Wolf Call

My sons have discovered the "wolf whistle." You know, the traditional construction workers to a pretty secretary cat-call. I'm not exactly sure where they've picked this up, but since they frequently watch old "Tom & Jerry," "Droopy," and "Bugs Bunny" cartoons, all of which feature that on a regular basis.

I first discovered this new entry into their arsenal while they were watching "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" The first appearance by Jessica Rabbit and suddenly I was surrounded by frat boys at a wet T-shirt contest. I thought that it might be an isolated incident, but then I let Marty watch a portion of an episode of "The Big Bang Theory" that featured the characters dressed up like DC Comics' characters. When the Penny character entered dressed as "Wonder Woman," there it was again.

Here's the problem -- more so than my 8- and 5-year-old boys objectifying women -- they don't know how to whistle. So, they just make some noise in their throat that approximates the "wheet-whew" of the whistle. It's annoying. So, now I'm trying to teach them how to actually whistle so that they can do this right. Objectifying women is one thing, but if you're going to do it with an annoying sound...well, that's where I draw the line.

They're also learning other things from those old cartoons -- besides the occasional racist joke and that it's ok for cartoon characters to smoke. For example, Marty has developed a strategy for if he ever finds himself in a bull fight. His idea is to paint the bull red, make him look at himself and, viola, the bull will just attack himself.

(I'm actually impressed that when Marty sees "viola" in print, he pronounces it correctly. For years, he's watched DVDs with the language option set on French. When I pointed out recently that he hasn't done it in a while, he whispered to me conspiratorially that he still does it with games on his Nintendo DS that have French as a language option. A couple of years ago, I asked him if he actually wanted to just learn French and his reply was, "Nah, that's too hard.")

Editors note: The title of this post is actually a reference to a song in my favorite Elvis movie, "Girl Happy." If your reaction to that bit of information is, "Elvis movie? Who has a favorite Elvis movie?," I honestly don't know how to help you.