It’s hip these days to be a young-old-lady, or at least it is in my world. So why not take a little inspiration from our favorite ladies in the AARP crowd?
Month: September 2014
This is your brain on Fraggle Rock
Oh yeah. It is definitely Friday afternoon.
Modern American Girl Looks
Two posts in one day?! I know it’s nuts. What’s the reason for this double-header you might ask? Well, I want to try this “write for ten minutes only” thing and see how far I get. So here I go!
First of all, I have been on a Polyvore binge for the past 24 hours. It’s so fun omg! I can’t afford all of these clothes, but I can throw together some outfits for free! Woo!
So today’s inspiration is the original 5 American Girl Dolls, a.k.a best dolls of the 90’s. I know maybe the “original” dolls depend on when you grew up or whatever, but my version of the American Girl Dolls is clearly the correct version. [Insert self-centered Millennial joke here]. Oh well, what do I care? I’m too busy shouldering the burden of an advanced degree and a slowly (ever so slowly) recovering economy, so I hereby name myself the ultimate authority of American Girl Doll history for the next five minutes on The Very Special Blog.
So the best part of these dolls is that they all come with a series of books. And each series has a lesson book. As you may know, we sure do love to learn lessons on this blog!
Very Special Lesson: It’s hard to chose between your dad, who is a patriot,and your bff, who is a loyalist, especially when you’re in school to learn how to properly serve tea!
Very Special Lesson: Sometimes Pioneers had to keep secret friendships with indigenous tribes. Also, it’s hard to go to school in the U.S. when you only speak Swedish.
Very Special Lesson: You’ve just escaped slavery! Now you have to decide who your true friends are: The girl who just wants to hang out, or the rich popular girl who makes you feel cool. Come on, Addy, you know the right choice here.
Very Special Lesson: Income inequality sucks, especially when it means your servant girl is illiterate. Also, child labor is not a great idea.
Very Special Lesson: Spies are cool for WWII, but it is not cool to be a spy if you are trying to cheat on your school project.
Jem and the Holograms: Roxy Rumbles
Before there was Hannah Montana there was Jem and the Holograms. Jem was a cool glam rock version of Barbie, but she also happened to be totally normal person when she wasn’t in her glam rock makeup. Jem is also pretty interesting in that it has music videos intermingled with the plotline.
It is always surprising to me when cartoons have very special problems. I mean these are two dimensional creatures who live in a world where no matter what happens to them they can look as good as new in the next frame. But they do have problems, you see. Sometimes cartoons can’t read and it really messes up their daily lives.
What’s a show about girl rock bands without a little gang rivalry, right? The Holograms rival gang The Misfits happens to have an illiterate band member, Roxy. They all make fun of her and call her an idiot. She finally has enough of their harassment, so she quits the band and moves back home. When Roxy gets home, Jem and the Holograms are coincidentally there for a charity event to raise money for literacy programs.
Oh by the way, did I mention that Roxy wins the lottery before she moves back home? Yes, well she does win the lottery and she almost does not know it because she cannot read the numbers. This lottery money gives Roxy tons of money in which to one up Jem’s event with a big carnival. Turns out, Roxy loses all of her money, since she signed a contract that she could not read. Jem helps her pay everyone back even though Roxy has been a total jerk to her all the time.
Roxy basically never cared about reading because she always had material things. Like why on earth would she need to read if she had tons of lycra-spandex and hair spray already at her fingertips?
This episode, which is supposedly about raising literacy rates, concludes with a song called “Open a Book.” The entire music video is full people picking up random things that you can read, like a cereal box or a job application. But I feel like Jem’s viewership was always mostly kids. And while they may not have been able to read, I don’t think they would have gotten the context of the help wanted sign in a store window or scribbling on a job application. To me this is just a big montage of boring words that did not make reading look fun at all. Open a book…okay..what book? I could open the dictionary and that would be a pretty disappointing book. If this is all people were throwing at Roxy then it’s no wonder she procrastinated on her abc’s. Sure that stuff is crucial to being self-sufficient and all, but she was a rock star you guys!
Very Special Lesson: You don’t need to learn how to read until you start losing money.
