After All This TIme... A New Pipsqueakism!

I used to love the Pipsqueak's left-handed approach to the English language. She would apply her own perfectly logical rules of wordsmithing to everyday objects and situations, or adopt partially overheard terms that were just a tiny bit off from the bull's eye of common idioms. This approach led to things like my toolbox containing a "screwter" and a "bang" (and later, when she learned that a "bang" was actually called a "hammer," she would mimic my hammering nails into wood by loudly saying "HAM!" every time her imaginary hammer would hit an imaginary nail), or to a room being "bletch dark" when all the lights were turned off.

However, just as Puff the Magic Dragon learned, children begin growing up when we're not quite ready for them to, and the cute Pipsqueakisms were slowly but surely subsumed into standard American English vocabulary and grammar.  Much as I might approve of & encourage her (good and growing) mastery of the language, I missed her much cuter version.

And then I picked her up yesterday to get her from after-school care to the dance studio and she began telling me about her morning visit to the eye doctor. (This, of course, after answering my hopeful question about how fun or interesting her day at school had been with a characteristic "Meh.")  She gave me some general information and then told me that the eye doctor had been very happy to tell her that the optimism in her eye was gone.

I very intelligently replied, "Huh?" and Miri repeated, "The doctor told me the optimism in my eye was gone."

I laughed so hard that I had to take my foot off the gas (and nearly choked because I didn't want her to feel like she was being laughed at).  Several blocks later, I was finally able to explain what optimism is and why I didn't think that's what had been in her eye, and we agreed that I would ask Mommy later on.

Riding up to the studio in the elevator, Miri got one of those "AHA!" looks and confidently told me, "I just remembered what the eye doctor said -- he told me that the optimism in my eye went away!" Even before I could say anything (or start laughing again), she stopped with a quizzical expression on her face and said, "Or is that the same word that I said before...?"

I told her it was and we shared a laugh.  Later in the evening, AJ called me on her way to pick up the Pipsqueak and couldn't stop laughing when I told her about the supposed diagnosis.  Eventually, my sister caught her breath and explained that the doctor had said the astigmatism in one of Miri's eyes had apparently self-corrected.  I wrote out both words & showed them to Miri when she Facetimed me after dinner (due to Mommy's expertise in mathematics, Uncle Brian gets to help with & review the homework), and she made a point of memorizing the jumble of letters & sounds that is "astigmatism"...

...but from now on, any time I have trouble seeing clearly, I'm gonna wonder if it's due to the optimism in my eye...!

No Mo' Momo

There's a new viral meme terrorizing the world, scaring educators, stressing parents, and affecting children so strongly that they are engaging in dangerous behaviors up to and including suicide in ever-increasing numbers.

Or maybe there isn't.

And even if there is... well, I'll get to that in a few paragraphs.  (And no, this post isn't specifically about the Pipsqueak, but it is very directly and strongly linked to parenting ALL kids in this age of ubiquitous and inescapable electronic links between people.)

When I stopped by the house to help my folks run some errands on Thursday afternoon, I had barely taken off my jacket & plopped down on a sofa in the family room when Mom -- who considers Yours Truly to be the family's expert on All Things Internet (Dude, you are, you know...) -- asked with obvious concern if I had heard of "Momo" or knew about how dangerous it was.  I drew a blank for a moment (I had been discussing the cat with Dad and couldn't change mental gears that fast), so she told me all about the news report she'd seen the previous evening about how something called "Momo" originated in Japan but was causing all kinds of problems for kids, that it was supposedly being put text messages and YouTube videos telling kids to do all kinds of horrible things, and that the influence of other kids sending Momo pictures around was so bad that a young girl had committed suicide as a result just days earlier.

As a vague memory began pulling itself together in the back of my head, Mom tried to describe the character that the news program had briefly shown onscreen; she described it like something out of the worst possible nightmares, like a normal person but with a horribly distorted face that had bulging eyes and something like a beak. It wasn't even a drawing, but looked real -- not even like a modified photo but the photo of something that actually looked that way.

