{"id":5102,"date":"2006-10-22T23:49:55","date_gmt":"2006-10-22T23:49:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/thomas-the-boring-tank-engine.html"},"modified":"2006-10-22T23:49:55","modified_gmt":"2006-10-22T23:49:55","slug":"thomas-the-boring-tank-engine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/thomas-the-boring-tank-engine.html","title":{"rendered":"Thomas the Boring Tank Engine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Thomas\"<\/a> Pardon me, but I do think Thomas the Tank Engine has got <\/em>to be the most boring children’s character\/series ever invented. Not even counting the fact that there are a slew of trains with faces in the stories and who the heck can tell the difference between them all? I got a book or two for Joseph a while back, but almost fell asleep myself reading them, and he’s never really gotten into the genre<\/em> anyway, being brain-deep in Legos for the past year or so. <\/p>\n

But Michael the Baby…..that’s another story.<\/p>\n

Oh, how he loves "Thom-as!" It’s hardly ever on at a time when television is allowed, but when it is, he is rapt. <\/p>\n

(He is also rapt in front of football, taking the stance of an offensive lineman waiting for the snap. And today when The McLaughlin Report was on, in the Time Before Football, around noon, he stood with his face right in front of Pat Buchanan’s and roared. Repeatedly. I don’t know if that was approval or disapproval, though. Only time will tell. I suppose. Our experience of Pat Buchanan is always framed by the time, a year or so ago, when I did the Scarborough show with Buchanan and someone else, and Mr. Buchanan somehow formed the opinion in the midst of it that I was a proponent of The Da Vinci Code. <\/em>Not that I said anything much, mind you. Perhaps Michael roars at him for that reason – across time and space trying to say, "Let my mommy talk!")<\/p>\n

But he does adore Thomas. I checked out a board book for him from the library last week, and poor Michael the Daddy read it at least 30 times in those 6 days, I suspect. Yesterday was our weekly (now that it’s not summer any longer – in the summer we go 2 or 3 times a week.) library trip, and we came home with 3 more. Michael the Baby was excited, Michael the Daddy – not so much.<\/p>\n

Why do choo-choos entrance little children so? Why does the creepy choo-choo with the BIG FACE entrance the little child so? I have no idea. But I still say, at the risk of causing great offense. When I read that the author of the Thomas stories was an Anglican vicar, all I could think was…ah. I mean, God bless Anglican vicars writing stories for their children, but suddenly…it all made a vastly, deeply sincere Barcester Towers<\/em> type of sense.<\/p>\n

Oh, and feel free to vent about the books that are in high demand in your house – but you could send into the fire – yesterday. Or flame me for hating Thomas. Which, you know, will probably happen.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pardon me, but I do think Thomas the Tank Engine has got to be the most boring children’s character\/series ever invented. Not even counting the fact that there are a slew of trains with faces in the stories and who the heck can tell the difference between them all? I got a book or two…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThomas the Boring Tank Engine - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/thomas-the-boring-tank-engine.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Thomas the Boring Tank Engine - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Pardon me, but I do think Thomas the Tank Engine has got to be the most boring children’s character\/series ever invented. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}