Ross Barkin ponders what kids of today lack compared to their 20th century predecessors:
When I consider the geniuses of that era—or any, really, before the last ten years or so—I think of time. Talented children, until the incursion of the smartphone and immersive videos games, had much of it.
One big reason for this:
Children could only be enchanted by gizmos and gadgets for so long. The television was stationary, rooted in the living room, and it might have only featured a few channels, depending on the decade. Movies, similarly, were confined to physical theaters. Even in my own childhood, in the 1990s and 2000s, video gaming was largely a social activity. I brought my friend over to play Nintendo Wii or we went to his house to battle in a Dragon Ball Z video game on the PlayStation 2. Unique among my peers, I didn’t own a video game console until I was a teenager, and this meant, to my benefit, I had a childhood free of such seductions.
I too did not own a video game console growing up, except a Game Boy (on which I did spend many maddening hours trying and failing to conquer the Toy Story game). That lack was something I lamented at the time but am grateful for today, because it meant video games weren’t constantly commandeering my time and attention. Instead they were a special occasion, something to be enjoyed with others. I have fond memories having a Halo party with my youth group friendsandplaying Ready 2 Rumble Boxing with my uncles on a PlayStation rented from Blockbuster.
Barkin spotlights Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys as an example of the kind of genius who had an abundance of time to be able to develop his talent. Then he asks what the Brian Wilsons of 2025 do with their weekends:
Brian was a preternaturally gifted child who deconstructed vocal harmonies on the radio and spent hours over his piano. A child today with such genius might tinker around with music but devote far more of his days to Minecraft, Fortnite, and MrBeast. The child might drown in a sludge bath of AI. The same could be true of the budding novelists, poets, and painters. All of these technologies are arrayed against dreams and imagination. The content—the YouTube, the video games, the TikTok videos—does all the imagining for you. The brain devolves into a vessel for passive consumption.
And that consumption happens (literally) right before their eyes:
For all the obsessing modern parents do over the fates of their children, they’re happy to toss out an iPad or a smartphone or a Nintendo Switch and let their boys and girls melt, slowly, in the blue light. A person close to me once suggested that wardens should start giving prisoners iPhones because there’s nothing that will more rapidly pacify an unruly and restless population. If iPhones were teleported back in time to the twentieth century, would we have a twentieth century?
Pacify, yes, but only temporarily since once you turn it off it’s like trying to quash a prison riot.
A while back we severely curtailed our now six year old’s screen time after finally getting sick of how it was negatively affecting his mood and behavior (and thus everyone else in the house)—not to mention time spent on creative endeavors. What used to happen almost every day after lunch plus some evenings is now maybe an hour on the weekend, and sometime none at all. No iPad, no more YouTube or garbage shows, the N64 every once in a while. Putting the TV away was a big help in removing the temptation, but just as important was holding firm on the boundary. It didn’t take long for him to accept the new normal and find other things to do like coloring/crafts, reading, and listening to Yotos.
Barkin’s post is about kids, but it’s just as applicable to us grownups too. I would benefit immensely from the same screen time limits imposed on my children—not because I’m a nascent genius but because I don’t want to melt in the blue light or drown in a sludge bath of AI either. I too want time enough at last.
We underwent several significant home improvement projects recently. I say “underwent” because we didn’t do the actual work but instead paid contractors who knew what they were doing.
One of those contractors was a local handyman who brought in his wife to help with the multi-day project. Their kids are grown but they enjoyed interacting with our young’uns.
In a moment when the boys were being particularly rambunctious, I asked if she missed this phase of having young kids.
“I’m glad we lived it,” she said.
In the moment I took that to be a polite way of saying “I’m grateful we went through it but also that it’s over.” Which was probably accurate to an extent. But I see it now as a richer sentiment: to be glad you got to experience something even though it was challenging, and that you really lived it—not just suffered through.
We have one of those all-in-one turntables that plays vinyl, CDs, Bluetooth, and the radio. One day my wife started putting on our local jazz station, WDCB 90.9 FM (“Chicago’s Home for Jazz”) and it’s been a nice burst of smooth vibes when we want a change from our usual rotation of kids music. I could always find something to play from my digital or vinyl collection of jazz records, but sometimes it’s nice to let serendipity take the wheel.
