Sometimes I wonder how people would react if you confronted them at 18 years-old, just out of high school, and said, “by the time you’re forty you’ll be bald, fat, and compulsively collecting animals.”

This comes up because animal hording is the hot new problem that’s sweeping the nation. No longer content to simply label it a quirk of personality, people who own lots of animals are now (finally!!) going to be ostracized by the psychological community. Remember that nice grandmother of yours, and how she fed all the neighborhood strays? Psychopath. Or how your grandpa had 8 dogs on his family’s farm growing up? Mental Illness. And since Dr. Girlfriend and I have recently taken in a couple of abandoned cats– with the intention of fostering them and moving them out– we are on the cusp of hording tendencies.

Naturally, it doesn’t feel like I thought it would to be a psychopath. I’m not making tasteful clothing from the skins of my animals, nor do I answer the census guy’s question of how many live here with “818, if you count my cats and glass clown collection.” That must mean I’m not a horder… yet. We have three cats, which is already kind of a lot. If I don’t want to end up on the Learning Channel being condescended to by clinical psychologists and soothing narrators, I’ve got to act fast.

That’s why I’m going to combine two issues here. I want to be self-employed. People suffering severe psychological trauma transfer their unbelievable heartbreak onto animals, resulting in lives lived in sadness, poverty, indecision, guilt and declining health. Thus, I’m going to start a pet store that caters exclusively to the animal horder.

Here’s why: the animals are living terrible lives. They develop all sorts of issues from the amount of waste around them, like eye infections and gambling problems. And a lot of the horders can’t change; they’ve been hardwired by completely unrelated tragedies to redirect their unrequited love onto cage after cage of hapless mammal. (That’s the other thing: it’s always mammals, which are like the hardest animals to take care of. No one hordes starfish or lizards or eels. Why wouldn’t you pick bugs? Praying mantises are fucking metal. Mammals, on the other hand, need to be nursed and fed and walked and cleaned and hugged and loved and watched and groomed. Let me tell you, we do have the three cats, and I barely want to do all that shit for one of them. I do it for all three anyway, but really, forty of them? People could just keep a bucket full of frogs and dump some dead bees in there for them to eat instead, but noooo. I’m just saying.)

Anyway, a lot of horders can’t change. They end up blubbering into cameras while they clap their hooves in dismay as their shit-soaked puppies and asthmatic cats jump happily into walls of Animal Control cages that don’t smell like a thousand butts climbed inside a colostomy bag. Thus, my business: “Bulk animal retail and evolutionary equilibrators”.

What I do, is this: I sell animals to anyone. You could be Hitler riding a feline abortion doctor and I’d still sell you six litters. That way, horders could get any, any amount of animals they needed. No more checking the newspaper or side of the road for FREE KITTENS! advertisements. No more stealing the neighbor’s mail until they hand over the keys to their rabbit enclosure. But we’d be equilibrators, too. For every mammal you buy, you also have to buy one of the mammal that is its natural enemy. That’s right. Think you can just close your eyes to a writhing mass of animal disaster, or just dump a fifty pound bag of kibble on the kitchen floor every day and be done with it? Yeah right. Try policing a house full of these mortal enemies:

*Cats vs. eagles

*Goats vs. moles

*Golden Retrievers vs. “Crazy Cletus the unretrievable Walking Stick”

* Raccoons vs. possums

* Rabbits vs. Zebras

* Birds vs. Karate

And so on. I promise you not only will you be so sick of animals that you don’t want to horde them anymore, you won’t even have to worry about cleaning up your ill-conceived coping mechanism. Why will this just take care of itself? Well maybe you haven’t been a mammal very long, so let me introduce you to a little friend of mine called “The Food Chain”:

And, obviously, the eagles will fly away afterward. I make money, people let go of their trauma and psychoses, and a few eagles get to eat some dinner.

Any investors?

I am one of the most forgetful people I know. I am constantly running back to the grocery store, sometimes more than once, to pick up the one really important thing that was the pretense for the trip to begin with. So I understand creative supply-and-demand. But seriously, turkey flavored Stove Top stuffing for sale on top of a Styrofoam cooler at a gas station? There is no world in which anyone has walked into a gas station on a late August night, smacked themselves in the forehead and said, “gah, you handsome failure! You forgot to get the stuffing again!”

