SST: I Love This Boat! (Revisited)

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

With thousands upon thousands of Sesame Street clips to chose from, it feels inexcusably lazy to repeat myself. However, it has been three years since I used this clip and it did come to mind several times over the past week:



This was the boat that I loved:

The Carnival Sensation, seen from the dock in Nassau, Bahamas.

For any of you out there contemplating a honeymoon, allow me to recommend a cruise. While Amy and I were brainstorming destinations for our trip (believe it or not, Columbia, South Carolina was shortly a contender) we saw a blog post from our friend Stephanie that made us consider a cruise. We were sure that a cruise would be way outside of our budget, but we browsed online anyway. We couldn't believe how affordable they were, especially considering that the price of a cruise covers all your food, lodging, and entertainment expenses rolled into a single cost. We ended up getting a good deal on a 4-day cruise to the Bahamas. (The low cost might also have been related to last year's highly-publicized Italian cruise disaster and it being the end of the off-season.)

It was absolutely perfect because every day we could do as much or as little as we wanted to. Every night we got a schedule of the next day's activities and we'd pick three or four to attend, and in between we had plenty of time for reading by the side of the pool, relaxing on the beach while we were in port, or just chillin' in our little cabin. And despite the fact that the boat was full of people, it felt like everything was about just the two of us. Plus the weather was absolutely perfect.

Speaking of being lazy, I'm just going to turn this into a picture-dump post of cruise highlights. Here goes:

• Amy did karaoke for the first time - a "Twist and Shout" duet with me. It was fun to see people (some of them with a few drinks in them) get up and start dancing as we sang. After that I did a solo number - Prince's "Kiss," my patented bring-down-the-house karaoke song of choice. The crowd went nuts and people kept shouting stuff at Amy like, "You got him, girl!" For the rest of the cruise people came up to us and complimented us on our karaoke prowess.

• We went on a snorkeling excursion on a coral reef outside Nassau. I had never been snorkeling before and it was amazing to me that from the boat there didn't appear to be much going on in the water, but once you dipped your face under the surface there were suddenly hundreds of brightly colored fish inches away from your outstretched arms.

 • Breakfast in bed.

 • Every night we would return to our cabin and cute little animals made of towels had magically appeared on our beds. So when they offered a class on how to make said animals we were all over it.

 • In between the officially scheduled activities there were plenty of other open activities, such as miniature golf, waterslides, a gym, and a running track. It was fun to get up early and go running with Amy every morning with the infinite blue sea or distant Bahamian islands as a backdrop.

 • I suffered a crushing defeat in the first round of the hairy chest contest. Seriously - look at this picture and tell me I'm not the hairiest guy up there. I think it may have been a Southern bias, since I was the only guy up there not from Georgia. I felt vindicated by all the booing from the crowd when the judges voted me off the stage with my consolation medal, and several ladies told me they thought I would win in a landslide, including the wife of the guy who won (in the middle) who said that she thought that I easily win and that her husband only won because "there's more of him to have hair on." Too bad it wasn't a "Most Sunburned Shoulders" contest - I would have had that in the bag.

• Said sunburn occurred at the beach in Freeport. We got all lathered up with SPF 50 sunscreen before we left, but we forgot to bring it with us to reapply. Oops. Funny tangent - on the beach we approached a random couple and asked them to take our picture. Later on we wanted to get in the water, but didn't want to leave our wallet, towels, etc. alone on the beach, so we went back to the same couple and asked us if they would watch our stuff. The lady asked, "Did you ask us because we are also Mormon?" She had noticed my CTR ring earlier. Turns out they were down from Mesa, AZ with a group of graduating seniors from the local institute. It seemed incredible that of all the people we could have talked to on the beach we honed in on them.

• Amy and I are not the dancing kind, but we saw "Thriller Dance Class" on the activity schedule and couldn't resist.

