Another Selection from our Collection of Terrifying Nixon-era Children's Books: What It's Like to Be a Policeman

This week's selection comes from the career shelf in our library of photo-illustrated Nixon-era children's books (published 1971). As always, some of the captions are real.

Charles Lawrence is a Chicago police officer. There are 13,000 policemen in the city and 500,000 policemen in the United States. The main job of a policeman is to enforce the laws of his city and state. Charles is going to show us what it's like to be a policeman.

It takes a lot of training to become a good policeman. After applying for his job, Charles had to pass several tests. When he was accepted for training, he was sent to the Chicago Police Academy, a school for policemen. "You chewin' gum, rook?" his teacher asks. "Do it again and I'll give ya detention.

Policeman school is a lot like regular school, except that at Policeman school you get to shoot guns all the time. Charles says shooting guns is as much fun as he always thought it would be. “It makes me feel powerful,” he says.

Charles learns to wield his night stick in formation. "Hippies show no mercy," his instructor barks. "So neither can you."

Man, Charles thinks, I hope the Tear Gas final examination is multiple choice.

Charles inspects some recently-confiscated weed. "Now that's some good shit," Charles notes.

Charles passed all his tests. He's a real cop now. "I can't wait to start waling on some hippies," he says.

Charles attends his first roll call. "That had better be powdered sugar on your jacket, Wakowski, or your days in the evidence room are over!"

Charles likes to go to the gun room and look at all the guns. "This room is cool," he says to the guy with the pocket protector.

"Yeah," the guy says.

Many big-city police departments have policewomen on duty. Although they do not have to chase after suspected car thieves very often, the women who are accepted for police work have to take the sane sort of physical and classroom training as their brother officers. Women police officers do all kinds of jobs---from investigating drug offenses to finding lost children and getting them home. [ed. note: I wish I had written that one]


Sometimes when Charles and his partner are on patrol, they spot a known felon, in this case a crooked Certified Public Accountant.

"You should know better than switching from the accrual method to the cash method!" Charles shouts in hot pursuit.

Charles brings the CPA into Central Booking. “What have we got here, Patrolman Lawrence?” asked the Sergeant. “Another book cooking swindler? You no good dirty piece of scum. You make me sick.”

The Sergeant congratulates Charles. “That’s another great collar, son. But dispatch just called in about some investment bankers loitering down on E. 119th. Be careful, though: they scatter like cockroaches.”

“Yes Sir.”

“Now book this mope, boys.”


Charles used to think those CSI shows were phony with their attractive investigators and non-conformist lab technicians, but not after meeting Ms. Peeples and seeing Harvey’s sideburns. “You guys could use some ambient lighting in here, though,” Charles told them.


If you're lousy at catching criminals or you don't listen to your superior officers, you may end up directing traffic like Officer McNulty here.

Traffic cops hardly ever get to shoot anyone.

Charles knows that if he always follows orders, respects the chain of command, and maybe catches a break, perhaps one day he’ll be asked to join the ranks of the Chicago Police Department’s elite Motortrike squadron.

Frequently Asked Questions

I never thought it would come to this, but it's gotten to the point where I receive so many e-mails every day that I can't even come close to responding to them all (although I definitely read every one). Because some of the e-mails seem to be asking the same questions, I thought I'd try to answer them in one big FAQ post.

How do you manage to take care of two kids and keep the house clean and still write and take pictures and go to museums and all kinds of dangerous places every day. . .

I don't. This blog is not reality. It presents a warped, carefully filtered sliver of my reality that makes some people think my life is something that it's not. My daughter is in preschool nine hours a week. My son still naps. I do not have any help, other than a wife committed to being the best partner and parent she can be. Sometimes it is really, really hard. I don't complain here because I don't feel like the world needs another asshole on the internet complaining. I am trying to share the things I find interesting about day-to-day life. I have no interest in sharing everything.

What kind of camera do you use?

I use a Nikon D50 Nikon D300 with a standard 18-55 lens Sigma 17-35mm 2.8 wide angle and a cheap 50mm f/1.8D AF with a crappy autofocus (sand got in the lens at the beach). I have a $15 tripod. I am looking forward to buying a fast zoom lens during the 2009 tax year.

