The Desert Mermaid

Oh, man, you guys. There is a documentary about Carroll Spinney out!

ABOUT TIME.

No, seriously, you guys. Carroll Spinney is one of the finest actors ever to appear on TV, AND YOU ALL FUCKING LOVE HIM. He is awesome. I've said it before, but I still think Carroll Spinney is BRILLIANT. Not only can he act enough to make you cry like a goddamn baby, but he can do it in a giant sweaty yellow bird suit where he can only see what's going on through a TV monitor and his right arm is holding up a giant puppet head and moving it like an actual bird would while controlling the eyes with his pinky finger. Sometimes he even roller skates that way.

Carroll Spinney is BIG BIRD.

And even if you're one of those people who thinks Big Bird is annoying, well, 1) I do not understand you, but 2) he is also Oscar the Grouch, so you still love him.

I'd have liked to hear a few more stories about actually being Big Bird in the doc, but I'm just glad he's getting some recognition. Mad respect for that guy. Check out the documentary.


DISCUSSION QUESTION: When, if ever, did you realize that Big Bird's right arm is basically a sticker? It's on a string that loosely moves it to act as a counterweight to his left arm, but yeah, he's pretty good at hiding that it doesn't really move much.

Oh, my god. Scott Lynch gives us a brilliant summation of an excellent classic Sesame Street special: Against Big Bird, The Gods Themselves Contend In Vain.

My old library had a battered VHS copy of Don’t Eat The Pictures back in the day, and I swear we checked that shit out ALL THE TIME. It was awesome: as Lynch points out, we get to watch Big Bird aid a soul on its way to the afterlife and plead its case to the gods,* a thing that made complete sense to me at the time because OF COURSE Big Bird will defy the gods for you.** But he failed to mention the part where Cookie Monster teaches us that you should enjoy art with your eyes, by which I mean his shoulder angels have to admonish him to refrain from eating not only the priceless works of art in the museum, but also the MUMMIES.*** Yes, Cookie Monster has a crisis of conscience about whether he should eat the dried corpses of Ancient Egyptian pharaohs.

Tell me, when does Dora the Explorer ever deal with the real issues like this?


*Or, in small child terms, help a little kid find his parents again. These are the important things.

**Incidentally, I would like to submit that Carroll Spinney is one of the most badass actors on TV. Dude has spent forty goddamn years acting virtually blind inside a giant pressure cooker, he can motherfuckin' ROLLER SKATE while wearing giant three-toed foam feet, and somehow he manages to hide that Big Bird has a nonfunctioning right arm pretty effectively--took me years to notice. Also, he himself probably has a right arm like a California redwood. Or maybe an anaconda.

***Actual line from title song: “Mummy look yummy, but not for tummy!”

It’s that time again!

Remember when I was going through a medswitch and it was sucking and so I asked y’all to distract me? Well, I am not switching meds, but this week still sucks for its own reasons, and everything is making me nervous, and by god I need distracting again. So please, Internet, I appeal to you: DISTRACT ME.

Go ahead! It can be anything! Videos! Book recommendations! Dumb mindless Flash games! Blogs! GIFs! Trivia! Puzzles! Timesuck sites! Anything! JUST POST SOMETHING.

Here, I’ll get us started with distractions of my own:

The Food Timeline, on the history of food.

ARKive is an image database of the biological organisms of Earth. It is also blessed by my main man David Attenborough!

Torn World is a source of anxiety for me right now because it is a responsibility for me, but if you're not in the Land Of Neuroses you get things like sea monsters, the mysteriously tame Rainbow Rainforest, and huge shaggy unicorns. It's pretty damn cool, really.

And videos:



(I love the Two-Headed Monster so much, especially when you see how each head entertains itself "alone.")



Okay, your turn!

WHAT THE—do you mean to tell me that my reward for getting 100% in Donkey Kong Country Returns is that I now get to do all the levels again, only backwards in sudden death mode?!

Didn’t I see this exact scenario on Monsterpiece Theater?



Yeah. Color me Grover.

Hell with that. I’m switching to Epic Mickey.

