Idiosyncratic

This post is, as its title suggest, a little jumble of things that are puzzling and delighting me lately. In no particular order, I ponder:

The name of the show "Pinky Dinky Doo." My children love this show. I do, too. What's not to love about a brightly colored cartoon in which the little brother has all manner of (perfectly normal) fears and worries, and his big sister soothes them by making up stories that serve as little allegories for working through anxieties? It's creative, full of "big fancy words," and fun.

And yet, my three-year-old persists in mangling the name of this show. She consistently calls it "Kinky Kanky Doodle." Her brother did the very same thing at this age (when she was a mere infant, so it's not as though she learned this pronunciation from him). I want to know: do TV show developers not test out the names of those shows on little children for purposes of confirming pronunciation? Because while "Pinky Dinky Doo" is a great name, "Kinky Kanky Doodle" sounds a little too much like her big sister who has an unmentionable job.

In other, unrelated, TV news, I have discovered a great new HBO series about a woman detective in Botswana. It's called The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, based on a series of ten novels by Alexander McCall Smith. It's filmed on location, and it is sweet, beautiful, fascinating, well-written, and so many other things. It explores the cultural of being a "lady detective" with humor and strength. I simply love it and never want it to end.

Not such a TV head? Did you know that there is a whole new genre of romance novels out there these days called "Bonnet Novels"? And that they are set in Amish communities and feature chastely intimate (no, that's not an oxymoron), apparently fascinating stories that are selling by the MILLIONS? Members of Amish communities are writing fan mail to authors confessing to sneaking the books (which some communities have banned due to religious differences) under the covers to read at night. But lots of NON-Amish women are loving them too. It's a fascinating world when Pride and Prejudice and Zombies can be #7 on the New York Times Bestseller list in the same week that The Secret (an Amish Bonnet novel) can be #19.

And if sports is more your thing, how about this? Sport Stacking. I'm not making this up. It's a huge sport with a worldwide organization. You train for it. You enter matches devoted to it. You have 12 cups and have to stack them into various pre-determined pyramids and back again as fast as you can. How fast? Under six seconds. Doesn't sound that impressive? Take a look at this video and be amazed.



And finally, today I am pondering: what does it mean to be 39? And will I like it? Perhaps I should take up a new sport this year? Do you think I'm too old to start wildly stacking cups?