Thieving elves?

I think those Keebler elves are up to something. 

This packaging has a kind of flair that makes me think of two of the Girl Scouts' most popular cookies.

To be fair, the packaging may be new, but the Keebler varieties are not. Keebler, which has a history dating back to 1853 and is now owned by Ferrero SpA (after being a Kellogg company for 19 years), has been making its fudge-based cookies for some time. But more to the point, Keebler was actually the first commercial bakery to make cookies for the Girl Scouts to sell. Keebler is still involved with the Girl Scouts, actually; its Little Brownie Bakery subsidiary is one of two companies that bake the cookies for the GS gang. (The other is ABC Smart Cookies.)

But are these knockoffs of the Girl Scout brands? I can't prove a connection, although Lifehacker says they are. The Fudge Mint Delights (formerly known as Grasshoppers) are indeed a type of Thin Mint, and the Coconut Dreams match up to the Caramel deLites (a.k.a. Samoas, depending where you live in the United States). But they are not identical. For example, the BusyBee blog did a taste test of the mint cookies a few years ago and found the Thin Mint slightly superior to the Keebler mint cookie. 

What does this all mean? I don't know. My wife was the Thin Mint fan in the family -- in the days B.F. (Before Fred) she and her roommate each bought two boxes of Thin Mints from people at work, not knowing the other was doing the same, and sat down to feast on four boxes. (Not all at once! or so she says.) But my wife thinks that Thin Mints just aren't as good as they once were, that something has changed, or got cheaper, and she won't bother with them anymore. And she thinks all Keebler cookies are poor. She much prefers the Back to Nature brand of mint fudge cookies, now owned by giant pasta company Barilla.

So let's hear your reviews in comments. 

I understand that the Girl Scouts have been distancing themselves from controversy in the last couple of years, and good for them, but frankly, I still think they are a lousy organization, if not completely woke then woke-adjacent. Why would girls want to join the Boy Scouts except that the Girl Scouts suck? The Boy Scouts got driven to bankruptcy, decided to let girls in, changed the name to BSA, then to Scouting, and now they suck even more than the Girl Scouts. The son of a friend of mine has had enough and quit -- and this kid was an ace away from Eagle Scout. He thinks it's a waste of time. The local Scoutmaster is a dummy, and the troops are disbanding one after another. It's pretty sad. 

Scouting may be dead, alas -- but as long as the Girl Scouts of America can make an excuse to do it, they'll keep raking in cookie money. I foresee a future when both organizations are as forgotten as the American Benevolent Legion, but people still buy Girl Scout branded cookies, not even knowing what a Girl Scout once was. 

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P.S.: If, like me, you're curious how a mint-chocolate cookie got to be called a grasshopper, it may have gotten the name from the green cocktail of crème de menthe, crème de cacao, and cream, which dates back to 1919 (according to Eater). The cocktail was popular in the fifties and sixties, so the cookie likely borrowed the name. By now the drink is not so well known, so the word GRASSHOPPER does not immediately signify mint and chocolate. No wonder Keebler changed the name of the cookie. 

Mutton-headed princesses.

I've worked on a few books for young readers over the years, most of which are targeted toward girls. Publishers will tell you that they barely bother with books for boys above grammar school age because boys don't read for fun. So they neglect boys' books and the spiral continues. 

I mention this because I don't want someone to think I'm just picking on fictional princesses today. No doubt there'd be plenty of fictional princes to pick on too, if boys were reading, and if boys were encouraged to believe in themselves beyond all reason the way girls are. 

That's the rub, right there. In almost every girls' book these days, there comes a time when the girl hero (we don't call them heroines anymore because that's a diminutive), who has been shoved aside by her oppressors, has a chance to sound off and show everyone how wrong they are. She doesn't have to know anything, as long as she believes in herself. Of course, the young lady's brilliance and goodness and courage dazzles everyone, and the bad guys are eschewed while the princess is tiara-cized. 

you go girl

We call this the Greta move, after Greta Thunberg, who may not be aware that the only reason she was able to tell off the UN when she was a child was because she was doing the bidding of the very adults she was telling off. But that's a longer, larger, more lousy story. 

