Sesame Street: twinned on YouTube with Creepsville

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/08/sesame-street-twinned-with-creepsville-youtube

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According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children under two shouldn’t be exposed to TV or digital media, which makes me wonder how the paediatricians in question turn their backs on their kids in order to make dinner, or get their screaming toddlers into a pushchair when the only bribe to hand is the iPhone.

I say this by way of a plea for mitigation. My children are under two and both recognise the icon for YouTube. They know how to swipe, scroll and activate clips. The AAP guidelines were established in response to studies on the impact of screen time on the brain development of young children, but most parents who break them have a more visceral understanding of why screens are bad, even as they cave in and allow them. If you want to become acquainted with the creepiest corners of the internet, there is no quicker way than putting a phone into the hands of an 18-month-old and walking away.

After two and a half minutes, like a kid following breadcrumbs into a wood, the child will somehow have navigated away from the Elmo homepage and found their way to sites tagged as similar in interest but that are resolutely not suitable for children. It’s only when you register a change in the audio that you know to fly across the room to rip the thing from their hands.

A few examples from the last few days: adults dressed as superheroes popping water balloons in a bath while singing the Finger Family song. It’s hard to say what this is or why it’s so disturbing – everyone in the scene is fully clothed, albeit as Spider-Man and his ilk – but it is unbelievably creepy. There’s a video of a mother and her young daughter, both dressed as the Joker right up to the red-and-white face paint, doing a weird skit in which they throw things and shriek and laugh at each other and that has, incomprehensibly, been viewed 30m times, which guarantees it comes up almost as often as Sesame Street.

There’s a video that, at a glance, looks like Peppa Pig but is actually a pirated version in which, after a few anodyne scenes, Peppa goes berserk and starts screaming like a hog in an abattoir.

Most of these videos are horrible only in the way that people straining to go viral are horrible, but that’s horrible enough. The lesson that life is an exercise in trying to win likes by acting crazy for strangers online is one that should come with a parental advisory, one that only expires when you’re 40 and fully know who you are.

The storm that never came

The long bank-holiday weekend in New York was dominated by the threat of a storm that never came, bringing to mind fond memories of Michael Fish’s finest hour in 1987. As of Wednesday afternoon, tropical storm Hermine had barely lifted the leaves from the trees, and all the wooden stakes that went up appeared to be redundant. For those living in the flood zones of the Rockaways or coastal New Jersey, the relief must have been immense. For the rest of us, watching the sky and waiting for the rain, there was a somewhat shameful but unmistakable sense of anticlimax.

… but better safe than sorry

In anticipation of the storm, I went through my emergency rucksack, assembled after watching too many episodes of The Walking Dead and which I hadn’t touched for a year. It contained, in the manner of a time capsule, out-of-date infant formula, six nappies two sizes too small, two pacifiers and some pureed carrots in a jar that had gone brown. If civilisation collapsed, it would keep us going for roughly 40 minutes. I ditched the carrots and formula, put in two bottles of water and made a mental note to buy a spare battery for the iPhone. If things do go Cormac McCarthy, we’re going to need something to distract the kids on the road.