Mr. T’s Night Elf Mohawk

Sesame: Life on the Street

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

Raymond Chandler was, of course, describing Kermit the Frog.

Certainly, the current landlords of Sesame Street might disagree, according to an article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine:

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street� are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School� is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.�

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?� asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.

Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official� and “two billion in credit over the next five years� — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.

The old “Sesame Street� is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World� started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street� might hurt your feelings.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,� how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.� Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior� — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.�

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street� that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,� she said.

Note that the evil liberal media elite writer thinks that maybe the producer may be overreacting a tad.

I do too, to put it mildly. I’m hoping my clone, James, will be able to be properly traumatized by old school Sesame Street, and have placed both DVD sets on his Amazon wish list, along with equally damaging classic Looney Tunes, Fraggle Rock and the Dini/Timm Batman, Superman and Justice League cartoons.

The Coyote Project, Day 22

Elvis has left the building.

My parents came down from Oakland this weekend to ogle the kid and pick up the kitten. Dad played with Dora (and Lucky) a bunch Friday night with the feather on a stick and the toy spider on a stick, there as a Saturday afternoon shopping trip to Petco and then Sunday morning, I tossed half of one of the sedatives Dr. Ahmed had prescribed down Dora’s throat, and then she was off on the 95, headed north.

That night, I got a text message from my dad:

The Dora has landed! Easy trip. She tried to prove she was stronger than any old dope and stayed awake a lot of the way. Even so, she was calm. Exploring now

Then there was a text message about Aliens in America (great show), and then this one:

Found the vet papers. Thanks anyway. Dora jumping after Temptation-on-a-Stick. Back to normal (?)

Dora’s departure couldn’t come soon enough for Hanna: Late Saturday night, Jenn had dragged the old scratching post tower to the living room on its way to the garage and leaving our lives, and Lucky climbed up on top and curled up atop it, as Alpha Cat. While we were watching TV, I looked up and saw that Dora had taken the number two spot, and Hanna, ears back and very irritated about the whole situation, had ended up below her, in the number three slot. To add to the indignity of having the pecking order explicitly spelled out like this, Hanna had to put up with Dora leaning down and taking mock jabs at her face, as if to taunt her.

The time needed to eat a banana

There’s a phrase for that in Malay, in fact: “pisan zapra.” Apparently this is an important measurement of time in Malaysia.

The World’s GeoQuiz recently had a piece on all sorts of words like this:

Kaelling – Danish: a woman who stands on her doorstep yelling obscenities at her kids.

Pesamenteiro – Portuguese: one who joins groups of mourners at the home of a dead person, apparently to offer condolences but in reality is just there for the refreshments.

Jayus – Indonesian: someone who tells a joke so unfunny you can’t help laughing.

Kamaki – Greek: the young local guys strolling up and down beaches hunting for female tourists, literally “harpoons”.

Giri-GIRI – Hawaiian pidgin: the place where two or three hairs stick up, no matter what.

Pelinti – Buli, Ghana: to move very hot food around inside one’s mouth.

Dii-KOYNA – Ndebele, South Africa: to destroy one’s property in anger.

Hanyauku – Rukwangali, Namibia: walking on tiptoes across warm sand.

Tartle – Scottish: to hesitate when you are introducing someone whose name you can’t quite remember.

Vovohe Tahtsenaotse – Cheyenne, US: to prepare the mouth before speaking by moving or licking one’s lips.

Prozvonit – Czech and Slovak: to call someone’s mobile from your own to leave your number in their memory without them picking it up.

Hira Hira – Japanese: the feeling you get when you walk into a dark and decrepit old house in the middle of the night.

Koi No Yokan – Japanese: a sense on first meeting someone that it is going to evolve into love.

Cafune – Brazilian Portuguese: the tender running of one’s fingers through the hair of one’s mate.

Shnourkovat Sya – Russian: when drivers change lanes frequently and unreasonably.

Gadrii Nombor Shulen Jongu – Tibetan: giving an answer that is unrelated to the question, literally “to give a green answer to a blue question”.

Biritululo – Kiriwani, Papua New Guinea: comparing yams to settle a dispute.

Poronkusema – Finnish: the distance equal to how far a reindeer can travel without a comfort break.

Pisan Zapra – Malay: the time needed to eat a banana.

Physiggoomai – Ancient Greek: excited by eating garlic.

Baffona – Italian: an attractive moustachioed woman.

Gattara – Italian: a woman, often old and lonely, who devotes herself to stray cats.

Creerse La Ultima Coca-COLA EN EL DESIERTO – Central American Spanish: to have a very high opinion of oneself, literally to “think one is the last Coca-Cola in the desert”.

Vrane Su Mu Popile Mozak – Croatian: crazy, literally “cows have drunk his brain”.

These are all from a book, Toujours Tingo: More Extraordinary Words To Change The Way We See The World, and Web site by dictionary collector Adam Jacot de Boinod.

The Coyote project, day 18

Neither James nor Dora mind that the fish tank doesn’t have as algae-free walls as it might.