Tag: sesame street

Well my day’s made (again)

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Because this .GIF is everything good in the world:

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Three times is a pattern

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Television10 Comments

You might recall my post “In which my wife destroyed my childhood– and you can too!,” wherein I discovered that the Sesame Street characters on a blanket that my grandmother had made for me and which I had owned since I was a toddler were all reading books that referenced sex or erotica.  Yes, that happened.  Go ahead, click the link.

I would just like to point out that my son and I were watching a newish Sesame Street episode this morning, and I damn near did a spit-take of my coffee during the opening bit, which featured Bert reading a book called… Fifty Shades of Oatmeal.

This shit is not an accident.  🙂

On family structure and Sesame Street

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Television6 Comments

34_elmo_gordon_aby_big_bird_richard_termine_copy

Something hit me the other day as my son watched his Elmo toilet training video for the three thousandth time. We don’t see a lot of the Muppets’ home lives, but what we do see is generally pretty traditional.  Baby Bear lives with his parents.  Abby Cadabby talks about her mom all the time.  Prairie Dawn tells a story about underwear shopping (no, really) with her mommy on the DVD.  Cookie Monster has referenced both his mommy and his daddy, Grover has a mommy and a daddy too.  Elmo definitely lives with his mommy and his daddy, although I suspect the Muppet he calls mommy is secretly daddy’s second wife.

Basically all the Muppets have at least one parent around who they refer to every now and again.  Generally it’s a mommy, but there’s always at least one.

Except for Big Bird.

I have seen four thousand episodes of Sesame Street in the last two years.  I cannot recall a single time where Big Bird referred to either of his parents or they appeared on screen.  Who does Big Bird talk about?  Granny Bird.  His parents are nowhere to be seen.

And who does Big Bird actually live with?  Gordon and Susan.  Or, at least, he lives in his nest– which is directly outside their window.  When Big Bird needs something at night– and this has been the focus of multiple episodes– it’s Gordon and Susan who take care of him.  Gordon and Susan, by the way, who already have an adopted son, and whose nephew  Chris lives with them for some reason now.

Guys, Big Bird is a foster kid.  Am I the only one who never realized this?  Without visiting a wikipedia page, I mean?  Which I only just did?

Don’t misunderstand me: Sesame Street has always sort of put themselves at the forefront of social tolerance and showing the world as being a diverse place, and they’ve never been shy about showing different kinds of people and different kinds of kids and different kinds of families.  I’m just surprised that they’ve been stealthing this for effectively the entire lifespan of one of America’s favorite children’s characters.  That Wiki entry is hella more detailed than my sudden realization; Big Bird’s never been portrayed as having a mom and a dad, and Gordon and Susan are clearly meant to be his caretakers right now.  He’s a foster kid.  Why hide it?

Anyway, I thought it was interesting.

Stuff what I wanna do in 2014

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Uncategorized, Writing5 Comments

I don’t do resolutions. Resolutions are promises; promises get broken. That doesn’t say that I don’t have projects and goals; sometimes I get to them, sometimes I don’t. Last year I did a post like this at the previous incarnation of this blog over at Xanga; I’ve got that post archived somewhere, I think, but I remember the two big ones were to write more and to cook more often. Both of those goals were definitely achieved; I write just about every damn day here and I’m a much better cook than I was at the beginning of the year.

So what’s on deck for 2014?

Keep writing. This ought not to be a problem; getting back into regular blogging again was one of the best things about 2013; I’m just flat-out happier when I’m writing a lot. As always, I want to bend more toward fiction, but I always want to write more fiction. That’s not new.

Still a writing goal, but a bit more specific:

Self-publish Skylights officially. This book is already written although it could probably use one more editing pass. Technically it’s available on Lulu– I put it there so I could have them print one author’s copy and buy it for myself– but I want it on Amazon. Plans are in the works to commission a local artist friend to do the cover if I get the teacher creativity grant I applied for earlier this year. I may suck it up and do that anyway. Even if I don’t get the grant, I want this book available on Amazon by the end of the year.