As a bonus point, I’d like to indicate that someone is going to get jobbed on the BO-GO. Why would you have an odd number of products for a Buy One-Get One display?

DEGREE OF ABSURDITY: Acceptable

The only thing that keeps this from being a ‘fail’ is the devotion to variety by said gas station. You can say a lot of things about this gas station based on this photo, but you can never, ever say of them that they don’t offer excellent deals on stuffing.

Nothing is more tragic to me than people giving in to their own foolishness without a fight. Thoreau said that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” and he’s right; except for the few of us in a position to do lasting good to the cause of humanity, I think people should consider themselves successful if they’ve simply made their desperation as loud as possible.

It’s hard to believe some people are functioning with the requisite level of irony, however. For example, I’ve seen this car around town maybe three or four times, and saw it again today. Now, your standard Christians are content with their smug sense of self-satisfaction, occasionally venting their desire to help others with such low impact and socially visible events as “Bake Sales”, “Canned Food Drives”, “Soup Kitchens”, and “Letting My Kid Stay Up To Watch Leno. I Don’t Know, I Don’t Really Think He’s That Funny, But My 12 Year-Old Loves Him. It’s Like, Reading Headlines? Really? I Get More Laughs Out Of Jokes On The Back Of The Count Chocula Box. Those Guys Sure Know A Lot of Vampire Puns!”

Occasionally, A Christian will become psychologically detached and conceited enough to believe their car is a proselytizing device for the Lord. This leads to several of the personalized plates I’ve seen, such as:

* GODGOOD (The bare, gruntable essentials I guess.)

* GODISLV (God is love. About as definite and descriptive as “war on terror.”)

* GODZ FAVR (Ohio plate. God’s favor. Or is it God’s Favorite? Judging by the teal Ford Probe he was driving, I’m guessing it’s some of that Old Testament ‘Angry God’ favor.)

But nothing was as curious as this GODMOBL. Not because of the plate; that’s an understandable level of crazy. But the entire car– a PT Cruiser– was covered in professional detailing and airbrush work consisting of a Cross on the hood, pictures of Jesus on the doors, and Bible verses everywhere. Now I grew up in West Michigan, where Jesus is a personality trait. I’ve seen its ugly side. So when I saw this, the first thing that came to mind was, this guy paid someone to do this. Not as in, “why would he?” As in, “how exactly did that talk go at the detail shop?”

Guy: “I just got this PT Cruiser, and I want some detail work done.”

Detailer: “Understandable. What were you thinking? Maybe some flames? Pinstripes? Something on the hood?”

Guy: “I want stuff everywhere, and damn the expense.”

Detailer: “Wow, okay. Sounds good. Where do you want to start?”

Guy: “I want a giant cross on the hood, to symbolize God’s love.”

Detailer: “I can do that.”

Guy: “And pictures of Jesus on the doors. Big ones.”

Detailer: “O… kay. Big pictures of Jesus doing what? Playing guitar? Riding a horse?”

Guy: “Reading the Bible to children.” (EN: actual picture on car.)

Detailer: “That’s impossible. The Bible wasn’t even written when Jesus was alive, and Jesus was an illiterate carpenter.”

Guy: “All things are possible through Christ.”

Detailer: *sighs* “Okay, what else?”

Guy: “Bible verses.”

Detailer: “Which ones, and where?”

Guy: “All of them, and everywhere.”

Detailer: “They won’t all fit.”

Guy: “All things are possible through Chr–.”

Detailer: “Yeah, yeah. I get it. Anything else? Anything on the roof?”

Guy: “No. I don’t want to go overboard, know what I mean?”

Detailer: “Really?”

Guy: “Haha,psyche! I want another Jesus on the roof.”

