Pick Your Poison

I have been enjoying my last Friday off from work until summer vacation. You gotta love Round-Up holidays! For those of you unfamiliar with St. Thomas, the school runs an annual fundraiser to generate the financial aid that makes it possible for about a third of the students to afford the steep tuition. The school provides incentives for achieving certain benchmarks, the most coveted of which is Fridays off in April. Every year without fail—knock on wood—the boys have met the challenge. This year they raised $350,000 in just over a month of selling raffle tickets. They never cease to amaze me! You can’t go to STH and not believe in miracles.

Anyway, after Anna’s nap it is customary for her to have a little bit of tv time. Over the course of the last year and a half, I have watched and re-watched countless children’s films and shows. Some are entertaining, others are palatable, and a few are beat-you-over-the-head bad. No matter what the quality of the programming, after viewing it for the umpteenth time everything becomes stale and hackneyed. Every show without fail wears out its welcome.

I have compiled a Top Ten list of the television shows and films that I now find intolerably grating, as in worse than dragging your fingernails across an old school chalkboard. Feel free to offer up your own list. I invite your input.

10- Any Pixar or Disney film (broken record needs changing)
9- “Veggie Tales” (catchy tunes and good Bible stories, but we need to get some variety)
8- “Dora the Explorer” (still has some traction, but I am starting to feel it creep under my skin ever so subtly)
7- “Mamma Mia” (I actually liked this one for a time, but it’s now as overkilled as just about any song on the radio)
6- “The Berenstein Bears” (I do like the country theme song, but aside from that…)
5- “Curious George” (this show genuinely has some charm to it, but it is beginning to feel repetitive)
4- “Blue’s Clues” (I don’t get the appeal of this show at all. It’s just bad.)
3- “Wiggles” (umm, yeah, I can only take so many songs with bizarre outfits out of some hideous 70s time warp and frightening dance numbers)
2- “Dorothy the Dinosaur” (I used to love dinosaurs, but whoever had the idea of making a female green one with grotesque teeth took the wonder right out of me)
1- “Barney” (that infernal purple dinosaur and his damned maudlin theme song drive me batty)

"Sesame Street" will probably make the list in the next couple of weeks as she bludgeons us to death with it. Besides, the Cookie Monster eats frackin vegetables. That’s an outrage! We need to draw the line in the sand somewhere, and that seems a pretty good place to me. What say you?