It’s all over the news.  Okay, mostly in the odd and bizarre section but when even NPR reports on it, it’s at least legitimate. It’s the story of the Massachusetts high school that has banned the apparently disruptive word ‘meep’ on school grounds. It doesn’t take much imagination to calculate the annoyance factor of a bunch of teenagers meeping all the time but they tend to do a lot of things that are annoying to adults. If this is the worst those kids are getting up to, I would think the administration would be sighing with joy and relief.

The interesting thing is that the majority of the press is attributing the word to Beeker  from the muppets, but it turns out from the NPR interview that this didn’t have anything directly to do with either Beeker or the Roadrunner, both of whom use ‘meep’ quite frequently.  Which is really too bad, because if this had been a Beeker uprising, they could now all start mambo’ing in the hallways in protest (one of Beeker’s lesser known talents):

Turkey Day is almost upon us. Now that the excitement of frying turkeys has mostly worn off – except for those that manage to burn their house down with this method – there doesn’t seem to be a new bizarre Thanksgiving custom on the horizon.  People seem to stick pretty close to tradition for this holiday that is well, pretty much all about tradition.  You could however experiment with stuffing and there are some strange ones out there:

Turkey stuffed with Twinkies

Video of the Swedish Chef and Danny Kaye attempting to prepare a turkey stuffed with chop suey

Resolve to get creative this year!  How are you going to unconform your turkey?

Statistically speaking it’s easier to get a Congressional Medal of Honor than to have a muppet named after you, and I bet the muppet party is a lot more fun too.  I figure I got lucky by having a minor muppet with my first name in a few episodes – pale blue fur and a fondness for worst case scenarios; it’s not a bad fit;-) In honor of Sesame Street’s 40th birthday here are ten muppets that parody ten lucky famous people:

Juliet the Muppet

1. Barbara Streisandwich
2. David Hoggselhoff – featured in Bay of Pigswatch
3. Gingrich the Newt
4. Jean-Dodd van Clamme
5. Placido Flamingo
6. Alistair Cookie in Monsterpiece Theater
7. Bruce Stringbean – see the classic Born to Add
8. Frank Lloyd Left
9. Ethel Mermaid
10. Howie Eatswell

It’s surprisingly close to the AMC version – although they stuck to advertising and left out the sexual escapades. I particularly liked the use of the word ‘sycophants’ at the end, toddlers could stand to use that word more often…

I guess ‘people that look like their pets’ is now passe.  It’s now all about styling to look like your favorite Muppet.  And the comments to that post prove that Sam the Eagle really does have an odd sort of sex appeal.

Also in the news: Beaker’s rendition of Ode to Joy (below) has been nominated for Best Music Video in this year’s Webby Awards. Hopefully it won’t go to his head.

On this day when we are all Irish (in the same way that we were once all Berliner jelly doughnuts) the Muppets always know how to get out of knowing the words.

I’ve lived enough and read enough self-help books to see the inspired wisdom in the song “You’ve Got to Put Down the Duckie (if you want to play the saxophone)”  That’s so much easier to grasp than being told to let go of the past, stop stopping yourself etc.  Which would you rather hear?

My all-time favorite life lesson in song is below – the doo wop tragic saga with the inarguable truth “stoplights and love can be cruel.” Don’t I know it.  This stuff is wasted on four-year olds! Part of Sesame Street’s concept is to include bits that adults find interesting to get the parents interacting with their kids, but what about those of us without kids? Thank God for Youtube. Now adults can get their Sesame Street fix without having to wade through the letter of the day and other extraneous material meant for the target preschool audience.