What really bothers me, though, is that as bright as the young princess is, she can't be any smarter than the writer, and that's a problem. I remember one book where the princess discovers how poor the peasantry in town is, and resolves to fix this by looting the royal treasury and throwing gold out to everyone higgledy piggledy. 

No one in the book is smart enough to explain the concept of devaluation, how if you give every peasant five pounds of gold, two gold coins will no longer be enough to buy a fine horse. Sure, the princessdom will look nicer, with everyone making gold utensils and things, but the value of gold will plummet. Whatever's left in the treasury will lose value as well. Of course, brigands from elsewhere will be happy to come rob from the easy-pickin' peasants and take the loot back home where gold still has value. 

These things are simple economics, not hard to understand, but they are not as obvious as knowing that if you let go of an object it will drop. Many things in life are like that. If you're in a sealed room and you turn off the light, why does it get dark? The room is sealed; where did the light go? Guess what: It won't stay bright just because you think it should and really want it to. Neither will the peasants be prosperous because you give away the store.

Sadly, the princesses in these books are also a model for political figures who cannot understand why people stay poor when you print so much money for them. 

It makes me sad, it truly does, that the basics of economics are not taught in schools, or at least not taught well enough to act as a counter to this kind of magical thinking. Prosperity is difficult. Poverty is easy. How people get through high school without understanding even that is beyond me.

Why are girls so crazy?

A longstanding topic for boys -- why are girls so crazy? -- is one that often persists well beyond the age of youth. And it probably goes back to the time of the first humans. Ogg couldn't figure for the life of him why Lilg said she loved him but treated him like dirt so often. Why she nutty as cuckoo? Ogg wondered. 

That's just typical battle of the sexes, boys being dopey stuff. Well, it used to be. Now I think girls have even more reasons to be crazy. Many such reasons exist in the modern era, such as social media, cyberbullying, and teen magazines. But we also have to count books, specifically books targeted at female readers. Here are three books that, while fake, provide representations of the kind of books I mean. 

Sweet but clumsy Hillary Hippo has a number of
silly misadventures when she goes shopping.

Besties Aisha and Tammy, who love detective stories, get on the case
when a dognapping ring steals Aisha's standard poodle, Miss Curlz. 

Book 5 of the Bluud and Thuunder series finds vamp tramp Katey Damian at odds with her lover Stormi Winds when the Sistahhood suffers a new attack by Rothschilde and his enforcer, Clerisy Bitchop. Can the Sistahs kill their way through their enemies and find a place to be free at last?

I know children change quickly -- but seriously, who could handle going from one to the other in six years? At least half of the teen girls' books I've seen lately aren't even girl-meets-boy books; they're girl-meets-girl books, and the males are at best useless and more likely evil. In the last decade it's gotten even worse than I could imagine, and I'm a catastrophizer. 

This is an important thing to note: Books marketed to women are not like the books made for teen girls. Certainly there are some, the kind that get made into movies with dark shadows and washed-out colors, but far more are typical love stories, more Hallmark than hellion, including mysteries called cozies and even a thriving subgenre of Amish romance books. 

So the next time a teenage girl is driving you crazy, bear in mind that it's not just hormones, it's not just peer pressure, and it's not just social issues -- it's also a mindset in the publishing world designed to make them angry and eager to reject everything.

Horsin' around.

Was busy at the church last week, in the room where they keep a lot of rummage for rummage sales. Rummagepalooza. Anyone want some good rummage? I can hook you up. 

Sometimes I see pretty good toys, things that seem like winners and yet somehow did not get the ever-lovin' snot smushed out of them as a well-loved toy ought to. You never know with kids. You spend a hundred bucks on the toy and they want to play with the box. It's been that way since toys came in boxes.