I edit in Photoshop CS4.

Why do you write so much about Detroit? Who cares?

I moved here because I wanted to live somewhere that interested me. Yeah, most people think it's a shithole. That means I don't have to interact with most people on a daily basis, which has done wonders for my raging case of misanthropy.

Detroit is the first place I lived after quitting a soulless job to stay home and take care of my kids. This scarred landscape will forever be the backdrop to the most wonderful time of my life. I can't help but think that general state of mind has improved my impression of the city. I don't write about Detroit because I expect everyone out there to care, but I do hope anyone reading this site will feel how important the idea of "place" is in all our lives.

Why don't you go by "Dutch" anymore?

My wife was asleep on the couch and I was flipping channels and Predator was on Spike and I was all, "Sweet!" because I loved that movie when I was ten. And then I realized that the Arnold Schwarzenegger character's name was Dutch and I saw how dumb a movie about an invisible alien hunter facing off against a crack squad of wisecracking future-governor commandos actually was and decided that having a nom de blog was kind of stupid.

Why don’t you post as many pictures of your kid(s) as you once did?

In September 2007, an online parenting magazine that had been treating flickr like a stock photography site screen-grabbed a photo of my daughter and incorporated it into the header of a story on the dangers of lead-based paint. It was an eye-opening situation that not only made me rethink how I wanted to present my family on this site in photographs, but how much of their lives I wanted to expose in general. I don’t really buy into all the blogging-is-exploiting-your-kids crap, but I did want to reevaluate the role my kids play in the story that gets told (and shown) on this website and balance it with their right to what I felt was an appropriate degree of privacy.

Why do you sometimes close comments?

Don’t get me wrong, it is so great to hear reactions to what you’ve written right away.

Sometimes I write something that I don’t think is really appropriate for commentary. Sometimes I just don’t want the pressure of writing something worthy of comment.

It’s not that I’m afraid of criticism. It’s not that I don’t care about what you have to say. Honestly, sometimes I write a post, read it over, and just want it to stand by itself. That is all.

Why do you only publish partial feeds of your posts for RSS readers?

We’ve gone back and forth on this. I know it's lame. I do believe that by publishing full feeds we would attract more subscribers and ultimately more readers. But here’s why I don’t:
I am overly protective of all the content I generate for the site. When we published a full feed, I noticed that way more of our content was showing up on random, unsavory sites because of RSS scraping. I know by putting any content on the internet I am always taking a risk of it being plagiarized or stolen, but it’s very important to me to protect it to whatever degree I actually can.

Your blog doesn't look right in Internet Explorer v.4.xx15. What can I do?

Download Firefox.

Why don't you have a twitter or facebook account?

Fuck that shit.

Why doesn’t Wood write as much anymore? Why do you sometimes go so long without posting?

We are very fortunate to have a few thousand strangers who are actually interested in our daily lives. As the number of people who visit this site grew, so did the pressure to produce something decent. More importantly, the pressure to write something inspired or interesting has started to feel enormous. Sometimes it’s just hard to come up with something in the face of that pressure. Neither of us wants to write just for the sake of updating the blog.

Wood still has a real job and some concerns that things written on this site could hurt her career. So she doesn't write as much as the guy without a job who committed career suicide years ago. Wood will be posting once a week to share here craft projects on a sub-page of the blog (Sweet Juniper WoodCraft).

Dear jdg and Wood, I work for a marketing company whose client ________ thinks that ____________, would be a great fit for SWEET JUNIPER and your readers. We would like to send you a sample of _________ _______ or ____________.

Okay, seriously, the fact that you’re even bothering to e-mail me about this tells me that you don’t read our site. Have we EVER done any kind of product review? What is it about anything I’ve ever written that makes you think I am just dying to write a long post about how delicious your new snack crackers are?

This is my place for writing tidy little stories and commentary. We have advertising on this site that is completely separate from my tidy little stories and commentary. The advertising is available for companies to try to reach the many smart, wonderful and fabulously-wealthy people who like the stories. But the stories themselves are off limits.

