"...it looks like all my dreams"

Another favorite picture book is The Big Orange Splot by Daniel Pinkwater. I love The Big Orange Splot and have a certain affection for Lizard Music, but in general, in life, Pinkwater irritates me. It's all that deliberate quirkiness, like in Hoboken Chicken Emergency. Ugh. He's not quite in that unreadable category - you know, the writers who give their characters "funny" names (like Horace Quillbottom McSprackle, which I just made up) to get cheap laughs. But he's close.
So I can't really account for my deep and abiding affection for Big Orange Splot, which I have read so many times that I can recite the first few pages verbatim (from "Mr. Plumbean lived on a street where all the houses were the same. He liked it that way..." up until the neighbor asks Mr. Plumbean to paint his house). Because when I thought, "hey, today I'll write about Big Orange Splot, I started by thinking, "hey, this book doesn't have any women". Well, I think there's a woman or two in the first picture, but they never get speaking parts. And yes, the book was written when single women didn't usually own their own houses, and yes, the absence of women doesn't necessarily mean anything negative, but still - I'd like to see my gender represented.
It's such a idealistic book! I'm glad that there aren't any local housing boards coming in and mandating that Mr. Plumbean's house stay the same color ("a neat street" would indicate one with a high property value, if the book were written by homeowners today). No one comes and mocks anyone else's dream - but everyone's dream is for a brightly painted, interestingly constructed house. My dream house is dark green or grey, and I fear Mr. Plumbean and his neighbors would turn me away for being too drab. (Then again, my SO and I think that the neighborhood in the Monkees' "Pleasant Valley Sunday" sounds, well, pleasant. We're not bothered, the way Micky and Co. were).
I think I'm just cranky today. My local library is celebrating "the heroes of 9/11" today. By "heroes", they really mean "victims" or "martyrs". They're explicit about remembering everyone who died in 9/11. There are certainlysome heroes among those who died, but dying in an act of terrorism doesn't automatically make one a hero. Calling victims heroes like that lessens the heroism of the real heroes out there. I heard children singing tonight, well-trained voices singing in to commemorate an event that (the current educational system, and current Administation being what it is) they may never understand properly.
Sigh. For what it's worth, some kids are shocked (and not in a good way) by the renovated houses on Mr. Plumbean's street.