...Scripta Manet

Since around 2006 the greeting on my cellphone's main screen has read Verba Volant.. ("words fly away)".  I put this to remind myself that whatever is said through the phone is temporal, to be lost in the ether of time and fiber optics.

I'd like to eventually obtain tasteful stationary which on its bottom includes the second phrase which completes the Latin expression: ...Scripta Manet ("words remain/are forever").  At the time I updated my phone greeting I considered making ...Scripta Manet my Gmail signature (I decided against e-mail signatures in general).  I created my Gmail account in 2005 - the service was a dream realized for archivist like myself.  Google advertised Gmail then as allowing you to never have to delete another message - to be able to save everything.  This now standard feature was revolutionary for those using AOL or our college e-mail servers.  I think then Gmail allotted each account 1GB in storage, which at that time was essentially infinity (Gmail was the everyman's first cloud storage system - when my fellow master's students asked how they were supposed to be able to move or store large quantitative data files around for their theses, our professor simply remarked, "Well, Gmail accounts are free...")

"Verba Volant..." reminder on my flip-phones home screen.  Note the 2013 dumb phone usage...

One of the more popular mobile apps today is Snapchat, which allows you to message self-destructing photos.  There are also analogous text versions (OneShar.es or PrivNote).  I can't even fathom this.  The only reason I could imagine would be, as some have suggested, is to send dirty pictures.  Otherwise these services are in direct contrast to what I perceive the point of a photo or purposefully writing a letter would be: you want to remember an image, a person or place or event.  I've never found an old photo, handwritten letter, or even e-mail that I don't consider priceless.  I wonder if twenty years from now there might be slight pangs of collective regret for at least some of the destroyed images.

I've used e-mail regularly since the late 1990s.  Our first inboxes were confined by small storage spaces.  Typically, old messages would self-delete after 30 days.  It's gut-retching to imagine how much loss occurred.  I probably used AOL, AIM, and GW's e-mail almost every single day from 1998 through 2003.  These messages would have formed an accidental diary, and what a treasure-trove it would be: a time capsule of our thoughts on daily life, our turn-of-the-century routines, clues to memories we've forgotten, and perhaps most preciously, words from friends and family no longer with us.  AOL or GW could literally name their price if they were able to sell my recovered e-mails.

I think I'm among the last generation that will ever have large parts of their lives undocumented.  Between permanent e-mail and especially social media, with ubiquitous photo and imaging hardware, I can't image how anyone growing up today won't have detailed depictions of their daily lives recorded.  It's almost too much information, and the appeal of Snapchat or checking-out of more permanent communication methods is that the past won't return to haunt you one day.  I'm curious what will happen when the children of this generation eventually grow up to comb their parents' whiny Facebook posts.  Some friends' children will lose as much respect for them as I have.

I know in someone's dusty photo album in some closet somewhere there are dancing photos of myself I'd turn beet-red to see.  I'm also sure that, many of my old e-mail or instant messenger conversations would be cringe-worthy if I were ever to read them.  How lame, how corny I'd seem!  I know for a fact many of my high school friends never want to look back at those years, and would rather pretend those years never happened.  But,  they did happen, and this is the only life we're given, the only awkward period we're given.  They're unique stories - our stories - and for that reason, even only privately, it's worth it to embrace them.


A New Mass Begins Today

Today, November 27th 2011 is the first Sunday of Advent, the first Sunday of the new Catholic liturgical year, and the first Sunday a new English translation of the Catholic Mass is being implemented.

The purpose is to move the mass nearer to the original Latin.  A widely cited example (likely because it occurs within the first five seconds of mass) is that when the priest greets the people with "The Lord be with you", instead of "And also with you", the people now respond "And with your spirit".

Awkward, but I'm no writer.  My first thought upon hearing of the coming changes was sympathy for the all the 80 year-old priests, old dogs who have to learn new tricks after decades of a particular litany ingrained deep into their brains.

As with the rest of us.  My own personal concern was that I would feel somehow an obsolete Catholic.  I do not have a perfect attendance record by any means, but have gone enough that I can get by through motor memory of my mouth.  Certainly not anymore.  Worse, I am also concerned I will feel a disconnect with the Church I grew up with.  It was comforting to have an unchanging continuity, to go to mass for an hour and hear the same unchanging words, anywhere I went, as I did when I was eight.