“Loud desperation,” is just a degree of self-awareness and irony about what one does that permits tongue-in-cheek reflection, and in turn, a more healthy understanding of one’s own passions through the eyes of others instead of just oneself. It’s a valuable tool; it allows you to look at your own life and say, “wow, I guess it’s pretty screwy that I make portraits of my family members out of macaroni noodles” or “maybe other people don’t love Reader’s Digest as much as me”. It doesn’t mean you have to stop enjoying yourself,just that you get it that other people don’t like, say, God as much as you do, and you get why too.

I don’t think anyone’s making that accusation about the Godmobile guy. No one makes the Godmobile because they’re only kind of into the Lord. So either that’s a man who believes his car is a weapon in the battle between Heaven and Hell (quiet desperation), or his sense of irony is so “Andy Kaufman” out there that no one gets it.

And if no one gets it, brother, neither do you.

America is in the shitter. Unemployment is like a bajillion percent. Birds are attacking women in phone booths, babies are shooting babies with guns they bought from other babies. Grandparents are exploding left and right. Just yesterday, I saw a swarm of bees steal some guy’s dialysis machine. Then they dropped it on him, and the following modulation in the swarm’s hum most certainly sounded like they were laughing. What I’m saying is, it’s a hot mess out there. We need something to bring us together as a nation. To put our loved ones back together, fight off deadly swarms of bee bandits, and somehow teach the babies to shoot those attack birds.

We need a real American drinking song.

Now I bet you drink beer, but unless you’re one of those know-it-all home-brew dicks, you don’t know what a lager is. Neither do I. But I do know this: from 0-7 lagers, I feel capable of mingling socially without doing something embarrassing, like getting a boner or picking my nose. From 8-12 lagers, I enter a phase I call “Professor Nick”: witty, insightful, dare I say… debonaire? Professor Nick knows one magic trick, and nearly one dance move. From 12-16 lagers is the phase called “Patrick Henry”, because I get ‘give me liberty or give me death!’ passionate about issues as trivial as, say, whether it’s racist to dislike brown rice. After 16, it’s in your best interest to stop feeding me beer: I start sprinting everywhere and I like to steal things.

My point is, America is the country that invented  steakhouses, even more steakhouses, Prohibition (boo!), fighting Prohibition (yay!), ending Prohibition (also yay!), and charging the mound. Lager, ale, whatever– get me lit, and make it fun. But culturally, we don’t have any drinking songs to go with it. Not like the Australians or the Irish or the Scottish do. And you better believe we need one. Everyone in the world already thinks our tongues are gay because we drink Budweiser and Miller, which I don’t know if you knew this they use rice to make. Tch. In Argentina, they have “Krakenbrau”. Know what that’s made with? The fermented blood of the mythical Kraken. (Also barley.)

So we’re fighting from behind here. People all over the world are making beers from monsters, fairies, old video games, spiders, thistles, reconstituted dinosaur eggs, and other beer. That’s right. Other countries have meta-beer, and we haven’t even gotten the first beer down yet. This is why I propose we even the tide with a good, original American drinking song. Don’t give me that Chumbawumba or “Sweet Caroline” bullshit either. It’s going to take more than “so good! so good! so good!” to catch up in this race.

This is what I’ve come up with. I know what you’re thinking. “Nick, you’re already busy punching millionaires to help orphaned piglets learn the rules for tournament majong officiating. How could you have time to come up with a song as handsome as this one?” Well, it wasn’t easy. I may just be some stupid, sexy failure, but I love this country.

Or drinking. Either or.

“America: the drinking song”

(to the tune of ‘You Make My Dreams’ by Darryl Hall and John Oates)

What you want, we got

and it might be hard to candle

(mumbled word) brother’s Randall,
He probably knows my name.
Hee haw, hold my beer
See that dude? I think he’s queer

His girlfriend’s hot, (garbled) not a trumpet

He looks like a muppet
Seriously, is Randall here?
He knows a guy, and I kind of want to get high
Holy shit, that’s Randall I’m serious!
Nope. Nope, it’s only Lucious.
Man, I’m so wasted right now!
So you’re like from Asia, right?
Because of your face, that’s why.
Seriously? From Cleveland? Go Browns! Yeeeah!
(mumbled words)
(more mumbling. like, a lot more.)

Where are you going?

Oh, hey Randall. Yeah, that Asian chick?

