The Madness of Curious George

           Once upon a time, a bunch of deluded assholes built a castle in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They made it their capital, and they often paraded around it with the kind of pomp and circumstance usually afforded to royalty, which these deluded assholes certainly thought they were. Edward I Longshanks would have laughed at such a ridiculous thing; for him, castles were built primarily to terrorize the local populace into paying their taxes. After all, any Welsh peasant stupid enough to complain about his taxes being too high in the Year of Our Lord 1290 was more than welcome to fuck off down to the castle walls and discuss it with a vat of boiling pitch. 19th century Louisiana had none of these things, and when the Yankees showed up to burn the place they had cannons with them, against which castles were like so much papier-maché.

So none of it made any damn sense, and when Mark Twain saw the castle he said it was the stupidest thing he had ever seen in his life, an utter waste of money, and most especially an outward sign of the most self-destructive fanboying his beloved country had yet seen.

Fanboys? Oh yes. Because, as Twain put it, every white household in the South had at least three books on their shelves: the Bible, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and something by Sir Walter Scott. Twain did not stop there; in fact, he blamed the entire Civil War on Sir Walter Scott and took to calling the former Confederacy Sir Walter Scott-land. Scott, Twain argued, had so brainwashed the aristocratic Southerners with his ridiculous historical fantasies that they began to believe that one heroic racist asshole with a horse could beat ten Yankees with their full bellies and modern weaponry. Didn’t work out too well for the boys in grey.

Sir Walter Scott wrote the kinds of books that gave his Southern American fans a serious case of the cain’t-help-its. And with these books came the Scottish stereotypes that we all know and love. All Scottish people wear kilts, play golf, carry huge swords and bagpipes around with them at all times, live in castles like the one in Baton Rouge, toss cabers, eat haggis, fuck time-traveling American housewives and, hell I dunno, murder English nobles or some shit because freedom. And in Scott’s novel Redgauntlet (1824), a storytelling rogue by the name of Wandering Willie goes a-storytelling in a brogue thick enough to utterly baffle the college seniors I often force to read it. His story, called “Wandering Willie’s Tale” just to be random, references each of the following:

1. Souls in Hell

2. A Castle

3. The Rent, and an Important Piece of Paper Referencing the Rent

4. Secret Passage to Hidden Cache

6. Evil Land Owner

7. A Mystery Mousketool that will Help Us Later

 Souls in Hell

Once upon a time, Curious George and Bill were doing what they do best, which is gleefully tormenting the local wildlife. Bill was whacking golf balls in the direction of Jumpy Squirrel, sending the poor animal into paroxysms of fear and no doubt shortening his life by a few months with every whack. George attempted to imitate Bill’s swing.

George’s ball torments not the squirrel, but instead travels straight up into the air for like a hundred yards, and then falls to the earth two inches from the tee.

This is one of the few times I have actually identified with George’s struggle. My father is an excellent golfer and has been since he was a teenager. He is good enough to be able to play with any golfer on Earth and not embarrass himself. I suck. I suck at golf worse than I suck at anything else, and Good Lord do I suck at a lot of things. I have a better chance of dunking on LeBron than I do of actually hitting two decent golf shots in a row. My father, bless his patient heart, tried for years to teach me his craft, but it was like teaching a frog to do ballet. I continue to suck, and though he would never admit it, I thoroughly embarrass him with my ridiculous attempts to golf. Golf is the most difficult game in the world, and I am not exaggerating. There are at least 1,567,800 different things that need to be done absolutely perfectly for the golf ball to travel as intended. The perfect golf swing is as elusive as the dodo; the adequate, not-sucking golf swing is as elusive as the ivory-billed woodpecker. So imagine my pure, white-hot, homicidal rage when Bill says “Don’t choke up on the club, George—the more club you got between you and the ball, the farther the ball goes when you hit it!” and George stops choking up and proceeds to nearly brain Jumpy Squirrel with a perfect shot.  Oh? Is that ALL Bill? Is that ALL we need to do to hit a golf shot? Just “don’t choke up”? Wish I knew that twenty years ago—I could be whipping Phil Mickleson’s ass RIGHT NOW. I could have spent the past TWO FUCKING DECADES actually being successful at something.

Fuckin Bill. As if I didn’t have reason enough to hate the guy, he goes and makes something that has plagued and frustrated me for my entire life look simple enough that a literal monkey could do it ON HIS SECOND TRY.

“I don’t know how it works,” says Bill, “But it’s something called leverage.”

Leverage…I guess George could have snapped Bill’s knees and elbows by utilizing leverage and left him flopping around on the ground like some sort of slobbering, wailing swastika, but I didn’t get to write this episode. George and the Man with the Yellow Hat (MYH) go to Scotland instead.

Now, ladies and gentleman, I’ve been to Scotland. I don’t care how rich MYH is; there is no way he got Curious George through customs in that amount of time. It used to be that British customs would keep dogs and cats in quarantine for six months or more—a nasty little monkey that is one missed meal away from becoming a feral, face-eating beast would surely have to endure more than that. But, a few hours later, George is running amok in the Highlands like it’s no big deal.

It is in Scotland that we meet Uncle Tam. Of course his name is Uncle Tam because “tam” means “weird hat that Scottish people and professors wear” and he is totally wearing one and he is MYH’s uncle so lol. Why do they go to Scotland? “To help Uncle Tam move,” says MYH, because apparently a guy that owns a castle and a golf course in Scotland cannot hire local movers, nor can he drum up any friends to help him box up four hundred years of accumulated golf memorabilia plus a couple of green kilts. Incidentally, MYH and Uncle Tam, resplendent in yellow and green versions of Scottish Fancy Dress, look like the two most obnoxious Green Bay Packers fans at a Bay City Rollers concert. Somehow, Uncle Tam’s culture actually IS a costume.

A Castle

Uncle Tam has known he has to move for long enough to request and receive help from America, but nothing is fucking packed. Not one single, solitary Scottish objet d’arte is in a box.

The inside of Uncle Tam’s castle looks like a pro shop, though the narrator says “golf store” because he is a damn Philistine. Literally hundreds of golf clubs on racks, gold trophies, just dozens of bowls full of golf balls all over the place. George is enraptured, and immediately goes outside with ball and club in the hopes that Jumpy Squirrel followed them on this transatlantic voyage in order to receive a hurtling golf ball right in his earhole.

But alas, there is no Jumpy Squirrel on the castle grounds; the squirrel George meets is Jumpy’s Scottish cousin. We’ll call him Jumpy McSquirrelFace because who gives a shit anymore. This squirrel is nobody’s bitch; his family has lived on a Scottish golf course for thousands of generations, and he knows full well what that monkey is planning. Before George can even stop choking up, McSquirrelFace steals his golf ball and flees into the castle. George follows, and together they tear around a library chasing each other and knocking over priceless shit.

Not sure why. There are hundreds of golf balls in bowls in the next room. Why doesn’t George go get a whole bowl of them and attack McSquirrelFace with the golf equivalent of a pirate broadside? McSquirrelFace could hardly be expected to steal or dodge them all, thinketh the guy who has sat through God knows how many Curious George episodes but still, somehow, has hope that reality will triumph.

The Rent, and an Important Piece of Paper Referencing the Rent

Meanwhile, MYH and Uncle Tam are talking instead of moving, and poor Uncle Tam is despondent. He has to move out of the castle BY THREE O’CLOCK because he owes rent for the four hundred years his family has lived in the castle.

“I’ll help you pay the rent,” says MYH, and I have no doubt he could do it too. MYH is, as numerous episodes have established, a multi-millionaire that has never had to worry about the cost of anything except elephant mittens.

Uncle Tam refuses the help. If only he could find the deed, he says; all he has to do is show the deed and he doesn’t have to pay the rent.

Now, I’m no Scottish solicitor, but I ain’t sure rent works like that. This all sounds contrived, a convenient literary device we’ll call Bullshitty McMacGuffinFace because who gives a shit anymore. McMacGuffinFace is a piece of parchment—four centuries old, mind you—on which is a cartoon drawing of a dragon wearing a yellow tam. MYH and Uncle Tam then start to break their backs looking for it. I think the stress of not being able to buy himself out of the situation makes MYH mentally challenged, or maybe it is the thin Highland air. Either way, later in the episode MYH finds two of the world’s cruelest pranks: two separate pieces of four-hundred-year-old parchment, each with dragons wearing red and blue tams respectively. Both times he believes he has saved the day. Uncle Tam savages him for this idiocy:

“No blue! Yellow! YELLOW! Have ya looked in a mirror today, laddie?”

Secret Passage to Hidden Cache

George is still chasing the damn squirrel through the castle. After knocking over a specific book, McSquirrelFace opens a secret passage and scurries inside. George has to pry it open to follow him, so he uses…wait for it…LEVERAGE. George finds an eight-foot halberd and prises open the secret door, leading the narrator to say, and I quote:

“There is nothing like a big stick to get you out of a tight place. Or into one.”

wat

Without the liberal use of Quaaludes, there is no way in hell the producers got William H. Macy to deliver that line with a straight face.

