I was thinking about all the things on my calender for the first half of 2008 … a friend’s wedding. A college reunion. The usual round of holidays. If I do it all, that’s three trips to NY in 6 months, on top of all the normal stuff in my life.
I’m also thinking hard about doing the Avon Walk this year, either in SF in July or in NY in October. Not sure how I’ll be able to fit it all into my schedule. But then, can I afford not to?
I finally got the photos from my trip home online. This one, taken at a small park near Riverhead, Long Island, didn’t turn out quite how I thought it would, but I like it anyway.
No, I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. In the middle of another jam-packed trip home, I came down with a nasty cold – the worst I’ve had in years – and now that I’m home all I want to do is rest.
Back to sucking down tea and regular doses of decongestants….
As I tried to get my aunt’s dog Woolie to sit still for a photo, Dad successfully managed to fire off a shot of the both of us. I had no such luck.
As reported the the NY Times today, two volumes of old “Sesame Street” episodes recently released on DVD come with the following helpful warning label: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”
WTF?
There are definitely old cartoons that I would not show to kids today. Some of the early Warner Brothers cartoons, for example, come off as highly racist to today’s eyes. But early-1970’s Sesame Street? How could they possibly offend current sensibilities?
Well, first off, there’s the Cookie Monster. An unrepentant cookie addict:
he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”).
And then there’s Oscar the Grouch, who can’t seem to see the bright side of anything:
On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic.
And worst of all, the setting: a somewhat run-down city street:
The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating.
[snip]
People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading.
Nope, definitely can’t have kids seeing that.
So today I accidentally did something very stupid. I locked my keys inside my car. Luckily for me, I have AAA. I called them and inside of an hour, the nice service guy got my door opened in about 30 seconds.
This is the second time this year I’ve needed to call AAA and my experience last time was just as good. And for this, I pay about $50 a year. What a bargain!
OnStar costs three times as much. Why would I want to pay that much more when the service I get from AAA is so great already?