Oh those Wisconsin Traffic Police

When my parents were in college they shared one car that they parked on the street. The streets near their (Frank Lloydy Wright designed, woo woo) apartment building had free all night parking but during the day became, like, 4 hour parking. So one of them would have to stay home until the traffic cop came by at 8 am to put some chalk on all the tires of the cars (thats how he marked which cars were parked at the start of 4 hour parking so he would know when he came back at 12 to ticket). Then my mom (seriously, no matter how this story gets told, we all know that it was my mom who did the heavy lifting) would back the car up just enough so that the chalk was under the tire. Then she would go to class.

There were many days when the cop was late and my mom had to go to class (or maybe she just left it up to my dad to take care of the car) and they got a parking ticket. They were students and planning on moving to Texas, so they didn't pay many of those, calculating the risks. After they moved away some law changed retroactively or something, and all those tickets were pardoned. I believe that this experience concretely shaped my father's views of parking tickets in Wisconsin.

I believe this because some thirty years later he was back in Wisconsin visiting family and one of his Texas brothers (he has four brothers, it doesn't really matter which one) got a parking ticket in Green Bay for not observing parking laws put in place for the snowmobiles. My father, being the oldest, and therefore the bossiest brother, snatched the ticket from his brother and tore it up. While doing this he announced that you don't have to follow the snowplow rules in the summer (which it was) and that since the brother lived in Texas, and it was a rental car that was ticketed, they would never track him down to collect.

Well they didn't find my uncle, put they did nail my grandfather when he moved back to Wisconsin and tried to get a driver's license. You can imagine how my grandfather reacted to being force to pay an outstanding parking ticket for his adult son. Also, my grandfather was there when the ticket was shredded and he strongly disagreed with this plan of action. And by strongly, I mean loudly. So my uncle who had always wanted to pay the nominal ticket but couldn't (because it was shredded) now looks like a bum.

And how did the state of Wisconsin come to charge my grandfather? They tracked down the info of the rental car to the agency, who narced out my uncle, who at the time was living with my grandparents, and boom, the same last name and the same address. Do Wisconsin police have so much time because there are too many of them, or is there so little serious crime as a result of so many police?

So why this story now? Because today I found this story about a Wisconsin parking ticket given to a Texan. It does make you wonder what the story behind that is.

Light

Travel Light
Live Light
Spread the Light
Be the Light

I don't care that those adjectives should really be adverbs, I really enjoy this mantra.
It was on the tag of a bag of yogi tea.

I have been cleaning out the bedroom where my mother has put all of my crap (along with crap that no one else who lives here needs). To clean clutter well you have to be merciless. If you run an actuarial analysis of all the crap and weight the cost of keeping it verses the cost of replacement and the probability that you will actually need that crap, is does seem like a good idea to get rid of it.

Today I sold three paper grocery bags full of books to Half Price Books for $15. It seems like there was a serious net loss over the life of those books. But hey, now I have $15 that I didn't have before and there is more room on the shelfs for the things that are now spilling onto the floor. I also posted many books on Amazon and two have sold. On the upside I think that might be another $15 gain, but I have to go to the store and buy something to ship them in and then I have to go to the post office. Good thing I'm on summer vacation and I have the time to do this.

Also, as I learned from Tim Gunn in the wonderful book Tim Gunn's Guide to Style, that Peggy gave me for my Bday, in order to dress well you need to have a good wardrobe from which to create your outfits. And you can't have a great artillery if your closet is full of crap that doesn't fit you or doesn't suit you. So on my move from California I gave away 2 bags of clothes. When I left Texas I gave away several bags, and then in New York I gave away several bags of clothes. I made a rule that if twice I try to put it on for the day and it doesn't look good it gone. My closet is a lot cleaner, and also I wonder, what was I thinking when I bought and kept that crap. I've really learned what does and doesn't suit me. This pruning has makes it alot easier not to buy stuff that looks like past bad choices and to actually wear closes that are outside of my comfort zone of jeans and a t-shirt.

