Life in Terms of Watermelons

Over the past 10 years I’ve had a number of jobs and each change has added some new benefit. Definitely, if you look at it in terms of watermelons! I started out in grad school. On the measly TA pay, a watermelon was a luxury. And if I were to buy them from Whole Foods, I might have just pledged two months of my salary to get one.

Then came Amazon! Now, I earned enough to afford them. But eating watermelons at Amazon.com was verboten. Maybe they thought that eating them might improve employee morale to an unacceptably high level. Or maybe they were afraid that the watermelon rinds would increase their garbage bills or they might have to pay the janitors $1/hr more to cleanup. Whatever the reason was, everyone just accepted it, and ate no watermelons. Except for the ones that came from watermelon rich jobs, but they didn’t last very long.

Then there was Blist (now Socrata). This was just like any normal place – you could buy watermelons and eat them too. For most people this doesn’t sound like a big deal, but coming from Amazon, this was huge! Finally I got to taste these wonderfully refreshing fruits at work. And then life kept getting better. First came Ning. Now, I didn’t have to buy watermelons anymore. They bought it for me – I still had to cut them, but still a definite improvement. And now I am at RichRelevance – here they buy the watermelons and cut them too. All ready for me to gobble down!

So given this trend, and the simple mathematical technique of extrapolation, at my next job I expect a better watermelon experience. But I can’t seem to predict how exactly it might improve.  I guess, we’ll just have to wait and see.

More strange rhymes

More rhymes from the the aforementioned book. These are more hilarious rather than morbid – but note that these are still rhymes for little kids.

In case you were concerned about your kid hitting other kids, here is a great way of teaching him that he is not alone:

My mother and your mother
were hanging out the clothes;
My mother hit your mother on the nose
What color blood came out?
R E D spells RED.

And this is the one to teach your daughters – a very important lesson in life:

I should worry, I should care
I should marry a millionaire,
Should he die, I would cry –
Then I’d marry a richer guy

This is their version of Peter the Pumpkin Eater. It is a great one to read to your wife, especially when you need something such as a smart phone

Eeper weeper chimney sweeper
Had a wife and couldn’t keep her
Had another, didn’t love her
Up the chimney he did shove her

Deathly Rhymes

Those of us who read nursery rhymes to kids get surprised with the amount of violence in these rhymes, clearly inappropriate for the kids to whom we read them to, especially in this day and age. But we get accustomed to it fairly quickly – most of it just comic/cartoonish violence – such as the rats getting their tails cut off (Three Blind Mice), a man being thrown down the stairs (Goosey Goosey Gander) or the pig breaking his bones (Piggy on the Railway) . This is similar in vein to Jerry dropping a hot iron on Tom’s tail, which of course we enjoyed as kids. Sometimes the violence is not so cartoonish – as in the case of lullaby Rock-a-bye Baby. My daughter always asks why the baby’s parents left her on the tree to fall in the first place.

So I expected not to be surprised when I encounter such themes while reading my daughter her new Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes book. Since the book contained a lot of rhymes, I was just choosing a few at random to read to her. And then I spied a rhyme that I had liked as a kid. The lyrics of the rhyme as I remember from when I was young went as follows:

Miss Lucy had a baby. His name was Tiny Tim
She put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim.

He drank up all the water. He ate up all the soap.
He tried to eat the bathtub but it couldn’t go down his throat.

Miss Lucy called the doctor. Miss Lucy called the nurse.
Miss Lucy called the lady with the alligator purse.

Measles said the doctor. Mumps said the nurse.
Chicken pox said the lady with the alligator purse.

Bye said the doctor. Bye said the nurse.
Bye bye said the lady with the alligator purse.

As I started reading the poem, I saw the last line of the verse and then immediately stopped – there was no way I could read that to my 3 year old. Here is how the variation in the book went:

I had a baby brother. His name was Tiny Tim
I put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim.

He drank up all the water. He ate up all the soap.
He died the next morning with a soap bubble in his throat.

That ending just completely shocked me. And I would venture to say, forget about kids, this variation of the verse should be disturbing for adults. Just the thought of drowning your own sibling and then writing a rhyme about it (to a catchy tune, mind you) seems a bit too morbid.