Black Bag. Felt great to see an honest-to-god movie in the theater with a delightfully twisty plot and inspired casting that made me feel as warm and fuzzy as the film’s lighting. Wouldn’t be surprised to find this on my best-of-2025 list.
The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson. Turns out there was a lot of drama leading up to the Civil War…
Lincoln. Rewatched this after finishing The Demon of Unrest as a kind of Civil War bookend. Daniel Day-Lewis’s win for Best Actor might be the most deserving Oscar ever awarded.
The Pitt. Been watching this Max series that’s an unofficial ER reboot and my hat is off to anyone who chooses to become and remain an emergency nurse.
A Complete Unknown. I’m not a dyed-in-the-wool Dylan fan like many white dudes around my age and above, so perhaps that’s why I didn’t fall for this as hard as others, Chalamet’s excellent performance aside.
Parasite. Yes this is dramatic and tragic and twisted and all that, but it’s also so damn funny. “Leave it—free fumigation.” 💀💀💀
Mary Poppins Returns. No one can touch Julie Andrews’ singing voice, but Emily Blunt really nails the other Poppins vibes.
Richard Polt typecasting about why we need typewriters in our age of AI and authoritarianism:
When you choose to write with a typewriter, you are quixotically, nobly flying in the face of the assumption that good = fast, efficient, perfect, and productive. Type your gloriously imperfect, expending ineffiencient time and energy — and declare that you still care about human work, and that the process of creation and understanding still matters more to you than the slick products of the machines. …
As for authoritarianism, it is happy to use digital technology to watch us, punish us, and entice us. A soft totalitarianism, with hard pain for those who aren’t pacified by easy consumption and pointless posturing, is becoming the new model of political control. …
Again, typewriters offer one humble but real form of resistance. As in the days of samizdat behind the Iron Curtain, even in “the land of the free” there is a need to find words without compromising with the digital systems that are increasingly under tyrannical control.
Tyrannies have always failed to contain lovers and writers. We must love to write, and write what we love — with the writing tools that we love.
I just finished reading Erik Larson’s latest book The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War. It’s about the military and diplomatic machinations surrounding the Fort Sumter crisis, including South Carolina’s role in fomenting secession and Lincoln’s journey to Washington D.C. and the presidency.
I saved a couple passages that I enjoyed for various reasons. Here’s one featuring General Winfield Scott, who was in charge of defending D.C. and the Capitol building during the contested electoral count process in February 1861:
The throng outside grew annoyed at being barred from entry and began firing off obscenities like grapeshot. If words could kill, one observer wrote, “the amount of profanity launched forth against the guards would have completely annihilated them.” Much of this tirade was aimed at General Scott. It had no effect. He vowed that anyone who obstructed the count would be “lashed to the muzzle of a twelve-pounder and fired out of the window of the Capitol.” Scott would then “manure the hills of Arlington with the fragments of his body.”
Love that FAFO energy from Scott. There was also this bit about President Buchanan’s Secretary of War John Floyd:
By now the war secretary had become a deeply controversial figure and an embarrassment to President Buchanan, which was saying something, since the administration itself was widely considered to be an embarrassment. Floyd was deemed by many to be a paragon of corruption, and a traitor to boot.
He had become embroiled in a financial scandal dating to 1858 that resulted in $870,000 in federal funds—equivalent to over thirty-two million in twenty-first-century dollars—being looted from the U.S. Treasury and the Department of Interior.
An embarrassing, corrupt administration with a controversial cabinet member looting federal funds? History doesn’t repeat itself at all…
And this exchange between General Beauregard and Major Whiting, who was scrambling to prepare the Confederate contingent surrounding Fort Sumter:
The island’s batteries had been ordered to be “in readiness,” Whiting wrote, but all he saw was confusion. “We are ready, perhaps, to open fire, but we are not ready to support it,” he told Beauregard on Thursday, April 11. “For God’s sake have this post inspected by yourself, or some one else competent, before you open fire. I am alone here, as you know, and heretofore have been exclusively occupied with the construction of batteries.” One newly arrived contingent of men was “helter-skelter,” he complained; all were volunteers. “There are no regulars here at all.” Beauregard tried to calm him. “Things always appear worst at first sight when not perfect,” he wrote. “We cannot delay now.”