Again, with the Star section! Today's Religion section (ok, so its technically not the star section but it is more of the Chronicle and human interest) had a piece on the Reverend Billy and his movie What would Jesus Buy. (There was also a story, unrelated but funny, about religious hairdos, with a quote from Mark Twain about how ugly Mormon women are and that to marry more than one of them really is a Christian service. I thought that was bold of the Chronicle to be so cruel about any religious group. :)) There wasn't really anything new about the Reverend, but they did interview an expert in funerals and she said some really sad things about vulnerable people paying more than they could afford for funerals. Legitimate men of the cloth are working with Reverend Billy because they are tired of watching their congregations over extend themselves into debt and misery. Reading stories like this makes me wish that the NeoCons hadn't tainted organized religion. There are religious leaders who really are trying to help people in need and improve their communities. Perhaps political and social tides are turning and those with good intentions will be more successful and more visible in the future.

A big ole shout out to all the milfs running the Rice track

Today I saw a woman jogging with two (very large) children in a stroller. Those kids must have weighted over 100 pounds together. I was so inspired by her commitment to running that I ran that extra mile. Then I saw a woman running with a large child in a stroller and a smaller child strapped to her chest. That's pretty serious stuff. I would have added a long sprint after seeing that but I was done with the running.

It's time for Baseball and I couldn't be more excited

Ken Hoffman is the Chronicle humor columnist, and his column today is about baseball. And by baseball, I mean his son's "select" little league team playing in Beaumont. (For those of you not from Houston who didn't travel for sports teams, Beaumont is like 90 miles from West University, where his "select" son lives.)

My first thought was that it was pretty lazy to write about how your son's coach got kicked out of a little league game. I mean, who does Hoffman think he is: Leon Hale (who today took us by surprise and became a Buddhist. Maybe my who view of the world is falling apart, ahhh)?

My second thought was that using your position as a columnist to vent about your child's coach getting thrown out showed a complete lack of perspective of the total insignificance of children's organized sports.

But then I read how the little league team came from behind after their coach was ejected. That was pretty awesome. And even more awesome was that it is my favorite strategy when playing MLB on the PlayStation. Charge the mound, get ejected, the team rallies and wins. I just never thought that is worked in real life. Sadly, managers rarely charge the mound in professional games. Something about acting professional, I guess. In fact the only ejection I can remember was this one.

• October 11, 2003: In the top of the fourth inning of Game 3 of the ALCS at Fenway Park, Red Sox starting pitcher Pedro Martínez hits Yankee batter Karim Garcia, prompting an argument between the two players, which ends with both teams exiting the dugouts. In the bottom half on the inning, a pitch from Roger Clemens to Manny Ramírez is high, and the benches clear with both sides brawling. Yankee bench coach Don Zimmer charges at Martinez who then grabs his head and swings him to the ground. Later, midway through the ninth inning, Garcia and Yankee pitcher Jeff Nelson fight with a Fenway Park groundskeeper in the bullpen.

Man, watching that old man get grabbed by the head and thrown down was so funny. If only that had been what happened in Beaumont, that would have really made that column rock. But anyway, thank you Ken Hoffman for validating my style of PlaySation playing. I just think that your article would have been funnier if you had made this connection.

Art Camp

This past weekend I went to art camp. And let me tell you, art camp as an adult is wayyy better than art camp when you are 12. Art camp when you are 12 should be fun, but you are too serious and adult like to enjoy the fun stuff and no one is really nice to each other. Art camp as an adult doesn't have those problems. Seriously, beer and hot glue, glitter, feathers, high tech cameras, sequence and fake fruit/meat: what could be better!

Coordinating all the Texas artists to converge for a weekend in park shelters, just like real artcamp, was Jill Pangallo. Check out her work, it set the tone for the weekend, and if I had met her before seeing her work and then meeting Nancy, her art counselor alter-ego I would think that she was a normal person. Nohegan, artcamp for grownups (who professionally do art, mostly) is Slamdance to Skowhegan's Showdance. And, as if often the case, the parody is more fun (as the Austin Chronicle will concur). I guess Skowhegan is sort of a big deal?

Since I don't really do art any more I was just as much into the camping part. Texas has been a little hotter earlier this year (as Peggy will tell you, we've had record highs), so it was really hot to camp, even in May. Almost too hot, but there was a springs, so we survived. I went swimming twice a day and took quite a few cold showers. We made s'mores, and David and I were the novelty of the camp when we busted out the veggies to grill and made pans of sweet potatoes, rather than par for the course veggie dogs on sticks. And what is better than a marinated, grilled mushroom with a cold beverage after a day of swimming and hiking (to the swimming hole)?

