One beer – just one – shared among Hamton, Buster, and Plucky makes them go bonkers. They drive drunk in a stolen cop car throughout Acme Acres, get into a burping contest, disgust the ladies, all after having shared one beer for about 24 hours!

They end up dying in a car crash and float up to a disturbingly goatse-esque portrayal of heaven before saying “I hope the kids got the message” or something. Then I realized the entire episode (Elephant Issues) was allegedly banned, and I had to wonder why. Of course, I’m not a fan of censoring anything soooooooo I used my Google-fu to do a bit of research.

So, an episode which deals with Dizzy’s illiteracy and American kids’ obsession with TV:

a robot who’s bullied by Montana Max, the douchiest douche from any non-MacFarlane cartoon (can’t find relevant video, youtube hates me,) and kids drinking is banned? For what? Kids dealt with all of that stuff in the ’90s and still do today. Banning things doesn’t make them go away. It actually makes whatever you’re banning more appealing. How have people not figured this out yet?

When I was 10, my mom banned Ryan and me from watching Beavis & Butt-head. So of course we listened to her, by going over to our friends’ houses and watching it. Man, lesson learned!!

I hate people. Talk to your kids, parent them, but stop treating them like delicate little snowflakes that will melt at the sign of anything that doesn’t smell like roses.

I got Anne-Marie and I loved her like nothing else. She was perfect and had her own little spot in my dollhouse with my Barbies and Skippers and decapitated Kens. Sure, she was tiny, but who cared? She fit right in with my McDonald’s Fraggle Rock toys and my little Minnie Mouse wind-up toy in her pink convertible (probably also from McD’s.) Come to think of it, I think my brother had to have given me all of his Happy Meal toys because my parents didn’t take us there all that often.

Anyway, when I was about sixteen or so, we moved out of my childhood home and my dolls and toys and everything were all sufficiently lost. All that remained were my American Girl dolls and a couple of Care Bears that I bought at Trader’s Village my sophomore year. Nothing from my youth survived, and let me tell you, I had so much Rainbow Brite stuff that I could have been crapping rainbows and unicorns for centuries. I was DEVASTATED. And I still couldn’t stop thinking about my dumb Anne-Marie action figure.

The internet was relatively less obscure among my group of buddies at this point (1998) so I, in my infinite wisdom, decided to look up the fates of all of the actors of All Dogs Go to Heaven. Christ almighty, why? Why did I do that? I read about Judith Barsi (ffs, she’s also Ducky!) and wanted to curl in a ball and cry. Sixteen years old, and all I wanted was a big fat hug from my mommy. Reading about that sufficiently killed a large chunk of my childhood, just like reading about Devon Sawa being a junkie who (allegedly) beat his girlfriend destroyed my teenage years.

Wahhhhhhhh.

This series was one of the most infuriating things I’ve ever read but it was so, so addictive to thirteen-year-old me.

So in this lovely installment, this girl Dina meets a guy named Matt while she’s skiing. Because all white people go on luxurious ski vacations, you see. They fall in love, because if there’s anything I’ve learned from YA books it is that love happens overnight and it overcomes all odds after about a week or so. And yes, Matt and Dina are IN LUV after a week. Gag me.

After she leaves, she returns home to Boston and her widower dad. Apparently a hurricane has just decimated Beantown or something and they have to move in with Daddy’s girlfriend. And wouldn’t you just know, Matt is her dad’s girlfriend’s son! What are the odds! Matt and Dina drive each other bonkers with all of their typical teenage idiosyncrasies. This book is really, really terrible. Like, even for YA standards it is fucking atrocious and at thirteen I knew it was terrible. Oh, boy, her dad and his mom hooked up and are like the Odd Couple! Everyone’s fighting! What wacky, formulaic adventures will they go on next? Will Matt kiss Dina’s best friend to make her jealous? Of course he will. Will they spend half of the book scheming to break up their parents? Damn right. Will everything work out in the end and drive me to drink with how terrible of a book it is? I’m on my third Jack & diet.

There is absolutely nothing redeemable about any of these boring, cliched characters. The plot is godawful EVEN FOR A YA NOVEL. I feel like I should read some Sweet Valley High to cleanse my palate, it’s that bad.

The best part about these stupid Love Stories books was the “love advice” at the end of them, and is probably the only reason my friend Danielle and I would read them. Case in point:

Dear Jake,
I’m 16, and I live with my older brother, Rick, who’s 25. I’m writing because his girlfriend, Lenni, makes me really uncomfortable. She’s always at our apartment, and the more time I spend around her, the less I like her. She hardly ever speaks, and she’s always shooting me dirty looks. My brother says she’s just shy, but I think she’s a snob.
What I don’t get is why he’s with her. He’s usually so outgoing and lively, but ever since they’ve been together they just hang out listening to music all the time. I consider myself a nice and accepting person, but she’s never responded to any of my attempts to be friends. I mean, she’s not even civil. I hate coming home because I always know she’ll be there, hovering. Should I tell my brother how I feel?
KS, New Brunswick, NJ

Jake’s response sucked, so here’s mine.