Y’know, I never realized just how hard those DKC games were on the Super Nintendo. I was a stupid kid, so I merely accepted whatever they threw at me as How The Game Is, so I PLAYED THOSE GAMES until I beat them. Once again, I demonstrate determination and perseverance only in the completely useless realm of video games. If only I’d shown that kind of dedication in … well anything else, really, I would probably be running the world.

All right, all right! I’ll do the damn meme, Facebook. Yeesh. Pushy bastard.

25 Random Things About Me:

1. For me, some very strange words are intrinsically onomatopoeic—such as garnet, swelter, and bottle. It's an odd extra of the synesthesia, I guess.

2. I chose Kenya for study abroad because I was already studying Swahili. I was already studying Swahili because one day in high school I saw a book in the library that said Teach Yourself Swahili and I figured, why not? Life is just full of these little oddities.

3. I am a first degree black belt in tae kwon do. No, really. No, really.

4. When I was in elementary school I spent every single recess from third through fifth grade meandering around in circles on the school’s crummy little track. I was dreaming up story ideas. I never realized how weird this was. (In sixth grade I discovered that I could do odd jobs in the library at recess.)

5. I started conlanging for real at the age of 12 or 13 when I included a sentence in “Yoshese” in a Super Mario story I was writing. I believe the sentence was “They don’t call him ‘Fireball’ for nothing!”

6. When I was ten, I struck up a long-lasting friendship with a children’s book author because of my name.

7. At one point in my house we had three cats, a budgie, a rabbit, and intermittent frogs and goldfish.

8. According to my mom, I have a defective imaginary audience—that chorus of people we think is watching our every move and judging us. Mine rarely shows up, and when it does it’s after the fact. It makes me immune to self-consciousness most of the time, but it also puts people off.

9. Between the ages of about four and seventeen, I was the Human VCR. I could recite or sing almost everything you told me after hearing it once, and I can still recite everything I learned back then. This includes the entirety of “Yakko’s World,” Rockapella’s “Capital,” and songs I didn’t understand—I learned “Cielito Lindo” from a Speedy Gonzales cartoon, and could sing a song in French. The trick was to memorize the sounds, not the words themselves. Either normal brain development or antidepressants robbed me of the ability.

10. Kermit the Frog was my first crush. (I was four.)

11. I have skinny-dipped at night in a phosphorescent ocean.

12. My hip still sports a big old scar from the great rollover car crash I was in when I was six. I got out of my seatbelt for ten seconds to reach for some markers on our cross-country trip, and of course those ten seconds were the ones we crashed in. I was thrown from the car so violently that I blew the back doors open; I apparently skidded to a halt and shredded my right side. I woke up in a thorn bush and for the next six months was picking thorns and broken glass out of my scalp. But all my abrasions were superficial, and I didn’t even break any bones.

13. I used to play the stand-up bass in orchestra and jazz band in school. That got me involved in all sorts of crazy capers.

14. I am a tea snob and can tell you the correct temperature and brewing time for white, red, green, black, and herbal teas. People laugh at me until they realize that the tea I make tastes a helluva lot better because it’s done right.

15. I once threatened to steal Penn Jillette’s ponytail, until he pointed out there was no way I could reach it with our height discrepancy. I still plan to steal his house someday, though.

16. My birthday is International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

17. I’ve had malaria.

18. I have a huge crush on Dr. Henry McCoy from X-Men. My friend drew several comics in which she and I hounded him the way Twilight fans hound Robert Pattinson, although to my knowledge Twifans have not, so far, given the object of their affections a bubblebath in a big washpan in the front yard.

19. For years I had a “Padawan braid” at my left temple while I kept the rest of my hair short. People knew me as “the girl with the braid.”

20. Until I was 19, I had never seen an episode of Star Trek. Then Liz, my best friend in college, introduced me to it. Blame her.

21. Liz and I also started CSI Night our first year in college, which remained a weekly party over the next four years. Sometimes we actually even watched CSI.

22. I collect mermaids.

23. I know how to cast a piece of jewelry using the lost wax process.

24. I have had a theme song since before I was born, courtesy of my mom, who would put headphones on her pregnant stomach while she worked and pump in Annie Lennox’s “There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart).” According to her, I could recognize that song long before I noticed any other music.