• Lots of people have asked me about the food and about the overheard legends of everyone stuffing their face all day long on cruises, so I'll illuminate a few myths. Yes, I suppose you could eat all day long if you wanted to, but the restaurant stations only opened up during mealtimes, so in the interim your choices were limited to pizza, sandwiches, or self-serve ice cream machines. Also, at dinner time they did not make us sit awkwardly at a big table full of strangers - we had a table for two every night. Overall the dinner meals were very good and beautifully plated. A lot of the food choices were surprisingly adventurous, such as alligator fritters and shrimp ceviche. I loved being able to try the types of foods I normally only see on Top Chef without having to worry about exorbitant prices. And if you didn't like what you ordered, they were more than happy to bring you something else instead.

So yeah, definitely loved the cruise. We felt so pampered and relaxed, and everything was taken care of for us so we could just enjoy ourselves on our honeymoon. In the words of Ernie, we loved that boat.

SST: Luis and Maria's Wedding

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

For many people (around 30 million, to be more specific), General Hospital's Luke and Laura had the ultimate 80's TV wedding. However, for those of us who were seven in 1988, that wedding's cultural impact was completely eclipsed by the wedding of Luis and Maria on Sesame Street. They built up to the wedding for months and I remember having an incredible sense of anticipation leading up to the actual event. It's weird to think of Sesame Street pulling something akin to a ratings stunt, but I was definitely glued to my TV, so it must have worked. You can see the wedding ceremony here - I couldn't figure out how to shorten this super-long clip when embedding, plus that clip has far too much Elmo to slide past my usual no-Elmo policy (although Elmo's fear of dropping the rings was the only part of the wedding that I actually remembered, aside from the general rooftop setting).



Still, Luis/Maria is only my second-favorite Muppet-related wedding of the 80's:



Note: I may or may not have sung that song to Amy when I proposed to her :)

SST: Jelly Man Kelly

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

On President's Day I spent seven hours over at my friend Mike's house helping him construct a cabinet for his home office. I'm not a very handy person and I haven't had much exposure to home improvement projects, so it was really amazing to me that in such a relatively short amount of time you could take a single sheet of plywood and transform it into a functional object.

Mike had a dazzling array of table saws and Kreg Jigs and whatnot; however, what was perhaps even more dazzling was Mike's array of James Taylor music. He hooked up his iPod to a speaker and put his whole James Taylor library on shuffle, and over the course of the seven hours I did not hear a single song repeat (unless you count live versions or duets with Carol King of a particular song as duplicates). Who knew that James Taylor had such a vast discography? And Mike was singing along a lot of the time. It was kind of adorable.

However, in those seven hours of James Taylor I noticed a significant hole in Mike's library, so the I present the video below to help him complete his collection:

SST: I Love You

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

Happy V-Tines!

SST: Fuzzy and Blue

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

Guess what my sister gave me for Christmas - I'll give you a hint:

You're right - a University of Michigan snuggie! I had my first chance to show off my fuzzy blue snuggie tonight at the Sugar Bowl party hosted by The Thirsty Lion pub in downtown Portland. I wish I had a better picture of it, but it was pretty dark in the pub, so the shot on the right will have to suffice. I blogged once before about the uniting power of Michigan football, and once again tonight I sat down at a table full of strangers and we instantly formed a bond due to our shared University of Michigan experience (except for the kid on the far left, who was an Michigan State fan - boo!).

I got a nice round of applause for the snuggie as I made my way to the front of the bar to pick up my prize from the halftime drawing - a $25 gift certificate to the selfsame bar. Between that and the waitress forgetting about my order and then comping my food and giving me a gift card for a free future appetizer, I made out like a bandit tonight.

This was a continuation of my recent winning streak, which is mostly connected to events at Yahoo!, some of which I have blogged about before. At the beginning of December we had our Yahoo! year-end party, which had a "Casino Night" theme. Poker chips were awarded for playing the various games, which could be redeemed for raffle tickets. I showed up near the beginning of the night and left before people had a chance to get too drunk, so I only ended up with four measly tickets (others told me they had accumulated twenty or thirty tickets).

After I got home from the party I got a text from a Brazilian coworker: "You just won the ipod touch!!!" I was really excited, but less than a minute later she sent me a second text: "sucker :-)"

I thought that was a pretty good prank, so I texted back: "hahaha" To which she responded: "sortudo" (Portuguese for "lucky"). At this point she had me confused, so I asked her in a text if I had really won, but she didn't respond that night.