Anyway, off George goes after the squirrel, and he ends up in a sort of catacomb that is filled with golf balls. Thousands of them, piled everywhere, as if the hoarding instincts of every squirrel since Robert the Bruce had been honed to desire golf balls, and golf balls only. In fact, the only thing in the catacomb that isn’t a squirrel, monkey or golf ball is Bullshitty McMacGuffinFace, which is squirreled away in one of the ball-piles.

Squirreled away

Lol

I guess we are supposed to believe that the squirrel stole it; honestly I don’t even know anymore. Maybe the little dragon with the yellow tam crawled down there his damn self.

Evil Land Owner

Outside, MYH and Uncle Tam watch a big fancy car pull up, and Evil Land Owner steps out with a smirk on his face. Poor Uncle Tam didn’t find the deed, and the castle now belongs to Evil Land Owner. A few yards away, peeking through a barred window, is George. He has the deed, but no way to get it to them. Except what? Go ahead and guess.

A Mystery Mousketool that will Help Us Later

If you said “He wads up the deed around a golf ball—uses LEVERAGE—and hits it perfectly through the window bars and into Evil Land Owner’s hat,” then congratulations! YOUR a genius.

Epilogue

Once upon a time, Wandering Willie told a tale about his gudsire Steenie. Steenie owed rent to the local Laird, and he paid it in silver, but before he could get a receipt for it, the old codger died. Later, the new Laird demanded that Steenie pay his rent, and Steenie did not have a receipt to prove that he had already paid it, the old Laird was dead, and nobody could find the silver. Steenie was very much in danger of losing his home, but that night he met a stranger in the woods who led him down to Hell. The old Laird was in Hell with all his buddies, and he wrote a receipt for Steenie’s silver. Steenie escapes Hell and heads back to produce the receipt. The new Laird is understandably freaked out because the receipt has a current date on it, and his father had been dead for weeks.

And the silver? Turns out the Laird’s jackanape had stolen it and hidden it in a secret room.

With apologies to Eminem

Allie and Bill run round the outside,

round the outside, round the outside

Allie and Bill run round the outside,

round the outside, round the outside

Guess who’s back, back again,

George is back, with his friends,

Guess who’s back, guess who’s back?

Guess who’s back, guess who’s back?

Guess who’s back, guess who’s back?

Guess who’s back?

Thought it was over, thought that my daughter

wouldn’t wanna see George anymore

she’s like her mother

watching Futurama now mixed with some Bob’s Burgers

it’s murder, returning to George after summer

when I thought it was over and done what a bummer,

cause I’m back in it, not finished, got me watching that George fishing

with Bill on the dock who done got that monkey cogitating,

why deal with the cold? He could be hibernating!

George is down with the bull and Bill’s dumb debating

so he heads home to where MYH is waiting,

George can’t talk so he tries describing

what a bear might do when the autumn’s dying,

George, you see

don’t want to be

among the trees

when it’s zero C,

he wants to go to bed and sleep for three

or four months so the winter goes past and he

can stay in his room, dark as a tomb

surrounded by rocks, hiding in blankets and gloom

like a bear, snore steady, but first he’s got to get ready,

eat all the food in the house--there’s no Pisghetti

(chorus):

cause just the MYH is there

and he’s all “Now George, you’re not a bear

you can’t, eat all the food and build a lair

don’t listen to Bill--he’s a box of hair!”

cause the MYH is always there

and he, never yells and he, always cares

and he, humors George and he never dares

to whip that monkey’s derriere!

Room’s “cavern”ous, George no longer ravenous

lays his head in the bed to take a nap, and thus

skip the winter, he’s wishing, he could go back to fishing

that’s his mission, but down in the kitchen

The Man starts his booming, thumping the room with

his music--it’s stupid--he’s playing the tuba

the whole world hears it up to the moon but

The Man and his hooting suck more than a Roomba

George covers his ears, and so it appears

he’s gotta go downstairs and knock The Man out his chair

but he can’t, nana-na na nanna na na na kshh

he’s simply too yellow, mutes the horn with a pillow

but there’s more, see

George has to run out the door, he

knows he can’t sleep till he yells at the corgi

who’s yappin’, amidst all of the hap-nin

the clucking and mooing and all of the jazz in

the Yankeetown farm that the Yellow Hat lives in

so Furious George

goes back to his forge, slamming the doors

tapes a blanket to his window, puts his clock in a drawer

can he hibernate NOW? Is there gonna be more?

(chorus x1)

No peeping, George sleeping,

he jumps out of bed--he’s happy, leaping,

winter is fleeting is what George is believing

but it seems he just dreams cause his sleep was deceiving

The Yellow Hat Man says, “George, good morning”

still autumn outside; still just as boring

George disappointed, hibernation’s a damn lie

not even thirteen hours have gone by!

George wants to cry, there’s no way to win now,

nothing but dead leaves and frigid-ass wind, how

can George possibly have fun with chickens and damn cows

damn this is boring, no reason to live, WOW!

What did The Man find, trapped in the closet?

Some sort of wintery gear deposit?

found a sled and found some skis

he thinks “This stuff’s for me? But this must mean...”

No need to worry, cause George can hurry

find Bill and Allie and all his pallies

cause finally Curious George remembers

he can do stupid shit throughout December!

Hey! There’s a concept that works,

three hundred new episodes emerge

and nobody cares what it does to me

exacerbating my disease!

(altered chorus):

Cause today George learned he’s not a bear

and I, can’t escape, no, au contraire

and I, have returned so y’all beware

“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” 

I wish I were lying about all of this.

I used to ask why a lot, y’all. Why Curious George does the things he does, why he gets away with it, why everyone defers to MYH like he is the Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu of the universe. Whatever pain-starved and masochistic readers I have left will no doubt agree that I have attempted in my ramblings to understand the why, and I have failed as utterly as when I tried to play basketball in high school. Know your role, saith the universe, basketball is not for you. Not only was basketball not for me, certain things were for me, and none of them were athletic, nor were they attractive to high school girls. That, in itself, was enough why and why me and why them to keep me filling notebooks with whiny, maudlin, cringy bullshit for years, chasing an unobtainable goal through various adolescent stages of goth, emo, grunge and whatever-the-fuck else in an attempt to be something (anything) different than what I was.

It took longer than it should have for me to realize that ca-caw, ca-caw and tookie, tookie DON’T WORK.

Yell for the monster all you want; he will not show up until his time is fulfilled.

Ask why all you wish; God will ignore you and focus on the what and the who because, if thou canst not draw out leviathan with a hook, then buddy, God ain’t got to explain shit, feel me?

ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do and die

Consider Kafka. There is no point, and that is the point. Sometimes people wake up as insects; sometimes people get arrested and stabbed for no reason at all. Sometimes people get beaten up by hoboes and change their name to “Negro.” Sometimes the moment is structured such that our protagonist lives in a village for no reason, has sex with a barmaid for no reason, and bides his time by fighting against a faceless bureaucracy for reasons he doesn’t understand towards a goal that doesn’t matter and we don’t even get to know what that goal is because Kafka died before he could finish Das Schloss. And anyway we wouldn’t even know or care if Max Brod would have just burned the notebooks filled with whiny, maudlin, cringy bullshit like he was supposed to.

The Man in the Yellow Hat knows what Kafka was throwing down. There is no point to the monkey; there is no purpose to be served. Life is a serious of random happenings that occur without our interaction, without our blessing, and without any manner of the control we like to think we have.

This is why clowns are funny.

This is why clowns are fucking terrifying.

Clowns do not follow the rules society has set down; they perpetually exist in a netherworld of obfuscation and misdirection. Why do they look like that? Why do they do all the patently ridiculous things they do? Why do they exist?

Because they do.

In this episode, MYH and George are traveling to a clown school. Nobody knows why other than a vague MacGuffin of wanting to see Pepe El Loco, ”the world’s greatest clown performer.”

But it is not a clown school.

It is madness.

And I don’t mean Lovecraftian Mountains of Madness, where the countless gibbering things at least have an unfulfilled hunger, a desire to devour , a desperate yearning to escape the foul darkness and feast upon the cracked psyches of all who behold them. I mean the kind of madness that plagues Pink Floyd’s Lunatic on the Grass, a meaningless madness, laughing at things that aren’t funny, laughing at nothing at all.

MYH almost finds a parking space, but then a clown car full of two other clown cars and like fifteen clowns cuts him off and steals it. Thus, it is the parking lot that becomes MYH’s Kafkaesque hellscape, and Curious George must brave the clown school alone. He is told to proceed to the ninth floor, where the Pepe El Loco show will be held.

First Floor: George sees a clown dancing with three dogs dressed as clowns around a fountain that is also a clown. The lobby looks like somebody paid Betsey Johnson to gravely insult Banksy using only decorations available at Party City. Another clown comes in, joy-buzzes himself for no reason, and leaves. Then, a messenger clown gets attacked by yet another clown who comes out of the elevator with a bucket filled with confetti.