I slept in this morning but my mom went and told me even the priest was reading off the card.  The people, she said, recited a mix of the new and old.  She felt the new translation is a step back.  When she was young and the mass initially changed from Latin, she said there was an similarly awkward, almost too literal translation.  She preferred the version I grew up which had a more common language usage, which she found more accessible.

I'm not sure how other languages handle their translations from Latin.  At Columbia, our Polish chaplain criticized English (or the American version, anyway) as the only translation to begin the Nicene Creed with "We Believe" - the Latin is Credo, "I believe" - because "Americans think they're special".  I liked our version, it gave a sense of community.  Unfortunately, he won: the Nicene is changed because to  "I believe" in the new version.

I'll be interested to see the faces of the Christmas/Easter Catholics this Christmas when the mass gets going.  Will they worry they've walked into the wrong building?

Biased Sample

On the MARTA there's a commercial that regularly runs displaying a "typical" time at Harrah's Casino. Wow! I should really go...the gentlemen win every bet they make and moreover find no shortage of beautiful women casting seductive glances their way.

China similarly is casting a polished - and from what I've heard, deceitful - image of the country to coincide with the games. Like the China pavilion at Epcot. Weren't people calling these the genocide Olympics? Did impressive opening ceremony choreography just displace the uncomfortable realities in our minds?

Lightning Bolt

Usain Bolt is fastest man alive, after yesterday running the 100m in 9.69 seconds.

The guy’s name is Bolt – he was always destined to be fast, with a cartoonish inevitability, like Captain Hook ending up with a hook or Remus Lupin becoming a werewolf.

It brings to mind the very self-aware Spiderman II’s great line (via J. Jonah Jameson) which I love: "Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs. What are the odds?"

Swimming for a Cause

On the Today Show this morning the conversation was not about Michael Phelps: The Swimmer but Michael Phelps: The Millionaire. The claim is that with the money he is/will make he will never have to work again. Well, MC Hammer and Mike Tyson probably thought at one point the money would last forever – though Phelps isn’t living such extravagant standards. No pet tigers.

I’m so fiscally responsible that if I won the lottery I’d never run out of money and so would never need to work again…but I’d want to. It’s the boredom, you see.

They talked of Phelps starting a foundation as those with too much money often do. One person interviewed said he will probably want to spread the gospel of swimming: promote a sport that has done so much for him. “The Michael Phelps Center for Kids Who Can’t Swim Good…Yet”. Poetic irony would be a protégé of Phelps breaking his record one day – Phelps knowing the record would still be standing if he never while the former PhelpsPhan stares him down with a defiant rebelliousness: “now the student has become the teacher… “ What I do agree with is their claim that Phelps is probably inspiring a new generation of swimmers.

At least in the short-term.

I’ve certainly been planning to cross-train in the pool, and watching his races makes me think what good exercise it would be; it’s pushing me to get in there quicker. But I’m easily malleable like that. Watching gymnastics in the 1990s, I would run around my house doing summersaults. Yet, when I feel that cold water my interest in swimming will experience shrinkage – and the youngins’ watching the games now have Wii, so how long will it last? I thought I might want to go into politics after staying home sick one day watching the movie “Dave” on TV. It took a year of Advanced Placement Comparative Politics and half-semester of undergraduate political science to make me realize what a dry boring topic it was, just invented for phonies to fill their egos. But I digress. If Phelps inspires many, and only a few stick with swimming, then at least some will have found a calling, and that’s a beneficial multiplier effect we cannot deny.

What's My Age Again?

Sometimes people lie about their age to make themselves older. 16 year-olds lie to get into R-rated movies. 17 year-olds lie about their age to buy cigarettes, 20 year-olds lie about their age to buy liquor, and 13 year-olds say they’re ten years older when they dial phone sex lines. Many of the living world war veterans are only still alive because they lied about their age to go war in the first place. Half of the Chinese women’s gymnastics team is lying about their age to be eligible to compete (I wonder if down the line there will be a Marion Jones-type exposé where the team is stripped of their gold medals when evidence emerges a number of them were too young – youth is the new steroids).