A couple of neurons in my brain finally agreed to access a dim memory, so I did a quick image search on my phone and held up the smallish, ugly photos and said, "It looked like this, right?"

WARNING: Potentially triggering "Momo" images are shown below.

But is there really a sudden surge in Momo appearances causing children to do terrible things and kill themselves?  Has it been popping up in the middle of Peppa Pig videos with text telling children to commit horrible acts and/or kill themselves, otherwise it'll come and kill their entire families?

Short answer: No.  Take a deep breath.

Better answer:  One reason Momo looks so damn scary is that it's not a drawing or CGI art; it's a sculpture, so photos look like photos of something "real" as opposed to just a creepy picture.  Some sources have attributed the sculpture (and in some cases the "Momo challenge" itself) to Japanese sculptor Midori Hayashi, but she has vehemently denied creating either.  Taking a few minutes to ignore both the quiet and the hysterical "informative" articles online brought out the actual facts: The statue, properly called "Mother Bird," was created by Japanese artist Keisuke Aisawa working for the effects house "Link Factory" back in early 2016.  The picture that pops up online is a cropped version of the closeup I posted above, which was originally posted to Instagram in August of 2016 by a user named "j_s_rock" when the figure was on display in Tokyo as part of an exhibit about spirits, ghosts, and the like. Here's another (potentially nightmare-inducing if unexpected) sample:

If you're not expecting to see that face suddenly pop up on your screen... Well, yeah, I'd probably poop my pants, too.  Amazing what a little cropping & tweaking can do.

In any case, the images have been floating around the Internet since late 2016... and has been the source material for scares almost identical to today's "Momo challenge" on a near-annual basis since then in locations all across the globe. The vast majority of the stories have been debunked, and the (very) few that have not been absolutely disproven have proven to be questionable at best.  Sources have pointed to the origin of the challenge being a YouTube video... no, a Twitter post... no, it came from Instagram (Dude, that would make a great horror movie title!)... no, it started with... Well, you get the point.

So what's my point?

Here's that promised "get to it in a few paragraphs" part of my post.  Are there Peppa Pig videos showing up online with the Momo challenge pasted in? Yes, there are -- but no one has been able to corroborate any reports of that happening until well after the craze began to become a craze spread by well-meaning news media & public safety organizations.  Are there people (mainly teens and tweens) forwarding Mom challenge messages around? Yes, there are -- mainly because it has become the Online Challenge Du Jour now that the very similar "Blue Whale Challenge" has faded, and before that the Thin Man challenge, and before that the... well, a whole bunch before that, too.

One half of the bottom line is that this kind of stupidity has been making the rounds online in some form since the "covered wagon days" of the Internet.  I remember when I was managing the Network Information Center at NASA-Goddard back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, we'd regularly see the email chain letter warning us to avoid picking up strange women in bars because someone knew someone who knew someone who knew someone whose first cousin on his mother's side did that, got into some heavy drinking with the woman, and woke up the next morning in a bathtub full of ice with a huge, sloppily-stitched incision on their belly and only one kidney, with a note nearby explaining the woman's sister or daughter or mother or husband or someone would die without a kidney transplant but they didn't have the money to get a fresh kidney any other way.  Then came the warnings about not flashing your headlights to tell oncoming cars their lights were off because that was how the gang members in the oncoming car knew to shoot you as you passed. Then came the warnings about people all across the U.S. being injected with HIV by needles placed strategically in gas pump handles. (That's not even the first page of the list, folks.)

The other half of that bottom line is that the Momo challenge and the Blue Whale Challenge and the Choking Challenge and any number of other dangerously stupid and invasive Internet-based intrusions into kids' lives would be weakened to the point of pointlessness, and children left essentially unaffected by any dregs that remained, if parents engaged in a little... parenting.