Very Special Movie: Wish Upon a Star
Wish Upon a Star is kind of like Freaky Friday but with sisters and edgier. It stars a young Katherine Heigl from the days before she supposedly alienated everyone in Hollywood with her alleged attitude problem. (That was so hypothetical that I hope Ms. Heigl can’t be mad at me. Since, you know she probably reads this right?) It contains a theme song that sounds like a bizarro rip off of the Boy Meets World theme. And parents whose primary role in this film is to do absolutely nothing. And unlike the typical body-switching movies, which teach us to appreciate our parents, this one teaches us not to be assholes to our siblings. In short, it is awesome.
Theme songs for comparison:
Danielle Harris and Katherine Heigl play polar opposite sisters, Haley and Alexia Wheaton. Haley is a mousey science nerd and Alexia is a hot bimbo. They really cannot stand each other. This is mostly because Alexia is a snob and thinks Haley is lame while Haley hates that Alexia makes her late to school. So clearly, one of the sisters is more of a jerk than the other. Hayley also wants to date Alexia’s boyfriend. One night, each girl wishes upon the same shooting star that she could be the other sister. (Oh wait, sorry that’s a spoiler. So for most of the move we only know that Haley wished and not that Alexia did too…)
Anyway, they wake up the morning after the shooting-star-incident in the wrong body. Haley (in Alexia/Katherine Heigl’s body) is super pumped because now she gets to be popular and date her crush. Alexia is really frantic because she has a fragile soul and cannot stand life without the protection of her 1995 version of the Plastics from Mean Girls. They try a ton of other wishing methods (b-day cake candles, wishbone, pennies in the toilet a.k.a. “wishing well”) but discover that only the star method is effective. Thus, they have no choice but to live as each other over the course of a day.
The girls in this movie have even worse rules than the plastics. According to one of the clique members, they signed these rules in blood. Here’s a list I have curated from my viewing of this film:
- Shave every day, NO STUBBLE . Stubble sightings will be called out for public embarrassment
- No tunafish sandwiches
- Members alternate bringing diet soda for the rest of the group
- Never date a boy for longer than 3 months (a rule designed to “maximize” experience with “other men”)
- Do not wear the same outfit two days in a row
- Everyone must read Self magazine cover to cover
- All members must weigh in every Friday
- Clique members will be friends forever
Haley learns from Alexia’s friends that Alexia broke up with her boyfriend (a.k.a. Hayley’s crush), so she tries to get him back. It’s very creepy if you think about the fact that she is an entirely different person and she’s trying to make out with this dude. Meanwhile, Alexia binge eats since she is no longer counting calories in her own body. When Aleixa discovers a hickey on the neck of her usual body, she flips out and forces Hayley outside to wish upon another star. They find no stars as it is overcast and decide to spend the next day ruining each others lives.
Hayley (in Alexia’s body of course) comes down stairs to find Alexia (in Hayley’s body) dressed as a dominatrix. I never expected to see this in a Disney film, but it happened and it is weird. Also, their parents are these overactive psychologists who have somehow meta-analyzed themselves into taking a completely permissive stance on parenting…so the fact that they see one of their daughters dressed as a dominatrix and the other dressed in the same exact clothing she wore the previous day is not concerning at all to them. Things really escalate when Alexia performs an exotic dance on a lunch room table in Hayley’s body. They get called into the principal’s office and end up having a big heart-to-heart while forced to clean off graffiti that they wrote about each other in the bathroom.
It turns out that Alexia was freaking out mostly because she thought that Hayley was going to lose her virginity (her meaning…well both of them) in Alexia’s body when Alexia was stuck in Hayley’s body, which I guess is pretty stressful when you come to think of it. But she relaxes a bit when Hayley tells her all she did was kiss a lot. Hayley is upset that Alexia thought that she would have sex in her body and Alexia is upset that Hayley assumed she was having sex. They realize that they never really knew each other and decide to start helping each other out. Hayley will help Alexia look smart and Alexia will help Hayley find a boyfriend. Also, Alexia tells Hayley it isn’t right for her to be making out with her boyfriend because it’s not fair to him, so she tells her that it’s only okay to hold his hand and nothing more. But it is too little too late because Alexia’s boyfriend tells Haley (who he thinks is Alexia) that he loves her and then she gets weird and runs away because well it is a weird situation.