I'll tell you what's better. All that, plus someone playing acoustic guitar and singing Side B of Abbey Road, and a couple (who might be the cutest ever) singing a duet of a grocery list for HEB that included both harmonizing and the line "Central Market is too bougie."

And so it begins

Being back for the summer I am beginning to remember all the reasons that I love/hate Texas.

For instance: I love love love Barton Springs. It is one of the places on earth that are just like Heaven. So like Heaven, that being there takes every other thought out of my mind for the first few minutes. It is a natural pool filled by a cold springs, and the temperature is the same year round (really freaking cold). In July it is full of hot hot families and hippies enjoying the cool down and visitors who aren't prepared for water that cold. But you can also do laps in December and share the pool with about five other swimmers, people (usually old people) who also understand that Barton Springs is Heaven and who probably got sucked into spending their lives in Austin because they just couldn't leave Barton Springs. Luckily, they probably live everyday on a Barton high.

I say luckily because Austin also possesses a great many traits that go in the "Hate" column. Mostly, the fact that Austinites have been completely impotent in protecting Barton Springs. Currently, the pool is closed one morning a week to clean out all the algae that lives off of fertilizer run off. The pool also has days when the water isn't swimmable because of toxicity levels. We are talking about water that bubbles out of the earth clean enough to drink and flows right into the pool. The run off from parking lots and roads is that potent!

The Save our Springs Alliance works to fight development that will endanger the springs and the Barton Spring Salamander, a species that only lives in Barton Springs. It doesn't look like they have been very successful and I want to punch someone in the face when I think about how The Domain ("defining the urban Austin lifestyle for the next 100 years") is interpreting all the green development ideas about live/work/shop spaces and building far far from the city, encouraging long commutes and more pollution.

Most of the time I lived in Austin I was pretty grumpy, the traffic, the hypocrisy, the boredom. But what was probably the best summer of my life was spent riding my bike from campus to the springs in 100 degree heat, swimming from 9 to 10 pm (when it was free) and riding home to eat left over cookies and sit around and drink beer. And now I am going to show my true colors as an Austininte and just say it, Austin has changed, and it used to be a lot better. There didn't used to be so many buildings. But they still haven't built a new road so the traffic might actually be worse, which means that all those cars just sitting in traffic are causing more pollution. You can have whatever crazy ideas about governments that you want (and those crazies in Austin do) but the thing about being pro regulation and an environmentalist is that we all have to work together to protect the things on this planet that can't be replaced when they are lost. Barton Springs is one of those things.

Oh, tv, how you suck me back in.

After Veronica Mars was cancelled last year I wasn't sure how I would go on. Seasons 1 and 2 were masterpieces of serial television, containing all the aspects of a great viewing experience: great villains, a compelling overarching storyarc, smart dialog, perhaps the best television love story ever. It saddened me when the CW picked up the show for season 3, only to damage it by cutting one long, relevant mystery into one short, relevant mystery paired with one short, stupid mystery and a few orphan episodes (all separated by miniseasons of The Pussycat Dolls, ugg!). For the show, it was time to go; before Kristen Bell became visibly too old and the writers cannibalized beloved characters to continue a threadworn plot line. But knowing that didn't make it sting any less or begin to fill the hole left in my life.

In tv, as in life, there is always next season. So go on I did, and, looking to fill the void, I was stoked about the new shows in the fall. Turns out, most of them sucked, and the writers' strike just emphasized how little tv belongs in my life.

Anyway, the highlights of the 2007-8 tv season were:

Josh Schwartz, creator of The OC, had two new shows last fall, Gossip Girl and Chuck. For those of you who didn't watch The OC; Season 1 was fantastic, and the only season worth watching. Sadly, the characters you wanted to hook up all hooked up half way through the first season, leaving no reason to watch the show. Where you gonna go from there? Bring in some contrived obstacle and hope that fans still care. Without some daily trials for the characters, big arches run out fast. The series was cancelled fast considering it's initially popularity, but not before I stopped watching. The last episode should have been the one where they killed off Marisa, a nice bookend to the story and notable because Mischa Barton's weight dropped right along with interest in the show. Let that be a lesson, young actresses: keep eating. :)

Back to this year and this abbreviated season:
I loved Chuck, the story of how a Stanford dropout working at Buy More is sent the database of all government secrets, which implants itself into his brain. If a show with a premise that contrived gets greenlit, either NBC really is as bad off as we think or the show is great. Well, the fans were the winners here. It was a fantastic show, a great kung fu scene in every episode and Simpsons-esqe supporting characters. It was a live action cartoon. And, ultimately, it had the best part of the OC, a character based on Josh Schwartz. Instead of Seth Cohen, we have Chuck. Awesome.