She’s not even really Asian. Just like, Clevelandian.

Plus she’s a bitch.

Kids have all the fun. It’s illegal to employ them, which means they basically spend 15 hours a day swimming and cramming Beefaroni down their gullets while you slave away at your job. Kids lack empathy and tact, which means that not only can they throw a frog full of fireworks at the prettiest girl in school, this same girl will deliberately, joyfully chase them around the yard as soon as she wipes the yesterfrog from her face and mouth. And leave us not forget, kids get to go places. If you have rich friends, they’ll sometimes take your kid camping or to Six Flags, so you can relax at home the same way you did before you had kids for a couple days (i.e. get whiskey-lit, watch porn, and play video games in your underwear). Overall, though, kids just get to go all over: to summer camp, rafting, biking, to friends’ houses, on field trips, etc. Kids are explorers. And that’s fucked up.

It’s fucked up because parents never agreed to give up their inner adventurer. It’s just, well, it takes so long to train a kid beyond poking dog poop with a stick that you can’t give kids advanced adulthood skills. What’s worse, your kid may already be a loser. It’s true. I’ve made the argument before that the “everyone’s a winner” feel-goodery of the 1980s basically created a generation of whiny, alcoholic pussies. A lot of people in the 18-30 age range need constant praise and validation, or they shut down. What happens if you’re one of these pussies? If you are, you’re already a shitty coworker, a crybaby friend, and almost homicidally insecure. That’s okay if the 1980s was only ruining your life, but now you’re responsible for your children– and those kids are at risk of being the exact same needy, fun-sponging attention whore you are.

Now I know I come down hard on kids, but that’s only because I see both childhood and adolescence as evolutionarily disadvantageous, and for that reason curious. It doesn’t mean I don’t care.

Which is why I’m now proposing five extremely awesome summer programs, guaranteed to make your son or daughter kick so much ass you’ll constantly tell other parents, “Yeah, I heard your son Billy got kicked out of the petting zoo for eating too many of the Goat Treats. Well, my kid gets laid like all the time“. And even though the other parents will know you aren’t talking about sex, they’ll fucking agree, because they’ll be compelled to. That’s how awesome your kid will be, all the time. I’m serious. So laid.

1.) Personal Space Camp

If you’re a loser, your kid will probably learn to do a lot of griping and moaning about insignificant shit from you. They’ll constantly encroach on the space of others and demand placation, priming themselves for a swirlie-intensive adolescence that they’ll no doubt melodramatize to a therapist years later.  Bah. At Personal Space Camp, they’ll learn valuable skills like Shutting Up, Going Away, and Dealing With It. Advanced students may even learn the trickier Making Daddy A Highball.

2.) “Plodding Horrors” Canoe Survival Course

At “Plodding Horrors”, kids will be paired off with a partner, and given a random assortment of survival gear. The river will be filled with various animals ranging from ugly to toxic, and every canoe will be exploded via remote control near dusk on the first night. The last three days will basically be like watching a poorly cast but extremely authentic version of “Lord of the Flies.” Sucks to your assmar!

3.) “Know Your Role” Self-Esteem Retreat

If you’ve ever driven behind someone who has like 3 different stickers claiming what universities/colleges they’ve gone to, you know what inappropriate self-esteem looks like. Do you want your kid to be the insecure socio-tard who thinks other people give a shit where he went to school? What’s next, reading Oprah’s Book Club selections? Having opinions about world cuisine? Or maybe acting like you know about Olympic Sports? Please. Spare your kid. We’ll teach them to identify their strengths and accept their weaknesses, and become secure, whole people instead of trepidacious oddballs who align self-worth with what they think, where they’ve gone, or what they do.

4.) “Jehovah’s Witness Relocation” Program

Have you seen two men walking down the street, dressed in short-sleeved white shirts, navy pants and black neckties? Well those aren’t successful people, like pilots or Battlestar Galactica fan fiction writers, you silly billy. Those are Jehovah’s Witnesses! If you have a minute to talk about the Lord and hear the good news about our Savior Jesus Christ,then you’ll love learning valuable life skills like: knocking on doors; dealing with rejection/violence; and, how to find inconspicuous dumpsters for pamphlet disposal. We also teach you how to blend in to your environment, like the Viet Cong, so no one will know your secret identity as a proselytizer. Wait… holy shit. Are Jehovah’s Witnesses superheroes?