Here's one I thought was pretty darn good:

I guess this toy proves that unicorns are no more than horses with horns on their heads, however much pink may occur on them naturally. That sound effect could have been around since the days when boys still played games with Western motifs. Now that's straight out, unless it's White Oppressors and Native Resistance. Which could be fun. However, I can imagine the neighing and galloping getting so annoying that a parent throws the thing out the back door, turning it momentarily into a Pegasus.

The point is, I never had a rocking horse to my knowledge, but if I had one like this when I was a toddler, I think I would have spent the day on it. Hi-ho, Pinkie Unicorn! 

Jerry Seinfeld talks about being bored to death as a child doing errands with his mother: "When you’re five and you get bored, you cannot support your body weight. I remember going to the bank with my parents... and I would lie down flat, like, 'Sorry, Mom, there’s nothing I can do. This place is so dull, I cannot get up.' This is what I think adulthood is: Adulthood is the ability to be totally bored and remain standing." But if he got a ride on one of those coin-operated horsies outside the store, he would be totally refreshed, ready to go look at carpet swatches.

If horsie's a-rockin', don't come a-knockin'!

Refreshment aside, the other problem with this toy for Baby Fred is that, of course, it's a girl toy. In my childhood in Bedrock, people still expected boys to play with boy toys and girls with girl toys -- guns and knives vs. baby dolls. As a toddler I think I would have just seen a horsie and gone for it. I could have gotten some opprobrium from the males in the family, yes. 

It's no better now, though -- it may even be worse. A modern male toddler riding on a pink unicorn rocker might make his progressive parents very proud, so proud they would start him on female hormones immediately and schedule his gender reassignment surgery. 

It's dangerous out there.

Anyway, it's not an issue for me at the moment. I'm way too big for this toy. I'm sure it will go to a good home, and I hope the little girl who gets it loves it. And if it's a little boy -- well, look out, kid.

War is... HeLLO!!

 

Bad Books Week.

Well, I missed all the fun of Banned Books Week again. I am so completely upset that once again no one has tried to ban one of my freaking books. I'd be on the best-seller lists and making a fortune.

I guess I've read a lot of the books that those self-righteous types celebrate on the Banned Books List, but I would never read one just because it's on the list. It may be striking a blow for freedom, but we don't ban a lot of books in this country (although we're starting to). When we used to think of banned books we thought of pecksniffian town elders getting so upset that a book contained a reference to a woman's ankle that their faces would pinch up like a dead man's anus. Now such old folks are desperately trying to be "down with the people" while banning is beginning to come from the same kinds of folks that celebrate banned books. So there's a good deal of insanity in the ranks.

Typically, though, it was really parents who wanted books to be banned, because they thought such books were inappropriate for young readers. For some reason it is reasonable to say that certain movies are not appropriate for youngsters, but you can no longer say that about books. And publishers seem to be thrilled about it, because when it comes to sex, depravity, and violence for the teen market, they are all in. (I should warn you that the link itself leads to naughty language because it's Cracked, but that should be obvious. Because Cracked.)

Personally I would like to lead a movement for Banned Bad Books Week. We're not going to get rid of books for young readers because they have sex, we're going to get rid of books because the sex in them is stupid and consequence-free. We're not going to get rid of them because they have violence, we're going to get rid of them because the violence is so ridiculous it makes your average superhero movie look like Saving Private Ryan. Above all, we want to ban books that are just bad. Publishers will say they print the books that teenagers want to read, but somehow if Nestle used that argument about Hot Pockets I don't think the nutrition watchdogs would buy it.

