729 Monkey

Hi team.
I decided to join this motley bunch because I like thinking about what stuff means. I like talking about what stuff means too, but generally possess the social skills to keep it toned down. Unless of course someone makes the mistake of mentioning one of my special dangerous trigger topics. If you want to avoid hearing me expound in animated fashion until syntax drips from your ears, you may want to avoid bringing up...

politics
the environment
cognition
the economy
linguistics
semantics
psychology
metaphor
fractals
chaos
complexity theory
the war on drugs
concepts
categories
paradox
education
the do-it-yourself movement
marine iguanas
philospphy
psychotropic substances
theory of mind
sustainability
narrative
duck-billed platypi
the underlying context (of just about anything)
sociology
social insects
idioms
taoism
speculative fiction
the stupidity of pandas
science!
symbolism
irony
technology & the internets
creativity
big complicated systems like healthcare or public transit
local communities
neuroscience
ornithopters
select cartoons from childhood
black-and-white thinking
steampunk
intelligence
zombie apocolypses
speech language pathology
the Coming Singularity
home-made or archaic weapons
alternative energy

That's pretty much it. Sports are pretty safe. I assume that most of the topics I'll choose to write about will fit into the above list in at least some way.

I have a bachelor's in psychology/linguistics and I'm working on a master's in speech-language pathology. Many of my more 'content-driven' posts will probably be along those lines. For example, today I was planning to post a semantic analysis of the lexical paradoxes employed in the Tao te Ching. However, I've been swamped this week by papers and tests... I've decided to rant about Captain Planet instead.

...

[On a sad personal note, everything but the pictures is straight from memory.]



Oh, Captain Planet... When I was a kid, I really loved the *idea* of captain planet, but even at the time was forced to confront the dissonance of the show's reality conflicting with what it could have been.

A superhero out to save the environment that needed the help from a group of multicultural everyday kids like me? Sign me up on recycled post-consumer paper!

Captain Planet looked cool, at least in a Vanilla Ice sort of way. All his planeteers had rings which gave them special super-powers, Gaia and that Russian chick were both pretty hot, and they had a solar-powered jet. The show had such potential for badass, especially in the mind of a boy raised on almond milk and soy-cheese.

Sadly, the execution left something to be desired. The plots hatched by the various eco-villians were always tragically contrived, things like creating oil spills so that pig-faced guy could sell snow-cones to the eco-volunteers who showed up to clean the seabirds. Even to my 9-year-old brain, it seemed as though the critical polluting aspect of each plan was often tangential or unnecessary.

Captain Plunder: "So, you have finally uncovered my plot to save millions in high-rise construction costs by replacing all the low-cost concrete with the hardened tears of baby koalas? Curse you, planeteers!"

My grievances continue:

- The earthjet.
They spent way too much time flying around in that thing without blowing things up. It didn't even have missiles. I can understand trying to keep things green and low-tech, but it could have at least fired rabid wombats or something.

- Gaia.
She was hot, don't get me wrong, but she'd just follow them around all the time whining and asking them to do crap. And let's be honest: it was kinda like their mom was sending them on their super-hero missions.

- Mati.



Poor, poor, Mati. It wasn't enough that he came from a persecuted indigenous culture in an educationally and economically-disadvantaged region of the globe. Of course not. What got me was that his amazing earth-saving ring superpower was... heart.

To receive rings, the Planeteers must all have been exceptional children.

Picture this: You've struggled your whole life to overcome hardship. You taught yourself to read by the age of 4. Strangled poachers and old-growth loggers with your bare hands at the age of 6. Educated slash-and-burn farmers in the benefits of bio-char farming by the age of 8. Started your own micro-finance organization funding the renewable harvesting of rainforest products by autonomous indiginous collectives by the age of 10.

Finally, by the age of 12, you are chosen by the EARTH MOTHER HERSELF to literally save the world, and you discover that while your fellow planeteers literally harness the POWER OF THE FOUR ELEMENTS to fight evil, you're stuck playing with your monkey in the back of the earthjet. Wasn't the fifth alchemical element supposed to be phlogostin or aether or something? The American kid can throw fireballs, the African kid makes earthquakes for fun, and you, you can send hummingbirds for help. Great.

That was the worst part, too. In order to highlight Mati's powers of animal empathy (in nearly every episode), he had to get trapped and captured ALL THE TIME.

"Oh no, I am trapped in a net cleverly crafted from plastic 6-pack rings that will never biodegrade on their own! How will I escape? I know, I will ask that Gibbon sitting on that log to go for help!"

"Oh no, I have been locked in this styrofoam-cup factory overnight and I am afraid of the dark! How will I ever see my friends again? I know, I will ask that river-dolphin in the break room to go for help!"

"Oh no, I am trapped in 30-year zero-down variable-rate 'liar-loan' mortgage about to roll over to 25% interest and I already possess negative equity, whatever should I do? I know, I will ask the snow-leopard cub at the local credit union to go for help!"

And so on.

On a final note, the above picture I found states that his powers include THE UNIQUE HEALING POWER OF RAINFOREST PLANTS. These days big pharma would be on him like potatoes on chips. They're patenting everything they can find down there.

... It was pretty cool when Captain Planet trucked shit up, though.

Happy earth day.

-odds