The party fell on a Saturday night and I didn't happen to pass by the cubicle of the lady who organized the raffle until Tuesday. She stopped me and asked why I hadn't come by to pick up my prize earlier. She then handed me a shiny new iPod Touch.

I was totally surprised because I thought my Brazilian friend was just messing with me, so I went and asked her why she had texted me the word "sucker." "Because you suck. I wanted to win the iPod!" she said. I told her that in English the word "sucker" has the connotation of "I fooled you," and she said that she was not aware of that. She just thought it meant "one who sucks." Seems logical enough.

For most of my life I have never been the type to ever win anything, so this winning streak has been a welcome change. Even Michigan won tonight even though they played like crap. Maybe my winning streak rubbed off on them. Or maybe it was just the power of my snuggie.

SST: Don't Eat the Pictures

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

A few years ago my friend Jessica posted something on her blog about her trip to Mexico that really caught my attention: "The anthropology museum was great, mainly because I put on my iPod and walked around looking at ancient Mexican cultures while listening to Arcade Fire. I think the visual/audio juxtaposition made the visit all the better." At the time I read that it sounded heretical to me - how could you take in the gravity of a museum while listening to your iPod? However, on my next museum visit I decided to give it a try and I instantly fell in love with all the unexpected "visual/audio juxtapositions" that resulted.

This past week was exceptionally museum-y for me and my iPod's shuffle mode came up with some inspired pairings. For instance, hit play on the song below:



This song ("The Rainbow," by The Apples in Stereo - if you don't know them, you should definitely check them out) cued up just as I walked into a room full of Modernist paintings, including "Political Drama" by Robert Delaunay:

I think the standard museum setup tends to do some artwork something of a disservice - the setting is too reverential as we silently cast our rueful gazes on the canvas. I think that tends to drain a lot of the vibrancy from the paintings and make you forget that the thing was dreamed up by a living, breathing person just like you or me. But this song broke up the sterility of the museum and unlocked a ton of energy inside the painting. Admittedly, this really isn't the most imaginative pairing - they are both really bright, high-energy works, and the title of the song seems rather obvious given the crazy arrays of colors Delaunay throws at us - but there were other unexpected combos of music and art that brought out subtle qualities in the latter that I might not have noticed otherwise.

So thanks, Jess, for the first museum tip: rock out to some tunes while you look at art. The second museum tip I observed on my trip came from Cookie Monster. This song comes from an old one-hour Sesame Street special that was a favorite around the Tanner house, and it's some pretty solid museum-going advice:

SST: Geometry of Circles

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

Last month Bob Boilen, host of one of my favorite podcasts (All Songs Considered), posted a memory on his NPR blog about his days as a director of the NPR program All Things Considered. It was his job to select appropriate, mood-setting music to play between segments, which was never more difficult than on September 11, 2001. He ended up choosing this piece by minimalist composer Philip Glass:



He later gave a talk where he explained why he chose this particular piece on that day:

"I wasn't going to play very dramatic music... I wasn't going to play music that had a lot of baggage to it... Not a famous Mozart or a Beethoven piece that was heavy or weighty... [Instead I played] a piece that didn't have a beginning, middle, and an end, because that is how I sometimes think about minimalist music, where it is just this mood that falls and happens... And it was just right... All of a sudden there was a place to breathe...... People didn't need more emotion, they just needed time to think." 

Although I had studied many of Philip Glass's works in depth as a music major in college and had seen many films that he has scored, I was unfamiliar with this particular piece. As I listened to it for the first time there was something about it that pushed out a lot of clutter in my mind and brought in a lot of clarity. I was recently able to track down the CD on which it is found, Glassworks, and I have been listening to it a lot over the last week, especially at work, where I have found that it makes me incredibly productive.

Little did I know* that my first exposure to Philip Glass came at a very young age via a series of pieces called "Geometry of a Circle" that he composed in 1979 specifically for Sesame Street:



*I wouldn't have realized this was Glass without an assist from my friend Peter. He emailed me about this a while ago, saying, "in retrospect, [this is] pretty crazy for a kid's show."

