Sunday, May 25, 2008

The Future?

So one of the great things about being a parent is you get to play with toys. Sometimes when Kirk and I are in the toy aisle I'll be begging him to beg me for a particular item, just because I want to play with it. I keep telling him, "We can't properly play crash the lowrider into the fire truck without a police car." I'm getting tired of pretending some old lego car is a police car.

Anyway this also applies to books. I have truly enjoyed visiting some of the lost treasures of my youth. I love reading Dr. Suess, and there are a lot of great new childrens books out there. One author in particular, Jarreett J. Krosozka, is very popular in our house. His books include Bubble Bath Pirates, and the ever rocking Punk Farm series. Punk Farm is a rock band consisting of four farm animals. They seem to have a pretty big following. I'm always reading too far between the lines in childrens literature. Punk Farm for example have a pig for a guitar player and a sheep for a lead singer and I'm always telling Kirk that those two seem like arrogant jerks to me. They always ride in the front seat of the tour van while the goat bass player who does all the work by the way, always rides in back. Pig and Sheep are always complaining, while Goat takes everything in stride. It's a common band dynamic I suppose. Kirk ignores me when I go on about things like this, and still says Pig is his favorite.

When I was growing up I liked the Berenstain Bears. Now there are lots of books and movies taking place in the Berenstain Bear world. So I got to thinking. If the world is populated by Bears, what happened to the humans? Now I've noticed other animals in their world, such as dogs, horses, bee's, fish. These are all earth animals, so I am certain they live here on earth and it's not an alien world with bear like creatures. I figure it has to be earth approximately 20 to 50 million years into the future. It has to be far enough in the future for bears to evolve into sentient creatures and to develop a high tech civilization. Far enough for our own human society to be buried deep into the fossil record. Then I wonder, since the Berenstain Bears drive cars that appear to be internal combustion propelled, is the oil they use for fuel the remnants of us? Do their gas stations show little silhouettes of sapiens on the signs? Of course it might be some kind of mutation, and the bear world we see is just a reservation for bear culture say 100 years from now, and all their technology is borrowed from us. Anyway it makes one think. Or maybe just me.

6 comments:

belsum said...

Ahem. There are five members of Punk Farm, not four. Just because Mercurial Rage doesn't have a drummer doesn't mean they don't need Cow! HA!!

And I'm still waiting for your treatise on Donald Duck & Mickey Mouse and Elmo and their relationships to those around them.

Chris Hill said...

oh and chicken plays keyboards. I guess I'm the asshole.

belsum said...

OH biker.

Jon Hunt said...

I always figured the Bernstein Bears thing happened in an alternate dimension parallel to ours, where bears are the dominant life form. One wonders whether, then, humans exist in some form -- perhaps just as neanderthals, who steal picnic baskets from campsites just like bears do in our world. Or hell, perhaps there are intelligent bears and savage bears and there's no sign of sapient life. But then, are there monkeys? How do they treat monkeys, considering they didn't evolve from them?

Do the Bernstein Bears have opposable thumbs? One assumes so -- but one also notices in the book their technology seems much less advanced than ours. The use of "Brother" and "Sister" as proper names suggests almost an Amish-level of civilization, like perhaps deliberately un-advanced, like perhaps they eschew technology and favor some kind of theocracy?

It boggles the mind, truly.

Chris Hill said...

I like the parallel dimension idea. Savage humans stealing picnic baskets. That is fodder for some serious comedy.

It's kind of simple and amish like. There is some sort of creepy village mindset present. A bear cult? But they do have telephones, and cars, and boomboxes and things. This is an enigma we may never figure out.

Jon Hunt said...

The only other place I've ever seen people name their kids stuff like "Brother" and "Sister" is in Salt Lake City, Utah. I had a waitress named "Sister" there, and it freaked me out. Maybe all the bears are fucking ursine Mormons! In which case -- maybe what we're NOT seeing is that there are more than one Momma Bear in other trees, and the Momma Bear WE see is just the head wife, y'know?