What Passes for Newsworthy at My House

I went bananas last Monday and cleaned out the fridge. REALLY cleaned it. As in removed and scrubbed shelves, grouped and organized contents. I discovered that we had seven open jars of jam, and eight salad dressings. I located three mustards (all different from each other) and three jars of olives (all green). So in the last ten days, we've eaten a lot of marinated things -- since, honestly, no one needs seven jars of jam at once. (Try apricot + orange marmalade + chunky ginger jam + soy sauce. Seriously.) I find myself smiling uncontrollably every time I open the fridge and view its pristine state, and I finally couldn't restrain myself from taking a photo of its shiny shiny clean.

And then I looked more closely and found this.

Yes, it's a Little People zebra and a tube of lip gloss with the lid off. I could guess how it got there, though I had no proof and no explanation.

Until yesterday, when I heard Daughter rummaging around in the fridge. "Sweetie, what are you doing in there?" I called out. "I put my sunglasses in fridgerator," she replied matter-of-factly as she firmly shut the door and walked into the family room empty handed. At least she's not adding half-used bottles of salad dressing.

In more "real" news, I read an article in Wondertime magazine that mentions in passing that there are pictographs in a French cave "that anthropologists have translated as saying: "Cro-Magnon man sucks!"" (See the article, which is all about potty talk, here.) I have spent an inordinate amount of time researching online, trying to find a source for this little gem of history. The well-known coexistence of Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, and the subsequent die-off of the latter, makes this a great little joke -- the first known example of graffiti. A 20,000 year old Neanderthal tag, if you will. The only information I can find (and I can find reams of it) is about the wonderful Lascaux Caves and the Cro-Magnon paintings of animals they contain. A little article in Time describes these paintings of bison, mammoths, horses, and deer as "fire shadows" for their lifelike fleeting depictions (Photo credit). They are indeed glorious. But they don't really seem to me to indicate any kind of Cro-Magnon vs. Neanderthal dust-up. And frankly they make the very idea, which delighted me at first, now seem a little tawdry.

If that conflict were in my house, on the other hand, it would look like this.

MONKEY SEE



MONKEY DO

I'm guessing kids have been doing this at each other for at least 20,000 years. Don't you think?