Sesame Street Quotes

You're an investigator - can't nobody find stuff out like a woman. Y'all put the police to shame, make the little investigative tricks they show on CSI and Law & Order: SVU look like counting lessons on Sesame Street.

It was a nephilim.” “A nephi-what?” asked Hugh, startled. “Isn’t that a character on Sesame Street?” Peter spoke up for the first time.

Why can’t we ever fight cute, helpless monsters? Like the ones on Sesame Street?

Do you know why they call me the Count? Because I love to count! Ah-hah-hah! - The Count Sesame Street

Someday I will stop being young and wanting stupid tattoos. There are 7 people in my house. We each have different genders. I cut my hair over the bathroom sink and everything I own has a hole in it. There is a banner in our living room that says “Love Cats Hate Capitalism.” We sit around the kitchen table and argue about the compost pile and Karl Marx and the necessity of violence when The Rev comes. Whatever the fuck The Rev means. Every time my best friend laughs I want to grab him by the shoulders and shout “Grow old with me and never kiss me on the mouth!” I want us to spend the next 80 years together eating Doritos and riding bikes. I want to be Oscar the Grouch. I want him and his girlfriend to be Bert and Ernie. I want us to live on Sesame Street and I will park my trash can on their front stoop and we will be friends every day. If I ever seem grouchy it’s just because I am a little afraid of all that fun. There is a river running through this city I know as well as my own name. It’s the first place I’ve ever called home. I don’t think its poetry to say I’m in love with the water. I don’t think it’s poetry to say I’m in love with the train tracks. I don’t think it’s blasphemy to say I see God in the skyline. There is always cold beer asking to be slurped on back porches. There are always crushed packs of Marlboro’s in my back pockets. I have been wearing the same patched-up shorts for 10 days. Someday I will stop being young and wanting stupid tattoos.

Though I wondered what she ever made of my professed love for and intentions to marry Big Bird, the hottie of Sesame Street.

Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee’s. To such a species, our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard. Our most complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door.

Call me a sucker for a man who had a great ass who knows how to bake a macaroni casserole and can tolerate six hours of Sesame Street a day.

She stepped back and frowned at me. "Open it." "Me?" I felt sure she was picking on me because I was the only enslaved god she had. "I'm not Hermes! I'm not even Valdez!" "Try." As if that were a simple request! I attempted to get my fingertips under the edge and prise it open. I spread my arms and yelled the standard magic words: MELLON! SHAZAM! SESAME STREET! None of these worked. At last I tried my infallible ace in the hole. I sang 'Love Is an Open Door' from the Frozen soundtrack. Even this failed. "Impossible!" I cried. "This door has no taste in music!

Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make television sticky.

I was coming down off the last painkiller left in my dresser drawer after Autumn tossed my stash. In that moment I was so groggy and happy I would have accepted a date with Oscar the Grouch - and planned to do some serious feeling up on the green furry beast too. Yeah, stooping to pharmaceutical-inspired sex fantasies about garbage can Sesame Street characters - that had to be the best Just Say No drug lecture a girl in a leg cast could ever receive to make her go cold turkey off the meds.

I fantasized about having a mother who was also raised on Sesame Street, Happy Meals, and John Hughes movies. Maybe she could ask me white mom questions like “How are you feeling?” or say white mom things like “I love you to the moon and back.” We would share the same first language. She could help me pick out a dress that I actually liked, instead of the dress that was most discounted. We would understand each other and not fight as much.

Early bird gets the worm. But cookie taste better than worm. So me sleep in.

He stood before the door, feeling uncharacteristically nervous. Hi. Uh... how are ya? No, no. Hello, Jack. I'm back. Shit, that fuckin' rhymes. Sounds like fuckin' Sesame Street. Hi there. Off with yer clothes. Nothin' like gettin' right ta the point, huh?

Parents embraced “Sesame Street” for several reasons, among them that it assuaged their guilt over the fact that they could not or would not restrict their children’s access to television. “Sesame Street” appeared to justify allowing a four- or five-year-old to sit transfixed in front of a television screen for unnatural periods of time. Parents were eager to hope that television could teach their children something other than which breakfast cereal has the most crackle. At the same time, “Sesame Street” relieved them of the responsibility of teaching their pre-school children how to read—no small matter in a culture where children are apt to be considered a nuisance.... We now know that “Sesame Street” encourages children to love school only if school is like “Sesame Street.” Which is to say, we now know that “Sesame Street” undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents.

Precious souls as young as three or four, raised on the misplaced multicultural priorities of Sesame Street,” he claims, “are doomed before they even enter the godless morass of the public school system.

In the history of show business, there probably never was a straighter straight man than banana-yellow Bert, the paper clip collector and pigeon fancier.

Here we are sitting at the Waldorf in a conference room... and in comes someone with long hair and wearing an outfit dripping leather. I remember whispering to Dave Connell, "How do we know that man back there isn't going to throw a bomb up here or toss a hand grenade?" Connell, always one to keep a cool head, assessed the situation with care. He discreetly turned his head toward the back and realized he recognized the tall, angular man carrying a small purse under his arm. A slight smile curled as he assured Cooney the hippie back there posed no threat. "Not likely, that's Jim Henson," he said.

She says New York was like Sesame Street for grown-ups, everyone has big hearts and you can be anything you wanna be.

Brenna, Beth, Britt…and Blake. Did your parents stop watching Sesame Street after the letter B and didn’t realize there was more to the alphabet?” I snicker. “That’s a good one. Remind me to tell it to my ma next time I see her.