Finish the bathroom renovation in a timely fashion. The boy’s home sick with me right now, which has slowed us down a bit, but I still think we can get the tub done by the end of break. The fear is that once that’s done the rest of the stuff will just sit in the damn living room for months because of the amount of work to be done and the lack of several contiguous days off of work. I’m going to DC over Spring Break with my kids, so it’s not like I can even back it up to that. MLK weekend is gonna be real busy around here.

Read big books. Spending last year trying to read 200 books led to me focusing on shorter fiction. I miss nonfiction a lot right now, and I’ve got a lot of stuff built up that’s gonna take me a while– for example, a 2600-page no-that-is-not-a-typo biography of Abraham Lincoln that is so big I can’t figure out how to read it in a physical sense– ie, how to hold the book while I read it. I’m reading it this year. I’m about 60% through Gone with the Wind right now, which is over a thousand. I also want to read through the Wheel of Time books; there are something like twelve or thirteen of them and they’re all close to or over a thousand pages each. I read about half the series before realizing how much Jordan had left to write and then bailed– and then Jordan died, and Brandon Sanderson took over, but now that they’re finally all written I can actually finish reading them.

Other reading goals: 1) Read every Stephen King book, in order (I’ve already started this, but The Stand is next, which is– again– a million pages long, so I put it off; and 2) I’m 1/3 of the way through The List and I want to be much closer to finishing that by the end of the year. That oughtta keep me busy.

(Have I talked about The List on here? I don’t remember. I’ll fill y’all in later if you want to know.)

Make it to Bloomington for a weekend sometime this summer. Also, Louisville, where I have some friends who I haven’t seen in forever. I haven’t been to Bloomington since 2005; it’s one of my favorite cities and it’s crazy that it’s been that long since I’ve been there. In addition, I’d like to go somewhere– and I’ll leave that generic– that I’ve never been to before. The boy’s old enough now that we can travel with him. Just come up with a place and go. (NOTE: This is the least likely of all goals thus far to actually happen. Overcoming my own inertia is insanely challenging.)

Buy a decent telescope, finally. Use it.

Learn piano, or at least learn a few songs I’m comfortable with. This is more achievable than it sounds because we actually own a piano; my wife plays. I failed spectacularly at learning ukulele this year, but I have some reason to believe that achieving at least moderate competence on piano will be easier.

Be a better teacher during the second half of the school year than I was during the first. Blah blah blah teaching sucks because reasons. Stop whining; do better anyway.

Watch less Sesame Street. Because gaaaah.

I’ll likely add to this as the day goes on. Feel free to check back ceaselessly if you like.

Just overheard on Sesame Street

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Television2 Comments

“Elmo doesn’t think Elmo’s tongue is long enough to taste back there!”

I’m going to hell.

In which I kvetch about stupid things

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Parenting1 Comment

…so, just like every post, really.

The boy’s current YouTube obsession is a video, not even a minute long, where Elmo is playing with a beluga whale, and it is a horrible, horrible video. First, it requires Elmo to twice ask Winston the beluga whale to “please show Elmo what love is,” which is absolutely completely creepy if you are possessed of a remotely filthy mind, and I swear to you that the filth in my brain has made run-of-the-mill perverts run screaming and enter monasteries. Also, in the last shot of the clip, Elmo is leaning over the whale’s pool so that he can receive belugish lovin’, and it is painfully apparent that they’ve positioned his ass off-screen so that the puppeteer can actually make him move. You can see every part of him but the back of his ass and it’s really weird and distracting and creepy.

On the plus side, he– the boy, not Elmo– has learned how to use the remote for the Apple TV to repeat his YouTube videos, so he no longer requires us to repeat the video for him. On the minus side, since he knows how to do this, his new move is to start the video, run out of the room to do something else, then run back in a minute later to restart the video– which means he isn’t actually watching it but I fucking have to because if he comes back in and the video is off he screams.