Don't get me wrong; I am not, repeat not, an advocate of keeping kids away from the Internet until high school, or of keeping cable TV out of the house because it may have a "bad influence" on children's development, or of not allowing a child to share in the common experiences of his or her peers outside of school.  However, I very much am an advocate of being aware of what you child is doing with that smartphone, iPod, iPad, tablet, laptop, or PC.  What are they watching on YouTube? (I don't look over the Pipsqueak's shoulder, but I listen closely to what she's watching.)  Who are they talking to?  Who are they exchanging texts with, and what is the nature of those texts?  What online games are they playing, and who else is playing?

We've had one experience so far in which Miri was exchanging texts with a friend that AJ found highly inappropriate. (Dude, maybe you should remind your readers that there are a lot of different versions of "inappropriate" that are totally non-sexual... Oh, I guess I just did...)  Those texts were on her iPad... which I configured to only be able to do texting when linked to her home WiFi. Mommy has, and periodically uses, the right to review how the Pipsqueak is taking advantage if the privilege of having & using an iPad as she likes -- thus the rapid discovery of & reaction to the texts.  (Notice the difference in the two underlined words.)  There was a discussion plus real-life repercussions, and Miri learned an important lesson (as did her mother).  On the other hand, I've seen discussion threads in online forums where parents were saying they were worried that a 9- or 10-year-old child was sharing inappropriate texts on their phones, but they didn't want to interfere in the child's freedom so what should they do?  My answer was be a parent -- exert parental controls over, and (just as importantly) remain aware of, what data was making its way onto the screen of devices used by their child. And, never mind checking what's on the thing... fer cryin' out loud, whatinhell were you thinking buying a smartphone for a kid who's just in 4th grade?!?!?

(A few observant readers may remember at this point in my narrative that the Pipsqueak was gifted with an iPod Touch at a very early age. I will point out that it had no external communications capabilities and that -- with my sister's full agreeement -- Yours Truly was the sole arbiter of, and gatekeeper for, any-and-every app, podcast, media file, game, etc. that was installed on the device.)

So there's my point: be a parent.  Be aware of what your kids are accessing (or having sent to them) on their devices.  You won't stunt their emotional or intellectual growth by keeping them out of the darker neighborhoods of the World Wide Web, you won't hurt them by keeping the darker content of the Internet off their devices, and you certainly won't be permanently damaging their self-esteem (or chances of getting into the college of their choice) by not buying them a smartphone before they're in their teens.  Is your daughter's iTunes library twice the size of yours? Fine! Just check the song list once in a while, and make sure you see things like "[clean]" or "radio edit" on the less-familiar titles. Is your son raving about the latest first-person shooter on his iPad? Great! Just look it up online and check its age rating & subject matter.  (We recently had to broadly hint to some friends that the "so cool!" online video game their young son was so fond of might contain extremly inappropriate material for his age group -- and it turned out we were right. Game deleted!)

Again: Be a parent. Check what your kids are playing, looking at, streaming; make sure they're actually talking to their friends and not just texting back & forth while sitting together. (Yeah, we've had to discuss that with the Pipsqueak and her friends, too; funny thing was, a major crisis that had several of them really upset evaporated in about 15 seconds when they stopped texting each other about it and actually spoke face-to-face... all while sitting around the same small table in a restaurant.)  Check the lyrics of songs you're not all that sure about.  Read a review or three of the latest video game they're begging you for before buying/installing it.  Be open about your expectations; talk about why and how some things are inappropriate; prepare them for encountering stuff like Momo and the Thin Man and Blue Whale and invitations to meet in person when Mommy isn't around.  If you hear about something worrisome, spend a few minutes on Wikipedia and Google before buying into the sensationalistic yellow journalism that seems attached to all things Internet and then talk to your kids so they know what's what.

And leave Momo, poor restless ubume that she is, and the rest of the yokai to the storytellers and anime artists.

PS - I tried to find credits for the Momo photographs included above but was unsuccessful, even when using multiple search engines.