Somehow, this means two things:

A. George cannot use the elevator. He must take the stairs.

B. George acquires the messenger clown’s bag, hat, and nose, which now makes George the messenger, like what happens to that suicidal guy in the Piers Anthony book about Death.

doctor you have to help me

Third Floor: George is distracted by a clown walking down the stairs on his hands. He forgets what floor he is on, and so opens the door on the third floor to ask for directions. The third floor looks like the playroom in that Richard Pryor movie The Toy. The woman behind the desk looks like one of the Murmurs joined the Swiss Guard and sounds like Fran Drescher.

She hands George what looks like a twisted green bongpipe and then genuflects to the portrait of Dear Leader Pepe El Loco on the wall. She explains that the bongpipe is part of the “greatest clown gadget ever” and George must go to the fifth floor to pick up another piece of it. George tries the elevator, but as soon as the doors open, a clown shoots another clown out of a cannon. The clown that is thus ejaculated bounces off a trampoline and back into the elevator. Who could use an elevator with all that mindless bullshit going on? Not George—back to the stairs.

Meanwhile, MYH finds another parking spot, but it is reserved for elephants. A clown shows up on an elephant and demands that he move. MYH keeps driving; elephant is parked. The clown leaves the elephant, but only after he hits a button on his keyring and the elephant-car-alarm beeps.

At this point, I paused the show and screamed at the heavens. The heavens did not answer.

i am sad and depressed

Fifth Floor: George is dumber than a football bat. I wonder if his intelligence fades in and out, like a variable Flowers for Algernon. Sometimes he can build fabulous machines. Sometimes he can solve mysteries. Today, trapped in the Tower of Madness, George cannot count from three to five, and thus must walk all the way down to the first floor and start over.

On the first floor the clown and his dogs are still dancing. Stop asking why—hear you nothing that I say?

On the fifth floor a clown riding a baby’s tricycle and sounding like Snagglepuss gives George some sord of weird-ass metal thingie with a red disk on the end of it like that orgasm-game Commander Riker played on TNG. This clown says go to the second floor. George still can’t count, so he goes down to the first floor and watches the clown and his dogs for a bit.

A worm crawling in my brain tried to make me say WHY? but I ignored it.

life is harsh and cruel

Second Floor: Second floor was just Paul Lynde bouncing around on bedsprings tied to his shoes. George collects another piece of metal tubing, heads down to the first floor to watch the dogs-and-clown, and then climbs the stairs up to the eighth floor.

pagliacci is a famous clown

Eighth Floor: Edith Bunker is dusting a bicycle seat in front of the Macedonian flag. She gives the seat to George and tells him to go to the fourth floor.

George has an epiphany. Instead of walking back down to the first floor and then up to the fourth, he can instead tape numbers to all his fingers and use them to subtract eight from four.

MYH is still circling the parking lot. As soon as he says “I’ll NEVER find a parking spot!” a clown jumps out of nowhere and paints a parking spot around his car.

I begin to believe Marcel Duchamp and Frank Zappa wrote this episode in a Navajo sweatlodge.

pagliacci is in town today

Fourth Floor: The fourth floor is the swimming level from Super Mario Brothers. A seal gives George something that looks like a can of pepper spray. A clown with a Minnesota accent unfolds from a filing cabinet and tells George to go to floor ten.

Now, follow me on this. We were told at the beginning that Pepe El Loco’s show happens on the ninth floor. That was the whole reason George and MYH came to the clown school. Now we know there is a floor above nine. Why this made me want to eat aquarium gravel will be soon made clear.

you should go see pagliacci

Tenth Floor: Clown on stilts gives George a toilet plunger and says he better hurry to the first floor to meet Pepe El Loco. George hurries. The clown and dogs are gone. MYH and the great Pepe El Loco are there.

pagliacci will cheer you up

FIN: They all take the stairs to the ninth floor. Pepe El Loco’s all-important gadget is a disassembled pogo stick with the plunger as the bouncy part. He gets to the center ring of a three-ring circus just in time to bounce around and do little flips with it.

Y’all.

Y’ALL.

The ninth floor of this ten-floor building is a cavernous bigtop the size of the dadgum Astrodome. The ceiling is made of vaulted tent-canvas.

There is no tenth floor. THERE IS NO TENTH FLOOR EVEN THOUGH I SAW GEORGE GO TO THE TENTH FLOOR AND RETRIEVE A TOILET PLUNGER FROM A CLOWN ON STILTS

           He has returned. For a while there I thought I was done with him—it’s been over a month, after all, and the last time I tangled with Curious George all I got was a public domain parody poem that permanently and exasperatingly rings in my head over and over like the time I fucked up on Jeopardy.

           But it’s personnel, kid. George and his crew have come at me, right where I live.

           They had a hoedown.

           I think the creative process went something like this: one of the numerous executive producers, maybe Ron Howard, had a nephew or cousin or something that once told him at a wedding that he wanted to get into screenwriting. Maybe it’s Clint’s kid. Maybe Clint has a kid; I can’t be bothered to IMDB every damn thing so we’ll say Clint Howard has a college-age kid who goes to NYU and is majoring in film studies. Let’s call this kid Steve. Steve is a bit awkward and is just about to slough off his high-school-emo-poetry-writing stage for good and metamorph into the kind of cringy hipster bullshit that infects people with too much money and too little self-awareness. Steve has only left Manhattan once in his life: four days ago, in fact. He took the train to Boston to watch a guy he met on Grindr play the overly rapey bad guy in Oklahoma! Steve sat through five performances, including the matinee that had the understudy take over when Mr. Think He Cute started yelling about tinnitus.

           It went well. Back home after a very eventful weekend, Steve looked at his email. “Hey Steve!” says Ron Howard textingly, “pulled a few strings and can get u writing credit on Curious George. Send a script next Monday.” Now, Steve’s been under a lot of pressure lately. His uncle is Ron Howard and his father is Clint Howard and they don’t need to know what he’s been up to in the six days since that email was sent. Also it’s 1:00 Monday morning and Steve’s roommate is in the Hamptons somewhere but his bottle of Adderall ain’t and maybe he won’t notice if Steve takes four of them.

           This is how the Rankins ended up hosting a hoedown in their barn, and all manner of canon and continuity were destroyed. The Rankins are Yankees to the depths of their rhubarb-eating souls, with downeast accents so thick they could talk a clown up out of a stormdrain. They have no reason to appropriate southern culture unless, for example, somebody behind the scenes watched Oklahoma! five times. So let’s pretend hay bales are benches, and let’s shuck-and-jive and wear our jeans tucked into our boots and yeeee-HAW! We don’t need Ali Hakim we got a monkey

           Allie Whoops and George were hanging Christmas lights in the barn rafters when the entertainment showed up in the dadgum Doodlebops bus. The entertainment for the evening, MYH was kind enough to tell us, was the Uptown Bluegrass Band, just a-pickin and a-grinnin atop the only double-decker bus on the Eastern seaboard. This is how our writer conceived of a bluegrass band. Behold:

The fiddle-player was a grown Tinkerbell in Molly Ringwald’s pink dress and Lisa Loeb’s hornrims. She looked like she was about to go on America’s Got Talent and lose to the cutest little Beyond Belief dropout ever to plié.

The banjo player was Betty Rubble in Back to the Future cosplay. She was not wearing overalls, nor a straw hat, and therefore had to be faking the banjo picking.

The mandolin player was Andy Richter, only fatter and quieter and more plaid.

The bass player was black. The only black person at the hoedown plays the bass. No wonder Token had one in his basement.

Oh and then, O Lord, their leader. Perhaps he was actually from Kentucky as his fake-ass accent purported, because his cowboy outfit was a bright Wildcat blue. Within two sentences he had introduced his guitar. Its name was Beau.

probably a les paul

“But yee-haw shucks and bless mah soul,” quoth the Blue Cowboy, “we shore gon have us a hoedown yippie-kay-yay. Ah reckon you Yaller feller oughta play the gee-tar with us this evenin, ho dee do.”

“Howdy howdy y’aaaaaall,” he added.

I wanted to kill them. I wanted a time machine so that I could murder Steve at the moment of his script’s conception, assume his identity, and rewrite the hoedown episode so that all the guests, and the band, and the monkey, and Allie Whoops end up in the Event Horizon universe for all eternity, and the poor Korean animator forced to bring my vile dreams to life would gouge out his own eyes just to make the visions stop.

But then Allie Whoops and George find MYH’s guitar and destroy it by giving it a bath.

And I then knew the deepest parts of my rage, for I could tell that the guitar existed only so that Georga and Allie could bathe it, and until this episode MYH played the fucking tuba but now he plays bluegrass guitar well enough to be called up on stage with the band, and the very concept of a hoedown in the Curious George universe is contrived so that all of this could come to pass and give George a reason to build a replacement guitar out of shit he finds around the house.

A shoebox. Chopsticks. Dental floss and yo-yo string and picture wire. All lovingly assembled by a monkey, who thus created such a miraculous instrument that when MYH and Blue Cowboy see the warped and peeled mess that was MYH’s guitar, they are not angry. They do not beat or kill George. They are thankful.

It is good the monkey did that. Whatever the monkey does is good. MYH plays the new guitar perfectly onstage, and the song they sing is about the guitar’s construction.

