Teeny Manolo

If you grew up in the seventies, then chances are you had a Garanimals outfit.  I’m not ashamed to admit that I owned more than a few myself.   Er, well, perhaps I should be, but there it is.

If you were not part of our exclusive Garanimals club, allow me to explain the concept.  Garanimals took the children’s fashion world by storm when they introduced the concept of a matching system.  By having labels, usually some sort of jungle animal, kids would be able to dress themselves by simply making sure that the labels were the same for both top and bottom.  If you had two bears, your outfit was a surefire winner!  There was no way you could walk out of the house in an unmatched outfit and embarass your mom!  So, a supposedly idiot-proof system.

Why this concept has not been introduced for men, I am not sure. But, that is entirely a different post probably better suited to a different blog. 

But really, isn’t being able to dress batshit-crazy some sort of three year old birthright?  At that age, it is downright adorable to go grocery shopping wearing an orange striped shirt, red shorts, and a superman cape.  Kids should dress like that as often as they can, because that window of opportunity gets slammed shut around the age of seven or so. At that point, the child will either be seen as destined for fashion greatness or someone who will never get invited to birthday parties.

Apparently the makers of Garanimals decided that a couple decades of freestyle dressing by America’s youth was too much for them to handle. They re-launched the brand in February of 2008, available exclusively at WalMart. Which sort of explains why I didn’t know about it until now.

So once again, children have the opportunity to match zebra to zebra and elephant to elephant! Forget about actually teaching them how to put clothes together, let’s have some faceless corporation do all the hard work for us! But according to Dr. Joyce Brothers, “Garanimals…helps the pre-schooler to handle his/her own wardrobe.” Remember Dr. Joyce Brothers? I thought not. Nothing like trotting out an almost thirty year old quote to inspire brand confidence!

I think the creators of children’s cartoons get away with murder because they know damn well Mom is in the kitchen finishing her coffee or her gin depending on the kind of day it’s going to be, and not in the living room supervising what her kid sees on tv.

As I may have mentioned, I’m An Old. I remember when black and white cartoons were in black and white because colours hadn’t been invented then. And yet, even I remember how children’s cartoons pushed the envelope (or is that the closet door) with some marvelously camp and butch characters.

How many can you remember? Velma. Peppermint Patty. Bugs Bunny in certain moods. That poor cat Pepe LePew was always chasing. And was there anyone on television, Liberace included, as gay as the Great Gazoo?

Take this quiz and find out which gay childhood icon you are. You can copy the code and post the result in your blog, or just come out in the comments section of this post.

Here is my result, and no surprise: it was either Velma or Peppermint Patty, and there were NO BASEBALL QUESTIONS! This quiz is rigged! Let’s call Scooby and the gang and investigate what’s really going on here…oops, slipping into character.

Back in the sepia-toned, bell-bottomed days of the Seventies when this documentary was shot, Langley was a lovely village surrounded by stables and farms, three-quarters of an hour’s leisurely drive outside of Vancouver. Now it is a strip-mall-encircled bedroom community an hour’s infuriatingly tense drive outside of Vancouver with, improbably, stables and farms still interspersed between SUV dealerships.

And this is the Langley School Music Project, a public school initiative by Hans Fenger, a teacher in the system. Just another public school teacher.

In the early 70s, Vancouver musician Hans Fenger decided to get a real job. His girlfriend was pregnant, and he couldn’t raise a family on earnings from club gigs and guitar lessons. He got a teaching certificate and a job in the Langley school district.

Here is some great analysis from The Delete Bin:

The recordings were literally a school project, headed up by music teacher Hans Fenger based in Langely B.C (just up the road from where I’m writing this), and incorporating 60 students who sang and played percussion instruments on songs which included David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, Paul McCartney & Wings’ “Band on the Run”, the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows”, and the Eagles’ “Desperado”. The record polarized opinion. Some said that the takes on the songs create a sort of ghostly, otherworldly effect, while others denounced it as sounding amateurish and very “school assembly” in delivery. Perhaps it’s their origin which makes these recordings so compelling. Fenger had this to say about the project and the kids who created it:

“I knew virtually nothing about conventional music education, and didn’t know how to teach singing. Above all, I knew nothing of what children’s music was supposed to be. But the kids had a grasp of what they liked: emotion, drama, and making music as a group. Whether the results were good, bad, in tune or out was no big deal — they had élan. This was not the way music was traditionally taught. But then I never liked conventional ‘children’s music,’ which is condescending and ignores the reality of children’s lives, which can be dark and scary. These children hated ‘cute.’ They cherished songs that evoked loneliness and sadness.”