Stoplights and love can be cruel

So…you're not going to tell me what they mean? C'mon. What's the Hob? Why Forks?” When I stand, I switch to my blatantly rude, you're-an-idiot tone. This is the one that always pisses off my mom. To be sure he's not missing my insult this time, I also cross my arms and speak very slowly like I'm speaking to a toddler. “The Hob is from The Hunger Games books. It's the underground market where the characters trade food and information. Forks would be the town in Twilight. The setting. In boy-speak, Forks equals the planet Tatooine for Star Wars. You know—Anakin Skywalker's childhood home? Or are you not familiar with any global blockbusters? I suppose I could use Sesame Street or Pokémon for a reference—if it would help you understand better?” Bam. That should seal it. I couldn't have sounded more like a total bitch. He nods. “No, I've got it. My bedroom was Tatooine for all of third and fourth grade. Boy-speak…that's funny.” He laughs again, and it sounds warm and—and—not at all offended!

The only nightmare I could remember was from when I was a very small child, maybe three or four years old. Cookie Monster from Sesame Street had been babysitting me and kept chasing me around the house calling me 'Cookie'. I was trying to focus on it, but at sixteen years old, it was funny to me now.

My unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do? If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece, "Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty, you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of, “over,” and “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk. If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground- like the rifle range or a car sales total board of the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

In time the whole family perked up like Sesame Street puppets, hoping that cheer, if worked at hard enough, could sugar the living and quiet the dead.

Rory is one part John the Baptist, one part John Holmes the porn star, and one part Elmo from Sesame Street.

Do you know why they call me the Count? Because I love to count! Ah-hah-hah.” —The Count Sesame Street

Shows like 3-2-1 Contact, The Big Comfy Couch, Captain Kangaroo, The Electric Company, The Great Space Coaster, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Romper Room, Reading Rainbow, Sesame Street, Zoobilee Zoo, and many, many more.

So my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece “Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of “over,” “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk.* If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground—like the rifle range or the car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

Cookie is like high five for stomach.

As a child I was a little bit disgusted and embarrassed to learn about the facts of life, and did not immediately connect the idea of “sex” to the feelings I got when I lay on the carpet on my stomach,idly humping a stuffed animal while watching Sesame Street. The realization that sex could be something to anticipate happily rather than to dread as another unpleasant grown-up duty came to me in a dream. Nothing overtly sexual even happened in this dream—it was a dream about lying in bed on a sunny afternoon with sun streaking the sheets, surrounded by warmth, feeling satisfied. It took life a long time for life to catch up with what this idealized version of sex could be like; it’s still not like that every time, but when it is, I notice.

There was a big “Sesame Street Live” extravaganza over at Madison Square Garden, so thousands of people decided to make a day of it and go straight from Sesame Street to Santa. We were packed today, absolutely packed, and everyone was cranky. Once the line gets long we break it up into four different lines because anyone in their right mind would leave if they knew it would take over two hours to see Santa. Two hours — you could see a movie in two hours. Standing in a two-hour line makes people worry that they’re not living in a democratic nation. People stand in line for two hours and they go over the edge. I was sent into the hallway to direct the second phase of the line. The hallway was packed with people, and all of them seemed to stop me with a question: which way to the down escalator, which way to the elevator, the Patio Restaurant, gift wrap, the women’s rest room, Trim-A-Tree. There was a line for Santa and a line for the women’s bathroom, and one woman, after asking me a dozen questions already, asked, “Which is the line for the women’s bathroom?” I shouted that I thought it was the line with all the women in it. She said, “I’m going to have you fired.” I had two people say that to me today, “I’m going to have you fired.” Go ahead, be my guest. I’m wearing a green velvet costume; it doesn’t get any worse than this. Who do these people think they are? “I’m going to have you fired!” and I wanted to lean over and say, “I’m going to have you killed.

Would've been useful when I was about eight," I said. "I used to have wicked nightmares." I did, too: stupid dreams about being chased by Elmo. A psycho Elmo with eyes like that Chucky doll. I'd wake up screaming and Vicky would come running in and ask what the nightmare was about. I never told her. I was too embarrassed.

He called me out in front of everyone and said sing- ‘One of these things is not like the other.’ That song is from the show Sesame Street if you do not know.' 'Nevaeh, can you see what is different? Along with Nevaeh, do you not see what you did? Then just after saying that he said. What did you do?’ Mr. DeVolcano said. 'He is contemptuously speaking down to me; he was trying to belittle my intelligence. I thought at the time, what is next, are you going to dance down the hall, while clicking your pointed-up feet together, and say- 'Nevaeh sucks, Nevaeh sucks!' 'Therefore, at that moment, I just said photocopy it, and that pissed him off; I would like to say to him to stop wasting my time.

Soccer's appeal lay in its opposition to the other popular sports. For children of the sixties, there was something abhorrent about enrolling kids in American football, a game where violence wasn't just incidental but inherent. They didn't want to teach the acceptability of violence, let alone subject their precious children to the risk of physical maiming. Baseball, where each batter must stand center stage four or five times a game, entailed too many stressful, potentially ego-deflating encounters. Basketball, before Larry Bird's prime, still had the taint of the ghetto. But soccer represented something very different. It was a tabula rasa, a sport onto which a generation of parents could project their values. Quickly, soccer came to represent the fundamental tenets of yuppie parenting, the spirit of Sesame Street and Dr. Benjamin Spock.

is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece “Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of “over,” “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk.* If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground—like the rifle range or the car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they

My unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do? If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece, "Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty, you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of, “over,” and “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk. If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground- like the rifle range or a car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

Now, back to Sapporo-ya. The place is deep enough below street level that the windows let in no natural light; harsh fluorescent lamps made everyone look ill. The walls are greenish-yellow. If you are directing a modern adaptation of The Divine Comedy, shoot the purgatory scenes here. The waitress set down my hiyashi chūka goma dare (sesame sauce). It was in every way the opposite of its surroundings: colorful, artfully presented, sweated over. The tangle of yellow noodles was served in a shallow blue-and-white bowl and topped with daikon, pickled ginger, roast pork, bamboo shoots, tomato, shredded nori, cucumber, bean sprouts, half a hard-boiled egg, and Japanese mustard. It was almost too pretty to ruin by tossing it together with chopsticks.

