Easy as 1-2-3: There's no reason to change Alphabet song

Things are always changing. Sometimes for the good, sometimes for the worse.

We allowed the designated hitter in all of baseball, not just the American League. We determined that chest hair on men was undesirable. We decided that Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson and Mahatma Gandhi were bad guys, not good guys.

Times change. Things are different now than they were 20, 40 or 60 years ago. Adapt or die.

That's all fine, but this is a bridge too far: They're trying to change the tune and flow of the Alphabet song. Yes. That song.

The one you sang to learn the alphabet. The "elemen-o-pee" song. They're changing that one. Or attempting to do so (and by "they," I means some people on the internet).

It's an outrage that could disrupt the entire educational system. It's a change that shouldn't be made.

We can change our view of O.J. Simpson and decide that Harry Truman was a good president and admit that disco music wasn't that bad. But can we change the flow of the ABC song that shares a tune with "Baa-Baa Black Sheep" and "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star"?

There's plenty of reason to say no, but the biggest reason is that the proponents of the new version (new = the earliest version I can find of it is from 2019) are trying to take away the part of the song we like the most. You know, the "elemen-o-pee" part.

I presume there's a reason for it. They think little kids will get confused and not realize that L, M, N, O and P are letters. They're right, but that's not a reason to change it. Generations of kids have learned the alphabet despite the "elemen-o-pee" portion. Maybe because of it.

Perhaps the confusion makes the magic.

Things don't have to be perfect to work. There's value in learning how to drive in an old, imperfect car. It's OK to take vacations where everything doesn't come out perfectly. Sometimes, the best meal can be food that's not perfectly prepared.

And there's value in the traditional version of the Alphabet song.

If we let them change the tune and flow of the Alphabet song, what's next? Will we try to make everything easy for kids? Will we stop having to, two and too mean different things? Will we stop talking about Persia, Prussia and Russia as different places? Will we stop telling them 4 is more than 2, but ¼ is less than ½?

No, no and no. But each of those makes more sense than changing the Alphabet song.

If we change the tune and flow (let's face it, we're changing the lyrics if we take out elemen-o-pee) to the Alphabet song, everything could be on the table. And that's a frightening proposition.

Just say no to the new Alphabet song.

Now I've said my ABCs, next time won't you sing with me?

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

When I learned about a thing by twice wrecking the Thing

Sometimes it takes more than one mistake to teach us a lesson. Sometimes it takes two mistakes in one week.

It was my senior year of high school. My dad had purchased a Volkswagen Thing – the Jeeplike vehicle that VW made for a few years – as a car for my older sisters and me to drive until we bought our own car. It was his car: We had to ask permission to drive it. He sometimes said no, deeming our desire ("I don't feel like taking the bus to school" or "I want to go to my friend's house because my other friends are also coming over") insufficient.

I was the youngest and by the time I was driving it, my sisters had either moved away, bought their own car or both. The Thing was largely mine (although I still often rode the bus to school).

It was an interesting car. The windows (except the windshield) were made of plastic. The doors came off. The windshield folded down. You could take it offroad, except it was just a two-wheel drive vehicle without much power, so you could get stuck. So what? It had a winch on the front, so you could hook it to something and pull the car out.

I drove that Yellow Thing frequently. It had a top speed of about 60 mph, but once you went above about 40 mph, the engine noise was so loud (the car was like a can, it echoed) that you couldn't hear the radio.

I drove the car to my job at McDonald's and one day, I stopped at the small supermarket near my home and picked up something (baseball cards? Diet soda? A Street and Smith's sports preview magazine?), then got in the car and backed up. I rolled back and . . . BAM!

Someone hit me from the right side.

Oh, no. My dad's car!

The other driver was gracious. Their car had very little damage (how much damage can it cause if you hit a car that's as strong as an aluminum can?). The Thing was dented, but not wrecked. It was my fault, since I backed in front of them, so we filed a police report for insurance purposes, knowing that only my car would need some work.

Dad was surprisingly gracious. That's why we have insurance, he said. Be careful next time, he said. I still felt pretty bad.

A week later, the police report was at his office. He worked near the police station and somehow it was sent to him. He told me to come by his office after school, pick up the report and take it to the insurance company, since they would be paying for the repair. (Imagine a world without email or even fax machines. I had to physically take the report to their office!)

I stopped by, picked up the report, backed out of his small parking lot, when . . . BAM!

Someone hit me from the right side.

What happened? Was this deja vu? How could this happen again? That other driver must have been driving too fast! I didn't even see him!

Well, maybe he was driving too fast, but three things worked against me:

1. The other driver knew my dad.

2. He was an insurance agent.

3. His father was the mayor.

Oh, no.

This time, the Thing was smashed. The entire right side was ruined.

I didn't understand how the same thing happened twice. This time (I found out a few days later), the car was totaled. I'd wrecked the car my dad bought for us to drive. Worse yet, I didn't have a car to drive and both accidents were my fault. I'd ruined everything.

As I thought more about it, I realized what happened. Sometime over the year-plus that I'd been driving, I'd developed a bad habit: When I backed up, I looked over my left shoulder and then looked in my rear-view mirror. I never looked to the right! Never. I saw what was on the left side and behind me, but that's all.

In retrospect, it's amazing that I hadn't gotten in other wrecks. I was blind to any car coming from the right side.

It's a life lesson: Sometimes, things happen that are not our fault. Sometimes, they're someone else's fault, sometimes, they're no one's fault.

And sometimes our bad habits – of which we may not even be aware – cause all kinds of problems.

