Monthly Archives: February 2010

The ATM, or Automatic Teller Machine

6 Replies

Recently, when I was home from work over Presidents’ Day Weekend, I watched a show I spent a lot of time watching as a kid: Sesame Street. Recently, I’ve discovered a bunch of clips from old Sesame Street episodes on YouTube, and I’m surprised at how entertaining they still are to me as an adult. How can you not love Cookie Monster as Alistair Cookie on Monsterpiece Theater?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSiVZ524yW4]

Or “The Beetles” singing “Letter B”?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIpB-pCMfBE]

Or Ernie dancing himself to sleep as Bert grumbles?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk1Y4xo4XJ4]

Or an orange singing Carmen, in a clip that was probably done by an animator on drugs?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8TqOTe3ODc]

So imagined how disappointed I was to sit down and discover that the unthinkable has happened.

After forty years, Sesame Street has been dumbed down.

Gone are the pop-culture references that only parents watching along with the kids get. Rather than a cute commercial about the letter F, we get some Muppet on the street trying to get kids to say “finger” and “foot” as examples of words beginning with F. The show is divided into segments, with Ernie and Bert appearing as cartoon characters (blasphemy!) in one of them. Another is “Elmo’s World” and goes on for fifteen minutes. Elmo, a character good in small doses, is basically the star of the show now, with characters like Big Bird reduced to brief appearances in “Elmo’s World.”

The rest of PBS is in a similarly sorry state. (Yea alliteration!) Most of them are now cartoons, except for insipid shows like Barney and Teletubbies. Personally, that disappoints me a lot. And I know I’m not the only one. Back when I did my 25 things, in #12 I reminisced about the old PBS shows and I was amazed at how many people commented in agreement.

I was such a PBS kid. Until middle school, it was practically the only channel I watched. If I ever have billions of dollars, after I end world hunger and most major diseases, I’ll donate a ton of money to PBS with the stipulation that they need to create more intelligent, well-written shows for kids—shows like these ones:

Ghostwriter
Word! This wasn’t just a fantastic kids’ show; it was a fantastic show, period. I had some episodes on video, and upon re-watch, they’re still genuinely entertaining. The show was about a bunch of pre-teen kids in Brooklyn who were friends with a ghost they dubbed “Ghostwriter” whom only they could see. Ghostwriter couldn’t see, hear, or talk- just read and write, and he appeared only as a circle with a couple of curvy lines over it or as multicolored swirls of words. With the help of Ghostwriter, the kids solved mysteries that went over the course of four or five episodes.

I was so obsessed with this show. The character Rob was my first-ever crush. I’d write down all the clues and try to solve the mysteries on my own. I entered a contest and was thrilled to get one of the consolation prizes—a pen on a string like the kids on the show used.

Square One TV
Another high-quality show. It was all about math, and although it was aimed at elementary schoolers, they had a lot of short songs, skits, and cartoons like on Sesame Street—examples include “8% of My Love,” “ Nine Nine Nine,” and “The Mathematics of Love.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDqrW85RECE]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q53GmMCqmAM]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DzfPcSysAg]

But the best part of the show was “Mathnet.” It was a Dragnet parody featuring two detectives solving math-related crimes over the course of five episodes. It was hilarious—lots of jokes that only adults would get and recurring gags. There was one episode where they kept talking about an ATM, and every single time they said ATM, they added, “Or, automatic teller machine,” which is actually how I know what ATM stands for. And I honestly did learn a lot about math from it—I knew what the Fibonacci sequence was way before we covered it in school.

Wishbone
Wishbone was a really cute Jack Russell terrier who lived with a twelve-year-old boy named Joe and his mother and loved the classics of literature. Every episode would retell a story like Romeo and Juliet, Silas Marner, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, among many others, with Wishbone playing one of the main characters. Meanwhile, in the real world, there’d be a story going on with Joe and his friends Samantha and David that closely paralleled the classic story being told. While they often left out a lot of details, the re-telling was usually pretty faithful. Even in college I was drawing on things I’d learned from this show—I didn’t read The Tempest until then, but had seen it portrayed on Wishbone.

Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego?
This was a game show, and when I was seven, my life’s ambition was to be on it. There was one multiple-choice round with questions about geography; then a memory game round where you had to find the loot, the warrant, and the criminal in that order; then having to locate seven countries on a map of a certain country within forty-five seconds. The grand prize was a trip anywhere in the lower 48. There was always some kind of funny segment with the host, Greg Lee, in the chief’s office—something would happen like the chief’s head falling off or a rude message from Carmen Sandiego herself. I was so sad to hear that Lynne Thigpen, who played the Chief, died in 2003. The theme song and various other songs on the show were sung by the incomparable Rockapella. By the way, it turns out I couldn’t have been on that show anyway—Wikipedia tells me that the contestants had to be from the New York City area. But if I had been, I would have been awesome.

With Open Arms

4 Replies

A few weeks after Christmas this year, I got a late present—the one I’d gotten myself.

Yep, I got myself a Snuggie.

And because I am, in fact, one of those obnoxious people who’s obsessed with her alma mater, it’s a BC Snuggie.

 

(Yes, my head is cut off deliberately. I have a bad feeling that putting a picture of myself in a Snuggie out on the Internet is going to come back to haunt me.)

It’s kind of funny—at first, it seemed like the Snuggie was going to go the way of the fanny pack and the scrunchie, things you can no longer wear even ironically. Those ridiculous commercials like the one below made it seemed destined for mocking by pseudo-celebrities when VH1 does I Love the 2010s.

