French for Penguin

The other morning I was watching TV and came across this great, little computer-animated children’s show about penguins. There was a family (I assume) of 5 super-cute penguins. Their beaks and flippers were colour-coded, so you could tell them apart (kind of like TMNT). They lived on an ice floe and slept in bunk beds. The only draw-back to this show was that it was in French. Apparently my French vocabulary is ranked somewhere lower than “Toddler” because I didn’t understand a word those little penguins were saying. I watched it anyway, because I was intrigued by the plot. From what I could tell, four of the penguins weren’t sleeping well and they blamed it on the well-rested fifth penguin. They tried to get revenge by scaring him. They snuck up on him, put on scary costumes, but nothing worked; probably because a super-cute penguin is still super-cute even if it is wearing a witch’s hat. One morning the fifth penguin wakes up to find his 4 siblings gone. He looks all over for them (well, he looked under the bunk beds anyway), then goes to ask the neighbours. This is where it fell apart for me. I liked it up until this point, I really did. The fifth penguin talks to some kind of cat, like a leopard or something, then some seals, then polar bears. Sadly, I doubt this penguin traveled all the way to the opposite pole to look for his siblings. This is just bad biogeography and we shouldn’t be teaching kids that polar bears and felines live on Antarctica. Granted, the children watching this show will probably see the extinction of all those animals in their lifetime, so maybe it doesn’t matter that they never knew where they lived if they’re only going to see them in museums. But still! It’s just lazy biology and I won’t stand for it.

During my daily onset of soul-crushing boredom, I came across an observation that I don’t think I ever published. It dates back to just before Christmas:

So I was on hold with a cab company, and in between pieces of musak, there was a recording talking about all the good things about that particular company. One of the things it said was that all vehicles are equipped with GPS trackers, “for your safety.” Oddly, that does not make me feel safe, if anything the fact that they feel they need to track their vehicles makes me uneasy. The only thing that tracker is going to help them with is finding out what route the cabbie took to the ravine to dump my body.