`Twas the week before Christmas, and on the TV,

That idiot monkey was torturing me,

At least I’ve avoided the movies, for now,

But Curious George was still in my house.

 My psyche is fragile—I’m barely together—

But wishing for death is a futile endeavor,

I’ve no choice but placating the baby, it seems—

If we don’t watch the monkey, she’ll kill me with screams.

 In the midst of her shrieking I found the remote,

That bringer of monkey, that crusher of hope,

But Scylla is better to fight with awhile,

Than to face down that yelling Charybdis—my child.

 As the Dr. John intro was playing again,

I attempted to crowbar myself with some gin,

But not even Marion, deep in Mongolia,

Could drink enough booze to erase melancholia.

 And so my depression met George in his glee,

Blissfully eating and hooting at me,

All four limbs employed, stuffing food in his face,

And making—like always—a mess of the place.

 The Yellow-Hat Man was as patient as ever,

All “You’ve made a mess George! We’ll clean it together!

“But sadly, a meeting has called me away,

“So clean it yourself, George—and THEN we will play!”

 So George is alone in the room with the mess,

Half-assedly cleaning, not doing his best,

He plays stupid games while wasting his chance,

And soon the apartment was crawling with ants!

 “Hooray!” says I, “God’s judgment is nigh,

George is no Leiningen—surely he’ll die!”

The Yellow-Hat Man will return from the store

And find Curious Bones picked clean on the floor!

 As always, my happiness was premature—

These ants were harmless, and cute, to be sure,

So George—undevoured, unhurt, and unstuck

Called on Hundley the dachshund to help him clean up.

 Once, when the ants had infested MY kitchen,

I painted the walls with my furious bitching,

I poisoned, I smashed, I went nuts with a shovel,

I killed without mercy and danced in the rubble,

 The religious among them probably prayed,

And begged me to spare them from fire and plague,

The rest denied that I even existed

And blamed all misfortune on random statistics.

 But Hundley and George were benevolent gods

And they spared the lives of each arthropod,

The lesson George learned was that ants followed food,

And thus they all gathered, and thus were removed.

 So George with a trash can walked out to the park,

And Hundley dispersed all the people with barks,

And out crawled the ants, and all was made right,

And the Man soon came home to a glorious sight,

 The apartment was clean, the monkey was spared,

And I sat depressed--and quite buzzed--in my lair,

Thinking of ants and of gods and of life,

And hoping my daughter could skip all the strife,

 Would that our world was as easy as theirs,

With money no object, and everything fair,

And all problems solved in a ten-minute span,

In which George buildeth a dadgum thumb

Allie Whoops is the Scrappy-Doo of Curious George. When I am forced to watch the Curious George movies, I hope the big reveal at the end shows a furious little Allie Whoops drunk-driving a Dalek, right before somebody pinches her smarmy little head off. Honestly, I thought I hated Bill, but Bill never made me want to hammer nails into my ears. Her voice is like listening to Pinkie Pie laugh about how much fun it is to dig a hole in a chalkboard with a fork. Together, Bill and Allie rule the land of non-sequitur stupidity with such hideous aplomb that Dryden should be disinterred and forced to write a poem about them.

I seriously hate that little red-haired trick. If any of my girls turned out to be anything like that obnoxious monster I would personally apologize to the UN. Sometimes I think Curious George should do a crossover episode with Game of Thrones and tell Melisandre that Allie is the long-lost second daughter of Stannis the Mannis.

Or maybe it is her grandparents’ fault. I have never seen her parents, but Mr. and Mrs. Renkins let Allie run all over creation, completely unsupervised, in the company of a monkey. I do not believe social workers exist in the Curious George universe.

So today’s episode shows how much fun it is to be gaslighted by everyone and play in the mud. Either the writer was high or he hates me personally. Imagine, if you will, trying to explain the plot of the Terminator movies to an Andaman tribesman, because the plot of this episode made exactly the same amount of sense to me. Indeed, if you had not the power of Hulu and PBS, you might suspect that none of this really happened and I was just blabbing about a dream I think I had.

So it’s raining, and George and Allie are sitting on the front steps of a country house, bored. Bill shows up and throws a newspaper on the roof. He explains his aim is off because he strained his thumb, an injury that was caused,

sweet Jesus I wish I were lying

by a “thumb-wrestling” accident. Before I have a chance to ponder what powerful hands could sprain a thumb in such an inane way, George clambers up to get the paper and delivers another plot point--somebody several towns over built a giant sculpture of his dog.  Boy that sounds fun, says the little red-headed hellion, we should build a giant sculpture, and Bill can “stupervise.”

Oh gee, y’all, she just said “stupervise” instead of “supervise!” Wow. So cute and endearing. Allie should win ten grand on America’s Funniest Home Videos and not be slapped at all.

I just want to eat her up.

But what to build? Oh, the possibilities. Could be another dog, a monkey, Allie herself, Mr. Quint’s dingaling, a sheep, several cows, a Calvin and Hobbes snowman massacre, an igloo, a dessert-dispensing vending machine, a Wall of Shame, a lifesize copy of that sculpture Tom Green made of his parents doing it, the frontline of the 1976 Philadelphia Flyers, the Burning Man, the Wicker Man, Ugly Lucille Ball Statue, Pretty Lucille Ball Statue, some owls, that weird dollar-bill floating eye thingy, Stonehenge, Charles Barkley, or the Tower of fucking Babel.

Lots of options. And what do they pick? Oh, but of course—giant sculpture of Bill’s left thumb. The uninjured one. Yay!

I now have many, many questions, all of which correlate with the great mystery of Curious George, which is “why the hippity-dippity fuck do any of these people do anything?”

And, and…and THEN, they all go to Bill’s house to look at pictures of his thumb. Bunch of vacuous shit is what it is; Bill is all “here’s my thumb telling my mom I liked her pisghetti” and “here’s my thumb while I was eating watermelon” and so George breaks out the Play-doh to build a replica thumb and Bill absolutely crushes his spirit.

“You call that a ginormous sculpture? That’s all you got?” Bill says, and I imagine burying him in the yard like that guy in The Serpent and the Rainbow. But then I make a mistake; I start to believe that building a giant thumb is stupid, and this episode cannot get any stupider.

Hope is poison. Take care not to get addicted to it.

Maybe Allie was just jealous of the fact that I had spent about ten seconds thinking about killing Bill instead of her, so she pipes up and says they should make the sculpture out of peanut butter. They have plenty of peanut butter—Allie leads them to a shed that is stacked to the ceiling with fifty-pound containers of peanut butter. She laughs and says her grandparents make their own.

Wat. Seriously…I’m watting as hard as I can. I am from an area of this country that literally supplies the entire world with peanut butter, and never in my life have I seen a personal shed filled with the stuff. TONS of peanut butter, on a farm that grows no peanuts, up in Yankeeland. Why do they need that much peanut butter? To whom would they sell it? Who buys peanut butter by the five-gallon bucketful? It is creepy.

Even creepier is when they pop open a drum and dig their grubby little hands into it. They decide--shocker of shockers--that peanut butter is too sticky, so they let the pigs lick it off their hands. Nobody loses a hand.

I know pigs too, y’all. I knew a guy when I was a kid that had a heart attack and fell into his pig-pen and they ate everything but his watch. Pigs will step on you until you die and then eat you. My neighbor kept pigs--the best advice he ever gave me as a youngster was “Git away from them gotdam pigs!” The pigs in Curious George are the size of four-wheelers. This is stupid.

They stay in the pig-pen anyway and try to make a giant thumb out of shaving cream because life is like a box of Dadaist chocolates--you never know what urinal aluminum nutsack kaboom.

It finally occurs to these Mensa candidates that mud might be the best medium for their thumb sculpture. This is discovered after Allie Whoops has an extended conversation with a giant pig about whether or not he wants her to make him a mud pie. I know it is supposed to be cute, in the same way I know Full House was supposed to be funny, but in both cases I either want to kill the writers or myself but would probably get the order wrong.

Because it’s not mud they’re playing in. They are in a pig-pen. It is pig shit. Tons of it. Did I say I know pigs? Because I do. They are indescribably filthy and they shit everywhere. Pigs make the entire state of North Carolina smell like that bathroom at the Carabelle public beach.

From this point on I can’t do anything but feel nauseous. They roll in it; they fill buckets with it. They use it to cover a tomato cage wrapped in chicken wire. Allie Whoops says “whoops” like fifty times, and Bill washes them off with a garden hose. Not only does nobody complain about the smell, but when Mr. and Mrs. Rankin discover what they have been doing with the pigshit, they are so very proud, whereas my mother would have rightfully beaten me bloody for doing such a stupid thing.

Neither pinworms nor tetanus exist in the Curious George universe. When a busload of tourists pulls up to take pictures of the thumb, they all sit in the pig-pen and eat the peanut butter sandwiches Allie Whoops prepares for them.

I guess I just don’t understand auctions. I’ve managed to stay alive on this useless-ass mudball for forty years without truly recognizing what this most capitalist of activities truly entails. And I’ve been to a lot of auctions. I’m from South Alabama, an admission that I realize is like coming out as Cletus Spuckler, and rest assured I’m about as proud of my heritage as Roy Moore is of his browser history, but it is the truth. Everyone with crippling depression and chihuahua-tier anxiety has to have an origin story, so there you are.