Since I was 17, I've never been hit by a car coming from the right side as I was backing out of a parking spot. Of course, I've backed into a closed garage door. I've scraped off the rain gutter off a school building (sorry Laurel Creek Elementary!) while driving a storage truck too close. I've backed into a tree while on a camping trip.

But I haven't backed in front of the insurance-selling son of the mayor again. Lesson learned.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

Ranking the most disappointing food and drink

On a recent day, I was getting groceries and saw something irresistible: Diet Blackberry Dr Pepper.

What could go wrong? It's adding something great (blackberries) to something already good (Dr Pepper). This was going to be the greatest soda experience of my life!

Then I remembered one of the key factors in all of food and drink: Sometimes things that seem great aren't. And sometimes, we continue to have false expectations of how good something is, even after previous disappointing outcomes.

Here are the top seven such foods. (Note: A food is disappointing if it's bad. It's also disappointing if it's good, but you expect it to be fantastic. So inclusion on this list doesn't mean a food stinks. It means it's disappointing., the same way that your mother didn't think you were bad, you were just disappointing.)

7. Exotic soda flavors. Blackberry Diet Dr Pepper. Fanta Peach. Sprite Cherry. Pepsi S'mores Toasty Marshmallow (!), Coke Cinnamon. They always seem great – if you love soda in general, it will be even better with this new flavor! Then you drink it and . . . you realize the basic soda is better.

6. Pop Tarts. I surveyed some friends and this got the mixed reviews. It's either disappointing (because we remember these as bigger and having more filling than they do) or great. I suspect the "it's still great" crowd might not have eaten Pop Tarts in a while.

5. Froot Loops. This is specific, but also a placeholder for all children's cereals that don't appeal to an adult's palate. Cap'n Crunch is still good. Lucky Charms is still good. Froot Loops? Honeycombs? Nah.

4. Abalone/crab. Both are very good, but when you consider the work that goes into them? Maybe not worth it. It's like spending (presumably) $100,000 on a car. It might be good, but is it 250% better than a $40,000 car? Nah.

3. Fast food. Everybody liked fast food when they were kids. Some people never gave up their love of it (much like I've never abandoned my love of pizza), but for many of us, fast food is a less frequent choice as we age. Then you decide to stop at a fast-food restaurant, maybe because it's along the freeway on a trip or because you're running errands and fast food seems easier than going to a regular restaurant or maybe because you decide to have it delivered. It's rarely great. It's OK. It's fast. It's food. But memory is better than reality.

2. Hot chocolate. The fact that this is rarely an option (you are never offered hot chocolate during the summer; you rarely think of it outside the holiday season) makes us forget that it's disappointing. Hot chocolate? Sure! It will be great. Then you drink it and it tastes like chocolatey warm water. It's a disappointment.

1. Fair food. Year after year I went to the Solano Fair excited about the food. Corn dogs! Fried pickles! Huge turkey legs! Kettle corn! Frozen bananas! They seem so great and it's easy to look past the fact that they're overpriced and are prepared in trailers that might be less than sanitary. Then you eat them and they're OK. And 20 minutes later, you feel like you have a bowling ball in your stomach. You will remember this . . . until the next year, when you're excited again.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.

DVDs, CDs teach us an important lesson about technology promises

About 30 years ago, most of us accepted what was obviously a scam.

As we transitioned from vinyl records and cassette tapes to compact discs, we told ourselves and each other that this was better. Not only was it easy to transport CDs, they were digital. They would last forever.

Forever, unlike record albums, which could scratch, warp and otherwise deteriorate over time.

CDs would hold up forever. They would never deteriorate. When we were 80 years old, that Tracy Chapman album would still sound exactly the same. It would never get old.

We believed that, even though the evidence was right in front of us. If you bought enough CDs, you knew that some didn't work. Some got caught on a loop in your CD player, forcing you to skip a song. Some actually skipped, like an album or 45.

Still, we believed the propaganda. CDs would last forever, just like the lie that microwaves would heat food evenly, that the new dishwasher didn't require us to pre-wash the dishes, that our shirts will never wrinkle.

Ultimately, we forgot the promise of forever CDs, not because the lie was exposed, but because technology overtook them. Why listen to a CD when you can stream music?

I thought of that bubble of false confidence in CDs when I recently read an article about how many DVDs – which I think of as the visual equivalent of CDs, since they were to VHS tapes what CDs were to vinyl albums – are decomposing rapidly.

An editor of a movie blog site pulled out some old films on DVD to watch. They failed. The DVD stopped playing partway through. Or it never stopped. 

This isn't something new. For years, DVD lovers have had the same experience, particularly with Warner Brothers Home Entertainment DVDs. You sit down with your DVD player (which most of us got rid of 10 years ago, along with our CD players and that old VHS player that we kept just in case), pop in a copy of a James Bond movie or "That's Entertainment 3," press play and . . . nothing. It doesn't start. Or it gets partway through and pauses.

Warner Brothers releases from 2008-2010 have been specifically targeted –- perhaps because that was the Great Recession and perhaps because the San Francisco Giants World Series title in 2010 broke the WB DVD Curse –but this shouldn't be a surprise.

Every new technology makes grandiose claims that it can't fulfill. Frozen food will make dinner simple, particularly with a microwave that heats evenly. A CD will never falter. A Nerf ball will never break a lamp. Self-driving cars won't go haywire.

But DVDs fail. CDs skip. That permanent press shirt you bought in 1978 is still in your closet, but it's wrinkled.

When people make claims about new technology – about artificial intelligence or electric cars or new TVs or a pill that will make you skinny with no side effects – keep in mind what happened to DVDs.

Technology overtook them and now they're useless. Although I guess anything that keeps you from watching "That's Entertainment 3" is probably worthwhile.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.