Sometimes people lie about their age to make themselves younger. Usually this is people who don’t want anyone to know how old they are. This doesn’t make much sense to me, because it should all be about appearance – is anyone ever surprised when a morbidly obese person admits they’re 400 lbs? They weren’t hiding any secret by not giving the weight away. You look how you look, and will disclosing one’s age suddenly make others notice wrinkles they wouldn’t have already seen? Perhaps there’s a biasing effect; maybe getting numerical clue does focus one’s observations.

At what age range are you honest? Maybe you’re never always honest, because age is very relative, and you might want to nudge the number as certain way as company changes. Personally, at 27, I feel very old and out-of-touch around teenagers yet young and naïve around middle-aged people.

A Many and Varied Family Tree

Our ancestors number like the stars in the sky, and the grains of sand on the beach...

We have two parents, four grandparents, either great-grandparents, etc. Continue backwards twenty generations and the level is*1 million* people across (Actually, 1,048,576). This is a mathematical fact, 2^20. Assuming each generation is thirty years, this coexistence of T.J.-generators occurred circa 1400 A.D.

I informed a girl friend a small region of medieval Europe existed solely to create her and that it was a lovelier product than any renaissance art. I give you permission to use that one if you want.

I envision this city of 1 million strong, going about, weaving cotton, escaping Black Death, coming together to produce me as some sort of civic project. It really does shrink the world.

Even more mind-blowing: On an educational adventure to The Fernbank Science Museum a month ago, I learned that mammals evolved from reptiles (specifically, "synapsids"). Creationists have enough problems with "Jesus was not a monkey"....but a lizard? It would make their head explode.

I find it fully plausible that humans evolved from an apelike ancestor, but I've always stopped there in my mind. I realized reading that diorama caption that I've never mentally gone further down the evolutionary history trail. We've been shown illustrations of tiny rodents scurrying around in the shadow of dinosaurs, but in childrens' books this is treated as if they sprung from the dirt. It makes sense we'd come from reptiles...what else is there?

The worst movie ever, Super Mario Brothers: The Movie, had it right. Humans evolved from dinosaurs.

Pareto's (Term Paper) Principle

Vilfredo Pareto observed that eighty percent of Italy's wealth was owned by twenty percent of the population. Various 80-20 regularities became umbrellaed under what is known as the Pareto Principle. Stew Leonard, Sr. applied business policy: when eighty percent of profits originates from twenty percent of your items, you should only sell those items. Tangentially, let me add that Pareto was a fascist and Stew Leonard was crooked tax cheat.

I can bang out the bulk of a term paper in one day, then I always spend a month tweaking it. This might supersede the Pareto Principle; I think it might actually be closer to a 90-10 ratio (90% of the time on the last 10% of the paper). As I rearrange paragraphs, and move a third page section to page five, suddenly page four doesn't make sense anymore. And so more rearranging is required as the composition dominios into non-chronological nonsense.

Returns are diminishing. I'm at the point of spending an entire afternoon to only accomplish a two paragraphs rewrite . But it has to be done; it's just a slow process to chisel raw conscious thought of the first day's effort into something can can be passed as a graduate school term paper.

Or it could be a matter of work filling time allotted. I should just put the paper down and print it out. Most likely the professor won't marvel at the beauty of my prose, just skim it and give me a B. But I wonder if one day I'll be forced to resurrect the paper, and I won't want to be embarrassed when someone else reads it more carefully - I alone have to answer for what I write.

Yet, there's always time to revise down the road; certainly I'll become a more mature, experienced writer. And so, as I think about getting my papers out to work over the Thanksgiving holiday, I'll be reluctant to give eighty percent of my vacation to something which is ultimately below twenty percent of my life's importance.

Another Ending

I'm ending this blog (for a while) as the pace of the semester increases. I think I've written a lot of material that will be enjoyable to revisit in a some decade's time. As I take leave for now, I wanted to leave by recording what I've always considered my most brilliant observation.

Having your shoelaces untied is a lose-lose situation. You look like a dork
continuing to walk with your laces untied, and you look like a dork bending over to tie them.

Until next time, take care of yourselves, and each other. And remember to have your pets spayed and neutered.

A Tangle of Correlations (or Causations?)

What I Don't Have: A List
(1) Money
(2) Car
(3) Girl

OK, so (1) implies (2), that's for certain. Also, (2) may imply (3). Finally, (1) implies (3), but no (3) means more (1), so there's a circular relationship.