Dearest KS,
Your brother is getting high and getting laid. It’s pretty common among 25-year-olds who have to deal with bratty, nosy 16-year-old sisters horning in on their love lives. Perhaps if you got surgery to remove the stick from your ass, things would improve! Hope this helps.
xoxo,
KM, Houston, TX.

- some of the Love Stories series, particularly “Hot Summer Nights”
- some of the Pizza Paradise series
- some of the Freshman Dorm series
- the Summer series, which is TOTALLY SITTING ON MY DESK AT HOME IN HOUSTON RIGHT NOW!

there are a few more but I really, really want to do those because they are awesomely bad and snarkworthy! Anyway I’ll be paying a lot more attention to this because I miss reading YA books for fun and there’s honestly only so much history I can read in a year.

Our heroine, Nicola, is looking pretty fierce there with her imaginary mouse. But Rose? Rose is not nearly as fat or gingerrific as I had envisioned.

Basically, Nicola is a tomboy who gets overlooked constantly for her high-maintenance, “talented” little sister Rose. Nicola is a beanpole who loves footie (soccer, you heathens) and watches Crystal Palace matches with her pops and can’t be concerned with girl-like things. She also loves tormenting Rose, because it’s just so easy. She draws faces on her expensive tap shoes, coerces her into sniffing sneezing powder, the works. Rose, on the other hand, is a demon sent straight from fat ginger bitch hell. She is the most obnoxious, horrid, irredeemable character that doesn’t have the last name of Wakefield that I’ve read in a long time. In essence, Rose is a stage kid – actress, model, dancer, whatever (hee, UL reference) who really isn’t all that fantastic.

One day, while Nicola was running around completely unsupervised as usual because her mother is a wretched, negligent windbag, she goes to this abandoned building or construction site or whatever and takes her frustrations about her nasty sister out there. She pirouettes in the mud and makes up silly songs just railing on Rose, and it’s fantastic. The best part, though, is that she gets caught by this woman named Mrs. French who thinks she has some real talent. She accompanies Nicola back to her home, where her mom rips her a new asshole for playing at the building site and in no uncertain terms tells Mrs. French that WELL, ROSE IS OUR LITTLE DANCER, NOT NICOLA.

I fucking hate Nicola’s mom.

Anyway, as it turns out, Mrs. French (as Rose obnoxiously points out) studied at the Royal Academy of Ballet and is quite good and discerning natural talent, and she truly believes Nicola has some. Rose changes her mind about which of her “many talents” she’s going to capitalize on (might I suggest one that involves a drive thru window?) and it drives her sister bonkers. The fact that Mrs. French wants Nicola causes incredible tension in the house (because Rose is INSUFFERABLE, I cannot point this out enough here) and finally her dad is like oh Nickers, why don’t you just come watch Crystal Palace with me and give up this silly girl business. So she does – she gives up her dreams for Rose. For probably the BILLIONTH FREAKING TIME. So infuriating.

What planet do parents in YA books come from, and can we nuke it?

Rose falls ill during the rehearsal for one of her dumb things (the part she stole from her sister, actually,) and Nicola steps in. Not surprisingly, she’s a hit and everyone loves her because she’s not an ungracious sea hag ginger beast. Mrs. French has decided to drop Rose for Nicola in this particular role and create a new role especially for her. Rose. Is. PISSSSSSSSSSED. There is a fabulous scene where she goes absolutely batshit and god, it is glorious. When I get my hard copy of the book (it’s at John’s right now, of all places) I’ll type up the passage because it needs to be shared with everyone.

Anyway of course, since it’s YA fiction, everything works out. Nicola gets the chance of a lifetime and might even move on to more fantastic roles. Rose gets what she wants. Their mom remains an insufferable asshat. And I think Crystal Palace wins a match by the end of the book, so yay dad.

This poor child is a ginger, her name is Tallahassee, her mom is a complete nutbar, and she’s being uprooted from crappy Florida to crappy suburban Maryland in the middle of winter.

Her ditzy mom has decided that, since she is 29, she’s losing her looks and has to get to Hollywood NOW NOW NOW to make it big. She’s dating some lecherous fucktard who enables this belief. Tallahassee’s not buying it. They don’t care, and ship her off to her aunt and uncle in the PGC.

