South Park: The Complete Eleventh Season

An Amazing Season
With almost every season of South Park you always have the odd one or two episodes that weren't really that good. Season 1 it was Weight Gain 4000, Season 2 it was Terrence & Phillip in not without my Anus and so on, as with all seasons although you have the bad episodes, you always have your personal favourites but Season 11 is in my personal view the strongest and most unique season to date. With episodes ranging from racial controversy to a trilogy of episodes setting the boys in Imaginationland and ended up with its own DVD releases.

Episode 1: With Apologies To Jesse Jackson: This is a Randy Marsh episode and shows the true no holds barred attitude that Matt Stone & Trey Parker have towards writing an episode. Randy is on an episode of Wheel of Fortune and accidentally uses the N word, which causes an uproar and singles Randy out as "That N***er Guy." This episode is obviously a reflection on the American society in relation to the N word and satires the whole subject,...

Still the funniest animated show on TV today
Even in it's eleventh season, South Park manages to still be the funniest animated show on TV today. Proof of that statement can be seen in the opening episode, appropriately titled "With Apologies to Jesse Jackson", in which Stan's dad Randy goes on Wheel of Fortune, and gets the wrong idea. If you've never seen this episode before and are easily offended, well, I suggest you don't watch it. For the rest of us though, this episode is worth the price of admission alone. Not to mention the simply brilliant "Imaginationland" trilogy of episodes, as well as the very funny "Cartman Sucks" and "Lice Capades"; which once again find creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker not only pushing limits, but obliterating them. Matt and Trey also have a fine time spoofing things as well, including 24 with "The Snuke", zombies with "Night of the Living Homeless", Bono's work (and their Emmy win) with "More Crap", 300 with "D-Yikes!", and the mega-popular Guitar Hero with "Guitar Queer-o". The season...

South Park, "Night of the Living Homeless" on Unbox
This episode had been recommended to me long ago, but I did not rent it because I did not want to commit to watching a whole DVD's worth of Southpark. $1.99 bought the unbox episode (cheaper than the cost of gas): Kyle gives a homeless guy $20 and soon afterward South Park is overrun with homeless. Cartman is as charming as ever, striving to vault his skateboard over the most homeless. The town council proposes the standard, mindless responses typical of city bureaucracy (designer sleeping bags, and such), and the homeless continue their undaunted chanting, "Spare Change? God Bless." So it's up to the boys to travel to a nearby town to seek the solution. Unbox has been flawless for me.

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Ni Hao, Kai-Lan: Super Special Days

Great show for preschoolers
This Nick Jr show is great. My son likes it as much as Dora. Each episode is interactive (I think even more than other shows, like Dora)--Kai-Lan gets viewers involved with things like helping her count or pick out certain colors or shapes. A few physical movements (reaching for things, etc) are promoted too. But the primary plus is how it focuses on social and emotional development--one episode has a theme of managing anger, another of helping out your friends, etc. And the song that is interwoven throughout the episodes (the words change for each episode, but the tune is the same) is quite catchy. And I have learned a few Mandarin words!

Episodes:

Dragonboat Festival -- Rintoo gets angry when he loses a dragonboat race. Kai-lan helps him calm down so they can all meet Mr. Dragon at the end of the festival.

Beach Day -- On a trip to the beach, Tolee gets mad when the waves knock over his sand castle, so the others help him calm down and...

Crazy good for your kid to learn how to deal with frustration
Until now, if you were, say, a 1st-generation Chinese parent who wanted their 2nd-generation, fully-immersed kid to watch Chinese DVDs targeted at English-speaking kids, you had to suffer through a few noble but failed attempts: Bao Bei the Panda is a notable example, Jade goes to Kindergarten is a little better.

This is great for Chinese language, though not for the vocabulary, but mostly because they use crazy-hard words like "Xue" and other tongue-rolling Chinese sounds and my kid picked it up spontaneously. Of course, we thought she was swearing at first, but turns out she was saying the word for shoe (or more appropriately, the word for slippers/sandals).

Anyhow, that's not the best part of these videos, which is a refreshing surprise. While Dora, Diego, and Blue all teach your kid to basically follow a three-part mystery, and prepare them for a lifetime of watching CSI or Law & Order, Kai Lan and her friends teach them much more valuable lessons...

Great show but warning on some of the behavior of the characters
In Ni Hao Kai-Lan Super Special Days, I like the idea of a Chinese kid's show teaching a few Chinese words here and there, but the goal of the show is not to teach a new language. It's about a Chinese girl and her adventures with her friends and family while introducing a few Chinese words. It's similar to Dora and her adventures while teaching a few Spanish words.

My kids (twin boys-5 years, girl-3 years), especially my daughter, enjoy the show very much. There are lessons to be learned about being polite, calming down when you're angry, helping friends, being creative, and having fun. However, because there's a lesson to be learned, one of the characters has to act naughty before he learns to behave....that's where the trouble begins for me.

Of course this could happen in any child's video, but for some reason my kids mimic all the bad behavior exhibited in the Ni Hao Kailan videos. For example, in the Dragonboat Festival, Rintoo is "so mad" when he doesn't...

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