People believe all sorts of things, don’t they. My daughter believes in fairies, and I have only myself to blame. Sunday she attended a birthday party convened by a Mom whose artistic ingenuity is apparently boundless – we were told it was a fairy-themed event, so everyone showed up in costume. When I gathered Gnat the appointed hour the little girls were all sitting in a circle opening presents, remarkably well-behaved – but fairies aren’t boisterous, are they. The assembled parents looked on with sugary expressions, soaking up the perfect cuteness of the moment. If we’d had a boy I would have enjoyed the sight of ten Transformer bots stomping around promising defeat and submission, I suppose, but it’s moments like these that make me glad I have a girl. In terms of sweetness and longevity, they’re the Jolly Ranchers of children.

Last week’s hurly-burly screechathon aside.

The gift bags were handed out with the request that parents open them with the child. Very well: when we got home, we opened up the bag to find instructions for attracting a snow fairy. (The bag had  a picture of said creature,  hand-painted by the Mom.) There was a small silver platter, fairy food (blue and white jelly beans), special gloves to wear while preparing the meal, bath fizzies for a prepatory ablution, lip gloss, and small note cards on which one could write a greeting to your fairy. We had everything except the snow. Gnat wanted to try to lure a fairy anyway, figuring that there might be other sprites about, so she wrote a letter of introduction on the card. We put some food on the platter and I set it outside my office window, secured to the sill with duct tape, and that was that.

Before going to be around 1:17 AM, bleary but still jazzed from “24” season 5 (It’s President Twitchy McNixon vs the Terrorists From The Unnamed Homeland! So far it’s great, and I have to applaud the set directors; the presidential retreat is a bitchin’ 60s pad) I realized that I should probably do something with the fairy food. So I chose a nice fairy font, wrote a thank note from “Fairicia,” folded it and put it under the plate. Went to bed.

It was the first thing she checked the next day. She was amazed and delighted and took the note to school to show all her friends. If she’d bumped the computer desk the screen would have popped on and shown what I’d had up before I hit the sack: the document on which I’d faked the fairy note. That would have been bad. That would have been a DaVinci Code Moment, right there. Belief, sundered in an instant. As it was I hoped she didn’t find the pieces of candy cane we’d set out for Fairicia; I’d stuffed them deep in the trash. Half of parenting is hiding the truth about magic, it seems, and the other half is telling it.

But people believe all sorts of odd things. There was a brief discussion at the Corner about the “war on science,” and I mostly agree; as with most things, people favor something when it fits snugly into a general worldview, and against something when it fails to make that satisfying click. I’ve pro-science. In general. I believe in evolution, because I think to disbelieve in evolution is like watching one of those elaborate displays of falling dominos, and saying the dominos aren’t falling. Obviously they are; it’s a question of whether the first one fell because there was a minor earthquake or because a finger tipped it over. And of course there’s the matter of who set them up. But you know what I mean. I am also disinclined to catastrophic predictions about hugely complex systems, which is why I don’t believe global warming is the grandest threat to humanity, and don’t believe it is a moral issue that trumps all secondary concerns. Which is why I’m always amused by remarks like this, from the Guardian’s George Monbiot:

Every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.

(via Blair.) George is quite down on airplanes, and shan’t stop ripping them until he does get buckled. Planes destroy the atmosphere. And this, to make a non sequitar, from the sort of fellow who would probably deride provincial Americans for not having passports. Which they would presumably use to visit Europe. But only once! He does offer this suggestion:

Some services would constantly circle the orbital roads; others would travel up and down the motorways that connect to them. You would change from one coach to another at the junctions. Just 200 coaches on the M25, Storkey calculates, would ensure an average waiting time of between two and three minutes. They would be given dedicated lanes and priority at traffic lights, disentangling them from the cars that now hold them up and force them to bunch.

That might be fine and practical, but I don’t think it’s going to stop the planet from burning up. I mention this, why? No reason. But it fit with something else I noted on the daily wanderings: a blog from the creator of Ren and Stimpy concerning a “lost” episode. O how I loved the first few R&S cartoons; I had a plush Ren in my DC office, staring down on Pennsylvania Avenue. YOU EEDIIOTS! But the latter work paled, and I didn’t much like the rest of his stuff. The “lost” episode is described as perhaps the best  R & S ever by his associates, and perhaps they were being kind, it being the holidays and all. It’s awful. Animation aside, it’s not funny. But it’s not really supposed to be, because it makes a Serious Point, namely, Life Sucks. Millions of 17-year-olds who had their iTunes accounts throttled back by Dad to $20 a month agree, so there must be some wisdom there, right? Well, the cartoon concerns Ren’s attempts to convince optimistic Stimpy – silly, hapless, idiot Stimpy – that life sucks, so he tells him the story of the Children’s Crusade, something John K. informs us that “many history books say actually happen.” Helluva research job, that. You can get the actually-happened details from an old Cecil Adams column, for heaven’s sake. But the details aren’t very satisfying, since they’re messy and confused and wrapped up in the values of a distant era. They may indeed prove that Life Sucked Then, but as a brief against the General Undeniable Sucktitude of Life, they lack.

But where’s the fun in that? Who gets props for a cartoon that states that life is dear and precious and good, considering the alternative, and that life in these United States, to quote the bible of middlebrow edification, is pretty damn remarkable, considering the sorry heap of squalor and grue and pestilence that generally beset most talkative bipeds since we invented shoes and government?  No, Life Sucks, and if you want proof, well, take a look at a 13th century legend as related by an adenoidal chihuahua.

Maybe it’s me. Watch it for yourself.

Via Mark at Boing Boing, whose take on this matter was different than mine. On the other hand, we are in complete agreement with this. Next up: Mr Weatherbee loses 60 pounds, lest he promote bad body images, and Jughead gets off the weed. Seriously: who looks at Dan DeCarlo drawings of women, and thinks "Oh, I can improve on that." It's like asking Ralph Steadman to draw Gwen Stacy.

Related, sort of: yesterday’s tossed-off comments on animation couldn’t have come at a worst time, since they appeared the day Joseph Barbera reached the end of a long, long life. I’m sorry to say I had the exact same thought as a FARK headline: Joseph Barbera dies. Funeral procession to pass same three buildings every two seconds

I’ve sniped at H-B cartoons for a long time, with good reason. But a good Tom and Jerry is in a class by itself (I root for the cat, myself) and a good Tex Avery Droopy has no peers. Watch one of those, compare it to a Ren and Stimpy disquisition on crappy stupid life, and tell me which culture you’d prefer. I’ll take the monotonal dog, and you can quote me on that.

Ghost Signs? You want ghost signs? A preview of the site is here. Enjoy, and I’ll see you tomorrow.