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• Yet Another Generation of Young Girl Popfatuations

  Like a lot of teenage boys, I had a poster of a professional male racquetball player next to my bed. At the time, my friends were adorning their walls with posters of Cindy Crawford drinking from that Pepsi can or some vestige from their older brother's Jane Fonda fixation. But I went to sleep each night staring at the visage of some nobody I can't even remember nowadays, thinking that if I practiced really hard, every day, for hours on end, I'd still never fill out eye protection goggles like that dude. At the time, however, I knew that if he had ever visited our local mall -- maybe for some spiffy new Ocean Pacific corduroy PE coach shorts -- I'm positive I would have talked my mom into driving me over to see him, and we probably would have ended our day in jail, arrested for either harassment or stalking. Or if I was really lucky, both. What I like to call my Humiliating Racquetball Period came back in full, embarrassing waves the other day when I was reading a New York Times story about these young girls' obsession with the new vampire movie Twilight and one of its stars: sweet, sweet Jawbone Pattinson. Pattinson was making an appearance at a mall in Pennsylvania, and a thousand young girls lined up to see him, if only for a fleeting, passing moment. Read More... Posted Nov 18 2008, 04:09 AM by Mike Adamick (Cry It Out!) with | with 6 comment(s) Filed under: girls, pop culture, Twilight, robert pattinson, embarrassing childhood infatuations, racquetball rules!, obsessions

• RetroFitted: Does Anyone Still Care About Garfield?

  Welcome to RetroFitted, a new feature that focuses on pop culture phenomena from the '70s, '80s and '90s, and assesses whether they still resonate with today's kids. First up: "Garfield."  The comic strip about an overweight cat and his dork of an owner made its debut in 1978. In the early 1980s -- when "Garfield" creator Jim Davis founded the company Paws Inc., effectively launching the "Garfield" brand -- Jon Arbuckle's best friend transformed from mere cartoon to full-on feline franchise. The cat was everywhere: On the cover of best-selling books, in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, in animated TV specials and stuck to a hell of a lot of back windshields in the form of a stuffed animal with suction cup feet. I was in elementary school when Garfield first got hot. I adored him, and I have the plush Pookie and an original copy of "Garfield Weighs In" to prove it. My friends and I traded stickers with Garfield and Odie on them. We lovingly referred to that sarcastic puss as "Garry." We thought every one of his lasagna jokes was freakin' high-larious. Read More... Posted Mar 27 2008, 10:02 AM by Jen Chaney with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: toys, pop culture, comics, RetroFitted, Garfield, Jim Davis

• The Internet is Not the Devil

  It seems that every generation views bashing the up-and-coming one as a kind of sport, and this one is no exception. Where older folks once lamented rock music and long hair as markers of the end of civilization, now we have teenagers who are ignorant and narcissistic and spend so much time online that they can no longer interact with real people in the real world. Well, Emily Goldwasser at Salon isn't buying it, and she says the internet is not a danger and a disaster for our kids. She's responding in part to a phone survey of teens that showed a "stunning ignorance" of history and literature.  Boy, does she make some good points in this excellent article: She highlights... Read More... Posted Mar 17 2008, 06:31 PM by Kelly Mills with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: youtube, education, research study, teenagers, internet, technology, blogs, Google, Salon, social networking, activism, writing, pop culture, survey

• Could We Lose These Parenting Terms In 2008?

  When the terms first appear, they maybe seem funny or twisted or innocuous or entertaining or whatever. Then they appear more and more, until finally you start to think if one more person refers to, say, "MILFs" you might have to barf--especially if it's in the "MILPH" sense. (Note to mommys making lingerie calendars--don't try and reclaim these terms in a faux-empowerment way, please.) They get overused and nauseating and when MSNBC uses them in a headline, you know the whole thing has so jumped the shark. It's over. Done. Let's erase the term from the lexicon and move on.  My nominees for this year's overused parenting terms:  Read More... Posted Jan 02 2008, 09:33 AM by Kelly Mills with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: words, vocabulary, msnbc, jamie lynn spears, lexicon, yummy mummy, pop culture, language, terms, baby-daddy