and I say hey, what a wonderful kind of day

We lost our free cable a few weeks ago. I believe it is part of Comcast's evil plan to give people free cable, take it away, and wait for those now addicted to Top Chef to come crawling back to them, ready to pay any price, JUST GIVE ME THE GOODS, MAN. Fortunately for us, our cable watching was mainly restricted to Mad Men, which is now over, and I can pretty much watch everything else online, through our internet, provided by Comcast. Sucka.

This is all to say that today when I was home and eating lunch and surfing during Tyra commercial breaks (and might I just say, that bitch is crazy. Seriously. Who gave that woman a talk show and what producer lets her continually dress like a drag queen while speaking in random, inconsistent, accents? Are you French, from the hood, a gay queen? I give up. But I guess you're on top), I happened upon an episode of Arthur - two episodes actually. I stopped at the first one because Tom and Ray, the CarTalk guys, were on. No joke: Arthur's dad was having a problem with the family car, so Arthur called up CarTalk and his rabbit friend imitated the noise the car made. It was very cool and very disorienting and I now know what the Magliozzi brothers would look like if they were cartoon woodland creatures. Thank you, public broadcasting.

It was the next episode that caused me to write a blog post. In this episode some girl is a bed wetter and fretting about the slumber party she has to attend. While at home, she wears an alarm to wake her up to go to the bathroom. WTF, right? She had this thing that looked like a walkie-talkie on her shoulder and she was telling her dad she wouldn't wear it in front of everyone. And then her dad told her she could wear her Pull-Ups, which I'm pretty sure is a copyrighted name by Pampers. And this isn't even the weird part of the episode yet. Yes, it gets more bizarre than a cartoon bunny with a bed-wetting alarm attached to her nightgown. She has a dream sequence during the episode in which she wins a gold medal in the Olympics and the sportscasters comment on her Nocturnal Enuresis. I'm not being clever here -- the cartoon anteater said, on the children's show, "This is such a great triumph, especially given her struggle with NOCTURNAL ENURESIS." Since this was a PBS program, the other sportscaster then got out a dictionary and explained what nocturnal (occurring at night) and enuresis (from the Greek meaning 'to make water') mean.

So I'm pretty much floored at this point. An episode on a children's program about bed-wetting is something I can handle - I think Ben Seaver or Screech had the same problem. But alarms? Scientific terminology? NPR programming? And then there came this line which made my head explode: "You know that soda is a diuretic, right?"

Diuretic, folks. A word I just had to google to make sure I could spell it correctly, came out of the mouth of a cartoon moose on an episode of Arthur. This was another learning moment as the moose explains to everyone that diuretic has nothing to do with 'going number 2' but simply 'going number 1' more often. It's fancy moose talk for saying, all that soda is going to make you pee a lot.

I didn't find out if the girl made it through the slumber party or not without any mishaps. Tyra had Clinton Kelly giving makeovers to moms, daughters, and bathrooms while offering dating advice to vegetarians. But I did find out that Arthur is (1) still on PBS, (2) still very current with the times, and (3) makes me very uncomfortable.