Things get really out of hand with the boys when their next door neighb
or, who had a crush on Haley from the beginning, starts to feel like his personality is more compatible with Alexia (who is actually Hayley!). That night, Haley wishes on a star to become herself again, but the next morning she wakes up and she is still Alexia. She thinks that they will be trapped forever as each other, but the real reason that they did not switch back is that Alexia also made the wish. But you already know that because I told you that in second paragraph. Anyway, they tearfully admit to one another finally about how they hated themselves and wanted to be one another. They hurry outside to find a shooting star, which of course they do because this town is FULL of shooting stars. They switch back and are all the better for having not been themselves for a while.
Very Special Lesson: It’s okay to date your sister’s boyfriend as long as you love her more in the end.
Very Special Halloween Costumes
You guys are all planning super in advance for Halloween, right? Well, just in case you are…I have some suggestions. I made a Polyvore account for this. I made some pretty weird looking things, so I think it’s safe to say that I have probably scared off the average Polyvore user from following me. Anyway, check it out! And yeah, I got tired so I only made 7 looks which means this chart layout for 9 is pretty sad looking. Whoops.
Slimed!: A Very Special Book Review
I guess I’m behind the times because this book has been out for like a year. Anyhow, I just finished reading it and I’d like to share some fun stuff from it with you! I supposed “review” is not the best title for this blog post. Believe it or not, I’m not really into book reviews. I seem to have SO many opinions about television, so how could I not take the opportunity to harass a book, right? Well, I don’t have much of an explanation for you, I’m afraid. I think books are more subjective than most other art forms and aside from saying things like “this book had a faced-paced plot” or “this person could not form a coherent sentence,” I don’t really see much point in critiquing someone else’s writing.
Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age is exactly what its title says it is. This book is comprised of interviews with producers, writers, directors, actors, and designers who worked on Nickelodeon shows from the beginning of the network through the late ’90’s. My two complaints about the format are that there was absolutely no narrative connecting any of the block quotes from the interviews. I would have liked at least a little context between subject shifts, or some objective background information in a sea of he said/she said memories. My other complaint is that I did not even realize that there was a glossary in the back of the book that said who all of the interviewees were. I spent most of the book guessing from context as to who each person was–aside from those people whose names I recognized like Blake Sennet and Melissa Joan Hart. Other than that, it was a really great read. Parts of it were painful because even though Nickelodeon seemed like a great place to be a kid, there was still all of that uncomfortable coming-of-age on television stuff. And a lot of the infighting between creators and producers was sad but not unexpected. Okay, enough reviewing! Here are some fun facts!
7 Fun Facts from Old School Nickelodeon
- Graham Yost (a writer on Hey Dude) also wrote the screenplay for Speed.
- Slime was originally created when a props master let a bucket of garbage that he was supposed to dump on a cast member of You Can’t Do That On Television sit overnight between shooting. The decomposing trash created a smelly green ooze, which the props master was instructed dump it on the kid anyway. Over the years, slime had many different (safer) mixtures, including bases of cream of wheat or applesauce.
- Double Dare turned down a million-dollar sponsorship from Casio because they did not feel comfortable displaying the brand’s name on the Double Dare clock. The network in general shied away from corporate advertising in its early days because they did not want to “sell out” the kids or their creative process.
- Gerry Labourne, who was the president of Nickelodeon until 1996, moved to Disney and helped to shape The Disney Channel. I always felt like Nick was the network of the ’90’s and Disney was the network of the ’00’s, but maybe this wall all due to one great children’s programmer! She also founded the Oxygen Network in 1998.
- Roger Price, the director of You Can’t Do That On Television, brought a gun to a meeting with crew members and told them he would shoot them if they tried to give or sell any of the kids drugs.
- Nickelodeon was contractually obligated to have activity on the stages at all times while occupying space at Universal Studios Orlando. When there wasn’t active production happening on the stages, they would send PAs to move cameras around and generally look busy during park hours. If you took at tour of the studios during the ’90’s, there’s a good chance you might have seen people pretending to work.
