I was talking on the phone the other day when my two year old came up to me and said “Daddy, I want a bottle of milk.” Actually, what she really said was, “Daaaa-eee, uh wannna ball-uh-meal,” but I’ve translated it for you. She’s a two year old. What do you want? That’s how to year olds talk.
“Just a second, Honey. Daddy’s on the phone,” I replied. Apparently this wasn’t satisfactory. She looked up at me and said:
“Vamonos! Andole!”
Now, I don’t know if I can put this in proper context or not, but I’ll try. English is the Universal language. We live in Central Pennsylvania and that’s pretty much all they speak here. My two year old is still in the learning stages of the Universal language and pronounces nothing properly. Imagine then, my surprise to hear her exhort into action in perfectly annunciated Spanish.
I could not have been more surprised had she quoted Hamlet in Cantonese.
“Excuse me,” I say, hanging up the phone. Then, to my daughter:
“What did you say?”
“Daaaa-eeee, I wanna ball-uh-meeaaallll. Andole! Vamonos!” and then she said another sentence in Spanish that I can’t reproduce because I don’t speak Spanish. I can tell you that it sounded well-annunciated and appropriate, anc clearly, from context I understood that I was being exhorted to get milk in a speedy fashion and/or being cursed for my laziness/ineptitude in this regard.
“Is that Spanish? When did you learn to speak Spanish?” I ask her.
My six year old chimed in to answer “She learned it from Diego. She loves Diego. She’s always watching Diego.”
"Who is this “Diego?” I ask. “Is Mommy having the pool man over again?”
“No Daddy, Diego is on tv. Mommy puts it on for us.”
“Ok then. We’ll just have to watch this Diego”
With a little help from the children I lean that Diego is on On Demand, for free on cable anytime we want to watch him. Almost every episode. Diego is an innocent seeming cartoon on Nickelodeon.
We have been suckered into allowing our darling daughters Diego because we have already pre-approved Dora the Explorer.
Diego is Dora’s cousin. He’s a sloe-eyed, black-haired swarthy little man of action running rampant through the rain forest on Macho missions of purported animal rescue with his shirt unbuttoned one button too much like some Sesame Street version of Antonio Banderas.
In actuality, a little fact-checking will show that Diego’s rain forest rescue station is in fact sponsored by Halliburton and his “animal rescue missions” are thin concealment for scouting reconassaince of good locales to strip mine off the local resources.
There are no Indians or Indigenous people’s because like that swarthy spaniard before him, Cortez, Diego has brought the scourge of chicken-pox and measles to wipe them out as they posess no natural resistance.
All this is well and good, but Diego talks directly to my two-year old. “Do you see the tree? Where is it? Point to it.” Once she’s progammed by that husky Latino charm he has her reciting Spanish code words so that she can communicate with him secretly once she’s been brainwashed into his South american terrorist cell. Clearly, he’s some kind of Contra midget left over from the El Salvadoran conflict of the 80s and involved in some kind of gunnrunning drug cartel in exchange for funds from Iran, all brokered by Ollie North.
Seducing two-year olds!
Dora has to be in on it too. If I remember correctly, she claims that the little Monkey, “Boots” is her first cousin or something, so now we got bestiality in there, too. It starts off all innocent with Dora, who merely goes for walks through the woods trying to avoid a klepto-fox.
In hindsight, I should have seen that introducing the subject of Kleptomania and other psychoses into a children’s program was unusual and make the connection. “Swiper” the kleptomaniac fox is engaging in a ruse and his penchant for swiping merely an artifice to pass on messages to Diego or possible some third world terrorist mastermind.
Many of you have argued against the NSA wiretapping, but I hope this opens your eyes as to how pervasive the problem is and how much real “Chatter” is out there.
They almost pulled it off to. But I’m onto you Diego. I have friends in the CIA in El Salvador. I’ll look forward to introducing you to them, and trust me, we won’;t be using MCCain approved interrogation techniques. We’ll see how you feel about seducing innocent children when we strap you to a rusty water pipe and apply some strategically placed electrodes.
Won’t that be a fine episode?