The New York sidewalk led us along a little corner park rimmed with yellow-orange and violet pansies that seemed to be smiling, their faces upturned, and past a bagel shop that smelled of sesame and salt, delicious warm air. We passed an empty wine bar with a pink chandelier, whimsical and dim inside, and a neighborhood diner with its blue neon sign huge and lit up, little white line-cook hats—the city seemed in my vision like a multifaceted gem, spectacular. I wished I could keep everything I witnessed like a photograph, to forever hold this electric aliveness. The colors of the flowers and the clothing were crisp and rosy, hyper-bright against the subdued sun-drenched pigments of the streets and the brick buildings, all seeming faded, softer than real. Pops of coral and red—a scarf, a lady’s lips—were pops of life.

There was little the mainstream auto industry could do to slow Tesla down. But that didn’t stop executives from trying to be difficult whenever possible. Tesla, for example, wanted to call its third-generation car the Model E, so that its lineup of vehicles would be the Model S, E, and X—another playful Musk gag. But Ford’s then CEO, Alan Mulally, blocked Tesla from using Model E, with the threat of a lawsuit. “So I call up Mulally and I was like, ‘Alan, are you just fucking with us or are you really going to do a Model E?’” Musk said. “And I’m not sure which is worse. You know? Like it would actually make more sense if they’re just fucking with us because if they actually come out with a Model E at this point, and we’ve got the Model S and the X and Ford comes out with the Model E, it’s going to look ridiculous. So even though Ford did the Model T a hundred years ago, nobody thinks of ‘Model’ as being a Ford thing anymore. So it would just feel like they stole it. Like why did you go steal Tesla’s E? Like you’re some sort of fascist army marching across the alphabet, some sort of Sesame Street robber. And he was like, ‘No, no, we’re definitely going to use it.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s such a good idea because people are going to be confused because it’s not going to make sense. People aren’t used to Ford having Model something these days. It’s usually called like the Ford Fusion.’ And he was like, no, his guys really want to use that. That’s terrible.” After that, Tesla registered the trademark for Model Y as another joke. “In fact, Ford called us up deadpan and said, ‘We see you’ve registered Model Y. Is that what you’re going to use instead of the Model E?’” Musk said. “I’m like, ‘No, it’s a joke. S-E-X-Y. What does that spell?’ But trademark law is a dry profession it turns out.

There was little the mainstream auto industry could do to slow Tesla down. But that didn't stop executives from trying to be difficult whenever possible. Tesla, for example, wanted to call its third-generation car the Model E, so that its lineup of vehicles would be the Model S, E and X - another playful Musk gag. But Ford's then CEO, Alan Mulally, blocked Tesla from using Model E, with the threat of a lawsuit. "So I call up Mulally and I was like, 'Alan, are you just fucking with us or are you really going to do a Model E?'" Musk said. "And I'm not sure which is worse. You know? Like it would actually make more sense if they're just fucking with us because if they actually come out with a Model E at this point, and we've got the Model S and the X and Ford comes out with a Model E, it's going to look ridiculous. So even though Ford did the Model T a hundred years ago, nobody thinks of 'Model' as being a Ford thing anymore. So it would just feel like they stole it. Like why did you going stealing Tesla's E? Like you're some sort of fascist army marching across the alphabet, some sort of Sesame Street robber. And he was like, 'No, no, we're definitely going to use it.' And I was like, 'Oh, I don't think that's such a good idea because people are going to be confused because it's not gong to make sense. People aren't used to Ford having Model something these days. It's usually called like the Ford Fusion.' And he was like, no, his guys really want to use that. That's terrible." After that, Tesla registered the trademark for Model Y as another joke. "In fact, Ford called us up deadpan and said, 'We see you've registered Model Y. Is that what you're gong to use instead of the Model E?'" Musk said. "I'm like, 'No, it's a joke. S-E-X-Y. What does that spell?' But trademark law is a dry profession it turns out.

