How My Childhood Got Poohed On

Say no to the Pooh

I like bears. This fascination most likely stems from my obsession with the Werner Herzog documentary “Grizzly Man” which I’ve seen more times than I can count. My fantasy football team is the Sheboygan Grizzly Men. I have used bears as unit of physical strength measurement before. For example: A bear has one “Bear” of strength, A T-rex would have like 15 “Bears” of strength, Batman would have like six “Bears”, and so on. Bears are something that I enjoy talking about and enjoy learning about for strange reasons. There is one bear however who I do not approve of. This bear stole part of my childhood, part that I will never get to experience again. He and his band of animals with personality disorders destroyed something that created some of my oldest fond memories.

This year for spring break I’m heading to Disney world with some friends. This will mark my first return to the most magical place on earth since 2001 when I was in fourth grade. Before that I had been there once before. I was very young, probably four or five years old. I remember this trip to Disney world probably more than the rest of that year of my life. Specifically I remember spending lots of time with my dad.

I am the youngest of four children and on that trip to Disney world I was too short to ride most of the rides.  My Dad, who couldn’t ride most of the rides because he has problems with motion sickness would stay with me and we’d go to other attractions. The most memorable instance of this was when the rest of our family went on the “Space Mountain” roller coaster. My dad and I found a ride that I was tall enough to ride in “Mr. Toad’s wild ride”. This ride, to the four or five year old Jeremy was the greatest thing on the planet. I remember riding it 3 times while waiting for my siblings and my mom to get through the line and ride “space mountain” just once. I’m pretty sure we went and rode “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” at least one more time while waiting for the rest of the family a different time.

Fast forward to 2001 when I returned to the Mecca of childhood dreams. While searching for the same ride that captivated my young heart. I came across the spot that it should have been only to find it missing. In its place was a Giant stupid bear with a red t-shirt and no pants staring back at me. “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride” was replaced with “Winnie The Pooh’s Honey Pot Adventures”. This is inexcusable. This is why I hate that bear. I have since boycotted all Winnie The Pooh related things.

I have really never spent a lot of time with any donkeys but if I ever meet one he better be nothing far from spritely, I won’t have anything to do with him if he even resembles that sad sack of a donkey who is friends with Winnie. This may make any sort of grand canyon trip a little more difficult but  I can live with that so long as I am in no way showing compassion towards anything related to that fuzzy bear.

If I hear Kenny Loggins I better be taking the highway to the danger zone, cutting a few feet loose, or possibly learning about how my parents can’t do musically related things, because if I hear “Return to Pooh Corner”: See ya later Kenny. “Count all the bees in the hive?!” Really Mr. Loggins? Hey kids, found a bee hive? Why don’t you get close enough to count them. Not to mention that any other song featuring the words “Back to the days of Pooh” would seem really gross.

Many people in Sheboygan might know of the pooh bear that is high in a tree across Taylor drive from festival foods. It has been stuck up there since I can remember and last time I paid attention it still was. I sadly was not the person who marooned the bear in the tree but seeing him in his weathered state gives me hope that one day, he will fall from his tree and be ripped to pieces by raccoons or something.

I urge all who read this to join me in this boycott. How long will it be before your favorite theme park ride is taken over by an animal who wears a shirt but has not the decency to wear a pair of pants. It’s the right thing to do.

Dear classmates,

To quote one of my favorite series of online videos “What are you doing? What, what. What are you doing?” I have always wanted to voice some complaints about some of the brilliant students with whom I attend class. So I’m going to. There have been many people who I’ve shared a class with who have been distracting, disrespectful, and just plain dumb. These individuals make me worried that our standards for who we let into higher education are too low.

I will start with a gentleman who I’ve had the pleasure of having a few classes with already. We’ll call him “Restroom Jones.” Now Restroom Jones shows up for classes about 60% of the time. When he does grace the class with his presence however he takes a five minute bathroom break during the middle of a lecture. This is every time we have class!? Now I understand having a schedule to do your business, that’s all fine and good. That however, cannot be the case with Mr. Jones due to the following evidence. During one class period he left the room twice for five minutes apiece, and I’ve seen him do this in consecutive classes that are just an hour apart. Unless Restroom Jones has a severe case of irritable bowel syndrome, it is clear to me that he thinks so little of the person behind the podium who has a Ph. D that he feels he does not need their assistance in passing the class.

My next case is another gentleman who was a lab partner of mine for a science coarse, we’ll call this upstanding student “Ipod McLaptop.” Now, Mr. McLaptop went to a prestigious school out of state last year and made a point to tell everyone around him. He talked about the great parties that he went to and all the classes that he would skip there. All this, along with talking about how smart of a guy he was. I mean that’s how he got into POSU “Prestigious Out of state University” (I know that could stand for something else, I’ll let you decide) last year. Unfortunately for Mr. McLaptop due to the quantity of aforementioned skipping and partying he failed out of his old school and ended up back here. Now he shows up to most of his classes, however when he does he constantly plays games and texts friends on his iphone. During lecture and lab, Mr. McLaptop can be seen with one ear-bud in his ear at all times. If you sit close enough to him, you can hear the bass from his music, When he is not texting his friends, he can almost surely be found surfing facebook on his laptop without any attempt to pretend that he is paying attention. Tapping away at his keyboard when no one is even lecturing.