Did I mention that the video is only a minute long and I have to listen to the sentence “Oh please, show Elmo what love is” twice during that single minute?

I’m losing my goddamn mind, folks.

Currently occupying more braincycles than it ought to: whether I’m buying a PS4 or an Xbox One. I mean that in two senses; first, whether I’m buying one at all, and second, which one I’m buying if I’m buying one. This is a stupid thing to be wondering about for a wide variety of reasons, chief among which being the fact that I’ve barely touched my Xbox 360 since having Paul Revere riding bitch behind me and calling out incomprehensible directions for me to avoid British soldiers caused me to stop playing Assassin’s Creed 3. Combine that with the fact that the game I’d bought before AC3, Bioshock: Infinite, was almost completely devoid of anything interesting and it’s been forever since I tried to play anything on it.

Most of my gaming lately has been on my iPad, honestly; and it’s been playing Baldur’s Gate, which came out when I was in high school or early college or something like that. I could blame the boy if I wanted to; certainly fatherhood has cut down on both my inclination to and my time for gaming, and the fact that I’ve been spending almost all of my leisure time reading in a frantic and pointless attempt to get through 200 books this year hasn’t helped either. But I don’t like the idea of not owning a gaming console. It bothers me. But the Xbox One has a number of features that bother me rather intensely. For example, everything they’re saying the Kinect can do is something that I absolutely do not want a device in my living room to do, and the damn thing makes the system cost $100 more than the PS4. And I don’t really want a PS4 because, well, I skipped the PS3 and I think of myself as an Xbox guy. But I’m mad at Microsoft and the Xbox One is stupid. But I want a new console. But there aren’t really any games I want to play for them anyway. And it’s not like I can find one in a store. But I like shopping for futile things. But I don’t want to spend the money! But I’m frustrated and want retail therapy.(*)

I love it when I’m stupid.

Blah blah blah wank wank wank first world problems. I know. But it was either this or post about work, and the last couple of days require some thinking before I write about them. Maybe tomorrow. I’ll have eight hours at OtherJob and it’s supposed to be cold and snowing so I’ll have plenty of time.

(* Also? Thinking about buying a PS3. I want to play The Last of Us in the worst possible way and if the PS4 was actually backwards-compatible that feature might sell me the system all by itself. And I figure by the time I’ve worked my way through the PS3’s backlog of good titles that were system-exclusive, which will all be cheap by now, the PS4 will have enough of a library that it might be worth buying. Which… this is probably the most sensible approach, which is why I’ll likely not do it.)

In which my wife destroyed my childhood– and you can too!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting9 Comments

Both my grandmothers were crafty people.  Not in the “sneaky” sense– although at least one of them probably qualified in that sense as well– but in the sense that they liked to make stuff.  I have all sorts of stuff around the house that my maternal grandmother made, and a couple of quilts that my paternal grandmother made.

One of them, due to overuse– I literally slept under the thing for fifteen years, and it’s gotten a bit gnarly– is permanently inside a duvet cover because there’s only so long a teenage boy can sleep under the same blanket without staining occurring, no matter how diligent you are about washing the thing.  One of them had Sesame Street characters on it, and while it’s gotten dragged out when we needed extra blankets for years, it’s mostly been on ice for a couple of decades or so.

My mom, who has had custody of it for a while, gave it back to us a couple of weeks ago, since she figured the boy was likely to appreciate it.  And it’s a cute blanket– Big Bird, Grover, Cookie Monster, and Bert are on it, all reading books, and the background is the alphabet.

Again: I have had this thing since I was a toddler.  And my grandmother made it.

The blanket, right now, is– rather ignominiously, I ought to point out– being used to cover up a couple of computers that I slaved over the other day so that they’re not immediately obvious from outside our front window.  My wife walked past it this morning– all three of us were in the dining room for some reason– and said “Wow, this thing is filthy.”