Some mindful leadership from Beauregard right there. Too bad he was a traitor!
Also wanted to shoutout this quote from Captain Abner Doubleday, who was part of the Union garrison defending Fort Sumter:
Doubleday led the first group to the guns in the casemates that faced the Iron Battery at Cummings Point on Morris Island, due south. “In aiming the first gun fired against the rebellion I had no feeling of self-reproach,” he wrote, “for I fully believed that the contest was inevitable, and was not of our seeking.” As Doubleday saw it, he was fighting for the survival of the United States. “The only alternative was to submit to a powerful oligarchy who were determined to make freedom forever subordinate to slavery.”
While working from home the other day I had my work laptop out at the dining table with my six year old nearby. Since I’m usually hidden away in my home office, this quickly piqued his curiosity. I let him type out a short email I had to send, then opened up Paint and showed him how to use the mouse to select a color and draw.
The result is below. If you squint you can make out his attempt at a smiley face in the lower left corner:
Glad to see MS Paint live on in the next generation…
According to research by Neil Patel, 59.2% of traffic to blogs is driven by SEO. It’s the biggest single driver of traffic by far.
Neil found that if your site is 10 or more years old, 44% percentage of the pages on your site could be considered “irrelevant” by search engines. The more irrelevant pages your site has, the more it suffers in search ranking.
In other words, Google doesn’t understand what makes for good publishing on the web.
My question is: irrelevant how, and according to whom? Google’s almighty black box of an algorithm that has already changed in the time it took to write this sentence?
Imagine if your photo library was subjected to the same treatment. “Google thinks this cool photo I took is irrelevant, so I guess I’ll delete it even though it captures a meaningful moment in my life.”
I’ve been blogging for 18 years and not once in that time have I considered the SEO implications of my writing. I don’t even look at view stats. I suppose that could be considered a luxury since my blog is not a business and I don’t have a large enough readership to capitalize on. I’m also fully aware that my full archive of 1,200+ posts to date are important to no one but me.
Google is about now now now. That’s its business, but it’s none of mine. Blogging is about now and then. The experience of capturing what’s on your mind now and making connections with what’s come before.
I echo CJ’s advice:
Don’t worry about what Google wants. It’ll change tomorrow. As will Google’s dominance.
Post as much or as little as you want. It’s your place.
Post whatever keeps you interested and publishing for the long term.
Post whatever helps you build a stronger connection with your audience.
Looking back at your archives helps you re-discover connections you’ve forgotten. It helps your readers do the same.
I can’t remember where I saw the recommendation, but I decided to try The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett Graff and found it a riveting read. Heavy, of course, but also very illuminating about how quickly and widely the September 11 attacks rippled beyond downtown Manhattan, affecting a lot of people in different ways and different places almost all at once.
I was about to turn 14 at the time. I saw the footage like everyone else and understood it to be a significant event, but I couldn’t have known all the details of the day that the book brings to life all these decades later.
For that reason I’m very grateful to Graff for this monumental work of oral history, which captures the kaleidoscopic nature of the crisis by weaving testimonies from the myriad people affected by the attacks, including:
people in the World Trade Center and Pentagon who managed to evacuate after the planes crashed (and even some who somehow survived the subsequent collapses)
firefighters and first responders at Ground Zero
people desperately waiting to find out whether their loved ones had survived
transcripts of calls and voicemails from passengers of the hijacked planes
air traffic controllers managing the unprecedented grounding of all aircraft across the United States
fighter pilots ordered to intercept Flight 93 and take it down by any means necessary, including crashing into it midair
Dick Cheney and White House staffers managing the crisis from an underground bunker
Congressional representatives and staffers scrambling away from the Capitol with reports of more hijacked airplanes on the way
Staffers with President Bush in Florida when they got news of the attacks, then on Air Force One as they flew between military bases before heading back to D.C.
One recurring motif that really stuck out to me was how often life or death came down to sheer luck, both good and bad.
One man had to leave his desk high up in the World Trade Center to retrieve a guest in the lobby, which allowed him to escape after the crash and avoid certain death. Another woman was standing at the copier instead of her desk when a plane struck and thus survived when all her other office mates nearby perished. And one firefighter fleeing one of the collapsing Twin Towers alongside a colleague turned one way and lived, while his colleague turned the other way and didn’t.