When she gets to Maryland, she immediately loves her uncle and thinks her aunt is a nightmare bitch. Because the aunt’s name is Thelma, I for some reason have always pictured her as Aunt Selma from the Simpsons, and it cracks me up every time. Anyway she sleeps in her mom’s childhood room and discovers her mom was the dumb girl who drew horses as a kid.

Tallahassee meets a girl named Jane who lives behind her, and they become bff. Jane tells her that Tallahassee’s mom and her mom were good friends back in the day, but drifted apart for some reason when they were in high school. Tallahassee lies to all of the girls in her class about her mom being in a movie with Richard Gere (As the Gerbil Climbs?) because she figures she’ll only be in Maryland for a couple of weeks before Liz sends for her.

She clashes with Thelma over everything from clothes to bedtime to the goddamn dog, and decides she’s going to run away to California. Oh, but she’s learning so much in Maryland, such as it’s quite possible that Jane’s mom and her mom drifted apart due to Tallahassee’s mom stealing a certain ginger boyfriend from her. The more Tallahassee learns about Johnny, the boyfriend in question, the more she wants to know. Unfortunately, he was killed in Vietnam and his mother seems to have never gotten over it, according to Thelma.

That doesn’t faze Tallahassee. She goes over to Johnny’s mom’s house to play with the dogs and show off her l33t gymnastics skills (apparently Johnny was a gymnast.) More fighting with Thelma and Tallahassee, and Jane’s mom is a total cunt to her. By now, the girls at school have figured out that she is full of shit, and her mom has disappeared from her job in California. Things are looking pretty shitty, so Tallahassee makes one final plea to Johnny’s mom – who doesn’t want her either.

She runs away. On a bus.

Of course, she’s caught quickly, and Thelma comes to get her. Blow-out fight, woooooooooo! It ends with Thelma busting her ass in a parking lot, and Tallahassee helping her up. They go to Mickey D’s and work shit out. Thelma even admits Johnny is probably her father, though she doubts Tallahassee’s mom knows.

Her mom shows up on the doorstep of Thelma’s house, just to say hi before leaving for New York. It finally dawns on Tallahassee that her mom sucks, and she tells her so. At least she gets a straight answer that yes, Johnny’s her father, and yes, she stole him from Jane’s mom. The self-centered bitch at least sheds a tear when her daughter lets her know that Johnny’s dead. Now that she has roots, friends, and family in Maryland, she doesn’t feel so terrible. Nobody really gives a rat’s ass what happens to her mom, either, and Thelma just kind of rolls her eyes when Tallahassee tells her what happened.

Picture it. Suburban Maryland, 1980-something. A doofy seventh-grader on the fringes of popularity has the worst day of her life and gets stuck with a total dingus as a partner for a huge English project. She comes to realize that her partner is actually pretty cool, but is grossly neglected and facing abuse at home. After promising not to tell, she tells her mom, and the partner/her sister are thrown into an orphanage. Happy ending?

Sophia Petrillo couldn’t make this shit up.

Jessica, a sort-of nerd who’s bffs with a popular girl, gets stuck with Daphne for a creative writing project. Jess = the best writer in the class; Daphne = best artist in the class. Apparently Daphne is Ally Sheedy’s character in The Breakfast Club minus the dandruff. They work on their story by playing with mice and Daphne’s sister, Hope, but Jessica is concerned that they are being abused and/or neglected at home by Psycho Grandma.

Yes, Psycho Grandma truly believes that Dead Father is coming home from Vietnam. It’s pretty freaking sad.

Anyway, Daphne flips her nonsense on Jessica because she has no spine and just sits there when her “friends” rip on Daphne. After a while, D decides to drop out of school at the tender age of 12? 13? because Psycho Grandma says she’s “too smart!” to go, according to Hope. Unfortunately, this information is revealed in a Mickey D’s bathroom where the Plastics are playing with makeup. I can only imagine a soundtrack involving Good Charlotte and Jimmie’s Chicken Shack at this point, with some SR-71 thrown in for good measure.

Daphne is actually dropping out to take care of Hope, because Grandma has lost her ever loving mind. Things get very tense/stressful, and Grandma flips her shit at the local food mart (Giant?) over some pickles and/or peanut butter – Daphne has only collected enough bottles to pay for one. No, I am not making this up; yes, this is heartbreaking.

Daphne makes Jessica promise not to tell anyone about what’s going on, but she talks to her brother and he pretty much tells her if she cares about Daphne at all to do something. So, Jessica tells her mom and shit hits the fan. Grandma goes into the hospital, Daphne and Hope are placed in a maximum security orphanarium, Adlai gives them surgery to make them adequate.. wait, Futurama tangent, sorry. Actually, their orphanage is quite pleasant. Jessica and Daphne win first place in the writing contest. Grandma dies. Hope & Daphne go live with relatives.

This is why I love MDH. Is it really a happy ending, or is it a Gordy happy ending?