I’m having dinner with my boys and we’re practicing “guy banter”. You know, that good natured yet abusive that eventually always gets us in trouble but if it weren’t for that we wouldn’t communicate at all sort of thing? Anyway, my younger son asks me if he can kill the older one. So I told him I’d give him a dollar for it.

At this point the older one protests that his brother always gets permission to kill him, but he never gets to kill his brother.

“Well,” say I, “when the Angel of Death passed over Egypt, there was a reason only the first-born were taken. They are simply too obnoxious to live.”

He shrugs and says, “That’s why I always paint lamb’s blood over my door.”

I almost fell out of my chair, as I never remotely dreamed he would know the story. So I told him how proud I was that he knew that, and asked if he had finally started listening in Sunday School.

But he confesses that no, it’s not church. They did a unit on Egypt in school last year and they showed some feature length cartoon about Moses. He then goes on to describe the chariot races between Moses and some pharaoh dude where they rode up the sphinx and right down its nose.

At this point I began wondering if the film’s director hadn’t confused the Book of Exodus with the filmography of Charlton Heston. My mind wandered for a bit to ponder whether there was a connection between Manna and Soylent Green. But I really didn’t want to go there.

So much for proud… if it weren’t for cartoons, my kids wouldn’t know nuthin’.