Hello my Friends, sorry for the delay in posting. I wrote a blog last week (750 words about college football rivalries and why Iowa needs to stop playing ISU.) It was bad so I didn’t post it. My goal is to keep you, the reader, happy and post about every 10(ish) days. Don’t get your hopes up though.
First things first, I was at Clones v. Hawks this past week (he wrote on Thursday and didn’t publish till the following Monday) and if you are wondering if a 6 hour football game is a good time, it’s actually the worst. If northwest Iowa doesn’t want to elect Steve King, they can always elect Kirk Ferentz because he is painfully conservative. (This is a political blog now. Also I know Iowa city isn’t in NW Iowa, it’s a joke because I’m so passionate about Iowa politics.)
Iowa sucks, alright moving on. You guys remember last time I posted about marketing and everything was semi-connected? Well it’s not going to be this time. I got 3 thoughts and they are completely unrelated. Buckle up because here we go baby!
Ok, imagine you are at the lake with your friends, family, or significant other. Now you’re thinking, ‘how could I let my friends know that I’m cool’,‘how could I make my dad be less disappointed in me‘, or ‘what would make home girl super impressed with me?’ respectively. The answer to all these is skipping a rock on the lake at least 5 times. You walk up and down the beach (or what we call a beach in South Dakota, more of a glorified gravel pit) but here’s the thing, you can’t find any good skipping rocks. You know why? All the good rocks have been skipped. Rocks are a lot like land and they ain’t making any more of them. Humans have been skipping rocks for what I assume is millions of years, and all the good ones are in the water. We’re just left with the duds, leaving us uncool, unimpressive, disappointments. Moving from throwing things into the water to going under it…
Disney has been in the public eye for casting a black Ariel and people are apparently up in arms, but the real controversy is in the opening line from the song “Under the Sea.” Sebastian the crab in his wonderful Jamacian accent bellows out, “The Seaweed is always greener in somebody else’s lake.” First off, before you call me an idiot, I get it, it’s supposed to be a play on the grass is greener, but let’s pretend I am an idiot and break down a lyric from a G-rated animated movie that came out in 1989. The Little Mermaid takes place “Under The Sea” they live in an unnamed body of water (ocean/sea) presumably by Europe. Spoiler alert, oceans and lakes are two totally different things and these worlds hardly ever mix. There is no way Sabastian, or Ariel for that matter, would know what the heck a lake is. It’s not like there is an underwater Internet that Ariel can go look up the different bodies of water. This is information she had to have been told and there are only a handful of fish that can go in both fresh and saltwater. So are these fish out here telling the citizens of Atlantica of these crazy foreign bodies of water with walls called lakes? I highly doubt it. (Plus most of these fish are located in America.) The line doesn’t make any sense really and just kind of ruins the whole movie if you ask me.
I have no good transition into my last point but here it is. The beloved children’s book series, The Boxcar Children. The first book (1924) is about 4 orphans surviving life by camping out in a boxcar before being adopted by their grandpa (spoiler alert). The second book (1949, 25 years later!) is about the kids going on vacation and basically the same plot as the first book just living in a lighthouse I’m pretty sure. (I last read this in 3rd grade and refuse to look it up.) Every other book in the series (including books 3-19 still by the original author) are mysteries.
How is going from surviving on a train to solving Yellow House problems a natural transition? 
- What are you doing. Why are you taking a beloved book and making a franchise about it that has nothing to do with the original book. What if we took the previously mentioned Little Mermaid and waited 30 years and made Little Mermaid 2 the Mystery of the Lost Dinglehopper. It’s just a cheap idea taking established characters and making them do something completely different.
- These kids were orphans and got adopted by their rich grandpa. (I think. Again I haven’t read these books since 3rd grade.) The last thing I would want to do in their situation would be to solve other people’s mysteries. These kids had a hard life as orphans where they were able to survive living on a train. Just let them chill out and live a rich life, they aren’t Batman. Although maybe it’s in rich orphans’ blood that they need to solve mysteries/fight crime, I mean small sample size but still 2 for 2.
- This is the last and least important point, it’s really just here because if it’s only numbered one and two it would look dumb, but, besides the first book, none of their adventures have to do with box cars. Come on guy, throw us a train every once in a while!
Thank you guys for reading! Tune in next week for another amazing adventure!
bteamballer 