Want to advertise? Contact our advertising partner, Federated Media Publishing.

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"A Horse Named Paul Revere," a children's book by The Beastie Boys

Our friendly neighborhood BARGAIN BOOK WAREHOUSE has a gigantic section devoted solely to shitty children's books written by shitty celebrities. I thought it would be funny to pick one out and make fun of it, but when I pulled down Jada Pinckett Smith's Girls Hold up the World, I felt horrible, like I was making fun of the retarded kids at the school assembly.

Then I found a celebrity totally undeserving of pity: Billy Joel. By virtue of his continued existence, and a literal reading of his 1977 hit "Only the Good Die Young," hasn't Mr. Joel essentially admitted what we all know to be true: that he is not good; that he is bad; that, in fact, he sucks a whole bowl full of dicks? Billy Joel's third wife is 24 years old. He's 57. His own daughter via Christie Brinkley is 21. That's why I was sure when I sat down with a copy of his crap children's book Goodnight My Angel, I would be able to totally make fun of this soft-rock pansy asshole with impunity. The illustrations are so saccharine that Thomas Kinkade "The Painter of Light" himself wouldn't even have the plums to draw anything this cheesy, and the text of the "book" is nothing but the lyrics to that incredibly lame song. So lame in fact, that I'm not going to bore you with it.

I found myself wishing that these book publishers would choose a song that wouldn't suck as a children's book. Then it hit me. "A Horse Named Paul Revere," a children's book by The Beastie Boys:

I have also set up a flickr site with the full rap/text. This blog is clearly a cry for help.

Dutch's Ultimate Anthology of Televised Toddler Entertainment

You may want to bookmark this page. Given the nature of YouTube, I'll be updating it regularly.

Last updated: 8/3/2007

Juniper's Most Requested Videos:

Where the Wild Things Are: fully animated!
In the Night Kitchen

R.E.M. and the Monsters: Furry Happy Monsters
Alice Cooper on the Muppet Show in 1978!
Babies getting all Busby Berkeley in overpriced French water
Mahna Mahna
Original 1969 Mahna Mahna
Doo Wop Doo Wop Hop!
Beaker sings Feelings


Chaplin and the Kid
Charlie Chaplin's Dance of the Dinner Rolls

Asian Pottytraining Extravaganza:

The original Shimajiro pottytraining with subtitles and live action pooping kid
Shimajiro 2: At the mall, Shimajiro encounters a squatter toilet

Four episodes of Pantzu Pankuro
Four more episodes of Pantzu Pankuro
#1 or #2?
Squatter Toilet 1
Squatter Toilet 2
I think this one's about diarrhea
Pankuro loves his toilet
Toilet hide-n-seek
Pankuro craps his pants
Just try to keep the constipation song out of your head

Weird American potty training video
Sesame Street: I Really Need to Urinate


Music videos for toddlers:

Bat for Lashes: What's a girl to do [Juniper squeals every time the BMX animals come out]
Matt and Kim: Yea Yeah [see also Matt and Kim: Yea Yeah, demonbaby remix video]
White Stripes: Fell in Love with a Girl
White Stripes: My Doorbell
Feist: 1,2,3,4




Breakdancing on Mr. Rogers
New York City Breakers - Graffiti Rock
RUN DMC on Reading Rainbow
Lavar Burton dances and raps in 1992

Yo Gabba Gabba - Party In My Tummy

The Sweet Juniper Virtual Zoo:

lions
tigers

monkey with a puppy
karate monkeys
ninja monkeys
snow monkeys
baby snow monkeys
baby gorillas
bears
four minutes of bears
frogs
giraffes

Panda
More Panda

The Sweet Juniper Virtual Barnyard Visit

Duck
Drunken Sheep Torture
More sheep
cows
horses
kittens
More cats
puppy

PBS/Children's Television Workshop stuff:

3-2-1- Contact Theme Song
70s signs from the Electric Company

Letters, Series 1: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Letters, Series 2: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Counting segments:

Counting Octopus Band (in color)
Count it higher
Counting Spies

Muppet Show Celebrity Performances:

Kenny Rogers & The Muppets - The Gambler
Buddy Rich versus Animal on the drums!

