When you were gone I talked about you for hours

I'll get around to Christmas soon enough, but I did want to close out reporting on the Santa Train visit. Actually, I had pretty well finished the Santa Train visit apart from some small bits of business. For example, when my niece named her snowman ``Blondie'' I pointed out the carrot of his nose, and told her in very brief form the story of how carrots used to be purple, but patriotic Dutch farmers grew orange ones in a burst of patriotic pride. I figure it can't hurt her to sometimes hear from me a story that's utterly ridiculous and yet reasonably true. Plus it gives credence to other odd assertions I might make. I remember also telling her about the Hungry Tiger of Oz, although how we got onto the subject of Oz I don't remember. I do remember my sister-in-law's insistence that I not be too scary. I think the Hungry Tiger has to be maybe less scary than the Cowardly Lion; my niece seemed to like the idea.

Driving back we got to talking about bunny_hugger since that's a very easy subject to get me to talking about. Actually, we moved on to her brother's band and the new album --- they wondered why she hadn't visited when she was out in early November, and I explained that she was only out for a couple days, and one of them was for the album release --- and my sister-in-law wondered what they sounded like. I'm too fantastically illiterate in music to describe A Big Yes And A Small No. In desperation I fell back on: ``they don't like the comparison but do get referred to as sounding like They Might Be Giants, from having intricate lyrics and a generally upbeat sound''. My sister-in-law, it turns out, has no idea what They Might Be Giants sounds like. Possible future music gift: all those children's songs they make.

So. We got around to trying to find their songs through what parts of the Internet mobile phones could access. ``I'm Always Manic When I'm Around You'' was easy to find, and I thought that'd make a fair introduction. My sister-in-law thought it was nice but silly with all that talk about flowers and spinning around and all. (I think she didn't hear the lyrics, really.) The other song we could find was, ah, their one tune with an explicit lyrics warning, and I was hesitant to play that around my niece, since she is at the age to pick up anything modestly inappropriate and repeat it forever.

But my sister-in-law was fearless, and observed that the song calmed her daughter down to napping. She's normally a hard one to get to sleep when there are things like anything to look at, especially in the car. So she proclaimed that A Big Yes had two more fans, and that if they can write songs which calm young children they could win the devotion of every parent ever.

I do not understand parenting at all.

Trivia: The French Academy devoted its 1811 prize to a proof that the five Platonic solids and four recently-noticed shapes were the only three-dimensional shapes which could be built out of identical regular polygons. Source: Symmetry: A Journey Into The Patterns Of Nature, Marcus du Sautoy.

Currently Reading: Fantasy And Science Fiction, January/February 2012, Editor Gordon van Gelder.