I've worked on a number of books for teen girls -- there are no books for teen boys, because boys don't buy books directed at teens when they buy books at all, which they don't -- and most of them end the same way. The heroine is someplace alone, bleeding profusely, but is such a badass she never quits. Here's my take -- and again, language warning, since I want to be accurate:

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Kaszandra got up out of the pool of her own blood that was quickly starting to ice over. It had to be minus forty in this warehouse. Wasn't that the same in Celsius and Fahrenheit? Damn, wish I'd paid more attention in Ms. Horkdork's class, she thought. 

But this was no time to review math homework. She ripped the scrunchie from her hair and made a quick tourniquet for the bullet wound on her leg. Devlin DeVille was somewhere in this building, and none of his evil demonic power, none of his obscene wealth, would stop her from destroying him. 

She hopped forward, stifling the scream from the stab wound in her gut. It hurt. She wouldn't have believed there was that much pain in the world. It hurt more than any hurt ever hurt. But all Kaszandra wanted was to stop bleeding so she wouldn't leave a trail for DeVille to follow if he was coming up behind her. 

It was dark as coal in this warehouse, dark as DeVille's heart. Who would have guessed that the richest man in town, head of the local Republican committee, was also a vicious bastard who raped the entire fourth grade? Fucking asshole. She had to destroy him. 

But where was he? She listened carefully, but her ears were still ringing from when DeVille shot her in the head with a potato gun. 

Fucking asshole. 

If only Jassper were here to help, but for all she knew he was--- God, she hated to think of it. She'd hated to leave him under that pile of excelsior, but there was no way she could dig him out. DeVille had planned that trap for Kaszandra, and Jassper had walked right into it, damn his stupid beautiful head, his 24-inch python arms, his rock-hard washboard abs, his---

Whoa, girl, better cool it. Work to do. 

Kaszandra shifted into the shadows, quiet as a mouse in fuzzy slippers. With the fracture in her femur it was tricky, but those three years of ballet finally came in handy. Suddenly she heard a click, or a clack -- was DeVille here, behind those stacks of boxes marked High Explosives? Or was that an echo... an echo from the---

"Catwalk," said a voice, and a bucket of gasoline poured onto Kaszandra's head. 

"You son of a bitch!" shouted Kaszandra. That was the end of this blouse. She staggered back into the center of the warehouse room. Dimly lit above her was the catwalk that ran around the interior of the building, and on that, cinematically lit from above, was Devlin DeVille. 

"Feeling warm, Kas?" said DeVille. He struck a wooden match on his thumbnail and tossed it toward her. Kaszandra gasped and stepped back out of the way of the flaming stick of horrible death just in time. "Things are just starting to heat up around here."

"I'm going to destroy you, DeVille!" yelled Kaszandra, her gasoline-soaked hair billowing around her like a bronze cloud. "You've hosted your last Trump fund-raiser!"

DeVille chuckled. "You're difficult to kill, Miss Hendreson, but we're getting there. Fortunately you are unarmed and a sitting duck. A duck coated in gasoline, I might add."

He was right about the gasoline. But wrong about the duck. And wrong about her being unarmed. Carefully, slowly, never taking her eyes from DeVille, Kaszandra reached up to her sternum where his throwing knife had stuck in her ribs. This was going to hurt....

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Oh, to hell with it. This is too easy. I'm going to start writing one of these today. I just have to sign my books F. P. Key and use my wife's photo for my author picture. See ya on the best-seller lists!

Always one weirdo.

Scouting scandal!

My wife has uncovered a scandal that is going to ROCK the Girl Scouts.

Everyone loves Girl Scout cookies, of course. The Samoas are my favorites. But every woman I know is hopelessly devoted to the Thin Mints.

The latest boxes were four bucks a pop, which is fine, because we're getting fat while supporting a good cause, right? And they are the greatest slim, minty, chocolaty cookie in the world.

OR ARE THEY?

Yes, shockingly, my wife prefers the Back to Nature brand of chocolate mint cookie to the Girl Scouts Thin Mints! It's a better cookie!