5.) Roy Scout Camp

Whenever anyone thinks, “x is the kind of man/woman I want my kid to be,” x is invariably, and unanimously, Roy Schneider. Roy Scouts will learn the ways of this mercurial and highly successful actor. They will dress like brooding ocean town sheriffs, drink scotch on a boat with an obvious Captain Ahab figure, and get merit badges in Rifle Shooting, Conversational Quips in Context, Problem Solving, and Shark Exploding. Advanced Roy Scouts will be allowed to shoot a pellet gun at the actual shark used in the filming of Jaws IV while shouting “you killed my only boy you son of a bitch!” This exercise teaches shark-appropriate coping mechanisms, and comes with a merit badge in Vengeance.

When I think “August”, I think “3 week, scorching hot, heavily policed bout of after-dark liquor fueled mayhem”. Hell, we all do. (Some would argue that if you changed “scorching hot” to any month-appropriate weather phrase, I in fact believe this about every month. But we’re not here to bury Caesar.) Which kind of got me thinking why August doesn’t have any cool summer celebrations/festivals. I call shenanigans.

Now first of all, I get it. August sucks. August contains the “dog days of summer,” named for the Celtic tradition of telling temperature by putting wool underpants on a dog and seeing if he dies from heat exhaustion. August is humid, rain takes a holiday, and the heat makes everyone so ornery that they start roundhouse kicking their children just for thinking about dinner. So what are we to do? Should we just let people degrade into heathens, eating bowls of cereal with their bare hands and drinking beer out of garbage can lids? That’s stupid question. Of course not. We’re being philanthropic here.

Someone originally suggested the idea of “Hot August Nights” to me as a chance to unseat the boredom of summer with a festival of… some kind. But I was thinking this can’t just be any old arbitrary excuse to drink, like a Car Show or Coast Guard Festival. Hot August Nights needs some zazz. So here are some sample events that you might see, all of them having to do with the month of August:

Evil Ice Cream Night: Participants get to vote on ice cream flavors named after their favorite demon, devil, mythological evil, succubus, outworlder, other-sider, or anti-christ. Entries include Chupacabra Cadabra, Beelzebubble gum, Hitler’s Aryan Superman, Tutti Lucifrutti, Charles Manson’s ‘Good Vibrations’, and Moose Tracks.

Churchill Down’s Syndrome “Trot for the Cure”: A charity race exclusively featuring horses with Down’s Syndrome.

Toxic Spider Roulette Night: Every entrant will face an opponent, and each will have four tiny watercress sandwiches on a Lazy Susan. They take turns eating one until someone hears a *crunch*. Surprise! You now have horrible, nightmarish diarrhea, compliments of the Australian Giraffe Maimer, a spider whose toxic innards are so dangerous for human consumption that simply cooking one is considered a war crime! Winner of the contest receives an “Air Supply World Tour 1986″ t-shirt (previously owned), and a trophy depicting President Nixon giving a speech to unenthusiastic youngsters.

1960s Night: Woah, it’s a flashback! Come enjoy the incredible music, dubious cuisine and racial tension of the 1960s! Don’t miss the ‘People of Color’ Dance Contest, or the ‘Smug White People Try Really Hard Not to Sound Racist While They Talk Reticently About Integration’ video retrospective.

The Captain Morgan’s “Let’s Get Lit Up Tonight, Okay?” Night: Bartenders from all over the city will be mixing up delicious, potent and/or gastrointestinally dangerous beverages, served at dirt cheap prices. We don’t need no stinkin’ cops! A little rioting will show them who’s boss, with special compliments and thanks to our sponsors, the good people over at Captain Morgan’s! Please drink responsibly.

Now who’s ready to get fuck-a-mailbox drunk? You are, thanks to some of our featured drinks this year :

The Ham Shandy: Wheat beer, Captain Morgan’s, Dr. Pepper, bacon grease, ham stick for garnish

Bartender’s Never-Ender Pretender Bender: Captain Morgan’s, turpentine, lime wedge. Comes with a straw.

