Alan’s Blog of Monkey Bloginess

In 1987 “The Tracey Ullman Show” aired on a fledgling network called FOX. As bumpers to ease the show in and out of commercials, a short cartoon was produced. Conceived of by Matt Groening, “The Simpsons” quickly won over my 7 year old heart. I would stay up late Sunday nights to watch “The Tracey Ullman Show” with the hopes of catching “The Simpsons” bumpers. It’s not that I didn’t like the rest of the show, ’cause I did, just that “The Simpsons” were the highlight for me. The antics of the Simpsons family resonated with me, along with FOX’s other original program, “Married with Children”. FOX’s dysfunctional family trend was a great balance to NBC & the wholesome “The Cosby Show” (which I also watched and enjoyed).

Then in December of 1989, as if ol’ St. Nick wanted to reward me for having been the best little 9 year old boy in the world (I hadn’t), “The Simpsons” received their own half-hour show for Christmas with “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire”. I anxiously awaiting the premiere, counting down the days more anxiously than Christmas morning itself. The day finally arrived and then more, even better news: what I thought was just a Christmas Special was actually the start of a regular series to begin in January 1990. Happy 10th Birthday to me! (”Bart the Genius” aired just 6 days before my birthday)

And thus it began. Here we are, over 22 years later and “The Simpsons” are in their 20th season having already been renewed to 22, and I am still a fan. To the right is a picture of me wearing my favorite t-shirt in 1990. That shirt disappeared one day, I never found out where it went. Presumably my mom threw it away as it was nothing more than technically a shirt after a couple years in that a halo of fabric kinda of wrapped itself around me. I had a plethora of Simpsons related merchandising from Bart Simpson dolls to stickers and posters. As I’ve gotten older, my Simpsons merchandising has simply matured. Instead of a simple t-shirt, I have a Pin-Pals bowling shirt and a Kwik-E-Mart shirt that button up to a Homer Simpson full-head rubber mask. Through gifts I’ve been given puzzles, card & board games, dolls & action figures, post cards, key chains, hula dancers, coasters, Magic 8 Balls … just about a little bit of everything. The one item I’ve always wanted and have never gotten: Simpsons Chess.

Now people may chime in with their idea on when the Simpsons have “jumped the shark”. As in the point in the shows history where it reached its apex of quality and signals that we are now on the slow decline of the show. While the show really experienced its heyday in the mid-to-late ’90s, it’s still managed to hold strong throughout the ’00s. And I’ve always contested anyways: even a bad episode of “The Simpsons” is still better the best episode of most other TV shows. As with a hometown sports team, I stick with the show through good episodes and the bad episodes, ride the low seasons along with the high seasons. In the end, the show still makes me laugh.

Kindergarten was the last time in my life that I remember learning something that hasn’t needed to be unlearned in some regard at some point in my life. The alphabet is pretty much the same now as it was in 1984, and the days of the week haven’t gone through redefinition. Recent scientific discoveries haven’t changed the color blue, and technological break-throughs while quickening the pace of change haven’t caused September, April, June or November to not have 30 days nor the rest (except February) to not have 31 (though the less said about the leap second, the better, February is still having identity issues with that one). What I learned in kindergarten has brought me far in life, and it has much farther to take me. But everything I learned after that, well, that’s all up for debate. And much of it has been.

Either through changes in definition, discovery of new information, advances in technology, or purposeful deception here are some of the things I was taught in school that later I had to unlearn.

In the school of astronomy, there have been many new discoveries that have redefined our view of the Universe. For example, until fairly recently our solar system consisted of a star, 9 planets & their moons, asteroids & comets, with a healthy sprinkling of dust. Our neighborhood felt pretty settled in; we knew who lived here, and we weren’t expecting there to be any moving vans taking up the street any time soon. But then, as if we were in a cheesy horror movie, something came from the darkness. The Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune proved that Pluto wasn’t necessarily as much of an oddity as it first appeared; it had some drinkin’ buddies. In response, Pluto has been booted from the Planet Country Club, and a new class of “dwarf planets” has been crafted for the Plutoids. And now, we are down to 8 planets. Old friends of mine had a mnemonic device for remembering the order of the planets, and it looks like now they aren’t getting their “Pizza”.

