrow.

You’ve become obsessed with building things. Legos are old hat by now — you’re on to the hardcore stuff, mainlining Tinkertoys and Lincoln Logs. I say “you”, but what I really mean is “us”, or more accurately “me”. You’ll put something together, like a banger (a single Tinkertoy hub and a long stick that’s useful for banging into things), and then demand that I build a sixty-piece robot that you saw in the teeny instruction booklet, the booklet that takes the words “instruction” and stretches it to cover a single blurry picture with no annotation.

The biggest change in our lives has been Liza’s arrival. You’ve adapted to her marvelously. At first she was a lump of baby and you didn’t care, but now you’re alternatively thrilled with her laughing delightedly at you and annoyed with her chewing your toys. Being a big brother is a tough gig, and she’ll get on your nerves a lot. Try to bear with her. She thinks you’re the coolest thing since mashed sweet potatoes.

One thing I’ve really enjoyed is watching you develop your thinking skills. You do your OCD parents proud when you announce, “I have a plan.” You don’t actually make plans, though, until forced to by us wanting you to do something different. We’ll ask you to clean your room, and you’ll say, “I have a plan. You, dad, and I will play marble tower after dinner while mom takes care of Liza and then we will have bath and after that I’ll clean my room.” It’s one of your set of bargaining and manipulation tools. Another one is, “I was just…”

ME: Ew! Did you just put that stick in your mouth?
YOU: I was just…running it over my lips.

Add to it “maybe we can…”, which you say when you want to give an alternative to going to bed or taking your medicine.

We also made the mistake of joking about you having an Emergency Show one day when you’d watched your full allotment of TV but Liza was sick and needed attention. “Okay,” we told you, “you can have an Emergency Show.” Since then you’ve asked for Emergency Computer Time, Emergency Wii, and Emergency Treat.

You’ve started pegging some of your plans to nebulous future dates that hopefully won’t come. Up to two days before your birthday you were announcing, “When I am four, then I will give up my pacifier.” The day you turned four, you explained, “When I am older, like five or six, then I will give up my pacifier.”

I was most proud of your planning the day you got lost in Babies “R” Us. Mom and I miscommunicated, and you ended up wandering away. Distraught, you went to the front of the store. When an employee asked you what was wrong, you told her, “My name is Eli and my mom is Misty. Can you find her for me?” That’s especially impressive because we had never told you what to do if you got lost. We’re the parenting equivalent of people who can’t remember to water their plants.

I haven’t been as patient with you as I should be. The stress of dealing with two kids has made me snappish and tired. Who knew that two kids are four times the work! Parenting is full of things that seem so important when you’re in the midst of them, but in retrospect were no big deal. It’s as if I keep climbing Mount Everest, only to look back when I’m at the top and discover that I’ve really been trudging across Oklahoma.

When I come home from work, you open the door and run to me, giggling. You talk to me non-stop from then until bedtime. Some days I’m so exhausted that I wish you’d go away and give me some peace.

Do me a favor: never make that wish come true.