Two sad moments

Both of these came up in class this week, and I thought I'd throw them out there for the world.

No real connection between the two...

The first came up because one of my students asked me to tell them a joke.

I defaulted to one of my standard jokes and said...

Ok, a baby seal walks into a club.

It's an old Bob and Tom joke, and it's one that tends to make a few kids chuckle - typically because I preface it with...

Man walks into a bar. Next guy ducks; he saw it coming.

and

A cannibal passes his brother in the woods.

This time, however, I dropped the seal gag into the ether with no set up and ended up having to explain the act of seal clubbing, which, of course, lead me to mention this clip from The White Seal, an animated film that I vaguely remember from my childhood (turns out the animated "film" is more of a short, only twenty-four minutes long, but the memories of childhood make it much longer.)

Skip ahead to 3:43 for the beginning of the horror...



I will say, however, that Robby McDowell's narration is wonderful throughout the film, and the Chuck Jones animation is brilliant. The film has aged surprisingly well for something that I haven't seen in a few decades.

That scene, however, with its flashing red and blue, the flames superimposed over the fat seal adults, the nearly faceless humans in their seal-skin coats, and the ghostly white seal terror left me with nightmares for weeks when I was a child. It's impressively horrifying for something in a children's film.

Later in the week, a different group of students came in asking if I had "Christmas Shoes" which they claimed was the worst Christmas song ever. I didn't, though I'll hunt it down for this post, but I did respond that I had a different song that I would put up as the worst Christmas song ever - because of both the horribly sad tone of the song and it's utter and total lack of rhyming even though the song form suggests direct rhymes at many different points.

So, to you, I present "The Cat Carol" by Meryn Cadell (performer of the much finer "Sweater Song").



By the way, in case you were not aware of The Christmas Shoes, here's the song on which the entire movie is based...



Mysteriously, there are other versions out there...

I'm not sure "The Cat Carol" is worse...

wow...