That’s “local” astronomy. For a more galactic scale bit of revelations came from being taught about the theories surrounding black holes, as at the time they were as mysterious as the contents of the meatloaf we had for lunch in the cafeteria. Our current understanding now extends to there being supermassive black holes, and that they exist at the center of every or nearly every galaxy. So, that’s a whole lot of book learnin’ that didn’t exist in the books I was learnin’ from as a kid.

At the rate textbooks get published, schools go through book buying cycles, and school curriculum gets updated compared to the increasing rate in which scientific discoveries are made, I’m not even sure how much information being taught in schools is up-to-date at any given point. I’m not even confident how many adults are aware that our solar system now only has 8 planets.

Beyond the stars, here on Earth, even our histories are being rewritten at an ever growing pace. The beliefs of where we came from had come a long way themselves, but there were still lots of holes and gaps in the scientific theories that made them as credible as any other creation myth. Many to this day still live in fear of “The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief”, no matter what new anthropological or genetic discoveries are made. The missing links have pretty much been filled in; we did not evolve from monkeys – for one, monkeys have tails, we don’t, we’re apes – we have a common ancestor as monkeys & other apes; we did not evolve from Neanderthals, we displaced them from Europe and possibly cross-bred; and we did not spontaneously evolve around the world simultaneously, we started in Africa and a tribe of 200 emigrated around 70,000 years ago. That’s a whole lotta our family tree that’s been filled in recently.

And then there’s the dinosaurs. Those crazy dinos. While there have been lots of smaller discoveries, nothing was as hard to initially swallow as the revelation that every bird evolved from dinosaurs. The mass riots from the ridiculousness of the mere suggestion took years to rebuild from. But slowly, with time as our wounds healed, so did the acceptance that the cute parakeet in the cage that you always thought would peck your eyes out without a moments hesitation did in fact come from the same genetic stock as the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park.

My idea of what in the world was in the world before I was has been written, rewritten, erased, updated, appended, and finally just tossed out and started over so many times that all I care about at this point is that I never did like that parakeet, and we’re all one big happily family.

As much as we’ve learned about where we’ve been, as little we know about where we’re going. With advancements in technology being measured in months at times instead of decades or years, by the time anything does make it to the school level to be taught, it truly is out-of-date. In the Did You Know video on YouTube, it states that the “Top 10 jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004″. Think about that for a second, I can wait as long as you need for that to sink in. Ready? Another bit of information from that same video later on states “For students starting a 4 year technical degree … half of what they study will be outdated by their third year of study”. Ok, now let that marinade too.

Schools can teach foundations and concepts, but any applicable information become irrelevant, and frequently the foundations and concepts becomes out-dated, too. When I was in grade school I was learning BASIC on an Apple IIe. There is practically no value in knowing that, nor has having learned it as an intro to programming concepts been anything that isn’t covered in one page in the introduction of even the most basic of computer classes now. We do, indeed, live in exponential times, so this is only going to get worse with time.

But beyond a structured school system’s inability to stay relevant in technology classes comes the flat out lies and deceptions I’ve had to rinse and repeat out of my head. Mostly having to do with rewriting American history from the glorified propaganda.

Most recently, I’ve had to come to terms that the buffalo did not almost disappear entirely from the American plains land because of over hunting. Well, not hunting in the sense I was led to believe anyway. It all came from when I learned how Buffalo Bill got his name, and why the latter years of his life were filled with such regret and remorse. For you see, Buffalo Bill got his name when he was in the U.S. military and followed orders to starve out the Native Americans in the plains of their main natural resource by killing entire herds of buffalo and leaving the carcasses to rot. Now I loooooove me some buffalo meat. It’s super yummy in my tummy. It’s so lean and sweet, the fact that this delicious animal almost went extinct saddens me; but to learn that billions of pounds worth of this meat jamboree went to complete and utter waste enrages me! I feel betrayed beyond description. Buffalo, not cows, should be the U.S. staple red meat.

And the list goes on. And on. Back up because some of the new stuff got rewritten. And back down the list. The more I learn, the more I know that I don’t know.

But all that stuff in kindergarten about sharing, playing well with others, and the importance of naptime … that stuff I’ll always remember.