Christopher Cerf has been composing songs for Sesame Street for twenty-five years. His large Manhattan townhouse is full of Sesame Street memorabilia – photographs of Christopher with his arm around Big Bird, etc. ‘Well, it’s certainly not what I expected when I wrote them,’ Christopher said. ‘I have to admit, my first reaction was, “Oh my gosh, is my music really that terrible?” ’ I laughed. ‘I once wrote a song for Bert and Ernie called “Put Down The Ducky”,’ he said, ‘which might be useful for interrogating members of the Ba’ath Party.’ ‘That’s very good,’ I said. ‘This interview,’ Christopher said, ‘has been brought to you by the letters W, M and D.’ ‘That’s very good,’ I said. We both laughed. I paused. ‘And do you think that the Iraqi prisoners, as well as giving away vital information, are learning new letters and numbers?’ I said. ‘Well, wouldn’t that be an incredible double win?’ said Christopher. Christopher took me upstairs to his studio to play me one of his Sesame Street compositions, called ‘Ya! Ya! Das Is a Mountain!’ ‘The way we do Sesame Street,’ he explained, ‘is that we have educational researchers who test whether these songs are working, whether the kids are learning. And one year they asked me to write a song to explain what a mountain is, and I wrote a silly yodelling song about what a mountain was.’ Christopher sang me a little of the song: Oompah-pah! Oompah-pah! Ya! Ya! Das is a mountain! Part of zee ground zat sticks way up high! ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘forty per cent of the kids had known what a mountain was before they heard the song, and after they heard the song, only about twenty-six per cent knew what a mountain was. That’s all they needed. You don’t know what a mountain is now, right? It’s gone! So I figure if I have the power to suck information out of people’s brains by writing these songs, maybe that’s something that could be useful to the CIA for brainwashing techniques.’ Just then, Christopher’s phone rang. It was a lawyer from his music publishers, BMI. I listened into Christopher’s side of the conversation: ‘Oh really?’ he said. ‘I see . . . Well, theoretically they have to log that and I should be getting a few cents for every prisoner, right? Okay. Bye, bye . . .’ ‘What was that about?’ I asked Christopher. ‘Whether I’m due some money for the performance royalties,’ he explained. ‘Why not? It’s an American thing to do. If I have the knack of writing songs that can drive people crazy sooner and more effectively than others, why shouldn’t I profit from that?’ This is why, later that day, Christopher asked Danny Epstein – who has been the music supervisor of Sesame Street since the very first programme was broadcast in July 1969 – to come to his house. It would be Danny’s responsibility to collect the royalties from the military if they proved negligent in filing a music-cue sheet.

Every few months or so at home, Pops had to have Taiwanese ’Mian. Not the Dan-Dan Mian you get at Szechuan restaurants or in Fuchsia Dunlop’s book, but Taiwanese Dan-Dan. The trademark of ours is the use of clear pork bone stock, sesame paste, and crushed peanuts on top. You can add chili oil if you want, but I take it clean because when done right, you taste the essence of pork and the bitterness of sesame paste; the texture is somewhere between soup and ragout. Creamy, smooth, and still soupy. A little za cai (pickled radish) on top, chopped scallions, and you’re done. I realized that day, it’s the simple things in life. It’s not about a twelve-course tasting of unfamiliar ingredients or mass-produced water-added rib-chicken genetically modified monstrosity of meat that makes me feel alive. It’s getting a bowl of food that doesn’t have an agenda. The ingredients are the ingredients because they work and nothing more. These noodles were transcendent not because he used the best produce or protein or because it was locally sourced, but because he worked his dish. You can’t buy a championship. Did this old man invent Dan-Dan Mian? No. But did he perfect it with techniques and standards never before seen? Absolutely. He took a dish people were making in homes, made it better than anyone else, put it on front street, and established a standard. That’s professional cooking. To take something that already speaks to us, do it at the highest level, and force everyone else to step up, too. Food at its best uplifts the whole community, makes everyone rise to its standard. That’s what that Dan-Dan Mian did. If I had the honor of cooking my father’s last meal, I wouldn’t think twice. Dan-Dan Mian with a bullet, no question.

Show me." He looks at her, his eyes darker than the air. "If you draw me a map I think I'll understand better." "Do you have paper?" She looks over the empty sweep of the car's interior. "I don't have anything to write with." He holds up his hands, side to side as if they were hinged. "That's okay. You can just use my hands." She smiles, a little confused. He leans forward and the streetlight gives him yellow-brown cat eyes. A car rolling down the street toward them fills the interior with light, then an aftermath of prickling black waves. "All right." She takes his hands, runs her finger along one edge. "Is this what you mean? Like, if the ocean was here on the side and these knuckles are mountains and here on the back it's Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, West L.A., West Hollywood, and X marks the spot." She traces her fingertips over the backs of his hands, her other hand pressing into the soft pads of his palm. "This is where we are- X." "Right now? In this car?" He leans back; his eyes are black marble, dark lamps. She holds his gaze a moment, hears a rush of pulse in her ears like ocean surf. Her breath goes high and tight and shallow; she hopes he can't see her clearly in the car- her translucent skin so vulnerable to the slightest emotion. He turns her hands over, palms up, and says, "Now you." He draws one finger down one side of her palm and says, "This is the Tigris River Valley. In this section there's the desert, and in this point it's plains. The Euphrates runs along there. This is Baghdad here. And here is Tahrir Square." He touches the center of her palm. "At the foot of the Jumhurriya Bridge. The center of everything. All the main streets run out from this spot. In this direction and that direction, there are wide busy sidewalks and apartments piled up on top of shops, men in business suits, women with strollers, street vendors selling kabobs, eggs, fruit drinks. There's the man with his cart who sold me rolls sprinkled with thyme and sesame every morning and then saluted me like a soldier. And there's this one street...." He holds her palm cradled in one hand and traces his finger up along the inside of her arm to the inner crease of her elbow, then up to her shoulder. Everywhere he touches her it feels like it must be glowing, as if he were drawing warm butter all over her skin. "It just goes and goes, all the way from Baghdad to Paris." He circles her shoulder. "And here"- he touches the inner crease of her elbow-"is the home of the Nile crocodile with the beautiful speaking voice. And here"- his fingers return to her shoulder, dip along their clavicle-"is the dangerous singing forest." "The dangerous singing forest?" she whispers. He frowns and looks thoughtful. "Or is that in Madagascar?" His hand slips behind her neck and he inches toward her on the seat. "There's a savanna. Chameleons like emeralds and limes and saffron and rubies. Red cinnamon trees filled with lemurs." "I've always wanted to see Madagascar," she murmurs: his breath is on her face. Their foreheads touch. His hand rises to her face and she can feel that he's trembling and she realizes that she's trembling too. "I'll take you," he whispers.