Science and Religion's Common Ground: Incest

The Bible is explicitly incestuous in the story of Lot, whose own daughters slept with him.

The Bible is implicitly incestuous in the creation story. Where did Cain's wife come from? OK fine, so God made more people? Fast forward - the Bible is implicitly incestuous in the deluge story. Afterwards, all that remained on Earth was Noah's family and a bunch of animals. God didn't say He was making any more people, but rather told Noah's family to go forth, "be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 9:1). After the first generation, incest was inevitable.

Evolution is, I'm guessing, also incestuous...as that little group of primates broke off, I would think there would be substantial re-mating until other members of the group's former species were similar enough as to mate and produce viable offspring.

Science or Religion, whatever story is true, face it: we're all distant cousins. Think about that on your honeymoon.

Cutting the String

Call me sentimental, but I have difficulty pulling loose threads from clothing. The little string appears so pathetic and fragile that I find I just don't have the heart to cut its lifeline and toss it to the cold floor, where I imagine essence of dog feces and dead skin particles remain from others' foot trackings (a cruel fate indeed). Eventually, I develop an emotional attachment to the string, which is, after all, part of the shirt. I can't just abandon it. Eventually, I view it as just part of the shirt - knowing there's a loose thread near the right pocket gives me comfort finding it's still there when I when I next wear the pants. It gives the clothing article "character" and evokes a feeling of comforting familiarity. This coupled with that I'm quite resistant to change.

Such generosity has gotten me into trouble in the past. Once as a young boy playing in a stream, I witnessed a tiny worm on me struggling not to be swept away by the current. Compassionately, I helped the little worm to my thigh, above the water.

However, that worm (and its "friends") turned out to be leeches. I was covered when I emerged from the water. That was my first - and last - episode with these parasites; I haven't gone swimming in steams since.

Back to the clothing: Admittedly, there's also a risk-adverse element to my decision not the pull the string. I imagine (and lesser variations of this have happened in the past) that I would pull the string, but the thread doesn't break, and instead just keeps unraveling, and unraveling, and unraveling, and unraveling...

Beyond "The End of the Universe"

Comedian Lewis Black claims that The End of the Universe is apparent at a street corner in Houston, TX (South Shepard and West Gray, I hear). There, one Starbucks coffee shop sits across the street from another.

But I now know that the true end of the universe is in Atlanta, GA, in the Edgewood Retail District, where there are opportunities to buy Starbucks coffee in not one, not two, but three locations all facing into the same squared off district: the Barnes & Noble, the Target, and the Kroger (not just bags of coffee beans like at the grocery store - I'm talking fresh drinks).

What madness is this?

School's...in...for...Autumn!

Maybe I'm corny in the 6 year-old in a 26 year-old's body sense, but I love the first day of school. There's something special about it. A buzz in the air. All new paper and supplies. The actual moment of first walking into class is like Christmas...it's like coming downstairs to see all your presents, except in the academic sense, your "presents" are your fellow students taking the class with you this semester. What will Santa bring me this year, Mommy?

And so, I'm off to what may could be my last-first day of school ever. Most likely I'll take one more class in the spring semester (which will certainly be it) but Spring semester first classes are not exactly the same as Fall, with that buzz that reminds me of waiting for the school bus in a warm Norwalk morning, bright white new sneakers, fresh haircut, belly full of a special breakfast my dad made for the occasion (most likely Egg McMuffins, scrabbled eggs with bacon/ham/Kielbasa, or Entenmann's Raspberry Danish Twist) thinking the possibilities of what the next year would bring, new friends I'd see, and excitement there'd be. And in a slightly different way, I'll get to capture this again, today, for at least one more time.

I'll miss this when it's gone.

Pre-Move Depression

Today I started taking my room down for Saturday's move. The walls are becoming bare and white. The anxiety over the new living situation is being supplanted with a depression.

As it always is. I didn't want to leave home to go to college that summer of '99, until all my trinkets were put away in boxes, so that my room was just bare walls. Then I couldn't wait to get out of there. There was nothing left for me.

Moving is hardest when we have an attachment to a place. Packing up helps to severe the ties; to show us under the comforting decorations we've added it's just four walls and a carpet, cold and uninviting, like a hospital room.

The place we move into is the same, but we think that we will be there a while, so we put a poster on the wall, and suddenly, it's not so bad anymore...

