good clean fun

i don't usually send out mass junk emails, but as i gleefully sent the sneezing baby panda youtube link to everyone i know this morning it became quite obvious to me that one of two things is going on: 1) i have gone soft in my old age or 2) i'm a sea of contradictions. evidence: the last time i sent out a youtube link to everyone i know it was dick in a box.

don't get me wrong. i think there's a time and place for poor taste... usually concentrated in my daily 30 minute fix of the family guy. that said, i'm growing quite weary of the standard, "family centered" sitcoms which, under a very thin veil of propriety, are chock-full of crass humor not really appropriate for families. it goes like this: our morbidly obese hero siddles up the bar with his shifty friends and through a series of winks and nudges conveys a sentiment to the tune of, "hey, it's my birthday today, and you know what that means... it's the one day of the year that my ordinarily frigid (but disproportionately thin, attractive, and stylish) wife releases her inner porn star."

so i guess it's no wonder that i've started to appreciate things that, while funny, truly are benign. hence my love of the sneezing panda, and of penguin in the backpack story. from the moment i heard it i LOVED the story of the 4 year old smuggling the penguin home from the aquarium, and delightedly repeated it to everyone i knew, never for a moment suspecting that it was urban legend. now i am heartbroken, jaded, and sad. i really enjoyed having such a funny story to tell that was appropriate for all audiences, that offended no one, and always made people laugh. i suppose i could continue telling it, but it's just not the same. this demoralzing event has left me so cynical, in fact, that i even have to question the sneezing panda. is it all just a contrived hoax, slipped into youtube to sucker gullible types like myself?

while i remain indignant about the factitious penguin story, and am tickled pink to have been shown the sneezing panda video, i do feel compelled to announce my steadfast belief that no woman actually named her twin babies lemonjello and orangejello. no fewer than 10 people have told me that they personally encountered these infants. this, my friends, really is urban legend. it's a story told coast to coast, that, if true, would certainly bump lemonjello and orangejello above jacob and emily as the most popular baby names in america. i don't buy it.