But I have attended auctions. I have listened to JD Swearingen sell third-hand tractors, and I’ve seen old men pull on their earlobes when some cow or other piques their interest. I even got a participation trophy from a dating auction once.

And I have read my Horkheimer. There is money to be made—lots of money—from the various insecurities of both the very rich and very poor. It is simple. If one wishes to acquire a rich man’s money, convince him that other rich people have better stuff, and then put him into a situation in which he can make eye contact with his enemies and defeat them by spending one more dollar than they do on some ridiculous play-pretty. If one wishes to acquire a poor man’s money, convince him that spending enough of it will eventually make him rich. Auctions destroy hope by providing metric assloads of it.  My own ancestors are perhaps most famous for the most capitalistic and insidious of all auctions, taking piles of Grandaddy’s money from semi-literate fops in exchange for the production potential of subjugated human beings. Entire city blocks in my homeland were once dedicated to the proposition that the most enviable position in society was reserved for the guy who could buy the whitest-looking concubine.

Gee that’s fun to think about. Maybe instead of ruminating on the deep evil of this useless-ass mudball I should instead wax eloquent about a cartoon monkey. If only I could separate the two.

But I can’t, because in this latest episode Curious George learns all about auctions. The local elementary school library was holding an auction of things the librarian had apparently found in an attic so that more books could be purchased. Curious George’s little Mexican friend Marco wouldn’t shut up about what a good cause this was. Imagine how many books they will buy, he said over and over. Just imagine.

On a table full of potential MacGuffins, George finds a pair of red mittens with elephants on them.

Roll Tide

George wants the mittens. Has to have them. Were the happenings in Curious George’s universe in any way logical or consistent, the Man in the Yellow Hat (MYH) would have bought them then and there. MYH could have bought the whole damn auction, like the time Rory’s father ruined the Star’s Hollow knitting bee. MYH has more than one house. He once bought George a robot that was aware of its own existence. MYH has no doubt paid for literally millions of dollars in damage caused by his Mayan Apocalypse of a pet. But not this time; this time he wants to teach George about auctions and the value of a dollar because why the hell not.

In they go, and MYH gets one of those little yellow paddles with numbers on them. As proof of concept, he spends ten dollars on what they SAID was a bright yellow traffic cone, and MYH SAID it would make a great mute for his tuba.

wtf.jpg

Okay, first off, I ain’t never seen an all-yellow traffic cone in my whole life, nor would a guy who owns his own tuba—even a shitty one costs more than my car—buy some piece of plastic bullcrap for a mute. It kind of looked like his hat, though, so maybe that was it.

So then MYH leaves to go pay for the damn traffic cone, leaving George and Marco in possession of an auction paddle and sitting in the same row as Mr. Glass, stereotypical plutocrat. I’ve seen this guy before—one time George destroyed one of his skyscrapers and he was happy about it. He looks like a Dick Tracy villain hate-fucked Rich Uncle Pennybags and somehow produced a child with fewer redeeming qualities than either of them. Which means he might be the best, most likable character in the show.

Mr. Glass wants the mittens. Curious George wants the mittens. Curious George has a dollar he earned by washing a giant pig twice. Mr. Glass was born on third base.

In the real world we know how this story ends. Mr. Glass buys the mittens for $1.01 and then lets George watch him light one of his cigars with the burning mittens. Then he forces Marco into making ten pairs of similar mittens a day by threatening to deport his parents. George, in a blind rage, attacks Mr. Glass and eats part of his face before being killed by the police. The resulting lawsuit makes MYH utterly destitute, and his subsequent methamphetamine addiction ensures that he lives just long enough to see his beloved yellow apartment building blasted into dust by the Glass Construction Company with the Doorman and Hundley still trapped inside.

lifeisbeautiful

But this is not the real world; this is the world in which a cartoon monkey gets whatever the fuck he wants and never suffers any repercussions. Mr. Glass says he has “auction elbow,” no doubt exacerbated by decades of buying tenements to gentrify, and thus he cannot match the frantic paddle-waving of Curious George. And so it comes to pass that Curious George wins the mittens with a bid price of one hundred dollars. Mr. Glass doesn’t even care—he just fucks off to Pisghetti’s to eat dinner.

There is a lesson in here somewhere. Sometimes buying can cause more misery than not buying. The poor need to learn their place. Marco knows what’s up—he says “That’s a lot of money, George” with the wisdom and certainty of a boy whose parents probably floated over here on a beer cooler. No problem, thinks George, we’ll just go see MYH. Surely this is the smallest amount of money George has made MYH pay in the history of their relationship.

Richuncleyellowhat

But not this time. This time, MYH is exasperated and says one hundred dollars is a lot of money. He even demonstrates this fact by counting out one hundred pieces of popcorn in a perfect square on a table. Amazingly, George understands. He imagines having to wash one hundred pigs in order to pay for some busted-ass mittens. Marco is optimistic, infuriatingly so. I want to snap his little pollyannaish neck. “You could just explain that you made a mistake,” he says, “Ms. Nguyen is nice; she will understand.” Then he gets that dreamy look on his face like the Elevator-Epsilon in Brave New World.

Snaphisneck

“But…what about the books?” says Marco suddenly, “how can we buy books?”

Snaphisgoddamneck

“Oh, I know!” says the Mexican kid with an unsnapped neck,”Let’s auction the mittens again, and Mr. Glass can buy them for $101!”

SnaphisneckandeathisfaceGeorge

I want to kill MYH too, because he could have ended this whole stupid charade at the beginning just by opening his checkbook. Money solves every problem George has ever had. But WHY spend the MONEY when you can get onstage and embarrass yourself for a half-hour trying to beg people at an elementary school auction to spend $101 on some elephant mittens?

I could see the faces in the audience. They saw right through MYH’s bullshit. Here was a guy trying to pawn off some stupid mittens ON THEM when everybody KNEW the guy could have bought them himself at any point and still have enough money left over to buy two used space shuttles. So they just stare at him and wait for 5:00, at which point the auction would end and MYH would be stuck with the mittens. To make the whole situation even more cringy, MYH brings Marco’s grandmother onstage and declares her the creator of the mittens. 

Of course she is. The analogy runs deep.

Marco’s grandmother tells everyone she made them out of yarn like Feynman telling gradeschoolers what protons are.

So where is Mr. Glass? I done said he was at Pisghetti’s. Marco gets on his bike and goes to fetch him. Gotta get him before 5:00 or George will have to wash a bunch of pigs.

Capitalistpigs

Mr. Glass is eating pisghetti at Pisghetti’s. Marco runs up yelling and scares the hell out of him. Mr. Glass’s yelp of shock when he sees how close a brown kid has gotten to his pisghetti has echoed down through the ages. Patricians of Rome made such noises when commoners dared to brush against their togas. Francisco Franco made such a noise when he was told Barcelona was being resupplied by sea. Czar Nicholas II made such a noise when the first Bolshevik soldier through the palace doors did not have the cup of tea he had specifically requested. But when Marco explains the situation, Mr. Glass agrees to go back. But the clock says 4:59. How could Mr.Glass get from Pisghetti’s back to the elementary school in time to prove the day-saving power of disposable income?

If you answered “by magically producing a bicycle helmet and riding tandem on Marco’s bicycle at the kind of breakneck speed Lance Armstrong could not have produced even after injecting ten years’ worth of saved-up red blood cells” you win the prize. Pick your favorite useless crap from the auction table.

Mr. Glass wins in the end. $101 buys a pair of hecho a mano mittens con elefantes. Inexplicably, George is butthurt about this, but Marco’s grandmother says not to worry, because she’ll make George a new pair of mittens with giraffes on them.

In which Curious George buildeth a cyborg

Many of the events that transpire around Curious George seem bafflingly random, that is, until a cunning and insidious master plan is revealed. George does not evolve—he is being crafted. It is known.

What say you, Polonius?

 Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t.

What say you, Gloucester?

As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods.

They kill us for their sport.

What say you, Alyssa Edwards?

Get a grip, get a life, and get over it.

Alas, mama, if only I could. But I must know what George will become, and why Wiseman is building him. Yorbo was just the beginning.

The very next episode starts with that guy from Jurassic Park III telling us that Curious George loves the museum. Thanks, Academy-Award-winning shoveler. Sky is blue, water is wet, the monkey loves the museum.

Half the episodes involve the fucking museum. It’s like saying Peter Parker loves science. Gee I wonder if Spider-Man is gonna have to fight some guy who did science. Will he himself do science to stop the science-doing guy? Bated dadgum breath I tells ya.

But George learns lessons in the museum. Museum lessons? Sometimes, but it’s always serving some sort of future plot-point. He saw polar bears. He saw penguins. He saw vending machines.

seethemonkey ain’thekeen allthingsserve thefuckinbeam

Penguins and polar bears frolicking together is as ubiquitous in advertising as anthropomorphic pigs smiling and serving us their barbecued brethren. Thus, it is necessary to repeat, as often as necessary, that in real life

isthisreallife

in real life penguins and polar bears never meet. They live on opposite ends of the Earth. Ground-based predators would make penguins go extinct. But Curious George knows this. In fact, he is more interested in the museum’s vending machines.

