In 1967, Cookie Monster made his first public appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in the clip below. The same sketch was performed in the same year for an IBM training video. Maybe this explains why IBM no longer makes consumer computers. Obviously, the name “Cookie Monster” came at a later date: 1969, when Sesame Street began its first season.
Monthly Archive for April, 2007
Did you know that the refrigerator magnet was invented in 1964? It’s hard to believe, because I was growing up in the 1980’s. 1964 + 20 years = 1984. 1984 + 20 years = 2004. So 1964 is only about twice as long ago as I can remember.
Also, wrist watches were not worn by men until WWI.
Link.
One of my favorite short stories is Mark Twain’s Story of the Good Little Boy, which is a satire on Sunday School/Sabbath School type stories.
ONCE there was a good little boy by the name of Jacob Blivens. He always obeyed his parents, no matter how absurd and unreasonable their demands were; and he always learned his book, and never was late at Sabbath school. He would not play hookey, even when his sober judgment told him it was the most profitable thing he could do. None of the other boys could ever make that boy out, he acted so strangely. He wouldn’t lie, no matter how convenient it was. He just said it was wrong to lie, and that was sufficient for him. And he was so honest that he was simply ridiculous…
Link.
I’ve made up my mind: I’m going to buy an iPhone. Of course, I need to wait until it’s actually released. However, in the meantime, I traded in my 60GB iPod w/ Video for a green Shuffle. I need a small iPod for exercising, and I want to sell my full sized iPod before the iPhone is released so I can hopefully get a good price.
So far the Shuffle is working great, and even though I have a music library in the tens of gigabytes, the one gigabyte size works well. iTunes automatically chooses songs from a playlist I designate, giving slight preference to songs I have rated higher. My playlist is all of my songs minus those that I uncheck and those that have only one or two stars.
Today on the commute home I was stopped at a traffic light behind a car that had a very wordy bumper sticker. Five lines to be exact. The text was so small that in my attempt to read the bumper sticker I was distracted from its message. I don’t remember what it said. Just that the text was tiny. I prefer Heather’s bumper sticker: “F the President”
…is actually really good. I want to start out by saying that the event that took place at VA Tech this morning is a horrible, awful tragedy, and I in now way wish to diminish what the victims and families and friends of the victims are going through. My argument, however, is that tragedy has been happening through all of recorded history, and events like this remind me that people will quickly forget this as they fall into the rhetoric of how the world is falling apart.
The fact is that massacres have occurred in public places for a very long time; massacres are not a new phenomenon (the Bath School Disaster of 1927 was the deadliest school massacre in American history). Mankind’s history is full of genocide. People in today’s democracies and republics have more individual rights than our ancestors could have imagined 300 years ago. The violent crime rate in the US has dropped by more than one half since the early 1990’s. Property crimes (burglary, automobile theft, etc.) have dropped by more than two thirds since the mid 1970’s.
Something must be going right.
When reports start coming out about the history of the VA Tech shooter, it is likely that people will discuss that he watched horror movies, or that he listened to Marilyn Manson, or that he played Grand Theft Auto. But I have a very difficult time believing that any of those things can cause something like that to happen. Nearly every person I know (and the people I know are pretty good people) does at least two of those three things, and none of them have murdered before. My generation and the one following me watch violent movies and play violent video games, but we are quite possibly the most docile generation yet. Just look at our asses.
When Hurricane Katrina hit, many people seemed to think that it was a sign of the end of the world, as it caused what is likely, apart from the tsunami in 2004, the most widespread devastation that most people have ever seen. Seen. That’s the problem. People have only witnessed the time period of their own lifetime, which maxes out around 100 years or so. On average, any given person’s experience is much less time than that. Also, Television has only been in common use since the 1950s. CNN and other 24 hour news stations have only existed since 1980. Cable television and satellite started coming into most homes in the late eighties. In short, this “see everything” phenomenon is something that is very very new. Our frame of reference is really only the past twenty years.
Yes, Katrina was a terrible disaster, although with a death toll of under 2,000 people, it barely made the list of the 50 most deadly cyclones of all time, and was certainly not the most deadly hurricane on American soil. And that’s just cyclones, other natural disasters dwarf Katrina to a historically insignificant event.
Considering our modern concept of civil rights, modern medicine, sanitation, low crime rates, scientific and cultural enlightenment, etc. I don’t think I would rather have lived in any other period in Earth’s history.
So apparently for April Fool’s day, Alanis Morissette released a cover of My Humps by The Black Eyed Peas.
The lyrical remake of this song just seems to highlight how ridiculous the lyrics really are.
And for your reference:
Sometimes I wish that driving on the road was like being a contestant on Survivor. But our vote would be honking our horns at stupid drivers doing stupid things like not just pulling out into the intersection while waiting to run left, but turning enough that they block the adjacent oncoming lane of traffic.
I vote you off the road, Mr. Goes-40-In-A-55.
When reading my RSS feeds, I have to constantly keep an eye out for something that sounds too bizarre to be true. It’s like reading an article from The Onion and not realizing that that’s where it’s from. However, reading about how people are suckered into believing crazy stuff does keep me entertained:
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