The Dick in a Box: Vodka, whiskey, Captain Morgan’s, 7-Up, Ranch Dressing. Served in a plastic bag glued to a shoe box.

The Eye (and other parts) of the Tiger: Captain Morgan’s, Red Gatorade, Cayenne Pepper, Siberian Tiger Juice (illegal in the US).

Heisenberg UnSquirtainty Principle: Ruby Red Squirt, Captain Morgan’s, Grenadine, and 2 oz. of something called “Flavor Taste” from the Lebanese grocery store.

The Fishmonger’s Codpiece: Pomegranate liquor, Captain Morgan’s, Omega-3 “Colon-Blaster” cod liver oil, Captain Morgan’s, Salt, actual cod, maybe a fishing lure?, more Captain Morgan’s.

Flag Day Night: Everyone brings a flag. Or doesn’t, whatever. Hooray for Flag Day! Sigh.

“Hamlet” Night: Always the last night of our festival. Basically, we get everyone drunk, then we show them a bunch of ineffectual, overemotional teenage bitches and some smoking hot but emotionally withholding older women. Anyone who bags one of each is awarded the “Claudius Maximus” trophy, which comes with an inset mirror so maybe you can take a look at yourself once you win it. Also comes with a box of tissues, because you probably won’t like what you see.

I want a dog. Dogs are awesome. Dogs combine everything neat about pet ownership with only the exciting parts of having a child. You can teach it to catch things, or bring you things, or drink beer. Just like owning any other pet, you have to shoot it full of drugs so it won’t die from worms. Just like owning a child, you have to stop a dog from eating its own crap and teach it not to have public sex with complete strangers. If you’re lucky, you can have one of those off-the-leash showoffs that makes everyone at the dog park think you do tricks on ESPN because your dog will catch a Frisbee and respond to its name, instead of chasing squirrels and shitting on its own feet like a normal person’s dog. I even have the perfect name: Joan of Bark (or Jeanne b’Arc in French).

So even though I’m at least a year away from getting a dog, I like to go to the Humane Society and scout out potential dogs, and I inevitably look at cats too. You know, feel out the territory, see what’s out there. It can be difficult to get through some of the rooms of animals, in part because their plight is so adorably tragic. In larger part, though, it’s because the old women working there have clearly owned cats so long they’ve contracted some tact-sapping brain disorder that forces them to talk to every animal as though its a full grown human being recovering from a head injury. And if I sound bitter about this, it’s because I looked into volunteering at the H.S., and all told it would be 9 months before I’d get to walk a dog or un-cage a cat. Why? God damn old ladies hogging all the face time with the animals. You have to pass a drug screen to volunteer, which makes sense if you’ve recently been busted for getting hamsters methed up or pushing smack to ferrets.

Anyway, this is that sad time of year when everyone who thought paying fifty bucks to spay your pet was another left-wing Obama conspiracy to inject communism into your cat ends up with 5-10 kittens screaming like a hungry accordion under their porch. They bring these adorable tramps into the H.S., where they frolic and pounce and generally look unimpeachably cute. Every single one of them looks like mogwai, which is really the only danger about adopting one:

Without question the highlight of the afternoon was a family of cats that all traveled together. Not in a fun, Disney-like Incredible Journey way. More like in a The Hills Have Eyes way. To be honest, I’m not sure it’s even 3 separate cats, because they never separated; it’s a mother and father, and their adult daughter named Baby. Trust me, I won’t be making any Dirty Dancing jokes because Baby doesn’t deserve a corner; Baby deserves to be chained up in a basement, where you feed it chicken bones and shattered dreams while you cry about the cruel design of God’s own hand. So while the entire family moved like Cerberos and looked like someone just opened the Ark of the Covenant, I’m sure they’ll find a lovely home somewhere. And I’m sure that, when the police find the remains of whoever used to live in that home, they’ll wrongly assume some terrible, ritualistic cannibal-type was involved. Right m.o. officer… wrong genus.