That said, there are things to consider here. The Back to Nature brand was $4.30 a box, and it's only 6.4 oz, while the $4 Girl Scout box is 9 oz. And as I exposed a couple of weeks ago, Kraft owns Back to Nature, so it's not like the cookies are so expensive because Ma and Pa Greengrass are lovingly forming each organic artisinal cookie by hand. Still, if my wife is right, and she always is, you have to ask yourself: Is it worth it to spend more money for fewer cookies if the quality is higher?

Me, I've generally been a quantity over quality guy. A bucket of cold Evian in your face may be bracing, but a swimming pool's worth of tap water will really get your attention.

We don't keep cookies around here much; they never last long anyway. (It's the dog's fault!) (Not really.) But since Girl Scout stuff is only around for part of the year, I'd say, if you support the Girl Scouts and want to help them pay the rent....

Midtown Manhattan: Not Cheap.

....then buy the Thin Mints when you can and go for the Kraft Back to Nature Fudge Mints the rest of the year. Or you may decide not to spend a mint on the mint and make your own cookies.

Meanwhile, there's another strange cookie scandal involving my Samoas, which Babble fearlessly exposed last year. I thought the name had been changed because of political correctness ("Stop insulting the Samoans! Struggle is reals, yall!") and then changed back due to customer ire, but it turns out to be more complicated an issue. (Hint: TWO bakeries!) (!!)

Who knows what cookie secrets have yet to be revealed? Margarine in the Trefoils? Savannah Smiles named for the late adult film actress rather than the town in Georgia? Peanut spread rather than peanut butter in the Do-Si-Dos? Is there a merit badge for COVER-UPS?

Amazing true Christmas story!

We had one of those Secret Santa things at the church (they don't call it that, but that's what most people call them) where you get a description of a present desired by a child who's been signed up and you buy it and wrap it in time for the big Christmas party. We had a five-year-old girl who wanted a toy. And since the party is early this year, we had no time to order something online. This was going to require a personal visit to the store to personally buy a toy.

We split our forces to tackle this mission: Mrs. Key, being a former girl, was strategy, I was tactics. But of course no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

She chose the Hello Kitty Dream Lite as an excellent present for a girl of that age. Late Saturday night we confirmed the presence of the present at the local Walmart through the company Web site. I was to procure same early Sunday morning, along with the necessary AAA batteries, because nothing sucks like getting a great toy without the necessary batteries. It would be wrapped and delivered at Sunday afternoon Mass. Sunday I got up, dressed, raced out the door without breakfast or even coffee. IT. IS. ON.

Well, sometime between Saturday night and Sunday morning, the last Hello Kitty Dream Lite was sold. When I got to the store and couldn't find it, I used my phone to check the Web site again. Now it said the nearest one was at a Walmart twenty miles away.

Agh agh agh agh agh!

Okay, don't panic; it was just after eight now, and that meant the nearby Target would be open. Did they have it? Target Web site says... YES! To the Fredmobile! Na na na na na na na na, na na na na na na na na...

But NO! Target was out too! In fact, this toy seems to be a hot seller this year. I had hit the wall; it was time to text Mission Control.

Garcia, Walmart was sold out--Target claims
to have but cannot find--going to look in bedding

Nuts! Okay, thanks. Don't leave Target;
if you can't find it I'll find another toy.

There were some Minnie Mouse Dream Lites, but Hello Kitty was needed for Dream Lite goodness of fit. Hello Kitty is soothing in a way Minnie is not. 

Gah--found Minnie @#&$! Mouse Dream Lite...

Gimme a momento to find something else, por favor...

Hello Kitty Neon Fairy Glitter Doll?

I sent this picture. Why did they stop there with the adjectives? Why not Hello Kitty Neon Fairy Sparkle Rainbow Angel Glitter Doll?

No; hang on...

Ok, how about Barbie Holiday doll or the
ballerina dolls (there are three of them:
pink, blue, and purple)?