You know how, back in your normal life, you'd get up every day and go to a job, then you go wind down at a bar, or go home and watch TV, maybe sometime along the line you get married and have some kids, and eventually you die?” “I suppose so.” Randy sounded doubtful. “Well maybe it's a little different for registered sex offenders. Maybe you beat off to Sesame Street, then microwave a burrito for breakfast or whatever.

Everyone knows you are supposed to read to young children. Well, that’s what I hear when I have my kids watch Sesame Street so I can waste time on the Internet. “Read to your children.” Interestingly enough, when you hear “Read to your children” on Sesame Street, they never say, “Did you hear me? Do not watch Sesame Street! Turn off the TV and read that kid a book!

I'm sorry. It feels like the moment calls for some humor. You're ranting and dressed like Elmo. The Cookie Monster. Whatever, Rashid

I felt like I had been run over by ‘Big Bird’ driving a London bus.

In Ernie’s book I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon, the cover shows stars shining right through a crescent moon. And in a “C in space” segment, the moon looks surprisingly happy, despite the fact that these stars are shining through it. OK, yes, the moon having a face and emotions is not astronomically accurate either, but that is still no excuse for teaching children inaccurate geometry. I expect more from a supposedly “educational” program. The only explanation I can think of is that, in the extended Sesame Street universe, there are Muppet bases on the moon, and those are the dots of light we are seeing.

Little House on the Prairie and Disney Sunday Movie were safe. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street were on the list, too, until the Prophet deemed them worldly and idolatrous because puppets, like cartoons, were an imitation of God’s creation.

No-prep meals on the way out the door: • String cheese and a box of raisins • Yogurt • Breakfast or granola bars • A plastic baggie of cereal (fill these up Sunday night so they’re set to go) And try to inclue a glass of fortified orange juice and low-fat or skim milk.

Trauma and bonding. Those are pretty big words. Were they the Sesame Street words of the day?” “Shawty fuck you.

Providing structure and predictability Toddlers are reassured by familiar routines, regardless of their nature. When the environment prior to placement is a healthy one, the use of transition objects that link the former caregiver’s style and schedule to the present provides the sense of structure that is important to the toddler’s developing sense of security in her new home. A consistent schedule is also important to the child who is experiencing separation anxiety. Parents should be absolutely reliable about returning when expected. It is important to help children anticipate their schedules by talking through the day’s routine. Because toddlers cannot tell time, use concrete, regularly scheduled events to help them mark time such as mealtimes or the timing of a favorite television program such as Sesame Street. Parents should make every effort to delay making additional major life changes following a toddler adoption such as moving to a new home, adding another family member, divorce, or marriage until new routines are firm and secure.

but aside from the cars the stars of the show were some make-believe characters called Muppets, still seven years away from Sesame Street fame. The auto show special two years earlier had been critiqued for being too dry; this one went to the other extreme. They were “clever little puppets,” noted one reviewer, “but there must be another way to add entertainment . . . with more auto-related features.

I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece “Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of “over,” “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk.* If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground—like the rifle range or the car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

I was an exceptionally freaked-out child. My earliest memories are of fear, as are pretty much all the memories that come after my earliest memories. Growing up, I was afraid not only of all the commonly recognized and legitimate childhood dangers: the dark, strangers, the deep end of the swimming pool, but I was also afraid of an extensive list of completely benign things: snow, perfectly nice babysitters, cars, playgrounds, stairs, Sesame Street, the telephone, board games, the grocery store, sharp blades of grass, any new situation whatsoever, anything that dared to move, etc., etc., etc.

Can’t you stop with the vampire clichés? Next thing we know, you’ll be wearing a cape and pronouncing all your W’s as V’s, trying to land a role on Sesame Street or a chocolate cereal ad.

He shook his head. “Just — beware of Mr. Chu. He makes Itex look like Sesame Street.

The apartments had probably been built back in the 70’s when the country was going through some ugly social times. Maybe the country was going through its adolescent phase and breaking out with a bad case of social acne. Cheesy professors were running around the country proclaiming “turn on, tune in, drop out.” A mean-spirited drunk from LA was cranking out poems about the low-life and reaching for another beer out of the refrigerator on stage as part of his performance. The porn industry was in its golden era. People proclaiming their individuality and uniqueness were all dressed the same. Mothers thought they were educating their kids by letting them watch Sesame Street, but they were just turning their kids into TV junkies and a future generation of pudding heads with blank faces ready to believe anything on the lamestream media. The Vietnam War eventually came to an end after Laos was clustered bombed, which had nothing to do with ending the war. Dominoes didn’t fall. A new war memorial went out for bid. Some crazy scientist found a way to make clothes out of chemicals - polyester. Dwarfs found their favorite hangout - the disco. The whole country seemed to be dancing to the disco beat, hypnotized by the flashing strobe lights off the big, shiny ball.

Nikolai walked behind the two new shifters and chuckled. “Two! Two vampires! Ah ha ha!” Vince laughed. “And Andrei said he wasn’t paying attention to ‘Sesame Street.