- A pilot for a sequel to Clarissa Explains It All was produced for CBS but the network felt that audiences would not like how Clarissa broke the fourth wall, a staple of the original series. The new series was called Clarissa Now and showed her moving to New York City and pursuing a career in journalism. You can watch it on Youtube.
Lizzie McGuire: Inner Beauty
Lizzie McGuire was this cute little show on Disney in the early 2000’s about three best friends in middle school. Having been a part of a girl-boy-girl best friend group in middle school, I ca
n assure you it’s pretty much the best. I threw Hilary Duff a lot of shade around 2004 and I’d like to personally apologize to her via the internet for that. Not that she ever saw me throwing shade or will ever read this post. I was just jealous of her success and the fact that she seemed like a nice person probably made me hate her even more. But now that I’m looking back on this show, it’s really very sweet and adorable and that makes me feel like I was being a jerk a decade ago. So for that, Hilary, I’m sorry.
In the life of a middle schooler, there a
re many very special moments. But things got really serious on one dark day when Lizzie and her bffs made a music video. Aspiring director, Gordo, took photos of Lizzie and Miranda as they practiced their choreography to Play’s “Us Against the World.” I vaguely remembered that song, but I don’t think it was a hit. It is very catchy though. I still have it stuck in my head and I did play it on youtube a couple of times…kinda want to play it again right now. It’s just so catchy!
Anyway, Gordo brings the pictures to school the next day and Miranda (who has just ranted about how she is a total failure because she got a B on a test) freaks out because she believes she looks fat in the picture. Gordo and Lizzie are all like what are you talking about? We, as the audience, also get to view the photo and I can tell you it’s super cute. Miranda is definitely not fat, but props to this episode for getting the whole body 
dysmorphic aspect down pat. Here’s where things get a little weird. Instead of starting off with a strict diet–but a diet nonetheless–like most people who end up with eating disorders, Miranda skips right to the never eating again ever phase. I understand that we’re on an accelerated schedule with the whole 30-minute time limit thing, but maybe we could have had a time jump and a reference to her erratic eating? Or something a tad more progressive? But no, we get an extreme jump to lunch where Miranda fakes a paper cut in order to get out of consuming some pasta. Well, I think it was pasta. The lunchroom food did look pretty weird. (Also, they live in an environment where they can always eat outside. I don’t think I’ve ever seen these people eating in an actual lunchroom unless the lunch room is an outside courtyard thing.)
Things escalate when Miranda faints at Lizzie’s house while practicing the dance and we learn that she hasn’t eaten anything all day. Lizzie’s mom thinks Miranda is probably dehydrated from all of the dancing, but Lizzie breaks down later and tells her everything. Her advice is to try talking to Miranda and then in a few days if things haven’t improved, she can talk to Miranda and Miranda’s mom. Isn’t this some sort of violation of the mom code? If you know that someone’s kid is starving herself, aren’t you supposed to send out the mom bat signal, pick up the red phone, sound the alarm that this kid needs some help? I’m all of letting kids work things out on their own and I know that eating disorders are delicate situations, but it still seems strange to me that Lizzie’s mom has no moral obligation to at least let Miranda’s mom know the situation.
But it’s a Disney show, so of course the “frienervention” works, and Miranda (realistically) explains that eating was something she could control in her life. She’s 
been under a lot more pressure than anyone knew–mostly due to the fact that her parents for some reason demanded that their thirteen year old determine her life goals. Miranda feels so much better that she’s able to complete all of her music video choreography even though she hasn’t eaten in the past couple of days. The music video is a more innocent rip off of Britney’s …Baby, One More Time. Though it does feature Miranda and Lizzie in detention dancing on top of a very uncomfortable teacher’s desk. The teacher also dances with them and they hip bump him and it’s kind of strange. Other than that it’s pretty cute and the song is soooo catchy. Here’s a gif: 
Very Special Lesson: Don’t worry if you’re friend abruptly stops eating, you can always talk it out. Or dance it out.
One Lovely Blog Award
JH Mae has nominated me for the One Lovely Blog Award. THANKS, JH MAE!! I’m supposed to share 7 “unknown” facts about myself and then nominate some of my favorite blogs to do the same.
