It's Never Too Soon To Learn That Squishy Turtles, By Their Nature, Can Never Be Your Friend

So basically there's this class of baby book that's designed for very small babies. We (read: I) didn't know about this type of book before Animal came along. My recollection of children's books skewed toward Seuss and The Runaway Pancake. Like a lot of stuff about early childhood, it all kind of runs together in a blob between age 0 and middle school, and it's unclear what happened when and, therefore, what happens when.

So this one baby book that we got — I don't know if we just got it or if it's something we (read: Jen) asked for — is called Squishy Turtle and Friends. And every time we look at it, it kind of blows our minds.

I mean, sure, Squishy Turtle and Friends is only six pages long, but what do we know about what babies like? Maybe they don't need a complicated multi-story plot. Maybe they don't care about character development. Maybe they're not wowed by tremendously adept turns of phrase.

Look, I get that half the joy of "books" like Squishy Turtle is that they're crinkly and children can suck on them. But every time we read — or more accurately, allow Animal to manhandle it — we keep thinking that the book seems rather, I don't know, thin.

I don't know how Fair Use laws apply to children's books, especially when they're "tactile," but it's difficult to discern how much of a six-page book can be excerpted. Seriously, where's the cutoff? Oh well, here we go.

Like all good children's books, Squishy Turtle can be a little dark. Take the ominous first line, for example: "Little fish with shiny scales are fleeing from alarming whales!" Turtle moves along in this vein for five more pages, illustrating a murky world of inter-species violence.

Not to sound like a dick, but the line "Gently bobbing up and down is how a sea horse gets around" (page 4) is crying out to be rewritten, in the bawdy way. Let your imagination go with that one.

The final lines — "The ocean floor is deep and dark. It's where you'll find this hungry shark." — make you think you're missing something. Yes, yes — it's a baby book — but why treat them like they're illiterate?

Now you may be wondering, as we were, if this is Squishy Turtle and Friends, well then where and when the fuck does the title character show up? That goes unanswered.

At this point, however, you have to wonder if there's a sort of commentary going on in the book's title. Yes, Squishy Turtle never actually appears in Squishy Turtle, but is that because of Squishy Turtle's inherent makeup? I.e., he/she is squishy, and thus equivocal? At the very least, it's worth considering.

The whole thing was kind of perplexing, so Jen finally just Googled it, and came across the Amazon page for the book. And that's where we saw it: When Squishy Turtle was first published back in 2003 it was eight pages!

And after reading the comments, we learned the Horrible Truth About Squishy Turtle: Back in 2007 it was cut down to six measly pages.

So in cutting down the books to six pages, Squishy Turtle joins Dannon Yogurt, Dial Soap and every other example of "wonderful new packaging" that seeks to cut costs by literally cutting corners.

Look, do I dislike Turtle? No. Clearly not. But I was disappointed by Turtle, in part for his squishiness and in part because I think it's just a bad example to set for the children. Because, after all, when it comes down to it, that's all that matters.

Do I Have To?

Chipper Jones' Farewell Tour Continues!

So, having seen two episodes of HBO's Girls, I don't mind talking about what I dislike about it. It's not so much that I necessarily dislike it as it is that there are a few things about it that just don't work. And perhaps I should mention that while I think I saw all — or most — of the first episode, the DVR of the second episode cut out in parts because of bad weather, which is because we have this dish on the roof because there's no FiOS in our neighborhood which is probably because all the cables from the cable TV thingys kind of float along the tops of branches in the area between the backyards of the houses on our street and the backyards of the houses on the other street, which means — or at least I think it means — that it's hard to string fiber optic cables back there, even though I saw some dudes from Time Warner stringing something back there the other week, so theoretically it'd be possible to get FiOS, but for the time being we don't have it, which is why the DVR of Girls cut out in parts — because satellite TV is kind of dopey, and because the cable packages are really expensive.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure I had to change a diaper during the second episode, and I'm still not really that quick at changing diapers, though I gather that a lot of guys take pride in being able to change a diaper like a NASCAR crew changes tires.

All of which is to say, I feel totally justified in saying that I completely one-hundred percent basically "get" Girls, the problems of which I will address immediately below.

Which starts here.

First, while watching the first episode I totally forgot the thing about how the show's creator is this decade's Harmony Korine or whatnot. What I remember thinking was, "Wow, this writer really thinks these characters are idiotic," which is a problem if you, as the viewer, are supposed to feel somehow invested — or at the very least interested in — the characters. For example, the protagonist is kind of a dipshit. Also, the lives of twenty-somethings in New York City are really fucking boring. Also, the New York that twenty-somethings inhabit is really fucking boring, like reading someone's Tumblr. And it doesn't help that the writer knows this, because then the characters seem that much less defined, and that much more stupid.

Which is why I was like, "Wow, I wonder who wrote this," which is when I saw the creator's name and Googled her and remembered the story about how she's like 23 or something, which actually made a lot of sense, because I while young writers tend to "write what they know," smart young writers will feel dumb about the limits of what they know and, in an almost self-hating kind of way, tear their characters apart. Which, like I said, ends up being kind of a drag to watch. I mean, sure, yeah, it's fun to laugh at dopey twenty-somethings, but this just kind of feels sadistic. If this were written by a 45-year-old man, you'd call it misogynistic. If this were written by a 35-year-old woman it would seem like satire. That you can see it as "autobiographical" or "semiautobiographical" gives it an earnest and ultimately kind of pathetic feel. At some point you can't really watch it without thinking about this aspect of the writing, because it kind of stands out.

That's not to say that parts of Girls aren't funny — there are some funny vignettes, especially in the second episode — but they're still just kind of painful to watch — and not just the sex scenes, which are what they are, but some of the job-related scenes and every time the protagonist tries to think of herself as a memoirist. And probably a few more which I'm too tired to correctly remember . . .

It's really hard to do unlikeable protagonists successfully. One of the strangest books that "works" in this respect is The Ginger Man, whose protagonist is such a huge dickhead that it gets silly after a while. Ultimately, I think most works of art with unrelenting protagonists tend to work better as think pieces than as something enjoyable.

(A quick aside: The more the protagonist/writer portrays herself as a loser writer who is chasing a faraway dream, the more annoying it becomes to watch the actual writer/protagonist get such success — it's a sort of faux modesty that rapidly turns into a kind of fuck you; maybe this is why people want to hate the whole thing.)

But I think there is one way Girls could really work well: Give the protagonist special superpowers to either fight crime or save Gotham from evil forces or something equivalent. If you think about it, it's perfect: Sure, the protagonist looks like a clueless rich kid slacker who is toiling away in obscurity but she's actually fighting on the front lines in the existential battle between good and evil. Now that's how you pull people in! It's like Dexter without the gore. It's like if Spiderman lived in Greenpoint. It's like if that stupid Jason Schwartzman show were actually good.

It's not too late to do this. And think about how pleasantly surprised you'd be if this turned out to be the case. In fact, you could probably make any bad show really awesome. What if all of these dreary David Milch series had a character with superpowers? Think how differently we'd perceive West Wing if C.J. used her powers to go rogue to really take care of Qumar. What if I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant was actually I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant . . . And A Superhero?

I may sound facetious but trust me, I'm not.