Wall Street: I’d start carrying guns if I were you.      Your annual reports are worse fiction than the screenplay for Dude, Where’s My Car?, which you further inflate by downsizing and laying off the very people whose life savings you’re pillaging. How long do you think you can do that to people? There are consequences. Maybe not today. Or tomorrow. But inevitably. Just ask the Romanovs. They had a nice little setup, too, until that knock at the door.      Second, Congress: We’re on to your act.      In the middle of the meltdown, CSPAN showed you pacing the Capitol floor yapping about “under God” staying in the Pledge of Allegiance and attacking the producers of Sesame Street for introducing an HIV-positive Muppet. Then you passed some mealy-mouthed reforms and crowded to get inside the crop marks at the photo op like a frat-house phone-booth stunt.      News flash: We out here in the Heartland care infinitely more about God-and-Country issues because we have internal moral-guidance systems that make you guys look like a squadron of gooney birds landing facedown on an icecap and tumbling ass over kettle. But unlike you, we have to earn a living and can’t just chuck our job responsibilities to march around the office ranting all day that the less-righteous offend us. Jeez, you’re like autistic schoolchildren who keep getting up from your desks and wandering to the window to see if there’s a new demagoguery jungle gym out on the playground. So sit back down, face forward and pay attention!      In summary, what’s the answer?      The reforms laws were so toothless they were like me saying that I passed some laws, and the president and vice president have forgotten more about insider trading than Martha Stewart will ever know.      Yet the powers that be say they’re doing everything they can. But they’re conveniently forgetting a little constitutional sitcom from the nineties that showed us what the government can really do when it wants to go Starr Chamber. That’s with two rs.      Does it make any sense to pursue Wall Street miscreants any less vigorously than Ken Starr sniffed down Clinton’s sex life? And remember, a sitting president actually got impeached over that—something incredibly icky but in the end free of charge to taxpayers, except for the $40 million the independent posse spent dragging citizens into motel rooms and staring at jism through magnifying glasses. But where’s that kind of government excess now? Where’s a coffee-cranked little prosecutor when you really need him?      I say, bring back the independent counsel. And when we finally nail you stock-market cheats, it’s off to a real prison, not the rich guys’ jail. Then, in a few years, when the first of you start walking back out the gates with that new look in your eyes, the rest of the herd will get the message pretty fast.

The world—much as we want it to—does not accord with our intuition. This is the second lesson of the Tipping Point. Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions. Without the evidence of the Distracter, which told them that their intuition about fantasy and reality was wrong, Sesame Street would today be a forgotten footnote in television history. Lester Wunderman’s gold box sounded like a silly idea until he proved how much more effective it was than conventional advertising. That no one responded to Kitty Genovese’s screams sounded like an open and shut case of human indifference, until careful psychological testing demonstrated the powerful influence of context. To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.

Disney walked away from the deal, but they started showcasing the Muppets in Disney World, anyway without paying any fees.

Clash found Maria sexy and attractive.

Leo has apparently changed his mind about Sesame Street. Through the kitchen door, I can see it on the screen. The Count with his benign cloth fangs and his outlandish Transylvanian accent is counting “little batties,” one, two, three—a charming portrayal of blood drinkers, that little cloth puppet, and quite preferable to some others I’ve seen.

A word I keep coming back to tonight. Word of the day. My life is now Sesame Street, and I am Oscar the Grouch. Pretty sure Elmo just brought me my wine.

Rogers's embrace of reality also included breaking one of the established rules of television, a prohibition against footage that is essentially empty. While Sesame Street used fast pacing and quick-cut technique to excite and engage young viewers and keep them glued to the screen, Fred Rogers deliberately headed in the opposite direction, creating his own quiet, slow-paced, thoughtful world, which led to real learning in his view...Silence - Fred's willingness, as a producer and as a person, to embrace quiet, inactivity, and empty space -- and his calm demeanor were completely unexpected...They were qualities that captivated children and their parents.

I see the rhetorical question "Who Owns the Past?" so frequently used by humanities and social science professors to provoke classroom discussions as needlessly and erroneously planting the idea that a living group of people could "own the past." Surely, any such claim should be taken no more seriously than the cast of Sesame Street should they claim to "own the alphabet.

The customer quickly turned the lock on the front door before following Mike to the workstation and watching as the butcher slid a fat smoked ham back and forth, back and forth across the razor-sharp blade of the meat-slicing machine. Mike caught each thin slice and piled it on the round, sesame-seeded bread that lay split open on the counter. He repeated the process with salami, depositing it on the ham. Next a layer of capicola, followed by pepperoni, Swiss cheese, and provolone. "Looking good," said the customer, observing from the other side of the counter. "Thanks again for this." "No problem," said Mike. "We Royal Street folks have to help each other out when we can." "How many muffs do you think you've made in your life?" asked the customer, setting a shopping bag on the floor. The sandwich maker laughed. "I couldn't even begin to tell you." He reached for the glass container of olive spread he had mixed himself. Finely chopped green olives, celery, cauliflower, and carrot seasoned with extra-virgin olive oil, all left to marinate overnight.

Her lover was, of all things, a Turkish physics professor at Mount Saint Mary College, a diminutive, balding man in his fifties who sounded and even looked sort of like the Count from Sesame Street. Even now, McDonald sometimes closed his eyes to see the Muppet laughing at him. “I slept with your wife one, two, three, four times. Ah-ha-hah!

You were right earlier. I do need better people in my life. So maybe…we could be friends?” I’ve become Grover from Sesame Street.

As a television show, and a good one, "Sesame Street" does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television.

We Americans once reveled in our reputation for self-sufficiency. We were tinkerers, fixers of things. Yet while many of us can recall our parents wrestling into compliance a recalcitrant toaster or washing machine, few of us today would attempt the same with a malfunctioning microwave oven, digital camera, or anything built up from a computer chip. Appliances, electronics, and automobiles are black boxes, impervious to probing and resistant to repair. Getting into the guts of things is difficult, and if we dare trespass in the innards of what we thought belonged to us, we do so at the risk of the guarantee. Even seasoned professionals are losing heart. In less than two decades, the Professional Service Association lost three-quarters of its small appliance and consumer electronics shop members. During that same period the number of electronics repair shops plummeted from twenty thousand to five thousand. Repair people of all stripes have fallen into obscurity. Sesame Street closed its “Fix-it Shop” in 1996, stating as its reason that young viewers were unlikely to encounter one.