Call it luck or something else—we’re all a split-second away from death, often without knowing it. The Only Plane in the Sky honors those who were unlucky that day, and serves as a sobering reminder for the rest of us about the fragility of life and the extraordinary bravery of ordinary people.
In what amounts to a positively glacial pace, I finally managed to fill up the small pocket Moleskine notebook I’ve been carrying around for seven years:
It was given to me by my friend Jason, an artist who founded Geocommunetrics and gave it this unique cover design:
It was tucked in my backpack for most of that time and proved useful here and there for personal and professional notes, checklists, and all the other miscellany these small yet mighty tools are good for.
Why so long though? As much as I’d love to be a dedicated notebook person, I’m just more prone to using Apple Notes and other digital notetaking methods because my phone is always with me or nearby. Plus the ability to keyword search. Keeping a notebook and pencil within the same vicinity, accessibility, and consistency feels like a heavier lift—not to mention handwriting being a more time-consuming than quickly tapping things out.
I say this as someone who deeply believes in analog tech and the preservation of tangibility, whether through typewriters or vinyl or indeed paper. I also understand all the psychological benefits of journaling and handwriting, and every time I look back at what I do manage to get down on paper I’m grateful for having that in my own historical record. But that hasn’t been quite enough for me to get over the cognitive hump of making it a daily practice.
People who use paper consistently while also having a digital job: how do you do it? What methods have you found useful and why?
This week we said goodbye to our washing machine, which according to its serial number was manufactured nearly 35 years ago in September 1990. For context: Goodfellas had just released in theaters, Saddam Hussein had just invaded Kuwait, and I’d just turned three years old. Time flies.
Its sudden demise has made for a challenging five days without being able to do laundry, but I can’t be mad given how it chugged along far past its expected lifespan. Like its matching dryer (which knock on wood continues to chug along), the washer was the oldest of our home’s old-guard appliances that we’ve been replacing since moving in nearly six years ago. No doubt the new appliances are more energy efficient and all that, but they’re not built to last like these beastly machines of old.
Farewell, you wonderful old Building & Loan Maytag.
Not Xwitter. I already stopped using the platform but only recently did the full delete. Grateful to the new ownership for making it easy to kick the habit after 15 years.
Not Goodreads. Did the full delete of my Goodreads account as well. This might seem counterintuitive for a librarian and bookish person, but over the last few years I noticed myself using it less and less and didn’t feel the need to keep up with its archaic UI as Amazon lets it slowly die.
Letterboxd. On the other hand, it’s a pleasure to use and keep up with what’s happening on Letterboxd among my fellow movie freaks. I’d say it’s the only good social network these days.
Not a random Google Sheets app script. Related to all this book- and movie-logging stuff, I’d been using a random Google App Script for my logbook in Google Sheets that I found online so I could include multiple tags for each book or movie. But I discovered recently that Google (finally!) added native support for multi-select dropdowns and thus was happy to ditch the script.
Though I usually do a Top 10 with some honorable mentions, once this year’s list of honorable mentions creeped past 10 movies I figured why not just do a full top 20? The more movies the merrier.
Here are the 2024 dramas, documentaries, dystopias, debuts, and other delights I dug.
A funny and sometimes wistful sci-fi remix of When Harry Met Sally that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Zosia Mamet and Aristotle Athari are a winning pair and fun hang as the will-they-won’t-they leads.
19. Peacock
Echoing the deliciously deadpan humor of Force Majeure, this debut feature from German filmmaker Bernhard Wenger follows a man so talented at blending into the fictions of his work that when his personal life begins to suffer, his ensuing existential crisis has him questioning his entire reality. It’s a darkly absurd and deliberately paced dramedy that serves as a wake-up call to people pleasers everywhere.
18. Mom & Dad’s Nipple Factory
A really nice discovery thanks to the chance to interview the director Justin Johnson. Spotlighting Johnson’s parents and the secretive prosthetic nipple business they started after his mom’s breast cancer diagnosis, this documentary also reckons with his conservative Christian upbringing in Wisconsin and subsequent religious deconstruction in a wholesome and humane way. Really nice portrait of family, faith, and life’s contradictions.
