What Mr Bunches is watching.

Mr Bunches knows how to work our computer really well, by now, well enough that he can cruise around on Youtube and watch a variety of videos.  

Well enough that I and Sweetie, as parents, can learn just how many videos there are on Youtube that feature people swearing.  What's up with that, people? Do you really swear that much in everyday life around your kids, at birthday parties? Because that is messed up. 

Someone, probably my mom, once told me that people swear only because they can't think of another word to say, and so swearing proves they are unintelligent.  Ever since then, I have tried not to swear, to the point where one day I mentioned that a lawyer I knew was "kind of a dick" and everyone reacted as if I'd just lit myself on fire in protest.

"I've never heard you swear," said one guy.

Which isn't to say I don't swear.  I swear a lot but I confine it to what I am saying about you as I drive behind you on the road.  That gets it out of my system.

(Mom also said that Jesus said in the Bible not to call people fools, which was a rare instance of religious instruction from Mom who otherwise was not what you would call overtly religious, but ever since then I've worried that if I call someone a fool I'll go to Hell and so I don't.)

The point is: the lessons we learn when we are young can stay with us forever, especially if you are in impressionable young boy like Mr Bunches, so we don't let him watch all those videos you people post of yourselves getting drunk and falling into the backyard pool while swearing at the pinata.  Keep it to yourself.

What we do let him watch is this:

That is, as you have read, Prueba y verdad, a toy commercial Mr Bunches especially likes to watch.  I have watched it with him, sitting behind him in a state of extreme bafflement as I try to figure out what is going on.

Of course, with my extensive background in speaking Spanish, stemming from not one but two years of high school classes under the stern tutelage of Senora Blaschke--

--the highlight of which was that we had to put on a skit in class, pairing up to present a dialogue done in entirely in Spanish; my partner, Mike, and I, did El Medroso Senor Gill y las ranas, which translates to "The Fearsome Mr. Gill and the frogs," a skit about our science teacher making us dissect frogs.  It's too bad we can't put that on Youtube, but Youtube didn't exist back then.  Video recorders barely existed back then; this was 10th grade, so I was about 15, so it was 1984, so VCRs were those massive things that needed to be wheeled around on carts by the A/V club, hooked up by 75 wires to the TV perched on a precarious angle on top of the cart, and the teachers could never figure out how to work the VCR, punching buttons and changing channels and  punching more buttons until finally we just got assigned take-home essay tests.--

(It's not much better today.  Why are there special channels for DVD players and satellite? Why doesn't my TV know what I want to do, or ask me? When I plug something into my computer, it tells me what I plugged in and gives me options for dealing with it.  The same with my phone.  My phone is smarter than my TV.)

(And my phone is smarter than my 10th grade teachers.)

With that kind of background in Spanish, I know that verdad means truth, or maybe true.  So I can guess that prueba means "dare?"

Having looked it up, though, it actually means test, which makes the game a version of Truth or Dare? but a particularly creepy one, because it involves a disembodied hand with a gangrenous finger pointing at you to make you... swing on a vine like Tarzan?  That's the dare?

I looked the game up and that's exactly what it is,  which I kind of find disappointing.  I like to think that Mr Bunches, who doesn't know what "Truth or Dare" is and doesn't always, at age 6, know what's real and what's not, might imagine that the hand is real and that it has the magic power of making people do things, which I would think would creep him out and scare him, but it doesn't.  He's okay with the Green Hand Of Death pointing its scary finger at people to make them act crazy.  He loves that.

But do you know what scares him?

Bee Movie.

That's for real:  Bee Movie:

scares Mr Bunches.  It scares him during the courtroom scene when Barry Bee brings a bear in to show people why they shouldn't put honey in bear-shaped jars, and it scares him at other times, too, like the scene where Barry and the woman who is Renee Zellweger only that's not her name in the movie get on the plane to fly to California to get the roses from the Parade Of Roses before the Rose Bowl, because Barry's lawsuit against the human race has resulted in bees no longer having to work for honey and so no plants are being pollinated and everything's dying.

That's the plot of Bee Movie: A bee sues humans, wins, and then has to fly to California to bring roses back to New York in order to save the ecology.  As a science lesson, it is less than accurate. 

But that's not the point.  The point is that there's a scene where Barry is in the cockpit of the plane (probably because this is before 9/11 when a bee could still visit the cockpit) and the pilots try to swat him and get scared, which is improbable because this is AFTER humans have lost a lawsuit to bees and in doing so have become aware that bees are (a) sentient and (b) litigious and (c) don't like to sting people, but apparently the pilot missed that whole memo, and the pilot fights Barry and gets knocked out (long story involving a minivacuum which they apparently keep in cockpits), and THAT scene scares Mr Bunches so much that he has to watch it standing in the hallway outside his room.

But a disembodied crawling hand that makes you act weird?  That's just funny.