Stealing Innocence

I don't know where the "Christmas in July" concept originates from, but today would be the six-month mark until the next Christmas (I already know what I'm getting my mom!).

While brushing my teeth last night, I thought of the jerk 3rd grader who told me at seven that Santa didn't exist, that it was really my parents leaving presents out for me. I wish I could find him now, and beat the living shit of out him. That little tidbit served no purpose but to ruin the fun and take away a large part of Christmas's magic.

Economists studying social interactions literally model knowledge flows like a disease spreading. Of course, some knowledge could be "bad", catching like a virus and "scarring" a childhood. I'm not trying to be overly dramatic, comparing growing up with catching a disfiguring disease (although I found puberty in general was very much a disease to me - but that's another post...). To me, it's something more than taking away a blissful ignorance. I see the beautiful, pristine, fresh-fallen snow of childhood, and then one asshole coming to trample over everything, then undoing his zipper and turning the remaining untouched snow yellow.

There is a scene sequence in The Catcher in the Rye where Holden sees something "unpleasant" written in several very public places. He worries about the effect it will have on who might see it, as well as experiences a sunken heart as he feels the graffiti ruins the tranquility of the place it was written. I've always related completely with his thoughts:

While I was walking up the stairs, though, all of a sudden I thought I was going to puke again. Only, I didn't. I sat down for a second, and then I felt better. But while I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody'd written "Fuck you" on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they'd wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them — all cockeyed, naturally — what it meant, and how they'd all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoever'd written it. I figured it was some perverty bum that'd sneaked in the school late at night to take a leak or something and then wrote it on the wall. I kept picturing myself catching him at it, and how I'd smash his head on the stone steps till he was good and goddam dead and bloody. But I knew, too, I wouldn't have the guts to do it. I knew that. That made me even more depressed. I hardly even had the guts to rub it off the wall with my hand, if you want to know the truth. I was afraid some teacher would catch me rubbing it off and would think I'd written it. But I rubbed it out anyway, finally...

I went down by a different staircase, and I saw another "Fuck you" on the wall. I tried to rub it off with my hand again, but this one was scratched on, with a knife or something. It wouldn't come off. It's hopeless, anyway. If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the "Fuck you" signs in the world. It's impossible...

I was the only one left in the tomb then. I sort of liked it, in a way. It was so nice and peaceful. Then, all of a sudden, you'd never guess what I saw on the wall. Another "Fuck you." It was written with a red crayon or something, right under the glass part of the wall, under the stones.That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they tick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say "Holden Caulfield" on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say "Fuck you." I'm positive, in fact.

Some months ago, Leslie Stahl (if I recall) did a story on 60 Minutes which profiled a memory pill - or rather, a "forgetting pill" - that eases reoccurring flashbacks among individuals suffering from post-traumatic events. E.g., one lady, a subway operator, was haunted by the memory of the man she watched commit suicide by jumping on the tracks underneath her subway car. I wish there was something we could give to children to help them forget all the crap in the world they've inadvertently witnessed when they were still too young to have deserved to.

Yet, this very morning, I saw posted on CNN.com an Associated Press story with the headline "'Potter' fans keeping the secrets". Although revealing the ending of the Harry Potter saga would not ruin the innocence of one's childhood, the restraint by those who have read it is promising in that a small joy could easily be ruined for others. So I'll still retain some faith in humanity.

Reading...or Reading Harry Potter?

Tonight is the end of an era; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (the final in the series) is being released at midnight tonight. It's the afternoon of Friday, July 20th and and right now nothing is hotter than Potter...

I saw a report that although Israeli law requires businesses to be closed on a Saturday in observance of the Sabbath, booksellers over there are saying to hell with the law. There's a Barnes and Noble pretty close to me; I've never been to a midnight Harry Potter release party and I should try and get over there because it'll be my last chance...

People give J.K. Rowling credit for getting children to read again. I think she deserves lots of praise for creating engaging and imaginative stories which are incredibly smart. It's formulaic that there be a plot twist at the end of each one, and knowing this each time as I go through a part of the series, thinking all the while I am a pretty smart guy reading a book I took from the children's literature section, I've never, ever been able to correctly figure out what the ending would be, and certainly have fallen for all the red herrings brilliantly woven in.