But a funny thing happened—all of a sudden, a Snuggie became something desirable. People were excited about getting Snuggies for Christmas. Facebook statuses like “My roommate and I got each other Snuggies for Christmas!” and “Snowing out…drinking wine and watching a movie in my Snuggie” started popping up. The commercials even started making fun of themselves.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeM4GMGWInY&hl=]
Here’s my theory: if the Snuggie were a band, it would be Journey—so uncool it kind of became cool. 80s power ballads are as easy a target as blankets with sleeves, and as recently as 2004, you had characters like Luke on Gilmore Girls declaring that Journey freaks him out. But eventually, the backlash developed backlash. Journey was Ryan’s favorite band on The O.C. Dave Eggers reminisces about singing along to “Any Way You Want It” in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. “Don’t Stop Believing” has shown up on the Glee pilot, the Sopranos finale, and every major sporting event in between. At this point, if someone dares to be snobby about Journey, you find yourself looking at him with pity. Really, don’t you feel bad for someone who’s never sung a Journey song at the top of his or her lungs?

Just like I now feel bad for anyone who hasn’t curled up on the couch to watch a movie with a cup of hot chocolate and a Snuggie. All hail blankets with sleeves! Don’t stop believing.

Katie’s Ash Wednesday Blog Post

4 Replies
Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. For a lot of people, it’s a mark on a calendar, but it does mean something to me. So today, I’m going to break a taboo and write about it.

I’m twenty-five years old and I identify as Catholic. But it’s not exactly something I tell people the first time they meet me. Or the second, or the third. In fact, it’s probably not something I’d bring up until pretty late in the game, if at all. And if I do, I feel the need to qualify it: “But I’m a liberal, open-minded Catholic!”

I’m sure it’s different in other parts of the country, but in blue states, admitting to being religious, especially if you’re Christian, is almost un-PC. It’s fine to say that you were “raised” in a religion, or that your family subscribes to a religion, or to joke about Catholic guilt. It’s even fine to say that you’re spiritual but not religious, because you don’t believe in organized religion. But if I mention that I go to church as part of a conversation, I can see people’s glances uncomfortably shifting as their perception of me changes.

To give you a little background, my family is Catholic, but even though I grew up going to church and CCD and received the sacraments, we’re not super religious. As an adult, though, I realized that I did like going to church and wanted to continue going. In college, I sang at Mass with the campus Liturgical Arts Group. Now I attend The Paulist Center, a progressive Catholic church on Beacon Hill. I do not agree with everything about the Catholic Church, but I’ve found ways that I’m comfortable reconciling my personal beliefs while remaining part of the Church. I’m also very interested in learning about other religions and have tried to read more books on religion and attend services in places other than Catholic churches. It is entirely possible that my beliefs will change as I get older, and I would never tell anyone that what they believe or don’t believe is wrong.

What is wrong, though, is forcing religion on others. Trying to convert unwilling people is wrong. School-sponsored prayer before public high school football games is wrong. Trying to ban the teaching of evolution in schools is wrong. Actually, trying to ban anything in the name of religion is wrong. Opposing gay marriage is wrong, especially if you try to justify it in the name of religion. Telling people they’re going to hell is wrong.

Equally wrong, though, is disrespecting religion. It’s one thing to call people out on it if they’re forcing religion on others, but mocking someone’s personal faith or obnoxiously questioning their beliefs is a terrible thing to do. I find Bill Maher’s movie Religulous horribly offensive because he’s not mocking the forcing of religion on others or even the distortion of religion to fit one’s personal beliefs—he’s mocking people for having faith at all, and forcing people—regular people who aren’t hurting anyone—to question their beliefs.

It’s also wrong to lump all religious people into the same group, whether it’s equating all Muslims with terrorism or believing that all Christians are Sarah Palin-loving homophobes who picket abortion clinics. Particularly, the culture wars seem to have lent people license to equate “Christian” with “Republican.” As a Democrat, whose more religious family members are also Democrats, who knows far more Catholic Democrats than Catholic Republicans (although, granted, that might just be because I’m from Massachusetts and went to a Jesuit college), that bothers me a lot.

Moreover, I don’t think you’ll find any two people within a religion who believe exactly the same things. Faith is a deeply personal thing, and people interpret religion differently. Catholics like me, who don’t agree with everything about the church, are often pejoratively called “Cafeteria Catholics,” but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. People like Bill Maher accuse religious people of believing blindly, and while that’s certainly true of some people, I think they’re outnumbered by people who have given their faith serious thought and have accepted or rejected certain beliefs based on that.

The First Amendment guarantees us freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but I often wish people felt more free to speak openly about what they believe or don’t believe without insulting anyone else. I like learning about other religions, and I wish it were easier to talk to people about what they believe and why. I know this post basically boils down to “Why can’t we all just get along?” but to me, it really is frustrating that people who abuse religion have made it so hard for the rest of us to talk about it honestly. I mean, I know someone who visibly recoils if you even say the word “church,” and whom I could see tensing up when I mentioned the name of a Catholic college in casual conversation. And I know someone else who, when someone asked him out of curiosity about his religious beliefs or lack thereof, looked at the person asking the question as if he was pissed that the question had even crossed her mind. So…why can’t we all just get along?

To end this post on a lighter note, I give you this song by Christine Kane, a singer-songwriter and fellow BC grad. It’s called “Mary Catherine’s Ash Wednesday Journal Entry,” and it’s pretty funny. And check out some of Christine Kane’s other songs while you’re at it.
http://christinekane.com/blog/just-because-its-lent/