I was really excited about Gossip Girl. New York teens and a Kristen Bell voiceover, how can you go wrong? Well you can recreate The OC, with all its flaws, in a stereotyped New York. After the first few episode's the poor outsider had hooked up with the it girl. Hey writers, Where you gonna go now? I don't care, I'm bored. Where they went was a few annoying stories that had only one possible conclusion. However, as unpleasant as the show is to watch, that's how much fun it is to read about on the New York Magazine blog. Yeah, see what I mean? To be fair, the only character I find tv worthy is the slime-o Chuck Bass, so in the spirit of Veronica Mars, maybe this show has legs afterall. I look forward to reading about it.

Houstonians who love the star section even more than I do

CVSTOS FIDEI: Houston Chronicle Purveyor of Pornography

Even better than that microchip.

I can't decide what is more amazing about this bird, the fact that he could give his full name and address or the fact that he knew enough not to talk to the cops.

He has exhibited model behavior for any child.

Congratulations B!

Way to keep it on the DL. Apparently she just confirmed it, although they were married in April.

The best thing I've read this year

This is the most impressive thing I have read this year. It is like the great twenty-first century American novel reduced to a concise interview. It hits it all: the power of mentorship, race, poverty, elitism, immigration, freakin' brain cancer.

My favorite part:

Some years later, I was sitting at a lunch table with colleagues at Harvard Medical School. Someone asked how I’d come to Harvard. “I hopped the fence,” I said. Everyone laughed. They thought I was joking.

If this man's life were a Fitzgerald novel, this would be the pivotal scene. The elitist response to the mythical American dream of social mobility, so rarely achieved that it must be a joke.

More comics

Oh they do now how to get me over there at Pearls.

Coffee Coffee Coffee

On one of the first episodes of the Gilmore Girls after it jumped the shark, Lorelai has broken up with Luke so she had to get her coffee somewhere else. The woman brings her 3 coffees to go and Lorelai protests that she didn't ask for three. The woman tells her that she said "Coffee, coffee, coffee" and so that is three coffees. This is sort of about how bad that show became but also about coffee and how badly S-bucks is trying to convince the wall street journal that this isn't the end of its exponential growth.

Big changes S-bucks is making:

* They rolled out a signature coffee: Pikes Place Blend, that they claim is fresh, fresh, fresh (fresh picked, fresh roasted, fresh brewed). Now their coffee was always fresh brewed within the half hour, but that didn't prevent it from tasting burned (I guess that was one of their "flavors"). Well PPB has that burnt flavor, but it lacks all the other flavors that make their usual coffee good. This girl on the street was giving out coupons, and she didn't really want to do her job, so she gave me, like 60 coupons for a free cup of coffee each. Effect: PPB is all I've been drinking; I've had it with milk, half and half, skim milk, black, and its not good any way. The dairy overpowers all the flavor, and drinking it black, all you taste is that burnt flavor that people hate.

* They are posting when and where the coffee was roasted. Honestly, its not really the same as going to a cute little shop where they roast themselves. Its sort of like when you go to Wholefoods and they tell you your kiwi came from chile, and you think, "thats pretty far away. I wonder what this is doing to my carbon footprint. Hey, that other kiwi came from upstate. I bet it was grown in a greenhouse. That's got a carbon footprint, too. Why the hell am I shopping at Wholefoods? This crap is all overpriced" Except, with roasting you think, "So this coffee was roasted in Pennsylvania. Do they have, like, a roasting plant there. And it was roasted two weeks ago. What's the shelf life for coffee? Does free coffee justify paying $3 for a muffin? Why am I bothering to wait in this line?" It really just highlights the fact that it wasn't roasted onsite, it was roasted in some warehouse and then trucked in, which is sort of what you always assumed.