There were a couple dogs there that were extremely playful and friendly, and I hope someday soon I get to actually indulge in owning a dog of my own. Because when you make a grown man walk on a leash and eat dog food, they call it hazing. When you make a child walk on a leash, they call it “white people at the mall”. When you make a child eat dog food, they call it cruel/Dinty Moore Beef Stew. But when you leash a dog and feed it dog food, they call it “friend.”

Someday, Joan of Bark. Someday.

I hate Shirley Temple. I always have. She is so insufferably cute and precocious that rabbits and birds happen in your living room every time you look at her. If her parents weren’t a baby deer and the giggle following a big, wet kiss, I’ll eat my hat– which after two of her movies, has probably turned into sunshine and cotton candy. Whether it’s tap-dancing her sugar-sweet heart out or chirping through songs that make The Sound of Music look like death metal, Shirley Temple was afflicting the sensibilities of the cinematic world for (quick shout out to Wikipedia) 19 years. I think she accidentally did a lot of damage with her movies, setting America down confusing cultural roads that it would take up to 30 years to full rewind.

And now, they’ve released a box set of all of her movies. I’m deliberately not linking to Amazon on this one; if you want to find it, do it your damn self. I’m not perpetuating this foolishness. Here are five reasons that no one should be buying this box set, inviting again the type of sociocultural turmoil that bemused  and enthralled youngsters, and later angered and confused those youngsters as adults. Her legend lives on:

1.) Poorly planned culinary fusion

“Animal crackers in my soup” is something I’ve actually tried. Now I don’t like animal crackers. They taste like vanilla and particle board, and are oozed into shapes impossible to recognize when compared to the animals on the back of the box. It’s a camel, is it? I know for a fact a camel’s face looks like a vagina, but the animal cracker does nothing to represent this anatomical abhorrence. Animals crackers are like a Rorschach test for which the child’s result is always a learning disability. This disability is only confirmed when you see a kid ruining soup by stirring in “animal” crackers. You might as well just show kids a movie of superheroes eating fiberglass insulation.

2.) Improper level of trust in adults

Shirley Temple was hanging out almost exclusively with grown men all the time. These mincing, child-hungry adults did nothing but sing, caper around, and teach her things? Doubt it. Forgive my postmodern cynicism, but if a grown man has a week of contact time with an 8 year-old girl outside the purview of her parents, he better be a family member, a social worker, or arrested.

3.) Suspiciously high optimism

Shirley’s parents in the films were positively batshit about sending her all over the world on the smallest pretense. “Flying to Australia to check the status of dingo-baby relations? Send a song ‘n’ dance man with her! Three weeks of freedom!” Even worse, most of her films were about being a parentless child, wandering around with a older man. I’ve watched enough “Law and Order” to know these situations overwhelming do not end in peppermints, held hands, and innocent giggles hopscotching through the gingerbread forest. I don’t want to say where things end up, but here’s some fruits that rhyme with those things: grape; whorange; prostitution watermelon; and, lime. (Crime. Lime is crime.) I’m sorry, Shirley, but no one believes that you can keep tap-dancing with a smile on your face with that shit going on around you. You’ve got bigger problems than toe-heel-toe-heel-heel-heel-pause-toe.

4.) Perpetuation of Jim Crow

When Shirley was dancing and singing with someone, it was very often a black guy. While the zeitgeist for films back then was certain still that “darkies are the dancingest, singingest damn things y’ever saw,” the innocence of a child was a perfect place to start that cultural revolution. Even if they wanted to avoid making that bold a statement, the least they could’ve done is not perpetuate the stereotype of minstrelsy and “natural rhythm” that they seem intent on putting out there.

5.) Wildly inaccurate reflection of military protocol

Shirley is a 9 or 10 year old girl tap-dancing on the deck of a navy ship. She couldn’t have gotten onto the ship without at least being in the service. To have the leave to dance and sing whenever she wants means she’s at least a general. If this is false, Shirley needs to quit forcing 200 men to stand around and watch her prattle on about lollipops. If it’s true, then Shirley has much bigger shit to worry about than the status of boats and candy. I don’t know if you know this, Shirley, but you’re only five years away from World War II. Start thwarting Nazis already.