17. The Greatest Night in Pop
I’d heard “We Are the World” like everyone else, and knew vaguely that it was sung by famous musicians. But until watching this documentary I had no idea about its background or the logistics of making it happen, let alone the insane star wattage it harnessed in one room. Fascinating to watch the dynamics play out among these very different artists and personalities during an all-nighter for the ages.
16. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
We told our six year old we were going to watch the new Wallace & Gromit movie. “I don’t want to,” he said, “they are far too silly.” We still watched it, and guess who was laughing and totally locked in the whole time? Me, that’s who. And also our six year old. Anyway, any Aardman joint should automatically win Best Picture given how insanely difficult it is to make any stop-motion animated feature film, let alone a great one.
15. Conclave
How Edward Berger turned ecclesiastical proceedings into a pulpy, beautifully shot mystery thriller better than it has rights to be shows just how powerful cinema is as an art form. And watching Ralph Fiennes play a character who’s basically the opposite of his role as Gustave in The Grand Budapest Hotel shows just how compelling powerful actors can be.
14. Rebel Ridge
Jeremy Saulnier knows how to make a damn thriller. In this latest pot-boiler, a former Marine has his bag of cash unjustly seized by local police, instigating his one-man revenge plot where with every slight escalation and provocation the stakes get higher and your heart beats faster. Civil asset forfeiture reform now!
13. Dìdi
I like the Google summary of this: “an impressionable 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy learns what his family can’t teach him: how to skate, how to flirt, and how to love his mom.” As someone who was only a few years older than Dìdi was in the movie, I found much of this both very relatable (hello AIM and MySpace Top 8 and Motion City Soundtrack needle-drops) and also painful to realize how much I saw my own 13-year-old self in Dìdi’s adolescent angst.
12. September 5
A worthy ancestor of Spotlight in how it dramatizes a real-life moment of media ethics and production colliding with a dark chapter in history, in this case the hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. For me the tactility of the period technology—analog phones, walkie-talkies, film cameras, buttons and knobs, typewriters, hand-lettered TV chyrons—made this even better and more thrilling than it would have been if set during our current digital era.
11. Challengers
I rather flippantly called this “your typical sports movie featuring a throuple of sweaty, smirking scumbags swirling into a sadomasochistic, psychosexual spiral.” Which I think is accurate but also doesn’t make clear how fun and funny this movie is in spite of (or rather because of) that. If tennis is a relationship, as Zendaya’s Tashi claims in the movie, then this tennis/relationship movie is worth the commitment.
10. My Old Ass
How many boxes did this check for me? Let me count: ☑ Earnest, bittersweet coming-of-age dramedy ☑ Light magical realism ☑ Frequency and Arrival homage ☑ Includes Little Women motif ☑ Birkenstocks-wearing character named Chad Can’t wait to see what star Maisy Stella and writer-director Megan Park do next.
9. Here
To paraphrase Doc Brown, the critics crapping on this Robert Zemeckis adaptation of Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel (one of the best books of the 2010s) just weren’t thinking fourth-dimensionally. We live in time, people! You can’t fathom how much has happened throughout human history and prehistory on the very patch of earth you’re standing on now because it’s awesomely unknowable! The movie lovingly portrays the book’s intra-panel time-jumping, its timeless themes of life and death and love and loss, and its deft intertwining of the everyday and eternal—all while rocking an Alan Silvestri score that goes right for the jugular. And I’m here for that.
8. Dune: Part Two
I couldn’t see Dune in theaters so I was happy to be able to see this one on a big screen. It’s a sequel that very much stands on its own as a stunningly rendered experience while simultaneously bearing structural burdens that middle sequels often have. Still, anytime I can see big, weird, tactile, religion-infused spectacle like this is a good time for me.
7. Good One
In stark contrast to the bombast of Dune: Part Two, India Donaldson’s debut feature about a teenaged girl on a hiking trip with her dad and his friend thrives in the smallest gestures and pauses and looks—in what’s said and left unsaid. It’s Reichardt-core to the core: quietly portentous, nature-drenched, and oh so gently damning of parental obtusity.