These are people who may have had the high school GPA’s to get into higher learning, but that does not make them acceptable student material. It’s people like this that should be removed and have their tuition used for the people who could not afford tuition but are willing to put forth an effort to respect the instructors and the learning process.

Family

Families are bodies. They work when all the pieces can collaborate and function together. Without there are few things that can be missing from it and it still works. Every body is unique. My body lost its heart a long time ago. When this happened it forced the other parts to work harder to survive. The brain in all it’s amazing glory somehow found a way to pump the blood through the veins all the while it thought as well. After all it had the rest of the body to care for. This went on for some time. All the while the body kept working. At a slower pace, but it kept moving. Because it had to. The heart if it were there would not have let it down so the brain and the rest of the body were not going to let the heart down in its absence. The body could feel itself moving slower, but it kept moving and was content to move at that speed. The brain used what blood it needed for itself to give to the rest of the body parts. The brain, though it learned to pump the blood out of necessity, couldn’t do it as well as the heart could. After all it’s just one organ. So the brain found a new heart. And the heart became part of the body. This heart was different. It pumped the blood differently and the blood was not the same.  The new heart came from a body of its own. This heart was damaged, but so was its new body. When the transplant was complete the body felt different. It didn’t see how hard the brain struggled doing the thinking and pumping the blood at the same time. Some of the tissue rejected the new heart. But other parts took to it. This new body was full again and the brain was happy to have a heart. And the heart was happy to have a brain. The brain thought of ways to repair the heart and the heart was able to pump the blood to the brain that it so desperately needed. If it weren’t for this new damaged heart, the brain would have ceased to function and  the body would have died, leaving just parts, not a functioning whole. And if the heart had no new body it would have remained damaged until it to ceased to exist.

I ‘m just thankful for the transfusion.

The origin of the Kung FU Custodian

In the wake of my last blog, I was feeling a bit complain-y so I've decided to steer clear of complaints this week.  I decided to instead shed some light on the origins of my url for this blog.

For years now I have been using the moniker KungFuCostodian as my xbox live gamer-tag as well as numerous other places where a unique name is required. The name came from my favorite cartoon series as a child: "Hong Kong Phooey." To my 6 year old brain, this cartoon is about a dog who is a janitor at a police station who becomes a super hero who uses karate to defeat his foes. I remember singing the theme song while running around my house at an early age. I don't know what I loved about karate so much, but apparently every other kid in the 90's loved it too. I know a large chunk of the movies I watched with my brothers centered around karate and martial arts... or ninjas. Movies like Three ninjas, Surf ninjas, Three ninjas: 2, Teenage mutant ninja turtles, Three ninjas 3... Ahhhh those were the days.

It wasn't until recently that I watched some of this karate based entertainment as an adult. Watching "Hong Kong Phooey" I can now see that it is clearly a riff on the black-sploitation films of the 1970's, and it's vaguely racist and sexist. The dog/janitor/superhero has the voice of a sole station radio dj and he and his cat sidekick make a complete mockery of martial arts. The only female character on the show is a phone board operator with a jersey accent that would annoy Fran Drescher.

Though I can identify the bias and misrepresentation of these characters I can't honestly say that I care I don't think that this had a profound effect on me growing up, even though it was my favorite cartoon. The thing is that I was a kid. I never heard Hong Kong Phooy's voice as a black guy, I heard my favorite dog super hero. There's a lot of talk about childhood development  in relation to television exposure and what they see on tv. I think tv does has a lot less of an effect on kids than is thought. At least, I think it did on me.

Crime and Punishment

I work in the customer service industry and have for the last five years. I generally do not despise my position behind the counter helping people to pay for their various goods. Many times however my day is soured by rudeness and lack of decency. It is for this reason that I would like to offer some new propositions for a punishment system for rudeness that this world needs badly. I will present a situation that I have encountered and provide an example of the system of punishments for this.

My first instance of note comes from my current job. I work at a convenience store/gas station. This is the most frequent situation that Irks just about everyone who works in my position. A guest will approach the counter swiftly, toss a bill onto the counter, mumble a pump number and sprint for the door. Often times these people cut through a line just to do this. I’m not sure if this sort of behavior is just the case with the purchase of gasoline or if people do it other places. I can’t imagine paying my rent by tossing a handful of cash in the face of my landlord and saying my apartment number as I leave her office. I wonder if these same people toss their insurance card at a doctor and say, “gastric bypass.” This is not socially acceptable behavior and ought to be punished. Here’s how J. I don’t think that there should be a fine of any kind for these people. I would like a more creative solution. I think that we should be allowed to tag these people in the way that scientists tag animals that they are studying. Give them a nice orange tag on their ear or something. This tag should signify to everyone else that this man or woman is in a hurry. They’ve got places to be and don’t have time for trivial things like ensuring that they’ve properly paid for seventy five dollars worth of gas.  So from that point on these people should be prioritized. We will put these people first in all lines and put them on the top of all the lists. Up to this point this doesn’t really seem like a punishment, here’s the catch. Everyone that they pass in line should have the opportunity to punch them right in the face. This face punch would be totally legal and permissible by the law. The passed people would not be required to do any punching, but they would have the legal right to. This will insure that these people will learn what is really worth treating other people with a complete lack of respect.

Now, I have been in a hurry before, but I can’t imagine a situation where in I could act that rude to complete strangers. I have, in my time in the industry, learned to brush off people like this for the most part. I am however still wishing for there to be some kind of universal justice system for people who completely lack courtesy and respect for people whom they do not know.