- I have a weakness for office supplies. I want to have a shopping spree at Staples. This love of office supplies is so intense that it carriers over to a love of office work. I don’t mind paperwork. I have always enjoyed filing. I would love to stamp all of your envelopes with the return address stamp. I like using the postage machine. I will pretend to be bothered if you try to manipulate me into metering mail for you, but it’s a lie. I like to do it.
- I’d like to host a radio show, but I probably talk to fast for you to understand me. I think I could work on
a cool disc jokey announcer voice though. You’d have to be down to listen to some Rolling Stones and Fine Young Cannibals though, and I’m not sure that’s the same crowd. I would make sure to have really cool prizes for the contests though. - A camel once imprinted on me in the span of like 20 minutes. I went to Australia when I was eleven and we were outside listening to some sort of presentation out on a farm in Alice Springs, and I encountered a camel who was being weaned. There were like 30 other people there and this camel decided that I should be his new mom. It was okay for the first two minutes when my mom was like “omg -” and then I was sort of overwhelmed by it and like, “Mom, I can’t be his mom! What is happening? I am a person not a camel!” I found the whole thing very distressing and I felt an odd sense of responsibility. It’s funny now to think I felt genuine emotional pressure from this camel.
- I can play only one song on the piano. I took piano for eight years as a child, so this is pretty shameful. But I can play Dream by the Everly Brothers. This may be largely due to the fact that this is the one song I enjoyed playing. It’s been years, since I have been near a piano, so it’s possible that this fact is no longer true.
- I guess this goes along with the office supply thing, but I have a mild obsession with carbon paper. I wish we used it on a more frequent basis even though I know computers are more efficient and green and so on, but carbon paper is still like magic to me. I found a waitress’s check pad at a dime store in high school and I had to purchase it due to the abundance of carbon paper it provided.
- I recently stopped drinking coffee entirely. This is in sharp contrast to my post in defense of Jesse Spano’s caffeine addiction, I know, but I detoxed while recovering from a stomach bug and I realized that black tea makes me feel better than coffee. So while I am not entirely caffeine free, I have switched to less-caffeine, but I think really the less acidity is the best part. And also I feel sort of like a Mellow Zen Earth Mother. And by that I mean I feel less anxious and dehydrated.
- I hate to cook so much that I will eat pretty much anything I can find in order to not cook. If you’re interested in an a three course meal of carrots & humus, a cold cut and provolone cheese platter with crackers, and yogurt mixed with granola and blueberries served on my coffee table for dinner, then I’m your girl.
And now for my nominees! You don’t have to participate, and you might not even know me. If so, whoops, then reading these random facts is a weird way to meet me. Anyhow, I enjoy reading your blog, so I’m nominating this award.
(in no particular order)
Breakfast with Myself
Just Stay Gold, Okay?
Sleepoverz
The Hashtag Generation
Stitch Boom Bang
Lisa Listed
A Very Meta Post: Search Terms
I painstakingly consider how to effectively tag my posts, picking the top four terms I think best apply–any more and I fear that it will look like I have written spam or any less and I may go undiscovered. So when I look at the below list of search terms, I have to wonder…have I totally failed at SEO? Most of the search terms are encrypted, so I have to analyze my tagging skills based upon the rather small list below. Yet some of them are so strange I wonder…how have these people found me based upon this? Thus, I have decided to pull out my Nancy Drew spyglass and investigate some of these terms on my own.