* They also claim that they are trying to make the stores more like the local coffeeshops that they are competing with and that they started as. Yeah, well, at a cute little coffeeshop they won't try to sell you itunes giftcards or give away terrible itunes downloads, unless they are of, like, the band of the barista. Barista, what a stupid, pretentious name. Seriously, I've been downloading the free songs and they are so bad that I don't want anyone to see them on my ipod; free sometimes has hidden costs. And they have these little preprinted index cards asking what I think. So where does that card go if I fill it out? Will Seattle respond if I tell them that every Sbucks in NYC could use three times as many bathrooms and way more cleaning people? If I send a comment about "my" Starbucks how will they know which one I mean if there are eight within a half mile radius of me?

But what really grinds my gears is that they have gone back to the original logo, but this time they've obscured the breasts, no more nipples. The image above is the first logo from the Seattle store. The one to the right is what all Sbucks are using now. Look closely and you will see the Brook-Shields-in-Blue-Lagoon look of hair glued to the breasts.

Now, what were they thinking? Its like some high-up convinced everyone that if they just went back to the first logo, things would be great again, just like they used to be. Then someone from legal came in and told them that Americans can't handle exposed breasts.

This crappy compromise is emblematic of the other half assed changes. Honestly, Sbucks, you sell overpriced coffee and a whole lot of crap. These subtle changes really just make you seem like the pretentious aholes you are.

Yeah, but, what keeps me awake at night is that Sbucks bought Clover, who makes this machine. Right now, at a few coffee connoisseur shops, you can get great coffee brewed on a clover, coffee made from beans that were curated by people visit small farms in coffee regions and encourage good growth techniques a la wine buyers. This is coffee that is definitely worth $3 a cup, and maybe $5 a cup.

I love Cafe Grumpy (as well as the other clover brewing cafes) and I love good coffee and I hope that Sbucks doesn't prevent small, nice cafes from buying Clovers.

Ahh, Pearls.

I like the way Rat is drinking coffee while he's miserable.

On my hair

This week's 30 Rock

Liz Lemon: I guess I am just getting to the age where I don't care what people think of me
Jack Donaghy: If you're thinking of getting a really short haircut let me know so I can tell you not to.

(or something to that effect)

Yeah, so I watched this after I cut all my hair off.

Lucikily, because I'm donating the 10 inches they cut off people will think I'm a good person regardless of what else they think. And as for things that make you a good person, donating your hair is one of the easiest.

My favorite Q and A from the Locks of Love website:
Q. Is my hair donation tax-deductible?
A. Please check with your tax preparer. We cannot place a monetary value on a ponytail.

Hmmm. I can put a monetary value of anything, so I'm good to go. But perhaps what they are really saying is that they would just prefer a monetary donation, which is pretty much what they told the nytimes.

Its been a while since all my hair was cut off. I was going to do this in February, but I was also going to go speed dating in February, and P told me that if I was going to go speed dating then I needed to keep my hair long. Well, I didn't go speed dating because my friend who was going to get us in for free didn't get single in time. So that was a bust. I'm not sure my long hair has done anything for me in the meanwhile, and its time for a fun summer cut.

And my mom said that she liked it. She also said, "why don't you cut your hair chin length?" for my entire childhood. So that's at least one person I don't have to worry what they think of me now.

Rainy Days and Monday

The first day it rained after I returned to NY from LA it was absolutely orgastic. I freakin love New York in the rain. And I had been totally deprived to rain for too long.

However, today is cold and wet and windy and I have been studying way too much for the past five days, and I am totally grumpy. And this rainy day kind of sucked. Apparently, my Totes umbrella is "guaranteed for life" against manufactures defects, not "guaranteed" not to break on a windy rainy day leaving my backpack totally soaked. To justify buying a $20 umbrella I claimed (to myself) that it was an ecological choice because it wouldn't break and be landfill like the $4 umbrellas from the newsstands. Well, that was crap.

I bought a new $4 newsstand umbrella on the way home, and it was totally a great move. Thank you New York City Council. Suck on it, Totes!

Maybe today was just like that. On the way home I counted at least 100 umbrellas on the street that had been retired after being injured while serving. They looked like they were ready to injure some wet pedestrians.

But I also saw a girl in a pink raincoat sitting on her dad's shoulders and carrying an umbrella over both of them. I think that that is the only way to share an umbrella.

Unless it is this umbrella. Sorry, Rihanna.