SST: The Yellow Yahoo

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

A few weeks ago I got a big purple box in the mail. When I opened it up, it made this sound:

Enclosed was a purple Yahoo!-branded t-shirt, a folder stuffed with information about benefits plans, and a offer of full-time employment. I have to give Yahoo! a lot of credit - they know how to make their employees feel cool and wanted.

As I have previously mentioned in this space, when I was first hired by Yahoo!, I was just a temporary contractor hired through an outside agency. I worked for Yahoo! Brasil for 4 months, and then they extended my temporary contract and moved me over to the US Mail Tech team, where I have been for about three months.  Effective August 29th, they decided to "roll me over," or make me an actual Yahoo! employee rather than just a contractor through an agency. This is great because I don't have to worry about whether they would extend my contract again when the current one runs out. Plus I am now eligible for benefits and bonuses, and I got a nice little pay bump too.

While I have missed working with my Latin American buddies (I still go to lunch with them every day), I have enjoyed working on the US team. In fact, my unique position as one who has worked on both the Latin American and US teams has put me in a position to be very useful. At my behest, my bosses have given me the unofficial title of "Latin American Ambassador," meaning that anytime the US team receives new policies or content or resources, I inform the Latin American team, give tutorials, and sometimes translate documents into Portuguese.

When the US Mail Team gets really backlogged, we have a bunch of helpers that we can pull in from all over the site to help us out. However, when the Brazil team gets backlogged, I am the only person on the site who can help them because of the language barrier. That combined with my "Latin American Ambassador" responsibilities make my job really satisfying because I feel like I have something unique to contribute to the company.

So I too must yodel "Ya-HOOOO-ooo!" for having a secure employment. Too bad this guy is not purple, or Yahoo! could use him as their company mascot:

SST: Letter B

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

As soon as I heard the release date for season 4 of Mad Men on DVD, I raced to put a hold on it at the public library. Turns out 172 other library patrons beat me to it, but after months of waiting I have finally got my hands on it and so far it has definitely been worth the wait. (Plus, season 5 won't air until sometime in 2012, so this way I'll have less of a gap between the seasons.)

This season takes place in 1964-1965, and one of the season's more delightful moments was young Sally Draper's reaction to the news that her dad had scored tickets to The Beatles' legendary Shea Stadium show:

So today's clip is courtesy of Sesame Street's thinly disguised Beatles parody, "The Beetles." As with many pop culture touchstones, I encountered the Sesame Street version years before I ever heard "Let It Be," and my first reaction to the latter was, "Hey, these guys are ripping off Sesame Street!"

SST: Children's Alphabet

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

A classic clip today that I've been looking for forever. It was aired so often that I'm surprised that is the best version I could find.

It's also surprisingly difficult to find the clips where the the kids run around like crazy in fast motion and then lay on the ground to form different letters of the alphabet. (It's very easy, however, to find these later, lame variations on that same idea.)

P.S. - I made a joke about Sam's talking computer on Today's Special at work today and drew blank stares from my coworkers. I know I'm getting older, but many of them are around my same age and surely I'm not the only one who remembers Today's Special. Or am I?

SST: Dog Paddle Song

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

Last weekend my friends Amy and Jess came to visit me here in Portland (as I am the last to blog about it, you can read their accounts here and here). It was a really great time and by far the Portlandiest weekend I've ever had since moving here in November. We basically went through the Portland checklist: foodwise we hit McMenamins and Voodoo Donuts, we did some hipster-watching at a traveling artistic miniature golf installation called Smash Putt: Miniature Golf Apocalypse (here's a video for you to get an idea, except this video was taken in a well-lit building in Seattle - for it's sojourn in Portland they found a dank and dimly lit old building/bar that felt more like a haunted house), we went to the Saturday Market along the Willamette River and caught some local musicians playing, we went to Powell's (the world's largest independent bookstore - 1.6 acres of retail space!), we visited locations where Twilight was filmed and reenacted scenes, and we did much hiking/waterfall looking at-ing in the Columbia Gorge.

While hiking up to Punchbowl Falls we somehow ended up talking about this Sesame Street clip:



Happy Sesame Street Tuesday!

SST: Captain Vegetable

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

It was my nephew Braden's birthday yesterday and I remember singing this song around him recently, so I thought I'd put it up for him.