25. I once got to be in the OR to watch a brain surgery. I was really enjoying it right up until I passed out.


Most of you with Facebook accounts have probably already been tagged 25 times, but if not consider yourself tagged. I like random facts about people!

“I’ll be damned! Oscar’s trash can is a TARDIS!”

 

Today’s quote brought to you by my new Sesame Street DVDs, in which it’s insisted that Oscar’s can is a 3½-room one even when he walks around carrying it.

 

Why yes, we’re having a Muppet fest here, why do you ask?
 

Random ETA: Way to go, Sir Pterry!

12. Favourite Christmas Movie?
Christmas Eve on Sesame Street. It has great songs and is spectacularly funny, with Oscar the Grouch falling down like 85 flights of stairs at one point and a “Gift of the Magi” parody and a song in ASL and a lot of little kids giving you their theories on Santa. The main storyline’s pretty sweet. And there is no Elmo.

Runner-up is, of course, The Muppet Christmas Carol, with Michael Caine playing the best Scrooge ever. I was impressed at how much of the actual Dickens they got in there (The Great Gonzo Charles Dickens himself even gives you a lot of the narrative, which is great stuff). The music is also terrific.

I also happen to love superhero cartoon Christmas episodes, because they are invariably cracktacular. The X-Men Animated one where Wolverine learns the True Meaning of Christmas, which seems to be donating blood to Morlocks, and we find out that Beast makes a spectacular cranberry glaze. The Justice League episode with the Martian Christmas carols, Flash’s desperate quest to get the last of the Awesome Gifts, the epic snowball fight between Green Lantern and Hawkgirl, and of course the nod to the fact that Batman hates Christmas. And the reason Batman hates Christmas, the best of all—“Christmas with the Joker,” in which the Joker holds people hostage, blows up trains and buildings, and takes over broadcasting systems in order to give Bats his Christmas present. (And the present itself is totally brilliant.) They don’t count as Christmas movies, but they are hilarious.

But that Sesame Street one … wow. Everyone should watch it. You want to cry every time Ernie sells Rubber Ducky in order to get the perfect gift for Bert. Man, that’s a good one.


Now, the happy: the ridiculous conversation I just had with lookingforwater in which we decided that Commander Riker would be the most hilarious drunk ever.  ("DATA WAS THAT YOUR DAUGHTER? OH SHIT SORRY ABOUT THAT. COULD SHE FEEL PAIN WHEN SHE DIED, DO YOU THINK? AND DUDE, WAS SHE 'FULLY FUNCTIONAL'?  WHAT DID I MISS WITH HER? TASHA SAID YOU WERE 'FULLY FUNCTIONAL'!  DUDE, YOU FUCKED TASHA!")

Oh, damn, old school Sesame Street is available on Netflix!

 

I will now confuse their recommendations algorithm even more.

 

Speaking of which, my sister and I both agree that if Obama weren’t around, our definite second choice for president would be Bob McGrath. Because who among us would not follow that man to the ends of the Earth and back? He’s got more qualifications than some candidates and current presidents I could name—not only does he know some Spanish, but he can play the piano, speak ASL, and sing in Japanese, and all evidence points to the conclusion that he can read ... can reeeead.* He can definitely count, so our economy is covered.  And it would absolutely improve foreign relations, because it’s damn near impossible not to like Bob: after about two minutes in a room with him, the leaders of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran would all be gathered around the piano for a sing-along.  Conservatives and liberals could all get behind Bob, because he is so damn nice. And I think we can safely say that the Department of Education would get a much better deal than it’s getting right now.

 

Plus, he’s only a little older than McCain!**

 

Honestly, you cannot look me in the eye and tell me you would not vote for Bob McGrath.  Your heart would have to be made of stone. And I know that's not true. And so does Bob.

 

 

*For example, once he read in a newspaper about a guy who ate 1000 pieces of pumpkin pie.
 

**He'd just have to be careful when choosing his running mate.  Nobody wants to think that Elmo might be just a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Muppets with Youtube accounts.



Welcome home, gentlemen.