On it

Barbie Holiday Surprise or
Barbie in the Nutcracker? You pick

(Time passes, Jeopardy! theme runs through head, grown man standing around in Barbie aisle not weird at all)

Fading...no coffee...

Holiday Surprise and another
Barbie outfit for her?

Done!

So our adventure had a happy ending. Some little girl is going to have a fun gift from Santa, and we once again proved that we were a great team when it comes to dealing with these little crises. 

Still don't know what was wrong with the Hello Kitty Neon Fairy Unicorn Sparkle Rainbow Angel Glitter Jewelry Stardust Princess Lollipop Kisses Doll. But you have to trust the women to pick things out. They know what girls will like. If it had been a boy there's no question I'd have gotten something that simulated destructive ability on a harmless scale, which is what boys' toys are all about. 

Ned Land! Ho!

Those of us who were first introduced to Jules Verne's classic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea via the 1954 Disney film will have formed a positive impression of harpooner Ned Land, a sailor on the ship Abraham Lincoln, as played by Kirk Douglas. I believe I heard that it was the only part Douglas ever sang for. And sing he did.

He makes it look easy.

He sang probably the best remembered number from this or any other live-action Disney film (prior to Enchanted, anyway). In "A Whale of a Tale," Canadian Ned---yes, Ned was Canadian, according to the Verne book---tells the musical song of his star-crossed love life. And we know that he's telling the truth, inasmuch as he swears his oath upon his tattoo. The three verses each describe a problematic relationship, such as:

There was Mermaid Minnie 

Met her down in Madagascar

She would kiss me

Anytime that I would ask her

Then one evening

Her flame of love blew out

Blow me down and pick me up, 

She swapped me for a trout!

The thing is, Ned is a sailor, and even a Canadian sailor is going to have more than three gals in his past. We did some research, and as it turned out Ned had more of a checkered past than he let on---in fact, there were twenty other girls, and twenty other verses to the song!

Copyright issues prevent us from reprinting the entire song, but we are able to present a spreadsheet showing Ned Land's various romances, including the initial attraction, the snag, and the resolution:

Frat boys on the town.

Yeah, it's probably the stupidest cartoon I ever made. Sue me.

Star-crossed lovers.

You hate when a friend has a terrible breakup. Your heart aches for him.

So will mine, if he ever finds out about it.

When Tralfaz came to live with us not quite five months ago, he was a fuzzy little fellow, twenty pounds of boisterous puppy. The girl next door fell madly in love. He parents had had a bad experience with an angry little mutt once and were unwilling to get a dog. Never mind -- she didn't want just any dog. "I want him!" she said. She patiently---even heroically---endured his nipping and jumping. As for Tralfaz, he fell for her like a sack of fire hydrants. Every time we went to the yard, night or day, that dog would gaze longingly at the house next door, pining, mooning, hoping his girlfriend would appear. 

Well, things have changed. 

Tralfaz has put on fifty pounds since then, all muscle and bone and fuzz; he was always destined to be a big boy. His daddy weighs 120 or so. It's unbelievable how fast our dog grew. You feel like you could see it happen before your eyes. I'm amazed there's anything left of his food to poop; he seems to convert it all into dog as quickly as he eats it.

So all of a sudden he is heavier than the girl, and if you get him up on his hind legs, taller too. While the nipping and jumping and mouthing has toned down, he is still a puppy---a great, big, huge puppy---so we have not been able to train the behavior out of him entirely. When he gets excited, his brain is like an Etch A Sketch---bonk!---everything gone. 

Now she's scared of him. And I don't blame her. 

So the great romance is over. 

She'll look at him sadly from behind the fence. He'll moon in her direction once in a while. But for the most part he's gotten distracted with all the many people out there to love and jump on. Yesterday she got out of the car and wouldn't even turn her face his way. If he could understand why she won't come see him anymore, he'd be brokenhearted. 

 

Ah, Tralfaz! Ah, humanity!

Yak.