“Wash it, then,” I thought, but didn’t say.  “It’s been in a bloody box for like ten years, and it’s probably 35 years old.  It’s not gonna be pristine.”

Then she points at the titles of the books that Cookie Monster and Bert are reading.  (Big Bird is reading a seeds catalog, and the title of Grover’s book is not legible, as he’s lying down on top of it.)

And, wham, just like that, childhood destroyed:

photo-2You either get it or you don’t, I think, so allow me to provide two helpful Amazon links:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Joy-Sex-Revised-Completely/dp/1400046149

and

http://www.amazon.com/Story-Translated-French-Sabine-dEstree/dp/B001A80P4W/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1384612616&sr=1-2

Oh.  My.  Fucking.  God.

So, here’s the million dollar question, right?  It ain’t like Grandma designed the material from scratch.  She bought it by the yard from a bolt and then sewed the quilts together.  My mom and dad clearly never got the joke.  There’s no way; they’d have mentioned it by now.  They can’t have been waiting thirty damn years for their kid to figure it out.  And I know for damn sure neither of my parents have read The Story of O.

(I have.)

Did Grandma?

I have at least one funny story involving my grandmother buying something without checking it out completely, one I might tell later in another post, that has resulted in one of my most treasured, if inexplicable, possessions.  And she died while I was in college, so I never really got to know her as an adult.  But, y’know, I kinda remember her having a bit of a salty sense of humor.  And she was a nurse, so it’s not like she was squeamish.

(Oh god just noticed the looks on their faces)

I have moments where I intensely miss my grandparents; none of them are around any longer, and I lost my grandfather– her husband– when I was somewhere between four and six, so I never really knew him at all.  I miss my mom’s dad on interestingly regular occasions– Veteran’s Day, for example, and Christmas– his birthday.  I miss my mom’s mother whenever I pick up a book, or look at the Bunka dragon hanging over the fireplace in my family room.

My other grandma sneaks up on me.  Reliably, I miss her on my birthday– she used to always take my brother and I out for lunch and to go shopping, just the two of us, every year, until I idiotically decided I was too old for it, which probably happened sometime around high school.  But other times?  Wham.

This is a “wham” moment.  There’s literally nothing I want more right now than to be able to talk to her for five minutes to find out whether she knew what a filthy, filthy thing she had her grandsons sleeping under for years.

And I kinda hope the answer’s yes.  🙂

Gotta go.  Crying.

Make up your mind, boy

On By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

Managed to get, like, fifteen errands run on the way home from work today, which has me feeling Awesomely Productive and Ready to Face the World… just in time to get home and have little left to do other than take out the garbage and wait for the boy to go to bed so that MLW and I can watch Walking Dead tonight. Right now I’m sitting on the couch typing this on the iPad while cycling through Sesame Street YouTube videos for the boy.

Full episodes don’t really do it for him anymore; it’s easier to select one of the few dozen songs we have in our YouTube history and watch it a dozen times, then insist that it’s time for “different singers.” Now, “different singers” could mean anything, but the one thing that “different singers” does not mean is the video you think it does. And he doesn’t seem to know what “yeah” means, either.

“Do you want to watch Elmo’s song?”

“Yeah!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah!”

“So I can play Elmo’s song. And you’re sure that’s the one you want to watch.”

“Yes.”

Daddy begins to play Elmo’s song. Screaming ensues. “DIFFERENT SINGERS!”

Ah, so… not that one, then. Rinse, wash, and repeat… forever. Even if he specifically requests something by name you can’t assume that he actually wants to watch that. It’s a ruse.

Speaking of ruses: He’s decided he likes Archer, of all the goddamn things in the world, which may make us the greatest parents in the known universe but probably actually makes us the worst parents in the world. Fun fact: the first season of Archer was on a loop while MLW was in labor. For many, many hours.

The nurses had absolutely no idea what to do with us.