As am I. They are weird. Not one of them dispenses a carbonated beverage or a candy bar. They dispense soup, sandwiches, and apples. Never in my life have I seen an apple vending machine. The very idea is obscene and erroneous. They would rot or get stuck in the gears or come out all nasty. Just dadgum ridiculous. George imagines that the apple-dispensing machine has a farmer in it that sleeps until he is called upon to throw an apple down a pipe.

no

Professor Wiseman appears out of nowhere and sets her plan in motion. The Watcher knows. She knows what will transpire. She has already glued together polar bears, penguins and vending machines. She is playing 4D chess while the rest of us are playing checkers with rocks and bottlecaps. She tells George to have an apple, hands him a coin and says “on me!”

The Man in the Yellow Hat (MYH) tries to make conversation. He does not know the role he will play. She will not send him on a quest to cure his grayscale. Wiseman will own him, body and soul. She spins a ridiculous tale.

She was about to go on an expedition to the North and South Poles, she says, but Operation Snow-Go is Operation No-Go

kekkity kek kek

because the Arctic and Antarctic Clubs can’t seem to get along. Could MYH possibly host a dinner—at his apartment—for these two groups of feuding scientists? And MYH be all “oh, sure I can do that well gee golly and so forth.” Meanwhile, Curious George watches a guy replenish the apples in the apple vending machine. He discovers that the machine’s innards are made of wheels and ramps and there is no sleeping farmer. So why did the vending-machine guy show up right then?

allpartoftheplan

Cut to MYH and George cooking dinner. MYH burns it in the oven because of course he does, and then leaves George alone so he can go buy an actual meal from Chef Pisghetti.

Y’all. We’ve seen this before. MYH leaves Curious George alone, Curious George trashes the apartment or floods the building or otherwise causes destruction and misery, only to be magically rescued from any sort of punishment or repercussion. But all these previous shenanigans were not specifically orchestrated by Professor Wiseman.

MYH has tasked George with using Wiseman’s dinner instructions to make a specific dessert.

It is a stupid dessert. I’ve never heard of it before. It is called Snow on the Mountain, which sounds more like Nicholas Sparks’s next novel, or the newest strain of that loud. There is no cooking, no flour, no sugar—none of the things that would normally cover every square inch of the apartment when George was done with them.

She knows

George does the logical thing—he builds a cyborg out of Gnocchi, Chef Pisghetti’s cat.

wat

Don’t tell me about no definitions. A cyborg is a machine made of both mechanical and biological parts. So when a monkey that has until recently been too stupid to count suddenly designs and assembles a vending machine out of toys, wooden spoons, butterflies, a refrigerator box and a dadgum cat, it’s a cyborg.

Where did this monkey get such advanced mechanical training? MYH didn’t teach him; that mouth-breather burnt dinner because he thought turning up the oven’s heat would make it cook faster. And a monkey, a monkey who until recently thought clocks were time machines, all of a sudden can build a cat-powered Snow on the Mountain dispenser.

The Watcher did this. Wiseman did this. And then she tests it.

When the Arctic and Antarctic clubs arrive, they look like distinguished scientists in the same way a bicycle looks like a sperm whale. They’re all wearing snowsuits over businesswear in the middle of a city in the middle of the damn summer. They divide up at MYH’s house like Sharks and Jets at the dance party. The North Pole crew are all wearing polar bear hats and are led by a dumpy guy that looks like pre-weightloss Al Roker. Meanwhile, South Pole Squad got them penguin snapbacks, son, and their leader is a high-chinned lady whose first words had to have been “Well, I never!” His name is Dewey Freezem, and her name is Chilla DeWinter.

Totally not made-up names. Totally not henchmen of the Wiseman.

One time I read this article about a psychological experiment. They put all the participants into a waiting room and said the experiment would start shortly. But the waiting room WAS the experiment. I think they just slowly raised the temperature in the room until everybody killed each other or something like that.

notreal scientists theyain’treal

I’m saying, we don’t even get to watch them eat dinner. MYH has opened the balcony doors and turned on the fan, because it’s so hot in his apartment that his ten guests are all wearing giant coats.

Wiseman says it is time for the entertainment. MYH says he forgot all about the entertainment. Wiseman isn’t worried.

She knows

Here comes George with his vending machine. He puts a butterfly into a coinslot cut into the side of the box. Inside, Gnocchi chases the butterfly, which turns a wheel, which scoops blueberries into a bowl and sprinkles coconut shavings on top of it. No human engineer on the planet has ever conceived of nor built such a machine, but a monkey did it with garbage and a cat.

Everybody gets Snow on the Mountain. Chilla DeWinter and Dewey Freezem bond over childhood memories of the dessert.

I just met a girl named Maria

Suddenly Gnocchi goes berserk inside the machine and wrecks it. Coconut shavings and blueberries go everywhere and destroy the apartment. Nobody cares—the Arctic/Antarctic street gangs laugh and cheer. Freezem says he loves the snow in the Arctic. DeWinter says she loves the snow in the Antarctic. But they’re friends now, because, as they say, “Snow is snow.”

Hold up now wait a minute

But that’s bullshit. None of this is true. It’s not snow; it’s coconut. It doesn’t snow in the Antarctic; Antarctica is the world’s driest desert—it makes the Sahara seem like Waikiki. She a lie.

She a damn lie

So what was the point? Why in the name of all that is holy would Professor Wiseman have a fake dinner for fake scientists and destroy MYH’s apartment?

Just to see George build a vending machine.

Imagine me as the butter-robot on Rick and Morty:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I wonder if there is a long con afoot in the Curious George universe. I no longer have any idea who is watching whom, who is the subject and who is the observer. To keep what remains of my sanity, I must believe that someone is in charge, that there is some sort of grand experiment being conducted, and that a Watcher in some sort of Foucaultian Panopticon is gleefully fucking with his prisoners.

Is this God? 

Am I God? Am I the Watcher? The nature of television seems to dictate that this is so, that I myself am the all-powerful, He Who Can End Misery With the Holy Clicker. 

But I cannot end it. As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. A god would be able to stay away, and I am therefore a toad. I will therefore be a toad. Stoned like Stephen, still hanging onto ideology, so soaked with misguided belief that it would take a Crane to get it out. I am the prisoner, not the watcher.

So is there a simpler explanation? Is there an in-universe puppeteer who controls the destinies of all involved, so that my delusions of control and omnipotence are akin to someone reading about an experiment in a scientific journal and irrationally declaring his own hand in the results? If I am not around to hear Curious George chortle and shriek, does he make a sound? Consider Yorbo. Yorbo is a robot, an ephemeral robot that exists for one episode only. He is dubbed George’s favorite toy by both the Man in the Yellow Hat (MYH) and George himself. If Yorbo has not achieved AI self-awareness, he is very close—Yorbo can understand George’s grunts and chitters as if they were a language, he follows complex commands, and he coherently answers questions. In my own universe, such a robot would be worth many thousands of dollars and exist either in the robotics lab of an American university or the lobby of a Tokyo car dealership.

Curious George takes Yorbo to the beach. When a storm rolls in, George and MYH rush into the house and leave Yorbo in the sand. When George suggests they need to get Yorbo, MYH says it is raining too hard. In fact, Yorbo the sentient robot is not even worth searching for until the storm is over, and by that time he has either been buried in the sand or washed out to sea. MYH and George go out to look for Yorbo. MYH and George rake up all the seaweed and then just randomly dig holes. A passing beachcomber offers the use of her metal detector, but it soon runs out of batteries. What to do?

Deus ex machina. The Watcher, the Prime Experimenter, appears on MYH’s laptop screen. It is Professor Wiseman. She knows all. Wiseman has been watching. She knows there was a storm. She knows all about Yorbo, bewails his disappearance, and then instructs George on how to build his own metal detector by taping a calculator to an AM radio (I Googled this. It is not bullshit). Wiseman knows what drawer the calculator and tape are in; she knows what shelf upon which the radio can be found.

Wiseman is the panopticon. Her name is neither random nor ironic.

With the help of this gadget, Yorbo is unearthed. He is no worse for the wear, which is a stick in the eye for MYH, who had suggested earlier that water would rust a metal robot. MYH a damn fool. Yorbo jumps with glee at being found and hugs George; together, monkey and robot disappear over a sand dune, playing and living joyfully.

No one ever sees or discusses Yorbo again. Yorbo is Richie Cunningham’s older brother. Yorbo existed for George to love and lose, so that Wiseman might teach a lesson about electronics and engineering.

I am not sure if the latest episode of Curious George is empowering for women, or humiliating for men.

Porque no los dos?

I fully expect to see MYH posting on /r9k/this very evening, two-fisting Code Reds and weeping into a bag of spicy Cheetos. Normies beware—there is a deep sadness in the Man in the Yellow Hat, a higher loneliness, the kind of desperate self-loathing that accelerates the emergence of the Reticulated American Douchebag, compels him to join with his kind in the friendzone, and there recite together a kaddish for the pisghetti that flowed from their pockets.

