![](\"http:\/\/www.funkymovie.com\/images\/product\/233728445c28554f3db6237982cbaabd.jpg\")
<\/p>\nI know, I know.\u00a0 Barney’s irritating.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
My apolitical friends hate Barney because of his relentless, up-beat cheeriness and, of course, the voice.<\/p>\n
My “conservative” friends – or at least some of the ones that look too hard to find political significance in life’s pettiest minutuae – detest him because of his cushy, relentlessly PC world.<\/p>\n
And truth be told, there’s much about Barney<\/em>, the long-running PBS show for toddlers and pre-toddlers, that’ll drive you nuts. The music is relentlessly simple.\u00a0 The supporting cast – Baby Bop’s voice and sing-song delivery will drive you to cheap liquor, and the kids at the fictional daycare are, let’s just say, not gifted actors.<\/p>\n But my various friends and I all have one thing in common.\u00a0 We’re not two years old<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n Too obvious?\u00a0 OK.\u00a0 Most of my Barney-<\/em>hating friends and acquaintances had never spent a day at home with a pre-toddler.<\/p>\n It’s hard to explain to them; I owe that purple dinosaur my sanity.<\/p>\n Let me explain.<\/p>\n Years ago, when Bun was a baby, I was working nights.\u00a0 Her mother worked days.\u00a0 So during the day, I watched the baby.\u00a0 Indeed, Bun was a pretty active baby – so I didn’t do a whole lot but <\/em>watch the baby.\u00a0 Bottles, diapers, doing stuff – there wasn’t a whole lot of time for luxuries and dissipations like going to the bathroom.<\/p>\n But every day, I could count on two half-hour breaks in the action, where baby Bun would be glued so firmly to the screen (also strapped so firmly into the Snugli) that I could go grab a glass of water and a quick (quick!) trip to the bathroom without fear of getting jolted to reality by a squall of screaming. Bun was mesmerized, which was thirty minutes of being tethered to the baby\u00a0by 25 foot cable, rather than a three foot leash.\u00a0 Barney <\/em>was on twice a day back then, and those two showings were my little rewards to myself that kept me going through the day.<\/p>\n So yep.\u00a0 I owe that dinosaur.\u00a0 Bigtime.<\/p>\n And whatever you want to say about the tone of the show (as an adult, and not the show’s audience), the theme song was the first song Bun ever learned.\u00a0 And there’s nothing in the world more cute than a toddler singing her or his first song – it wouldn’t matter if it were a Throbbing Gristle song.\u00a0 Although thankfully it wasn’t.<\/p>\n So anyway.\u00a0 Step off the dinosaur.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I know, I know.\u00a0 Barney’s irritating. My apolitical friends hate Barney because of his relentless, up-beat cheeriness and, of course, the voice. My “conservative” friends – or at least some of the ones that look too hard to find political significance in life’s pettiest minutuae – detest him because of his cushy, relentlessly PC world. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,29,6],"tags":[211],"class_list":["post-4689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e","category-family-law","category-mitch","tag-love-and-hate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4689"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26898,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4689\/revisions\/26898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}