Johnny Cash on the Muppet Show- Dirty Old Egg Suckin Dog
Johnny Cash and Big Bird: Don't Take Your Ones to Town

Cab Calloway: Hi-Dee-Ho Man
Paul Simon: Been Such A Long, Long Day
Beatles Cover: Hey Food
Grease Parody: One Way
Lynda Carter sings Flash, Bam
Chickens Play Piano
Gonzo the Great
You and I and George

It's not easy being green

Swedish Chef:
chocolate moose
cooking lobster

Great Vintage Sesame Street:

The following clips are intended only as a supplement to foldedspace.org's excellent collection of Sesame Street Clips on YouTube.

Frazzle


I'm between
Paradise Island
The Pie Thing



Ernie and His Rubber Duckie



City Life vs. Country Life
Wide Open Spaces
Echo in Mexico
There's a Zoo in Me!
Kermit: Disco Frog
Fat Cat Sat Hat (with the "Mahna Mahna Guy" Bip)
Bip sings of air
Bip's Opposite

Bert does the pigeon
Open!
O is for Open
O is for Open 2
Construction Gang Builds a Q
ADVENTURE!
What's an alphabet?
Alphabet Onslaught
What if I popped this balloon?
What if an anteater had long legs?
What do you do with a pet?
Waking up a plant
It's springtime!
Do you want to see a scary looking thing?
Tortoise and the Hare
Bedtime noises
Cat and Mouse Rhythms
The Silent E
Jump for J
The J Train
Shoemaker and the Ruler

Mimery:
Shields and Yarnell: Robot Breakfast
Clinkers Christmas Vacation

Yip Yip Aliens discover a clock
Fuzzy and Blue
Eleven Purple Pooches
Man on a Wall
In animation
I'm serving dinner for 9 tonight
5 people in my family
Question Song
G sounds
G is for Goat
Counting Fiddler- Snails
Twiddlebugs go to the zoo
Ernie: Somebody come and play
Somebody Come and Play (live action)
How crayons are made
There's a bird on me
It's a long hard climb
Cats have kittens
I believe in little things
Dressed Up
Monkeys and Music
Why do we need rain?
What water does
In the mood for food
MILK!
WET PAINT!
Danger! (silents)
Go to the exit (silents)
Crowd Alphabet
Kermit: Three Little Pigs News Story
Kermit: Sleeping Beauty News Story
Disco Frog
Big Bird at Hooper's Store
Big Bird's debut
Fixing your hair
Getting Dressed
Everybody eats
Everybody Sleeps
African Kids
Everybody Makes Mistakes (Big Bird)
Swing up free
Early People in Your Neighborhood

Lily Tomlin as Edith Ann: PROUD




Turtles singing in the round
The Geefle and the Gonk
Ernie & Bert - Eating Cookies In Bed (Classic Sesame Street)
Ernie has a banana in his ear
Danger
Teeny Little Super Guy
Teeny Little Super Guy 2
Furry Blue Coat Wanted
Kermit's Cookbook
The Count and the Cookie Monster
Harvey Kneeslapper: Picture of You
The Great Cookie Thief
The Story of Dirty Gulch
No Cookies in the Library
Adding is Putting Together
Bread, Milk & Butter
Lulu's Back in Town
The Pied Piper
The Monster Carnival
Kermit's Imagination Game
Lola Looks for Home
Don Music Writes the Alphabet Song
The Two-Headed Monster Shops for Shoes
Up and Down
Singing Frogs
The Little Girl and the Cat
Next to
How to deal with a bully
Trippy-ass running kids
Telephone Rock
Oscar: I love trash
The size of it (see also Charles and Ray Eames' Power of Ten)
Monsterpiece Theater: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Electric Company:

It really blew my mind!
Tall, Taller, Tallest
Right On!

