Updating "The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish"

I love reading Neil Gaiman's picture books to my daughter Sara: "Crazy Hair," "The Wolves in the Walls," and "The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish." It was the last of these that I read to her tonight. But even though the book was published in 2004, it is already out of date, so I had to update it.

It begins as follows:

One day my mom went out and left me home with just my little sister and my dad. My dad sat in front of the television, reading his newspaper. My Dad doesn't pay much attention to anything, when he's reading his newspaper.

I revised it as follows:

One day my mom went out and left me home with just my little sister and my dad. My dad sat in front of the television, reading his iPad. My Dad doesn't pay much attention to anything, when he's reading his iPad.

Yes, yes, that is much more up-to-date!

I should add that the book is hysterically funny. I laugh my head off about some of the bits, even though I know they are coming: "Mumf, mumf, mumf," said my little sister. You'll have to get the book yourself to know why that is hysterical. :-)

Scrotum

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much. It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

This appears on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal. Libraries, it seems, are refusing to stock it because of the use of the word "scrotum."

What else should Patron have said here? The word appears when Lucky, the ten-year-old heroine, overhears someone say he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog Roy on the scrotum.

The only alternative would have been, "That snake bit Roy in the balls!"

Some people. :-)

Goodnight Mush

I enjoyed Elizabeth Kolbert's article "Goodnight Mush" in the Dec. 4 issue of the New Yorker:

'If, as Joan Didion famously put it, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” why do we tell stories to our children? In my experience, mostly it is to get them to shut up. A book read to a toddler who, after running around the house all day, has had to be stuffed, quite literally, into his pajamas, may traffic in imaginative freedom and wonder, but it is still an instrument of control. I will read this to you, and then you will go to sleep. End of story.'

The article lives up to this opening (and it is nice to see that EK can write well about other things, and not just about her usual terrifying topic, global warming).