Explain the dinosaurs
I don't know what to tell you
There is some disagreement over what happened to the dinosaurs. Scout believes that an asteroid hit the Earth, causing volcanoes to erupt, which covered the dinosaurs in lava.
Japhy’s thesis is that an asteroid crashed into the first dinosaur, who fell into another dinosaur, who fell into another dinosaur, who fell into another dinosaur, until half the taxonomic class had been wiped out in a tragic game of dominos.
They have had shouting matches about these competing views, each becoming quite upset that the other won’t listennnn to what they are saying.
What I appreciate about Japhy, 5, is that the Domino Theory is so obvious to him, so CLEARLY THE ONLY EXPLANATION, that he drew it for us out of frustration:
Here is Scout’s rendering of the dino-pocalypse:
Michael Crichton, Sam Neill, and Chris Pratt (especially Chris Pratt, but not Laura Dern) have a lot to answer for, since the confusion seems to stem from Jurassic Park, which Japhy has a) watched in LEGO form, and b) viewed pictures of in Google Images. I tried explaining gently that Jurassic Park was just a movie, and humans never actually ran around the Earth in cargo vests dodging velociraptors. “Yeah Mum,” he said, “sure, but I also think it’s real.”
He has seen the pictures! Don’t tell him it isn’t real! Much like the electric fences in JP1, the IP guards seem to be down on the original premise, and there is a whole (unlicensed) genre of kids toys based on a world where humans and dinosaurs coexist. The canon has been overrun by toy engineers who simply don’t care about the bounds of speculative fiction. What if we had some LEGO people and some Mayan architecture and some guns and a T-Rex, but also it’s a tree house, they are thinking. That seems to be the idea behind this $300 Playmobil set that is on Japhy’s Christmas 2022 wish list, and which appears on a small toy catalog he carries around to show people:
The whole thing reminds me that one of the truths about parenting is that you are caring for people who exist in an alternate reality most of the time, living through days that slide into place like boulders while yours zip by like gnats.
We continued to try to impress upon Japhy the vast years that separated the dinosaur age from our dominion and fuckery over this planet. Noodles spent good amounts of time talking about prehistoric vegetation that has survived to this day, and about how some of the dinosaurs grew feathers and evolved into birds (we’re trying to keep it simple!), but the scaly dinosaurs were folded into the peat bog of the past—Noodles knows a thing or two, as a former collector of Jurassic Park trading cards.*
This explanation seemed to satisfy Japhy, who, in fairness, has walked the Earth for only five years out of millennia, and hasn’t pulled enough of a sample size of life from which to draw hard conclusions. Some of his books call Pluto a planet, some don’t. The brontosaurus is now an apatosaur. Just this week we apparently began to second-guess the liquid core of the planet we live on. Some of the kids in his pre-K class are giants and some are the size of small pets. He just saw an X-ray of his sister’s mouth that showed two lines of teeth for uppers and lowers, all at different heights, like a game of Red Sea Crossing was taking place in her skull. Clearly, he understands there this is all a ~developing situation~.
Like many in this pandemic age, I, too, feel that the bedrock of How Things Are has begun to shift, as I surrender into an early middle-age phase of personal growth that feels like a long, slow, three-hours-of-pushing, shoulder-dystocia kind of rebirth. ^No one has a good answer for how a T-rex made it to the Tiki Room, nor can I fully comprehend how I wound up in Troy, N.Y. at this moment in life, homesick for the ferns and gum trees of a land that is way up over the curve of the planet and crawling with ridiculous animals that lay eggs and also lactate out of their bellies.
Japhy went to bed satisfied and when he got up the next morning, the sankara stones were still glowing in the temple of his passion for dinosaurs.
“Dad,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about it. If humans weren’t around with the dinosaurs, who built the big gates?”
*Okay, yes, I also collected Jurassic Park trading cards.
How it happened
sprucing up the bunk bed with found items:
I don’t know, man. He has had that pie pan sticker up there since Thanksgiving.
Goodies
I am late to Bridget Everett, but I love Somebody Somewhere, and feel I need to cross-stitch myself a framed “titties out” mantra—the kind of thing they might sell in Tender Moments—as a reminder of the important life lessons Everett has to offer. It’s not too late for us; put them in the air!
“He loves being Wee Man.” —Caity Weaver on Wee Man.
The lost concept of “selling out” is something I often discuss with my friend P., a fellow Gen X cusper, and I liked this dispatch from climbing writer Andrew Bisharat, who has covered, among other things, the bonkers goings on at Everest base camp in recent years. Anyway:
“Kalous brought up the topic of selling out, which led to a funny exchange in which we imagined Reinhold Messner in an Adidas track suit nested in his Italian castle. The debate wasn’t a litigation, per se, of selling out generally; instead, we debated the question whether selling out is something people even care about anymore.” —Andrew Bisharat
I used to race cross-country (badly) and had a bit of a larf at Bill McKibben describing the Beijing Winter Olympics venue (on which note, go Jessie Diggins!):
It is an inauspicious setting. Thousands of newly planted trees look tiny compared with the giant light poles that dominate the scene. Viewed from the air—drones are increasingly key to TV coverage of the sport—it resembles a penal colony in a remote and frozen valley, which is probably not the image that China was aiming for in what some have dubbed the Genocide Olympics. The accounts from the ground are only slightly better: the trails are wide and well-groomed, but all the snow is man-made (using hundreds of millions of gallons of water in a droughty region), and it’s dry and slow in a truly bitter cold that has the skiers shrouding their faces.
You probably already read this Jennifer Senior piece on keeping friendships through mid-life, but did you appreciate this throwaway? Hahaha come hang with meeee
This piñata story made me cackle.
What did all the ~ideas~ actually achieve? Oscar Schwartz on the TED Talk industrial complex.
A depressing but very good look at climate grief from 2019.
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Love , love , love the dinosaur article !