Junk on the Subway

I love this story about a man who secretly films men's crotches on the subway. "Because nothing shown on these videos isn't already on public display..." filming men's crotches isn't illegal.
Its sort of like crotch man is the converse of this guy, who likes to take his equipment out of his pants on the subway. Putting your stuff on display, however, is illegal.

I wonder if the crotch taper is a vegan, too.

Strangers on a Train

Earlier tonight I was sitting on an F train to Brooklyn and a silver bearded Hasidic man sat down next to me and pulled out an IPod. I really wanted to know what he was listening to so I rudely looked over at his screen. Total bummer: it was in hebrew. Man, it would have really rocked my week if he had been listening to Jay Z or Metallica or something.

On Hair

I recently saw Iron Man. How was it? Does it really matter? Anyway, I was totally distracted by Gwynith Paltrow's hair. And, oh man, did it look good. I kept thinking how hard someone had to work to make it look that good.

In the past few months I have learned alot about hair styling. Most important I have found the product that my hair has been waiting for it's entire life: Bumble Grooming Creme. My hair is really fine and curly, but there is a tremendous amount of it. So what I look for in a product is weight to bring it all together. However, a nice styling produce like a gluey creme or gel marketed at "control" for "style" usually requires the hair to be put into a 'style" and held there, hence "control." Lazy me usually just puts the stuff in and then goes to bed. So, when I wake up my hair has been "styled" in to crazy bends and "x"s and "z"s instead of the nice "S"s shown here on Gwynith. At this point I can either go with the crazy homeless look or I can comb it out, causing it to poof out again, de facto nulling the products effect. Booo.

Grooming Creme, however, doesn't have this problem. I don't know how it works, but rather than acting like glue to "hold" the hair in a "style," it makes my hair like clay that just bends and behaves now matter what I did to it when it was wet. Awesome!
But it is $26 for 4 oz. which is not awesome, and that it is more than I am willing to pay.

But that's Ok because I am crafty. As a "hair model" at B&B U. you get a product credit worth then that their stuff costs (a nice little ploy to get you to actually pay for stuff) and some "hair miles" which accumulate to actual free stuff. After having someone tug on my head for 2 hours and then being told that I could go home because my hair was unacceptable, I cashed in my miles for 2 tubes of Grooming Creme and a t-shirt with hair drawn all over it, just what I always wanted. Anyway, I'm good for a while.

I also learned that even though I can put my hair in a ponytail in less than 3 seconds, if I were on tv or in a fashion show someone would come and cover me in a lot of product and then hairspray my head for at lest 20 minutes to get all the flyaways in line to get the top completely flat to the scalp. Now, I'm a girl who grew up watching John Waters movies in Texas and I just don't understand why anyone would use so much hairspray just to make their hair smaller and flatter.

But back to Gwyneth. It's a totally glamourous look, and totally perfect styling for a comic book movie.

quote of the week

"Hit the ball, Duncan. Hit the ball or I'm gonna kill you. I'll kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiilllllllllllllll you!"

Marion Island: The dark underbelly of cute penguin world

Last year during state testing week there was a day when all the freshmen came to school and then were not required to test. So some genius decided to take them all to the gym and turn off the lights and show Happy Feet. These kids went crazy for Happy Feet. As soon as it started then all held up their cell phones like they were at a concert. It was pretty cute.

I do love a musical, though the whole premise kinda didn't pass my snuff test. Basically, it is Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer with penguins. Happy Feet (the title character) can't sing good so he is ostracized at school. Then a seal tries to eat him, and then he finds a group of Mexican penguins who groove to the way he tap dances. Then he uses the power of dance to convince the humans to stop overfishing and turn back the clock on global warming, all set to pop hits of the 80s.

The appeal to an underachieving 16 year old is clear.

After about a half hour the movie loosened it grip and kids started yelling and dancing and setting paper on fire and throwing it across the gym. By the end the gym was covered in trash and the teacher next to me complained that this was a disaster. I thought, "Dude, this was the best possible outcome to this scenario. From what I can tell no one blatantly lit up a joint in the gym, ambulances weren't called, and no one got pregnant. If you want more than that, don't put all the freshmen in the gym and turn out the lights."

So what is my point?

This is. A seal rapes a penguin?!

Why wasn't there any of this in all the recent animated movies? I would like to see an animated musical that incorporated all these possible behaviors.

I've already got the pitch: Marion Island, its Surf's Up meets The Wire.