Happy Sesame Street Tuesday!

SST: Heeeeere Fishy Fishy Fishy!

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

My friend Elizabeth recently turned me on to a weekly podcast called "Pop Culture Happy Hour," a loose, funny roundtable discussion among four members of the NPR arts and entertainment staff. Recently they devoted an entire show to things from pop culture that children should not miss out on, eliciting such suggestions as The Muppet Show, Fantasia, Pee-Wee's Playhouse, They Might Be Giants, and Schoolhouse Rock. One answer given by panelist Stephen Thompson really resonated with me: "General advice for those who want to set their children on the proper path, entertainment-wise: have a crazy uncle... who is there to expose your kids to weird pop culture."

This is a responsibility that I have felt for years as an uncle, it is something that I have mentioned before in this space, and it is one of the reasons that I started the Sesame Street Tuesday feature in the first place. I had a very rewarding moment talking to my niece Kate on the phone the other day when she told me that she pulls up my blog to show Sesame Street clips to her friends (no doubt skipping over the long-winded ruminations that precede the clips). I've felt similar satisfaction when watching my nieces' and nephews' faces light up when they watched the bus stop scene from My Neighbor Totoro for the first time, hearing them repeat the punchlines from Calvin and Hobbes, seeing them contort their faces and limbs in an imitation of Artie (The Strongest Man... in the World!) from The Adventures of Pete & Pete, or doing Beatles sing-alongs with me on my guitar.

However, yesterday I felt like I had somewhat failed in this regard when we were at a trout farm and my sister Emily's call of "Heeeeeeere fishy fishy fishy!" drew blank stares from the kids. It's one of the all-time great Sesame Street sketches and in the two-plus years I've been running this feature I somehow have never presented it. So allow me to now correct that gross oversight:



The aforementioned incident happened at the Bonneville Fish Hatchery, home of Herman the Sturgeon, who is 11 feet long, 500 pounds, and 70 years old. I can't find anything to confirm this, but here's my hypothesis: that native Portlander/Simpsons creator Matt Groening used Herman as the inspiration for General Sherman, the legendary giant catfish from a season 2 episode. The name is just off by one letter (plus a military title) and the species is changed from sturgeon to catfish, and this scrap of exposition from the episode seems to fit: "Yep, 'General Sherman.' They say he's five hundred pounds of bottom-dwelling fury, don't you know. No one knows how old he is, but if you ask me (and most people do), he's hundred years if he's a day." So if you're reading this, Matt Groening, leave me a comment and tell me if I'm off base with this.

P.S. - The first time someone introduced me to Homestarrunner.com they showed me the Strong Bad Email "Lures and Jigs," which I saw as a clear rip-off of Bert and Ernie. It dissuaded me from coming back to the site for a year or two, after which time I realized the Brothers Chaps are geniuses with highly original voices and that this email was either an aberration or a deliberate Bert and Ernie homage:

SST: Cookie Monster Buys a Rhyme/Bein' Green

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

Since this week has two holidays, today we're getting two clips. The first holiday can be a little bit hard to remember:



I myself had forgotten that yesterday (3/14) was Pi Day until the early afternoon when Yahoo! laid out a spread of about twenty different types of pie. You know you work for a nerdy company when they officially commemorate Pi Day (I mean that as a compliment).

Yahoo! is planning a much larger party for the second holiday this week:



Happy March!

SST: Have a 7

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

It's amazing how durable this ad is:



Coke Zero remade it for the Super Bowl two years ago with the Steeler's Polamalu, and this year's Super Bowl had a parody starring Dr. House and a churro. I remember finally seeing the original for the first time as a teenager and being confused - I always thought it was an ad for the number 7:



P.S. - This year's great Super Bowl ad was this stunning Chrysler/Detroit spot. It's already been plastered all over the blogs and facebook statuses of my Michigan peeps, so I will let you just link you through to their thoughtful analyses.

SST: Teeth Look for a Job

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

I rejoined the workforce yesterday. After several years of working only sporadic hours as a graduate student instructor, I was a little worried that I wouldn't be able to make it through a full 8-to-5 day, but the day actually flew right by. The first day on the job is always a little strange with training and tours of the facilities and whatnot, so I won't really get a sense of what the job is actually like for a little while. However, based on today I think I'll survive the baptism by fire just fine.