You’re way better than that other guy,” Kasey says, crossing her arms over her chest. “Just tell her you like her. It’s all about the confidence, you know?” “They tell you that on Sesame Street?” I ask, matching her stance, and she makes a face at me.

Misha confirms what I fear most: no one knows how to use Excel,

In order for cultural socialization to be antiracist, however, it has to unfold in three crucial steps. The first is to raise a child to comprehend and appreciate what is distinct about their own culture and history. Next, we have to raise a child to comprehend and appreciate what’s distinct about other cultures and histories. And finally, we must raise the child to comprehend and appreciate what’s the same about their own and the other cultural groups. In the words of the classic Sesame Street picture book, we have to teach kids that We’re Different, We’re the Same.

What did I glean?" "I'm not trying to be flippant. Just - did he tell you anything about himself?" "He hates Sesame Street." "We'll need more than that when we're eventually put on the stand for this.

[...] the chimps had many empty hours to fill. Time can seem endless and often cruel for caged animals. Nim and Sally did have some diversions in their enclosure: a small television set, rarely watched; a tire swing; a basketball set; and a variety of allegedly indestructible toys. But the chimps mainly passed the time interacting with each other—grooming, cuddling, playing, chasing. When occasional squabbles erupted, their high-pitched screeches could be heard from a distance. Minutes later the couple would make up and hug. Nim was frequently seen signing “sorry” to Sally, who always forgave her close friend. On his own, Nim spent hours flipping through the pages of old magazines, seeming particularly diverted by images of people. The magazines, which Nim tore to shreds, were swept away at the end of each day and replaced by new ones in the morning. But he did manage to keep two children's books intact—no small accomplishment. His prize possessions, they were carefully tucked away in the loft area of his cage. (WER would have appreciated Nim's affection for books.) During the day, Nim brought the books down from the loft and pored over them intently, as if studying for an exam. One was a Sesame Street book with an illustrated section on how to learn ASL. The other was in essence his personal photo album from his New York years, a battered copy of The Story of Nim: The Chimp Who Learned Language, published in 1980. In it, dozens of black-and-white photographs of Nim— with Terrace, LaFarge, Petitto, Butler, and a handful of others—tell the story of his childhood (or an idealized version of it) from his infancy to his return to Oklahoma. Nim appears dressed in little-boy clothes, doing household chores, and learning his first signs. The book ends with a photo of Nim and Mac playing together, cage-free, in Oklahoma. The accompanying text explains that Nim is a chimpanzee, not a human, which was why he had been sent back to IPS.

My life is now Sesame Street, and I am Oscar the Grouch.

The head of research for Sesame Street in the early years was a psychologist from Oregon, Ed Palmer, whose specialty was the use of television as a teaching tool. When the Children's Television Workshop was founded in the late 1960s, Palmer was a natural recruit. “I was the only academic they could find doing research on children's TV,” he says, with a laugh. Palmer was given the task of finding out whether the elaborate educational curriculum that had been devised for Sesame Street by its academic-advisers was actually reaching the show's viewers. It was a critical task. There are those involved with Sesame Street who say, in fact, that without Ed Palmer the show would never have lasted through the first season. Palmer's innovation was something he called the Distracter. He would play an episode of Sesame Street on a television monitor, and then run a slide show on a screen next to it, showing a new slide every seven and a half seconds. “We had the most varied set of slides we could imagine,” said Palmer. “We would have a body riding down the street with his arms out, a picture of a tall building, a leaf floating through ripples of water, a rainbow, a picture taken through a microscope, an Escher drawing. Anything to be novel, that was the idea.” Preschoolers would then be brought into the room, two at a time, and told to watch the television show. Palmer and his assistants would sit slightly to the side, with a pencil and paper, quietly noting when the children were watching Sesame Street and when they lost interest and looked, instead, at the slide show. Every time the slide changed, Palmer and his assistants would make a new notation, so that by the end of the show they had an almost second-by-second account of what parts of the episode being tested managed to hold the viewers' attention and what parts did not. The Distracter was a stickiness machine. “We'd take that big-sized chart paper, two by three feet, and tape several of those sheets together,” Palmer says. "We had data points, remember, for every seven and a half seconds, which comes to close to four hundred data points for a single program, and we'd connect all those points with a red line so it would look like a stock market report from Wall Street. It might plummet or gradually decline, and we'd say whoa, what's going on here. At other times it might hug the very top of the chart and we'd say, wow, that segment's really grabbing the attention of the kids. We tabulated those Distracter scores in percentages. We'd have up to 100 percent sometimes. The average attention for most shows was around 85 to 90 percent. If the producers got that, they were happy. If they got around fifty, they'd go back to the drawing board.

The chocolate chip cookies that Cookie Monster eats on Sesame Street are actually rice cakes with brown paint dots.

I kept my identity to myself as soon as I found it. I had seen it before, in cartoon characters...Big Bird and the Brave Little Toaster. They didn't have to be a young girl or a young boy with dark insecurities and stigmatized daydreams. They could transcend ambiguously between boy, girl, hero, villain, martyr.

It’s as though the gentle reggae strains of Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” have been sped up to a ska beat, and both worrying and unhappiness are now treated not just as a taboo but as an affliction you have a responsibility to treat. Curmudgeonly remarks, high-strung habits, and skepticism once merely meant you were a certain type of person, negative but relatively harmless, like Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street. But these days, “grouchiness” is often encountered as a condition for which you require intervention: a prescription, more meditation, more self-care, a subscription to O, The Oprah Magazine.

