AARP : Declares Kids Shows A Danger For Senior Citizens.

Editors Note:

I am going to interrupt my normal subject matter with some pieces that I wrote a while back. Over the next few days, I will be posting some satirical material. I hope you will enjoy them.

 -Mark

PHOENIX, AZ. –
Researchers for The American Association of Retired People have found that senior citizens who are forced to endure certain children’s programs have an 80 percent higher mortality rate than the national average. During a double blind study, people over the age of 50 who were exposed to the insane babble of Barney, Tele-Tubbies, or Veggie Tales videos while babysitting their grandchildren were likely to commit suicide 200 times more often than those in the control group.

  Senior men over the age of 73 were found to have a higher incidence stroke or heart attack after watching "The Doodle Bops", presumably because the chick is kinda hot. One heart attack victim, Harold Niemeyer, was interviewed in a Miami- Dade I.C.U. after experiencing a myocardial infarction. He stated: “I would still like to tickle her ‘Ivory’s’ and not the ones on her keyboard dress, if you know what I mean.”  Mr. Niemeyer’s wife then reportedly pulled the plug on his respirator.


Other more extreme cases were found during the case studies. Three percent of all grandparents who were repeatedly subjected to Second Hand Singing, or “S.H.S.” from toddlers who continually and loudly sang songs The Barney Song, were actually found to die of massive brain trauma.
Even the musical numbers of seemingly innocuous Sesame Street characters such as Elmo and Cookie Monster were found to have correlation to nervous breakdowns with repeated exposures. Mayo Clinic Director of Geriatric Medicine, Dr. Schlomo Chen, weighed in with his latest findings; “The unfortunate truth of the matter is that many of these children’s songs have catchy tunes, and become self propagating ear worms that the victim continues to hear long after the children have turned off their videos or CD’s and have gone to sleep. In fact, hearing the “Elmo Song” one too many times was reportedly the reason that actor James Gandolfini perished while vacationing with his family in Italy, earlier this year.

As it turns out, “C” is not for cookie, it is for “crazy”.
 

Adult subjects over the age of 80 were found to have markedly lower susceptibility to S.H.S. Clinical researchers were initially bewildered by the drop in traumatic incidents, until it was discovered that post octogenarians either were completely deaf, or no longer were aware enough of their environment to give a damn.

Ya Don't Say!

I am rounding the corner into a new phase of middle aged fatherhood. One where both of my children are past being babies and are on their way to normal little children. It is a relief in one sense, as they are getting are articulate and able to express their needs and desires without crying and pointing. " I want some juice", or "Can I have an XBox?" Unfortunately, they are also able to express their feelings of outrage at having a older and therefore defective father. I get asked questions like: "Daddy, why are you fat?" or "My friend Tommy says his grandmother knew you in high school, Is that true?" and my favorite; "Daddy, when I grow up can I be better than you?"

One problem (and by extension, their problem) that I am experiencing  is selective and non selective hearing loss. The older I get the more I tune out. In my defense, there is a lot of noise to filter. Kids are always humming, screaming, or incessantly begging. The TV is always on. Washer and dryer always running. The wife constantly crying out to God to forgive for whatever she did so she can be set free from this hell.

I have developed a hearing filter that allows only certain kinds of sounds in. Calls to dinner. Items breaking or about to get broken get priority processing. inappropriate dialogue on broadcast media. Any of these will trigger a physical response which sets my body in motion to stop the potentially damaging behavior. Case in point, I was making breakfast this morning and heard something from PBS that triggered the filter. I leaped into action and changed the channel because the narrator said they were going to have a dinosaur *mating* game. My feeling is that if I cannot watch mating rituals on late night cable TV, then my kids cannot see it during the day. There were of course dueling squeals of displeasure, and my wife came to the rescue and switched it back, because they were only having a dinosaur NAMING game. My bad.

I may be at a bit of a disadvantage because our household is frequented by lots of non native English speaking peoples as well as those who do speak English as their first language, they just learned it in a different part of the world. I routinely have to mentally transliterate three year old,  British, Chinese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and various Latin accents. I have gotten good at it and sometimes am called on to translate one accent to another for the benefit of our diverse gatherings.That being said, sometimes the filter does not work as well as it should, sort of like the word recognition program needs tweaking.  

Sometimes I can blame the misunderstandings on toddler speak, for example:
"He has a bag eye."                             (He is a bad guy.)
"Daddy, Cam eye have a gun?"           (Daddy, can I have some gum?)
"My wand duh no men."                      (I want some ramen.)

 Other times what I think I hear is plainly inexplicable:
"The green plate is alert."                    (We are going to be late to church!)
 "This puddle pizza wuzzle fit!"          (This puzzle piece does not fit.)

My hands down favorite however was:
"I sh** on France!"                              (I ripped my pants)

My wife says I need to have my hearing checked, but all I hear is; "Unique calves earring stacks." I think she wants me to get something from the dairy store, but I just do not know what.