The application process for teaching positions is still in full swing, but I'm really glad that I can take a break from the search for an immediate position. I was getting pretty tired of this:

SST: Bad Luck to Be Born a Duck

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

The moment I crossed the border from California into Oregon I could feel that the state was in the thrall of Oregon Duck Football. For months I have seen countless cars with Ducks flags mounted on the top, stores with the big yellow 'O' logo in the window, and people everywhere sporting the vast array of head-turning (and headline-grabbing) Nike-branded Ducks apparel. It's been fun to be along for the ride as Oregon surged into the national championship game. Last night we had a game viewing party with Emily and the boys (Brad was notably absent - he was attended the game in person with his team from work, which is ironic since he is the least football-crazed person around here) with Emily's homemade taquitos and some Ducks green-colored rice crispy treats.

The game went down to the wire, but Auburn scored the winning field goal as time expired. Talk about bad luck to be a Duck:

Obliquely Christmas II: Embracing Wham!

Editor's note: This post is a follow-up to a previous post about Christmas music.

I recently listened to a holiday installment of one of my favorite podcasts, All Songs Considered, where each guest brought in a few favorite Christmas songs to play for each other and the listeners. All Songs Considered usually traffics in the kind of elitist and esoteric music that appeals to overeducated hipsters like myself, and the initial Christmas selections on the podcast reflected that bias. However, fairly early on in the proceedings one of the guests on the show made a most unexpected selection:



This song was greeted by huge groans from all the other guests on the podcast*, and from me too, listening in my car. But after we all suffered through the song, the guy who chose it offered an interesting apology for his selection. He said that oftentimes during the holidays we often find ourselves at gatherings where we're fully expecting to have awkward meetings with certain acquaintances or family members, but we attend just the same because it just wouldn't be Christmas if we didn't see them. Likewise, he argued, there may be a lot of Christmas music that bugs us, but it just wouldn't feel like Christmas without it.

That reasoning really resonated for me, and I feel like since then I've had more of an open mind towards mainstream Christmas music. Yes, Wham! or Mannheim Steamroller, for example, drive me crazy, but it just wouldn't seem like Christmas without them.

* I liked their dissection of the lyrics of "Last Christmas" - George Michael gave his heart to someone and then the recipient gave George Michael's heart away to someone else? That's awkward - does George Michael even know who has his heart anymore? Does the new owner of the heart realize that it originally belonged to George Michael**?

** All this talk of George Michael makes me think of Arrested Development.

P.S. - Congratulations to Cookie Monster for breaking onto SNL last week. There was a much bigger cheer for him than there was when real host Jeff Bridges came out (not that there's anything wrong with Jeff Bridges - I'm looking forward to the Coen Brothers remake of True Grit), so let's hope Cookie Monster can parlay this appearance into a full hosting gig.

SST: Mysterious Theater

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

If the Three Young Sleuths ever need a mentor, they need look no further than Sherlock Hemlock, the World's Greatest Detective. He and his trusted companion Watson would prove invaluable to them should it turn out that the ever-elusive True Meaning of Christmas is housed inside of a circle, square, or triangle.

SSSN: Sesame Street Saturday Night (Live!)

SESAME STREET SATURDAY NIGHT

This special Sesame Street Saturday Night edition is brought to you by the letter "C." As in "C is for Cookie." Cookie Monster is following in the footsteps of Betty White, who wrestled her way onto Saturday Night Live through a Facebook fan campaign. Like White, Cookie Monster would totally walk away from the experience with an Emmy.

I've never proselytized for an online campaign before, but this is just plain fun and I thought that those of you out there that like my Sesame Street Tuesday posts might want to jump on board. To join the cause, watch the video, then jump on Facebook and like the "Cookie Monster should host Saturday Night Live!" group.



Seeing this clip makes me feel prescient for putting Cookie Monster and SNL veteran Tracy Morgan (aka Tracy Jordan) together to do a sketch in my 30 Rock spec script for my TV Writing class. I knew there was a sketch comedian inside Cookie Monster waiting to burst out.