Anyway, I'm not sure it's totally accurate to claim J.K. Rowling has gotten children to read generally; rather, she's gotten them to read Harry Potter. How much of it has spilt over to inducing consumption of other literature? Now that the series is over, will children continue to read?

In 4th grade, I brought out the original 400-page version of of Bram Stoker's Dracula when at least some of my classmates were probably struggling with Red Fish Blue Fish. Observing this, my teacher wanted me to start reading only high school books, to encourage what she saw as an advanced reading ability (I'm trying to be modest). Clearly she didn't get it: I didn't want to read high school level books, I just wanted to read Dracula. Ms. Rowling certainly has created an explosion of reading, but is the situation similar? Is it that these young muggles have been introduced to literature and adopted a general joy of reading, or is it that they just want to read Harry Potter?

Where do (Cartoon) Babies come from?

Cartoons' family trees must be diagonal, not vertical. Everyone had nieces or nephews, never daughters or sons.

Inspector Gadget had Penny, Scooby-Doo had Scrappy Doo (da da da da daaaa...Pupppy Powwwer!!!). Huey, Dewey, Louie were Donald's nephews, who in turn was Uncle Scrooge's nephew. Et cetera.

It's too much of a pattern to be a coincidence. Was the idea to avoid the suggestion that cartoons have sex? It couldn't be to avoid to burden of having in addition to invent a mate. Donald and Daisy were eternally courting, for example, she was already available to become a wife. But maybe that change had to be avoided. Cartoons are sort of stuck in time - dating when first drawn, dating forever. Statuses can't change. Bringing a nephew out from somewhere is a convenient want to introduce a character.

Also, maybe there's something about a parent-less child that has a Dickens-like appeal. Yet, the uncle still provides a loving and comforting home life, the happy ending of every orphan story.

The movies got a late start: Snow White didn't have a parent, and Geppetto wasn't exactly Pinnochio's dad. Finally came Dumbo's mom (very touching) and then Bambi's mom (I think I'm going to cry). Curiously, these predate the nieces and nephews era, so cartoon baby-making had already been established. Perhaps America went through some sort of moral reform?

Later on, Goofy got a son, Max...geez, the one person least capable of child-rearing. Currently, there's a reversal of trends. Homer Simpson has three children, but (yikes!) no nephews...and no uncles!

Rain => Sleep

Empirical Observation: I tend to sleep-in (or oversleep my alarm) on mornings when it's raining; my state of sleep is also deeper.

In fact, if I oversleep my alarm, I can often successfully predict that in fact it is raining outside. This is the usual cause. "Oh, crap, I overslept...well, let's take a look outside the window...and yeah, it's raining." Case in point was this morning. Well, yes, you can't really oversleep on a Sunday, it's sorta the point not to get up early. But it was later than I wanted to get up.

This has been something I've noticed since high school; how many a rainy morning caused a tardy entrance to first period? Of course, in commutation with the rushed start, you're wet walking into school, grumpy because being late you couldn't find a good parking space. It's the start of a sucky day.

Maybe it's all in my head - just a coincidence I mentally invented. Or maybe there is something there. I'll have to poll others regarding this. But there has to be a deeper root cause than just the precipitation itself; it's not like the raindrops ferry tiny sleep pixies to my bedroom. Could it be something to do with the low pressure that accompanies storms? Rainclouds making the mornings darker? Raindrops continuing to soothe me asleep as track number 19 of the easy listening CD selling at Bed Bath and Beyond?

Let Our Powers Combine...

Earth!...Fire!...Wind!...Water!...Heart!...

What was disheartening for me about Captain Planet and the Planeteers was that the creators oversimplified the problems by displaying exaggerations of cartoonish super-villainy: "I've created a machine the chops down the Amazon rainforest and turns the trees into toxic waste...mwuhahahahahahahaha!!!...." So it teaches kids that the planet would be safe if only a blue-skinned, green-mulleted depiction of what a committee lamely decided "cool" would look like showed up and used his Superman-breath (or whatever).

Much better (and accurately more morally complex) would be if you turned on the for 30 minutes the cartoon was just a headshot of Captain Planet's head, saying "Hey kids at home...your watching TV right now is contributing to the planet's ill-health. You're burning fossil fuels. Want to make a difference? Turn the the TV off. Go outside. Now. Turn the TV off. Turn it off. Go outside. Turn it off....."