The other Saturday morning I was flipping channels when I stumbled upon ABC and the Wonderful World of Disney, in particular a show called The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. These two are white tween twins who live with their mother in a hotel room and carry out a series of I suppose white tween twin exploits. This being Disney, there's some lesson learned along the way. Some lesson.

In this episode, one of the twins is sad because his twin brother is better than him at everything he does (by which he means sports, dancing etc). So his mom consoles him, "You get better grades". He replies, “Like that matters... I want to be good at something important”. To which the mom says, get this, "Dont worry, you'll find something, keep trying".

Before hearing this, in all my wisdom I'd thought she would, if not give him an earful, make him understand that grades do matter and that's the lesson he'll learn at the end. Just goes to show I underestimate the depths to which Disney can sink. Here's what really happens: after trying his hand at various things he fails at (here we're supposed to laugh), it turns out he's good at doing magic tricks. And that's the lesson: grades dont matter; you gotta keep trying to be good at something your age group agrees is cool (and btw, the Disney store has a magic starter kit).

But the real Disney phenomenon is Hannah Montana. This is a show about a tween girl who's a simple brunette by day (called Miley Cyrus, which is her real name), and a pop singer called Hannah Montana by night. Only a few people know she's the same person (Clark Kent took off his glasses, Miley Cyrus dons a blonde wig). And the sheer marketing genius part? There are real tours by Hannah Montana. This is such a big phenomenon that there are mothers calling talk shows saying scalped tickets are 3000 bucks, should I dip into our savings to send my daughter to the concert, I hate disappointing her.

The real clincher is this: Miley Cyrus cannot sing. She's not mediocre, she's terrible. Forget singing, she cant even talk properly. She keeps her mouth continuously open while talking so all her words run together and it feels like a continuous barrage of noise which is what it is. Here's an actual Miley Cyrus quote about a biography of Einstein: "It's really random but it was the biggest book in the bookstore and I was like I wanna show how smart I can be so that's what I got". Now say all that without closing your mouth.