My mom, by contrast, never liked fantasy. When I was little, this made as much sense to me as not liking gravity or Gordon from Sesame Street. "I just like things that are true," she'd say. "Strong people fighting against the elements." I grill her so often on why she wasn't obsessed with dragons LIKE A NORMAL PERSON that it became the catchphrase in our house - strong people fighting against the elements.

Carolyn's father said she was too old for stories, but she thought eleven wasn't too old for anything—except diapers and maybe Sesame Street.

O societate care insistă din proprie voință să creadă că inocența este cea mai nobilă dintre virtuți și care venerează inocența în altarele sale din Orlando, din Anaheim și de pe Sesame Street, va fi incapabilă să sesizeze orice sămânță care nu este învelită în glazură de zahăr. Asemenea lui Forest Gump care mănâncă ciocolată și le oferă dulciuri străinilor înainte să-i privească în ochi, când te comporți ca un prost, ești prost. Ideea de sămânță rea, ideea că există vocație demonică ar trebui să ne contrarieze inteligența nativă, trezind-o din inocența teoriilor noastre americane, astfel încât să fim capabili ca națiune să înțelegem să răul este atras de inocență, locul lui și este lângă inocență. Abia atunci poate vom recunoaște că în America, cei Născuți Asasinisunt însoțitorii secreți, dacă nu efectele, lui Forest Gump.

I think of this whenever someone says to me, “Jerry Lewis says women aren’t funny,” or “Christopher Hitchens says women aren’t funny,” or “Rick Fenderman says women aren’t funny…. Do you have anything to say to that?” Yes. We don’t fucking care if you like it. I don’t say it out loud, of course, because Jerry Lewis is a great philanthropist, Hitchens is very sick, and the third guy I made up. Unless one of these men is my boss, which none of them is, it’s irrelevant. My hat goes off to them. It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist. So my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you. If the answer is yes, you have a more difficult road ahead of you. I suggest you model your strategy after the old Sesame Street film piece “Over! Under! Through!” (If you’re under forty you might not remember this film. It taught the concepts of “over,” “under,” and “through” by filming toddlers crawling around an abandoned construction site. They don’t show it anymore because someone has since realized that’s nuts.) If your boss is a jerk, try to find someone above or around your boss who is not a jerk.* If you’re lucky, your workplace will have a neutral proving ground—like the rifle range or the car sales total board or the SNL read-through. If so, focus on that. Again, don’t waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go “Over! Under! Through!” and opinions will change organically when you’re the boss. Or they won’t. Who cares? Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.

You could even break it down by year and see the evolution of America that way. It, like America, became more and more diverse. Now, however, it’s a different story. They’re teaching extremely basic skills, things that children that age should already know. And the characters are more extravagant but lacking in depth. It’s a reflection of ourselves with all this celebrity worship and a disdain for all things intellectual. I think Sesame Street will predict the fall of our nation much better than any media outlet. They’ll begin to have characters, as they’re starting to now, that are homeless, or socialists, or felons. Then they’ll give up and begin teaching children just enough to get by. How to be manual laborers or soldiers or whatever else the dominant profession of a declining society will be.

Virtually every time Sesame Street’s educational value has been tested — and the show has been subject to more academic scrutiny than any television show in history — it has been proved to improve the reading and learning skills of its viewers. Most recently, a group of researchers at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Kansas went back and recontacted close to 600 children whose television watching as preschoolers they had tracked back in the 1980s. The kids were now all in high school, and the researchers found — to their astonishment — that the kids who had watched Sesame Street the most as four- and five-year-olds were still doing better in school than those who didn’t. Even after controlling for things like parent’s education, family size, and preschool vocabulary level, the Sesame Street watchers did better in high school in English, math, and science and they were also much more likely to read books for leisure than those who didn’t watch the show, or who watched the show less. According to the study, for every hour per week of Sesame Street viewing, high-school grade point averages increased by .052, which means that a child who watched five hours of Sesame Street a week at age five was earning, on average, about one quarter of a grade level higher than a child of similar background who never watched the show. Somehow a single television show an hour long, watched over the course of no more than two or three years, was still making a difference twelve and fifteen years later.

The best take I’ve heard on this topic comes from the geniuses at Sesame Street, who describe foods as being “anytime foods” or “sometime foods.” When you define these categories for your daughter, explain that anytime foods are unprocessed (and are the foods that take the best care of her body) and sometime foods are the heavily processed. If necessary, educate your daughter about how to identify a sometime food: it’s made in a factory, it comes in a package, it usually has more than five ingredients, and it contains things she can’t pronounce.

Brenna, Beth, Britt…and Blake. Did your parents stop watching Sesame Street after the letter B and not realize there was more to the alphabet?” I snicker. “That’s a good one. Remind me to tell it to my ma next time I see her.

She's like some demonic version of Big Bird, and we're stuck in Sesame Street hell.

Her French sounded exaggerated, like the puppets on Sesame Street.

Word of the day. My life is now Sesame Street, and I am Oscar the Grouch. Pretty sure Elmo just brought me my wine.

has found that California’s highest prevalence of ACEs is in rural counties, has initiated a public education campaign that has so far reached 31 million families with messages about childhood adversity, how it impairs health and how to heal. Even Sesame Street is in on the act.

Eighth Street on St. Mark’s Place has a flush feel with breezy trees and neighborhood stoops with networks of fire escapes above beautifully natural hip people of every stripe striding the streets. It feels like Sesame Street got an expensive new outdoor set upgrade filmed in widescreen Technicolor.