Children are molded by those who raise them.

I was raised by NPR, PBS, and parents who thought those things were good.  NPR meant lots of classical music, endless “games” of name the composer / time period, Car Talk, Whad’Ya Know (not much, you?), and I shudder to think of it, Prairie Home Companion.  PBS meant Nova, Nature, Mystery, and Muppets.

And by “molded”, I mean warped.

It’s more fun to learn things when they’re funny, hence the endless “memory devices” utilized in my childhood.  Happy Birthday to You was “Hippo Birdie Two Ewes”, Rimsky-Korsakov was “Rip-your-Corset-off” (as in Flight of the Bumble Bee is so fast…), you know this is what it is because it sings “Oh, my word, it’s Beethoven’s 3rd”, and that this is what it is because it sings “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a Mozart”, this goes “Old Mozart’s in the closet, let him out, let him out, let him out”, and that this is the “Pathetic Symphony”.

I also knew that Harry Belafonte was obviously “Harry Bellybutton“.  The Muppets did this all the time.  You have Alistair Cookie, Placido Flamingo, Polly Darton, and an entire list of famous people that children don’t know but their parents do.  Jokes that the adults get and the kids will if a) their parents are weird or b) the kids actually pay attention and therefore learn things later on when they get to be weird adults.

There’s so many more examples like this, but I’m sort of trying to write a thesis…  Don’t even get me started on Victor Borge.