The Yellow Hat is not a fedora, but it is close enough.

Bless Dr. Wiseman. She has no idea what has been wrought. She is a good, kind, intelligent woman who no doubt finds MYH both capable and charming in a dorky sort of way. He is helpful. He is kind to animals. He has the patience of Garrison Keillor munching Quaaludes while attempting to translate the Voynich Manuscript into Yankee Lutheran.

But he is not her type, alas.

MYH and Curious George visited Dr. Wiseman at the museum. She was answering phones and stacking papers and basically being a whirling dervish of a competent professor. MYH saw his chance. He screwed his courage to the sticking place and said, “Dr. Wiseman, you need to relax. Wanna come with George and me and do something relaxing on Saturday?”

Perfect opening gambit. It’s a group thing, no weird “just you and me” schtick. I could see it in his eyes. He had been hoping for this moment for months.

She accepted! Oh frabjous day! Caillou! Callay!

MYH and Curious George went back to the apartment to plan the…date? Was it a date? Why, yes, I do believe it might be a date! No George, she won’t want to jumprope.

A picnic seems like a great idea, despite the horrible fake etymology the internet has bestowed on the word.

And so it came to pass that MYH, Dr. Wiseman and Curious George had a picnic in the park. Dr. Wiseman was wearing jeans. She said she had been practicing reclining at a 45 degree angle, which was the most relaxing angle. In short, she made herself absolutely nerd-adorable without even trying. Just so awkwardly cute. Waifu material. They shared a brief, giggly moment.

Then the day imploded. MYH cannot be trusted with himself. As an aside, I know this feel. I know how it is to love with pock-marked teenage ardor the achingly desirable girl who does not even know how desirable she is. I also know how it feels to fuck it up in a way I had heretofore believed to be unpossible, by out-dorking even the dorkiest of dorks.

“Dr. Wiseman, you want a pickle? They are very relaxing.”

(Freud)

Dr. Wiseman DID want a pickle, one of the big ones, but MYH could not get the jar open. Neither could Curious George, though I suspect he was only pretending he couldn’t open it in order to be a good wingman to MYH and not embarrass him. Wiseman helps George open the jar, and he accidentally dumps all the pickles all over MYH.

“Well,” MYH says, “maybe pickles aren’t THAT relaxing.”

MYH’s next attempt is a hammock. Yes, a hammock strung between two trees in the park. He suggests that she should lay in it. But he doesn’t want to be creepy,so he doesn’t say they should lie in it together. He does not tell George to go away. Again I see the gears turning—how to convince Dr. Wiseman to lay in the hammock without sounding geeky, weird, or desperate.

But then he says—I shit you not—

“What could be more relaxing than hanging from a tree?”

ohshitoshitdudewhatareyouDOING?

Yes. He did that. George scrambles up the tree and hangs by his feet to show Dr. Wiseman what MYH was TRYING to say and oh my God I didn’t mean it like that dear Lord just let the ground swallow me up.

The hammock swallows him up instead, and then Dr. Wiseman picks up a baseball bat. She says she will help get him out of the hammock. MYH laughs nervously and asks if she will get him out like she gets candy out of a piñata.

For that is what he deserves.

But no, she uses the bat to lever the strings apart. Dare MYH hope that things will now improve?

No. The damage is done. Dr. Wiseman says she has to go soon.

MYH panics. He starts blubbering about how she needs to relax and they’ve been there all day and she’s had to do stuff for them and has not been RELAXING. Um, let’s feed the ducks, Dr. Wiseman, wanna feed the ducks?

George does, but somehow, in the midst of duck-feeding, MYH’s yellow hat ends up in the middle of the pond.

His essence. That which makes him, him. Dr. Wiseman fashions a hook and line out of a paperclip and some yarn, but cannot retrieve the hat.

“We need more weight,” says Dr. Wiseman. This phrase destroyed MYH as easily as it did Giles Corey, but in this case a little more Freudian symbolism was called for.

Dr. Wiseman looks around for something with which to weight the makeshift hook. She discovers a small pickle in MYH’s pocket, pulls it out, snaps it in half, and uses one half to weight the hook.

The hat is now retrieved.

Dr. Wiseman says not to worry—the day was relaxing after all. MYH says he’s going home to take a nap.

“George didn’t have a feather, but he DID have twenty fingers!”

I hate Bill. He is a garbage person. He thinks he knows everything. I think he calls Curious George a “city kid” in every episode he frequents.

“Hey, city kid, you don’t know how to ride a jetski?”

“Boy, you’re pretty good at cookin’ meth for a city kid!”

“I bet I’m better at choppin’ cotton than some city kid!”

Jeesus. He may not have ever said any of that, but it was kind of like that.

Fuckin Bill. Thinks he knows everything.

Curious George is not a kid, Bill, you sanctimonious know-it-all turd. I always thought he was some sort of chimpanzee, but even if he ain’t, even if he really is some sort of tailless monkey, he is still at least four times stronger than you, Bill. He could eat your face. I know he does that “aw shucks” little squeak every time you tell him how dumb city kids are, but you better believe that if that monkey ever snaps, if he ever REALLY snaps, you better sure as shit not be alone with him and gunless out in the wilderness.

One time I saw a fifteen-year-old female orangutan LAY DOWN, grab a tug-of-war rope with only one hand, stick the other hand two knuckles deep up her own ass, and pull a three-hundred-fifty-pound sumo wrestler right into a dadgum RAVINE, Bill. Youtube it—I ain’t lying.

If she did that, you better believe Curious George could break every bone in your body while eating a banana through a fence, Bill. MYH realizes that—I know he does—because never once has he insulted George, threatened him, or even spoke to him harshly. Can you imagine? The Man in the Yellow Hat (MYH) knows Curious George could skin him and fight off the cops at the same time.

And he wouldn’t go to jail for it. He’s a monkey, Bill. It would be your fault.

This last time, Curious George went hiking to photograph some wildlife. MYH told him the pictures he took—he, a monkey who never says a coherent word—would be part of a new nature exhibit at the museum. So off he went, snapping pictures of possums and snakes and whatever.

And oh boy lookee here, here the fuck comes Bill. Whatcha doin, city kid, betchu don’t know about this and that and etc. You really oughta take a picture of that fawn I saw but I can’t go with you, see,because I gotta fix this trail for the Nature Scouts. They trust me to do it, and then I’m gonna go swimming.”

Bill immediately whips out a hoe and begins to attack the middle of the nature trail. I have no idea what he is accomplishing; he’s randomly scraping the leaves like they’re part of a Zen garden.

George goes off looking for animal tracks to photograph. He does fairly well, too (for a city kid) until he stumbles upon some giant footprints that look like swim fins.

That’s because they ARE swim fins, but Curious George doesn’t know that, and he thinks he’s found a dinosaur.

Also—and this is the best part—there is a small, unbroken ditch running between the swim fins.

What could it be, Curious George? We will never know what he thought, because he ignores the ditch entirely. Does not even mention it. But there’s the ditch, running between the footprints the whole time Curious George is tracking his dinosaur.

Surprise—it’s Bill, who was wearing swim fins because “[he] had new boots and they were hurting his feet.” But the ditch? What about the ditch?

It was Bill’s hoe. He dragged it behind him while wearing swim fins through a forest.

I'm not sure how much longer I can do this. I daydream about breaking a cartoon monkey upon the wheel.

Curious George is become Death, destroyer of worlds.

This time he was left at home by himself all day.

He made a mess. He dumped out the potted plant. He chopped up all the magazines in the house in order to make chains of paper monkeys. There was confetti and potting soil and garbage everywhere. The Man in the Yellow Hat (MYH) came home from a long day of drawing stupid pictures or giving speeches or torturing dogs or whatever.

He brought with him five valuable stamps, and patiently explained to George that there were indeed five of them, and he had to give them to Mr. Stamp. Then he notices the mess, and decides today is a perfect day to teach George to use a vacuum.

Three guesses as to wtf Curious George will do with this newfound knowledge.

But the makers of Curious George won't let us off this easily. It is no fun snatching hope from the hopeless. For one brief moment, we are led to believe Curious George WON'T do what we all know he will do.

Curious George is too short to operate the vacuum. He cannot clean up the mess. He cannot destroy Mr. Stamps's stamps. Dare we hope for peace? Will MYH finally take responsibility and clean up after his pet?

No. Right before he leaves on some meaningless errand, MYH gives Curious George a Dustbuster, which he calls a "monkey-sized vacuum."

Good Lord.

The stamps are the first to go, after which Curious George ingests LSD.

Maybe not, but I can think of no other reason why Curious George begins to vividly hallucinate and run out into traffic. Wearing a cape, and calling himself a superhero.

George thinks he will save the city by vacuuming things. He sucks up the birdseed a lady is scattering for the pigeons. The pigeons swear revenge.

MYH, meanwhile, learns that the stamps are gone. His frantic search for George and the Dustbuster leads to the best dialogue I have yet discovered:

MYH: Hey lady, have you seen a monkey with a vacuum? Lady: Was he wearing a cape?