6. Saturday Night
It’s hard not to be impressed by how Jason Reitman pulled off depicting in real time the 90 minutes before the first episode of SNL in 1975, complete with spot-on portrayals of the original cast and other figures. In that way it’s like the groovy ‘70s love child of Steve Jobs and Birdman. (It’s also a fascinating double feature with September 5, the other 2024 film set backstage of a seismic mid-‘70s television event.) More fables about the beautifully chaotic process of making art, please and thank you!
5. Civil War
One criterion for making my best-of lists is being something I just couldn’t shake. That’s definitely true for Alex Garland’s latest, which depicts a United States embroiled in a violent civil war and a crew of journalists trying to interview the embattled president. I find the criticism about the ideological vagueness of the different political factions to be beside the point—what matters is how different individuals choose to engage with the turmoil, from a young photojournalist compelled to capture frontline combat to a store employee blithely dismissing the conflict altogether. Let’s hope this doesn’t become more prescient than it already is.
4. Nickel Boys
Sure-handed, tough-minded, clear-eyed, and full-hearted, RaMell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel takes cinema’s power as an empathy machine to the extreme with its first-person POV perspective, strapping us along for a turbulent yet touching ride along with two friends weathering life at a Florida boarding school. I found this to be in accidental conversation with the next movie on this list, both being searing 2024 films that dramatize the triumphs and travails of mid-20th century Black life.
3. Soundtrack to a Coup d’État
As a lover of history and jazz, this documentary spotlighting famous ‘50s jazz musicians and their role in the Cold War geopolitics surrounding Congo’s push for independence bebopped me right on the nose. It plays out much like a jazz track, with different people trading solos and the frequent context-setting intertitles like punchy drum riffs and an ensemble of colorful characters making the whole thing sing. As sharp and smooth as a Miles Davis solo, and a revelation for the documentary form.
2. Anora
From Tangerine (a favorite of 2015) to The Florida Project (my #1 of 2017) to Red Rocket (a favorite of 2022) and now this Palme d’Or-winning tale of a Brooklyn sex worker’s misadventures with a Russian oligarch’s son, Sean Baker has become American cinema’s most reliable anthropologist of the restless strivers and scrappy survivors at society’s margins. How this turns from high-flying Cinderella story to shambolic chase movie to gut-wrenching character study feels like a crossover of Scorsese with the Dardenne brothers, but also a continuation of Baker’s characteristically compassionate yet clear-eyed treatment of even his most challenging characters.
1. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
If Fury Road was the New Testament of George Miller’s Mad Max saga, bringing redemption to both the story’s characters and the action genre itself, then Furiosa is its Old Testament: brutal, beguiling, mercurial, and thrillingly epic. Call it a Pentateuch for a new (post-apocalyptic) age. Also really interesting to rewatch this right before another Fury Road rewatch as it provided the backstory to Furiosa’s journey and the events of Fury Road that I didn’t have the first (several) times watching it. In that way Fury Road felt more like the sequel/conclusion to Furiosa than vice versa, and made me appreciate both even more. This whole saga is a really rich text on gender, power, politics, and what we do to survive.
Still haven’t seen: Nosferatu, A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist, All We Imagine As Light, Wicked
Non-2024 movies I watched and enjoyed: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Populaire, Little Children, Green Room, The Thing
Happy 6th birthday to our firstborn! We celebrated by going out to breakfast and then bringing him bowling for the first time. He got second place with a bumper-assisted 85, while I snuck into first place with a well-timed strike at 95. While it had been about a decade since I’ve played, I also have just never been a good bowler. But that’s OK because it’s still a great thing to do for a date of any kind.
I’m happy to report that the state of one of America’s longtime third places was strong, with a bunch of retirees and families at the bowling alley on a weekday morning. Also happy to report the style and amenities were firmly stuck in 1993, including an Addams Family pinball machine:
During a recent songwriting session with my five year old (i.e. in the six minutes before he got distracted by something else), he improvised these lyrics while I strummed my guitar and took notes:
There’s a maple tree in the meadow And every winter it’s not making progress But in the spring, the tree starts growing away And once you know It’s taking so Long to grow Then you know There’s a maple tree close
Twigs in the grass And down below You might know Something slow It’s a mole. Yes it’s a mole, ohhhh What do you see under the snow? Why it’s a mole! So give it a dole It’s hard to be a mole
