Scorsese Muppets

Sesame Street Old School

The ♥G♥ got me two neat things for my birthday -- A new leather briefcase, and the new Sesame Street Old School DVD set, which features the premiere episodes for each season from 1969-1974. Interesting opener: It starts w/a cartoon character ready a statement that "...these early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grown-ups and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child." I did a research paper on the Sesame Street/CTW phenomenon in college, and as part of my research (blogged about here) I watched the full first episode at the Museum of Broadcast Communication, the same one I am watching now. Detailed analysis here.

Items

Several things:

• Check out the BoingBoingBoing podcast with "Ghost Map" author Steve Johnson.
• We watched a real good documentary the other night, The World According to Sesame Street, which showed how the Children's Television Workshop developed Sesame programs in Bangladesh, South Africa, and the former Yugoslavia. I did my senior research project in college on the Sesame Street phenomenon; Maybe I'll post some stuff from it here at some point.
• Take a look at the cool retro snapshots at Square America.
• The ♥G♥ pointed me towards a cool site where you can do jigsaw puzzles online.
• Enough TV to make your eyeballs melt -- Get it while it lasts!
• New York Times Magazine article by James Gleick about the Oxford English Dictionary in the age of the Internet. Excerpt: The version now under way is only the third edition. The first, containing 414,825 words in 10 weighty volumes, was presented to King George V and President Coolidge in 1928. Several “supplements” followed, but not till 1989 did the second edition appear: 20 volumes, totaling 21,730 pages. It weighed 138 pounds. The third edition is a mutation. It is weightless, taking its shape in the digital realm. To keyboard it, Oxford hired a team of 150 typists in Florida for 18 months. (That was before the verb keyboard had even found its way in, as Simpson points out, not to mention the verb outsource.) No one can say for sure whether O.E.D.3 will ever be published in paper and ink. By the point of decision, not before 20 years or so, it will have doubled in size yet again. In the meantime, it is materializing before the world’s eyes, bit by bit, online. It is a thoroughgoing revision of the entire text. Whereas the second edition just added new words and new usages to the original entries, the current project is researching and revising from scratch — preserving the history but aiming at a more coherent whole.