Obscure older videos that are more for my entertainment:

Maurice Sendak's Really Rosie- with Music by Carole King

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

More Really Rosie songs:

Alligators All Around
The Ballad of Chicken Soup
One Was Johnny
Pierre

1950s Saul Steinberg/Charles Eames cartoon about computers
Calder's Circus 1, 2, 3, 4
Christopher Crumpet (1953)
Do Do The Kid From Outer Space - Do Do In Japan (1959)
Luno: The Poor Pirate
Luno: Gold Dust Bandit
Superchicken
KUMO-TO-CHURIPPU(1943)
UGOKIE-KO-RI-NO-TATEHIKI(1933)
Winsor McCay's Little Nemo
Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur
Ladislaw Starewicz: Frogland, The Devil's Ball, The Insects' Christmas
Ub Iwerks: Flip the frog: Room Room Runners, Flip The Frog: Fiddlesticks (1930), Flip the Frog: Movie Mad, Hell's Fire (1934) - Willie Whopper, Jack Frost
Max Fleisher's Bimbo's Initiation
Swing you sinners
Sesame Street sketch with Maria as Charlie Chaplin

Chaplin and the Globe

Chaplin: A Dog's Life
Classic Buster Keaton clips


Crazy Frog
Funky Duck
that's a lot of laughing babies

Weird Asian Videos

Kure Kure Takora (Gimme Gimme Octopus): Episode 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and the famous murdered baby octopus episode.
Chinese baby obstacle course
Chinese laughing song

The Sacagawea Theory

When my wife claims we need something for our baby pricier than a sippy cup, I usually say something like, "Sacagawea gave birth to her baby a few weeks before Lewis and Clark embarked and she carried his ass on a cradleboard the entire way to the Pacific Ocean. Do we really need another _________." Usually the answer is "Yes," but my point has been made.

All babies really need are boobs.

The Chiasma of Judgment

Despite my recent accolade as a mommyblogger and my honorary degree from vagina university, I am still a man. That means I am pretty dense about some heavy shit, like all the fucking insecurity and the "judgmentality" among interacting parents (particularly moms). Despite all the shit that went down a few weeks ago and all the veterans of the mommy wars banging their tin cups all over the internet, it didn't really dawn on me until my wife explained it recently: "parenting is a really fucking hard job," she says, "one that certainly makes me insecure. So we all slog through this job wondering if we're doing the right thing and always feeling terrified that we're not, and then when we encounter someone who has done some other thing, made some different decision, we take that insecure energy and turn it into judgmental hate." Now that I fully understand this subtext, I have heard playground interactions and seen blog conflict where all this runs like electric current through every passive (or not-so passive) aggressive comment. It makes sense. For many of us this is the first time in our lives that our every decision affects the future of someone other than ourselves, and that's an enormous, uncomfortable responsibility. I was reading MamaC-Ta's post from a few weeks ago about all the hate she was getting for dressing her kid the way she wants to, and I really started thinking about how all this insecurity and judgment boils down to a relatively simple chiasma:

(1) Parent A makes an intentional values-based decision to do something (i.e. formula feed, co-sleep, cry-it-out, let her baby watch television, leash or spank her kids, or feed them junk food).
(2) Parent B makes an intentional values-based choice not to do the same thing, often creating a false sense of both insecurity and superiority in Parent B, who feels that it takes so much more effort and sacrifice to make the value-based choice she has made for her child.
(3) Parent B resents (and judges) Parent A for making the "easy" choice.
(4) Parent A feels the blatant judgment from Parent B, often creating a sense of guilt or insecurity for making the choice she has made. Parent A now resents (and judges) Parent B.

In any interaction, multiple values-based conflicts may exist at once, creating a tangled web of judgment and insecurity. Nearly every values-based parenting choice exists on a continuum between two dichotomous poles. Any time a parent takes a strong position or makes a particularly "polar" values-based decision (i.e. "No TV! Only wooden toys!" or "TV teaches my babies to read! They learn so much more from their leapfrog toys than they do from wooden blocks!") the judgment just becomes intrinsic to the choice. You really can't win, unless you learn to just accept that judgment and insecurity are a part of this process, and ultimately if you have a strong sense of personal values you just make decisions according to those values and try not to ignite the insecurities in the other side. Easier said than done.