And now, click on to see (and hear) the kids:
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My dear friends, you’ve no idea how brutal this world can be to an artistic soul. One by one, it eats them alive. Raymond Chandler. Dashiell Hammett. Dorothy Parker. Damon Runyan. Anita Loos. Ernest Hemingway.Mother Goose.

Yes, for is there any soul as fragile and artistic as that of a child’s storyteller? And yet as each tender Easy Reader, picture book, or pop-up manuscript is born, it is ruthlessly wrenched from its creator’s loving embrace and cast upon the heaving black waters of the heartless book market, there to sink or swim as its now-helpless progenitor can only clutch pearls or fedora and gape, wreathed in cigarette smoke and sheer terror (and then write about it on the Oprah forums). Oh! The Humanity!

Here, thanks to Kids in the Hall, perhaps the greatest sketch comedy troupe in history, is archival footage of one such writer’s brutal struggle through the long, dark, teddy bear’s picnic of the soul.

I was going to use their Teddy Bear’s Picnic skit, but that’s too dark even for me.

That rapier wit, that irresistible malevolence, that roguish smile, the manly tan, the arm/chest pelt, those perfect teeth, those suspiciously buff pecs, the himbo pinup calendar: is it any wonder that Simon Cowell, evil overlord of American Idol, has won the hearts of so many? But there’s one more reason:

The hair.

We at TeenyManolo, as dwellers in the Manolosphere and survivors of the Eighties, are uniquely placed to reveal to the world the secret of Simon Cowell’s mane muse. Where, in a world dominated by variations of the Trent Reznor and the George Clooney does a man get the inspiration for such a vividly gravity-defying, yet carefree and jungle-lush look?

From just one place, my friends:

Yes, it’s the comeback of the hottest look of the Eighties: The Monchhichi. Via toybender.com. Sex-AY! Is it any wonder they’re also the inspiration for a line of condoms?

via WanderingCoyote

Okay, so it’s not Beethoven. You think Beethoven’s Fifth would calm a crying baby? Behold the power of the greatest pacifier known to humanity, the ever-reliable Rickroll. I wonder what would happen if they played Rick Astley in Helmand; the entire region would break into a soporific version of the Hustle, shake hands, and declare peace. You doubt? You watch!

via Defamer.

Remember Tang? It’s what we had before we had SunnyD. Old people remember Tang, and the thing we remember best about it is that the astronauts had Tang in their space ships, and so we wanted it. We wanted it with all the blind zealotry that preschoolers can muster. We wanted to be astronauts, too, and we knew we had the right stuff, and we figured we might as well get a head start by acclimating to the menu as early as possible. But we refused to eat the dehydrated peas, and so we grew up to be bloggers instead.

Where was I?

Ah, yes. The astronaut menu was all about the dehydrated, the freeze-dried, the vacuum-packed, the foil-lined, and the otherwise meddled-with. If you were off to the Moon you wouldn’t think to pack an apple until it had been reduced to something resembling the stuff you scatter on your driveway when it’s icy. THAT is real down-home astronaut cooking. Unappealing, impractical, expensive, and synthetic.

Until now.

my head almost exploded when I recently found PB2. PB2 is my newest peanut butter obsession. Basically, it’s just powdered peanut butter... a fine, insanely delicious-smelling, peanut butterlicious powder that is EXTREMELY versatile.

According to Bill Keith, head of sales and marketing for Bell Plantation, the company that sells this delightfully bizarre foodstuff, it’s better for you than regular peanut butter.

Here are the nutritional facts : Reg PB has between 190-200 calories per serving, PB2 has 54. Reg PB has between 140-150 fat calories per serving, PB2 has 25. PB2 is all natural. There are no additives.

But wait, there’s more! Sure, it’s self-evidently astro-fabulous, but it is also delightfully reminiscent of some of the shall we say less orthodox archetypes of the Sixties.

As HungryGirl says:

I literally spent an entire Saturday night experimenting with this stuff and had the BEST time (it was not nearly as pathetic as it sounds, I promise).

No word on if she put it in brownies. And from Bill’s recommendations on the RandomThoughts blog:

You mix 2TBS of PB2 w/ 1 TBS of the liquid of your choice. Water will reconstitute it to the consistency of regular PB. You adjust the formula to your taste. JC’s granddaughter likes it w/ grape juice. Try it with your favorite liquid. I know someone that mixes it w/jalapeno juice. Talk about a kick.

Hmmmm. Who would do a thing like that?