Stand up for 'Mum and Dad'

I’m starting to get so antsy about the constant use of Mum and Dad as an adjectival phrase. You know the one. We hear about the Mum and Dad entities all the time. Mum and Dad investors. Mum and Dad retailers. Mum and Dad franchise holders. Mum and Dad ratepayers.
The Americans have their own version, as in Mom and Pop. In Australia they just call them battlers. I suppose it’s taken over from that older all-encompassing phrase ‘the man in the street’ which never worked either because it ignored women. Whatever, paternalistic words like this always come out of the mouths of people in smartly tailored suits, who work in splendid offices, drive (or get chauffeured in) gleaming new cars and who never come across as being part of any sort of family.
It always feels like they’re talking down to the rest of us. When they say Mum and Dad you know they’re referring to rest of us out here who are just members of the masses - possibly undereducated, needing advice, liable for manipulation, needing to be told what’s good for us.
I get the feeling from such authority figures that they think Mums and Dads are a bit thick and dour and very ordinary. And as we all know, that sure ain’t the truth.

Scary onscreen

These are dark times we live in, at least if you’re watching popular movies or TV.
The vampires of the Twilight saga saturated modern media for a while, and then they got booted out by the warriors of the Hunger Games, in which young people in an imaginary society not too removed from our own are selected to fight to the death.
Teenagers  flocked to Hunger Games and a friend of mine took her daughter to see it – and hated it. She hated what she saw as its glorification of death – and feared for how it might affect more sensitive teens.
I doubt you’ll have see any comments like that from professional reviewers though. I figure they’ve mostly become so immune to fictionalized violence that they can’t see any harm in it.
The mood of these movies is very dystopian. Dystopia is of course the opposite of eutopia. If an ideal society is eutopian, then a dystopian one is a place where everyone’s having a miserable time - a bit like what's happening in Spain now but with murder and monsters as well.
There’s also plenty of dystopia on TV, as in the recent Terra Nova series, and let’s not forget UK series Being Human, which features people who have an alarming tendency to turn into ravening beasts.
True Blood is back on our screens too. Shape shifters abound there, with multiple fangs slipping out of the gums of a host of Mississippi vampires, all the better to plunge into tender necks.  
The biggest new monster on the block is  Prometheus. Its director  Ridley Scott is the guy who scared the bejesus out of us with Alien, as you may recall.
It’s a long time since that ghastly critter gnawed its way out of a crewman’s chest in the first Alien movie. Want to guess how long? 1979. Can it possibly be 33 years? Sigh.
Have you noticed how dark these movies are - as in literally dark? So many deep shades and shadows and blackness. Sunlight hardly gets a look-in.
My current question is whether, at five, my grand-daughtet is too young for the latest Snow White iteration, Snow White and the Huntsman.
I just took a look at some it on YouTube. Oh yes,way too young.
I see it has an M rating - "suitable for mature audiences" but still unrestricted.
Sure, I'm mature all right, but this movie could give me nightmares…  

Lit hits

Book lovers used to talk about things literary but now the literature word itself is being chunked down into 'lit' genres... as in chick-lit, that disparaging little term used for lightweight reads aimed at women. No attention is ever paid to how hard it is to actually write an engaging, lightweight read. Never mind, also, the big money such books make for the publishers. Women are, after all the major buyers of books and popular fiction does best of all. Despite that, chick-lit is considered by critics to be fluff and therefore mockable. I hear farm-lit (also known a rural-lit)is very popular in Australia, where they love novels set in places where there’s lots of open space, grass and animals. Dinner at Rose’s – written by New Zealand vet Danielle Hawkins is a case in point, just published in Australia and new Zealand. And the other day I got introduced, via Bitch Magazine to priv-lit – standing for self-help books. Priv-lit, suggest Joshunda Sanders and Diana Barnes-Browooks, is a first-world kind of con-job because poor people in real need of help don’t have time (or money) for reading about self-help; they’re too damn busy trying to survive. Good point, gals! In other words, it’s only the privileged who have the luxury of taking time out to spend money on 'finding themselves'. For an example of priv-lit look at the immensely popular memoir Eat, Pray, Love, which Joshunda and Diana suggests could just as well have been called Wealthy, Whiny, White. Interesting that these 'lit' genres are all books for women. Nowhere yet have I seen mention of footy-lit, fish-lit or auto-lit. 'Bout time, isn't it?