Elmo is everywhere.

Ain’t Elmo’s Fire.

My toddler son has, in his entire 16 month lifespan, probably seen about 4 minutes of television broken down into 10 second clips here and there as we pass by the electronics department in our local Target.

We have purposely chosen to not expose our son to any sort of television shows or children’s videos or Wii games until he’s at least 2. We play with books and toys and the dog and whatever else is at hand, but we don’t sit and watch TV with him.

Despite all this our son has developed an overzealous obsession for that high-pitched voice red furry Grover knock-off Muppet named Elmo.

Elmo is a strange little creature. His bright red fur puts Little Orphan Annie’s hair to shame. His googly eyes dwarf Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mars bugged eyes in Total Recall. His high pitched voice is one that can only be replicated by continually taking shots of helium. And his speech pattern is reminiscent of what you might get out of a toddler Yoda with a learning disability.

Elmo is, quite literally, impossible to avoid in the course of a normal day. My son has a few Sesame Street themed toys and books and Elmo is featured in a few of them, but Elmo isn’t usually the main character. Still, I’ve noticed that Elmo is the only character to make a single appearance in every book and on every Sesame Street toy we have.

Bert and Ernie? Shunned and pushed to the background for two many questions about their sexuality. Big Bird? Everyone’s still a little sheepish around him ever since Snuffalufaguss appeared and made everyone feel like a fool for all those years. Oscar the Grouch? Too reminiscent of the dirty old man who sits in the rocking chair on his porch all day watching the kids get on and off the school bus.

But Elmo has some sort of magical appeal. He’s the baby equivalent of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan all rolled into one fuzzy puppet: you simply can’t turn away from the spectacle. My son can spot Elmo’s face on a sippy cup from 100 yards away and immediately start bouncing and chanting, “Elmo! Elmo! Elmo! Elmo! Elmo!” like it was a sacred word of power from an occult religious ceremony.

And this magical appeal means that Elmo is seen everywhere we go. A visit to the grocery store, book store, clothing outlet or even someone else’s home is not complete without an Elmo sighting. Elmo can be seen on everything. There are Elmo clothes, Elmo baby food, Elmo snacks, Elmo remote controls, Elmo televisions, Elmo CDs and Elmo diapers. There are probably Elmo cans of beer, Elmo lighters and Elmo condoms. Elmo’s eyes follow you where ever you go. Elmo is always watching. Elmo is everywhere!

Elmo! Elmo! Elmo! Elmo! Elmo!

Technorati Tags: Humor, Fatherhood, Elmo

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I haven’t written for a while because I’ve been dividing my time between a number of “money making” blogs which, annoyingly, really weren’t making all that much money. Like a rat chasing that ever elusive moving piece of cheese in the maze, I was starting up new blogs based on whatever the hell caught my fancy at the time. I’d buy three or four domain names, pick one I liked, design some graphics, install Wordpress, write a few posts, slap some Google Adsense ads on them and wait for the truck load of money to pull up to my house.

My Retirement Plan…sucks.

Except it didn’t really work that way.

I simply ended up with a bunch of blogs and not enough time to write or promote any of them properly. For a few of the sites (like this one) I would have a lot of people visit the site but almost no one have any interest in the ads. With no one clicking on ads I ended being branded with a “low click through rate” which sounds like some sort of medical condition a robot might have when it needs Viagra.

When you suffer from a low click through rate Google ends up giving all your websites crappy paying ads and you end up with… yes… just about nothing in revenue. Google calls it “smart pricing” but I call it “smack pricing” because it’s pretty much a slap to your adsense account for a while. Google figures your content is crap, so your ads should be, too. In reality it’s a pretty effective way to stop spammers from putting up crappy sites just for making a quick buck. It doesn’t stop them, but it’s a good start. In addition to my low click through rate Google also went ahead and slammed a few of my blogs for not having regular posts or links and ended up squelching the Pagerank on a few of them. Low Pagerank generally means less traffic and, you guessed it, less money from ads.

So I wasn’t really creating spammy blogs, I was just lazy and unfocused, which is pretty much the story of my life.

To remedy that I’m going to start taking Speed.

Kidding!

I would never take Speed. I’m much more of a crack cocaine kind of guy. At any rate I’ve made the decision to shut down a couple of my wackier blogs and concentrate on the few that are more fun to write for and even have a chance of making me some cash at some point.

Yes, I’m keeping this one up for the moment because it is, believe it or not, one of my less wacky blogs. I’ll even, you know… write some more. Maybe. I’ve taken down most of the ads that I know exist and I even upgraded Wordpress (which I had avoided doing for about… oh… a year). I’ve also been futzing around with the theme and generally trying to get back into the “fun” part of blogging instead of just the cold, heartless money-making side of it. I ask for your patience while I play around and continue to find things that work and don’t work. I noticed the Blogroll is totally toasted and this theme still has some odd issues with the sidebars that I’ve never been able to figure out.

Now that I have the new version of Wordpress I can actually use some of the neat features like tag clouds and other plugins that I couldn’t use before. Of course, to use a tag cloud means that I’d have to go back and tag all 100+ previous entries.

And you know I’m too lazy to do that.

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Okay… I admit. I’m really the one screwing up my kid with electricity, but it’s fun and he’s cute.

Magic!

Arthur C. Clarke is attributed with stating that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But when you’re a toddler everything falls into the category of magic.

Like good parents we put up a Christmas tree for our 15 month old son and decked it out with ornaments and lights. Because I’m a pretty lazy guy when it comes to Christmas trees, I decided to put the lights onto a Clapper that I picked up a yard sale a few years ago. Yes, they still make that wonderful kitsch gadget from the 80’s with that melodic jingle and clever lyrics which stated, “Clap On! Clap Off! Clap On! Clap Off!” The writers of the “HeadOn” commercials continued the fine advertising tradition of annoying the heck out of every human being on the planet with their own similar commercial.

The Clapper works just like it’s supposed to do: Clap a few times and the tree lights go on. Clap a few more times and they go off. My toddler son has watched us doing this for the past couple weeks and has quickly surmised that clapping turns on lights. He now runs around in public clapping madly in front of Christmas trees, regular trees and even the bushes that line the sidewalk. When nothing happens after a few moments he frowns and points and then moves on.

And while most people have just attributed this to him being a typical toddler, a few family members have pointedly asked why our son is running around applauding at house plants. “Oh, he just wants to turn them on,” we say.

The ceiling fan thing is a little more difficult to explain.

One night my son was pointing at the ceiling fan. I told him it was stuck, but if he blew on it like his pinwheel then it might work. He surprised the heck out of me by actually blowing upwards. As any good father would, I obliged my son by flicking on the electric switch on the wall and made the fan whirl for a moment. I thought we were just playing a game, but I was creating a monster.

Each morning we now have a ritual where we both run around the house and he blows at all the ceiling fans, making sure they are all turning. If I’m not near the switch at the moment he blows he frowns, shrugs and says, “Stuck.”

At least, I think that’s what he’s saying.

Is all this toddler behavior cute? You bet it is. Will it permanently scar him psychologically? Almost definitely.

I can’t wait for the day when I can be in the Oval Office as he strides across the presidential blue carpet, steps behind the most powerful desk in the world, sits in that big leather chair and starts clapping for the lights to turn on.

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