| ben savage drinking problem | 2 |
| dj and kimmy at the fraternity party | 1 |
| cosby show drinker down | 1 |
| bayside the musical | 1 |
| white slavery is real | 1 |
| boy meets world scene wallpaper | 1 |
| crossdressed teenage boys | 1 |
| brother can you spare a jacket | 1 |
| original saved by the bell show prop | 1 |
| braceface cheerleader | 1 |
| 90’a outfits | 1 |
| golden girls | 1 |
| where can i get a growing pains luau in hawaii? | 1 |
| the facts of life starstruck names | 1 |
| straight up anti-drug video | 1 |
| who played on the facts of life starstruck jermaine jackson names | 1 |
| boy meets world if you can’t be with the one you love | 1 |
| full house 2014 | 1 |
| 90’s very special episodes | 1 |
| saved by the bell | 1 |
| running zack saved by the bell | 1 |
| panga saved by the bell | 1 |
| sabrina pancakes | 1 |
Ben Savage Drinking Problem
Okay, so at first I was like “What, Ben Savage has a drinking problem?!?” but then I realized that I had tagged my post about Shawn and Corey getting drunk on Boy Meets World with Ben Savage’s name as well. Fortunately, it does not appear that Ben Savage has a drinking problem in real life, though another different Ben Savage was apparently involved in a fatal hit-and-run. Was the person who found The Very Special Blog looking for a local news story about a different Ben Savage? Did this person think that beloved actor Ben Savage has an alcohol addiction? Or could they simply not remember the name Corey Matthews? We may never know. The internet remains a mystery. I think that the “boy meets world scene wallpaper” also must have popped up this article because of my use of that group photo. It seriously must have been a slow day on Google Images though.
Cosby Show Drinker Down
Well, done Cosby Show fans. This, of course, is the incendiary phrase that Cliff and Clare heckle Vanessa with as she resists their sick drinking game of lies. I personally thought they were uttering some sort of mumbled “drink her down,” but I could see how one might hear it as “drinker down.” While I do recall heavily promoting the adoption of the phrase “chug-a-lug” in modern drinking language, I fail to remember mentioning anything about “drinker down.” I couldn’t find myself up to the 5th page of Google search with this phrase, at which point I got tired and gave up. However, I must admire this unknown individual’s dedication to thirty year old sitcom episode recaps, which appears to be far greater than my own.
White Slavery is Real
I am truly afraid to search this term. Yet my dedication to investigative journalism insists that I must. In fact, Google suggests it as the most popular term after “white slavery is…” which I find concerning. I am not on the first three pages of Google for this one, and I refuse to go any further. I am relieved to find that most of the search results are historical in nature, but it still is awfully creepy. This search term MUST have lead to my post about Lisa from Saved by the Bell giving a presentation about the underground railroad. I definitely don’t think I have mentioned the word slavery any other time on this blog.
Crossed Dressed Teenage Boys
This is all about Chick Like Me! Whether or not that is what this searcher was hoping to find, I cannot say, but I hope they learned a bit about living in someone else’s shoes while they stopped over at The Very Special Blog!
Original Saved by the Bell Show Prop
I can’t help with this one, but I believe there are plenty of people on Ebay who would love to sell you some “original” props.
Braceface Cheerleader
Apparently, there is an episode of Braceface where Sharon (ugh that is NOT her real name) gets jealous of a cheerleader. I have never seen that episode, so I”m afraid this was a totally disappointing page for this searcher to land on. I also fear that some insecure adolescent girl did not get the reassurance she needed about being on the cheerleading squad and also having braces. Hello, insecure adolescent girl. If you have searched these keywords again and once more found yourself on this page, fear not! I knew plenty of girls in high school who were successful cheerleader and also wore braces. You’ll be okay!
who played on the facts of life starstruck jermaine jackson names
Jermaine Jackson was played by Jermaine Jackson. Unless, you want to know who played crazed-fan, Tootie. That was Kim Fields.
Straight Up Anti-Drug Video
Schools other than my dumb school made kids watch this stupid movie? Oh war on drugs, your reach is far.
Where can i get a growing pains luau in hawaii?
I have no idea, but if you find out, please let me know.
90’s very special episodes
This is the dream!! This is what I hope brings people to this site! But only one person seems to have found it that way…whoops…oh well. However, if all of Jermaine Jackson’s 21st century fans are finding this site via his name, then that’s cool too. The Very Special Blog: for all of your Jermaine Jackson guest appearance needs. And that time Fake-Michael-Jackson was on The Golden Girls and Saved by the Bell. (Dear Jackson Family Fans, if I have successfully lured you here by name dropping people who are very rarely mentioned on this site, then won’t you please take a second and listen to me snark about television for a little while? It could be fun!)
The End.
P.S. I know that I did not investigate all of the terms. This post got too long. And some of them were boring. Feel free to do your own research if you’re interested. But if you are an SEO spambot, I will ignore you. Be forewarned.
The Very Special Blog 