Scooby Doo, Valentine's Day and the Catcher in the Rye

Jen's Valentine's Day present came in the mail on Thursday. I showed it to Lily right before her bedtime story. She loved it. She put it on and posed for the mirror in her "Princess Pose" which she learned from Belle at Disney World. She's such a diva.

I put it back in the box and stowed it away and Lily said, "I have an idea! I'll tell mommy that you're throwing out a candy box." She's alarmingly adept at coming up with plausible cover stories.

(Sadly, Lily had a more interesting Valentine's Day than we did. She had a party at her school. Jen and I did Jack Squat.)

Later on in the kitchen Jen was telling me a funny story, and she started laughing a little at her own story and the way her laughter mingled with her words reminded me of Lily, who is sometimes so overcome with amusement at her own story that she'll react the same way. Of course Jen must have done it first, but adults laugh at their own stories much more rarely than kids do, so I never noticed it as a trait of Jen's until Lily had done it all the time. Strange what kids teach us about ourselves.

For our Wacky Wednesday movie, Jen and Lily and I were watching a Scooby Doo movie where Fred was going to be a councilor at the camp he attended as a kid, and I commented "Yay! It's the real Fred! He's wearing his ascot!" because some of the more recent character designs have him scarfless and in a striped shirt.

Lily asked "What's an ascot?" and I explained "It's that scarf he's wearing" and then on the TV the person in charge of camp exclaims "I'd recognize that ascot anywhere! C'mere, Freddie!" and Jen and I cracked up.

I got A Pup named Scooby Doo for Lily and it came on Monday. I thought she'd like it, but she asked for a Scooby Doo movie she'd already seen a thousand times after watching two episodes. She said she prefers Fred's hair as a grown up. I don't even know how to begin to make sense of that.

Later on, I was discussing Beatle's songs with a friend (specifically the fact that Fiona Apple's cover of Across the Universe is better than the original) and I got to wondering when Mark David Chapman (John Lennon's assassin) had died. I discovered four interesting things.

1. He's still alive
2. He's kept largely sequestered from the rest of the population for his own safety, which as Jen pointed out, is kind of bullshit, because it's really pretty unlikely that somebody now imprisoned in Attica going to be a big enough Beatles fan to recognize him and start something.
3. He's still married and
4. He gets one 42-hour conjugal visit a year from his wife. 

When I related this to my friend, he observed, "Sadly, he's probably had sex more recently than I have" to which I replied "Here's a map to Ringo Starr's house. I think you know what to do next."