Ponder this, my faithful readers. The lady seeks clarification. Was it the cape-wearing monkey, or was it one of the other monkeys with vacuums she saw today?

Then a random guy shows up and yells "Help! A monkey just sucked up my winning lottery ticket!"

Winning lottery ticket. Sucked up by a monkey.

Words cannot adequately express the horrible shit I would do to a monkey that sucked up my winning lottery ticket. I would keep him alive for weeks, doing things that, translated into cuneiform, would make even the ancient Persians vomit on their sandals. I would know every noise a monkey's shattered vocal cords could whimper, and I would replay them all through Peavey speakers every Christmas.

But I do not have a winning lottery ticket. And I do not exist in the Curious George universe.

And so, just as George is about to empty the vacuum bag in a construction site dumpster, MYH catches him. Stamps, birdseed and lottery ticket are saved.

In the latest episode, George and MYH went golfing with the mayor at the end of the show.

On the 18th green, the mayor holed a twenty-foot putt.

With an iron. Off a tee.

Why does the Man in the Yellow Hat (MYH) ride the bus?

He has a car--I've seen it. He drives out to his country house in it.

He has a country house. He owns a bright yellow apartment building. Why does he not have a limousine on retainer, complete with an angry but deferential driver who bows and scrapes dutifully, but dreams of squandering his dead father's life insurance on a liquor store scam?

Perhaps he wishes to save the environment. Perhaps he likes to pretend to give a shit about the hoi polloi, to rub elbows with the less fortunate and share with them the savage joy of a monkey who ruins lives with the kind of reckless abandon normally reserved for Ponzi-schemers and East African dictators.

Perhaps.

But today, MYH was late for a very important presentation. He had scribbled some drawings, childish representations of pigs and horses and smiling snakes, of which he was proud and about which Curious George was...curious. Professor Wiseman wanted a distinguished colleague--from Paris--to see these drawings, and so she sent word to MYH to meet them at a swanky restaurant.

MYH had ten minutes--the length of an episode--to make it to this restaurant and show off his art.

This bitch decides to take the dadgum bus. Even better, he gives the route map to Curious George and trusts him to plot their journey.

MYH makes it onto the bus. Curious George does not. At the last second, he drops the map and it blows away, so he goes scampering after it.

Nine minutes until presentation. MYH does not stay on the bus. He does not ask the driver for route information. He panics and gets off, shouting for George.

He leaves his bullshit drawings on the bus and it drives away. Seven minutes.

Curious George catches up with the map. Some kid on a bicycle, who is inexplicably fine with a monkey clutching his head and screaming in his ear, takes him on a quest to find the bus, on which MYH most certainly is not.

It is at this point I meet the most put-upon and pathetic creature in George's universe, a man who did not expect his day to go this way, a man who is simply trying to make a living, a man who managed to live his entire life without tangling himself up with MYH. He is a taxi driver. Brown, because all taxi drivers are brown, but blessed with the kind of Brooklyn accent that dwells upon phrases like "Hey buddy" and "Listen, Mac" as if they were part of a rosary.

MYH gets in his cab. He demands that the taxi driver follow that bus, find a monkey on a bicycle, find his pictures, and get him to a specific downtown restaurant.

Wat. Hey buddy, five minutes.

Taxi driver is confused. "Where to, Mac?" did not produce the desired answer. Instead, taxi driver now has to listen to a diatribe about monkeys and bicycles from a guy that looks like a pencil.

He asks what we are all thinking, "Hey buddy, you want me to follow a bus? Why didn't you just ride the bus?"

MYH does not wish to give a coherent answer. Three minutes.

Cutscene to Professor Wiseman, sitting with distinguished guy from France in the restaurant. She remarks that MYH has NEVER been THIS LATE for ANYTHING before.

I now believe Professor Wiseman is not at the restaurant. Such an asinine claim could have only been made by a replicant of Professor Wiseman that was built that very morning and did not know what monkeys were.

One minute.

George finds the pictures. He gleefully brachiates through Central Park with the pictures clutched in his feet. He knows he will beat MYH to the restaurant, and he has a few minutes to kill, so he briefly drops down from the trees into a buggy pulled by two horses. The horses freak out and stampede away through the park. The man in charge of the buggy watches his livelihood thunder away, and no doubt wonders how long he will be in prison when the horses accidentally trample somebody.

George returns to the trees, unbeaten and unkilled. Zero minutes, time is up.

Guy from France says he cannot wait any longer, because he has a plane to catch. He leaves. He runs into Curious George outside on the sidewalk. Curious George shows him the pictures.

He loves them. He praises them effusively, especially the one of a spotted snake which is smiling as it contorts itself into the shape of a staircase. They are brilliant and inspired. Matisse should have chopped his hands off. And etc.

MYH comes running up. Taxi driver probably goes off to an AA meeting or something.

"Oh. So YOU'RE the artist who painted these wonderful pictures? Amazing. Stupendous. I absolutely need these pictures to be displayed in a children's hospital in Paris. Do you and your monkey want to come to Paris?"

Today I noticed that the building in which Curious George lives has at least ten stories, and is painted bright yellow.

The Man in the Yellow Hat (MYH) is not the only resident. There are perhaps dozens of other tenants, the existence of whom I had not considered before. They flit about offscreen, intangible as shadows, whispering, circling.

I have a new theory. Much like the Rugrats and the three Eddies, everyone in this building is already dead.

In the Hotel season of American Horror Story, the Hotel Cortez was built by a serial killer named James March. It is filled with the restless shades of his victims and the damned souls of his co-conspirators, plus some vampires and the prudish wife from Big Love. It is hell, or at least some aspect of it, and March is its Prince. Perhaps he is Belial, demon of foul desire, and thus the diversions offered in his hotel are nothing but kids playing video games, old people smoking weed, and Lady Gaga having threesomes that sometimes include Rudolph Valentino.

But I digress. There is another hell. For, you see, MYH is Mammon, the Golden One, Bringer of Wealth, Caecodemon of the Purse, and his building is a nexus of avarice. Those who reside there are forever punished for their selfishness.

It was all made clear to me when Curious George discovered recycling.

The Doorman (Charon) and his loyal dachshund Hundley (Cerberus), are taking out the trash. They mention to Curious George that trash must be separated as wheat from chaff, "real trash" from that which may be resurrected and used again. The Doorman says there is to be a contest among the buildings to see who can collect the most recycling, and the winner will receive a fabulous gilded MacGuffin.

George knows good and damn well what recycling is. He knows what trash is. He knows that empty containers and finished meals go in the trash, the old things, not the new. But desire for the gold overwhelms all, and George is determined to fill the bins for the Doorman.

He begins to steal.

MYH's refrigerator is ransacked. Half-empty containers are melded together with little regard for taste or nourishment. The jar of olives is combined with peanut butter, so that the peanut butter jar may be recycled. Salt is poured in the cereal, and the salt shaker is recycled. From there, George moves throughout the building. All newspapers disappear. Paint buckets are emptied, their contents combined with the groceries of a dozen apartments, so that empty vessels may be placed in the dumpster to be measured, and others may be filled in the unholy union of bubble bath and orange juice, or Windex and hummus.

In short, Curious George befouls the sustenance of every apartment as expertly as a flight of Harpies.

Literally no one suspects George is the culprit. It is as if every day in hell is fresh, and all memory is wiped, so that each torment is without peer and Sisyphus himself cannot remember why the rock keeps rolling back. Curious George has gleefully tortured the inhabitants of this city for three seasons so far, and yet no one remembers.

Instead, they blame the Doorman and accuse him of taking the stuff in order to artificially inflate his recycling count and cheat his way to the MacGuffin. Had they access to a Wicker Man, the angry mob that forms around the Doorman would surely have burnt him alive.

And his little dog too.

But alas! MYH appears at the last moment and tells everyone that George did it. Is George burnt alive? Is he beaten or killed?

No, for who can stand against the power of Hell? Who dares injure the familiar of Mammon? The tortured souls melt away back to their cells. George dances triumphant, because MYH's power is absolute in the realm of Mammon. We are left with Curious George and the Doorman inspecting their recycling trophy and laughing.

The demeaning Italian stereotype that runs the local restaurant in Curious George's universe is named Chef Pisghetti.

He too, is certifiably insane.

MYH, Professor Wiseman, and Pisghetti the racist caricature decide to go birdwatching.

They leave the restaurant, Pisghetti's livelihood and raison d'etre, in the charge of two idiot children, Curious George, and a hyperactive black dog named Charkie because why tf not.

Buckets of paint are in the kitchen. As the birdwatchers stalk their quarry, MYH remarks that he is glad he left George at the restaurant, where he can stay clean.

Foreshadowing.

Curious George paints himself bright orange. Charkie paints himself blue and goes running through the restaurant splashing blue paint everywhere. George chases him, making the restaurant look like Carrie White loved the Gators.

When they return, nobody is mad. Curious George remains unbeaten and unkilled. Pisghetti lets George eat cake. They then have the great idea to paint George red and put him on the cover of a birdwatching magazine.

Because the bird they went looking for is red.