News You Can Bruise

I've long been fascinated by the highly ritualized nature of Congressional hearings. I think my interest started back in 2002 when Elmo the Muppet, a fictional character, testified before Congress, and no one said "Come out from under that Muppet and face our scrutiny!" or "Holy shit, Muppets are real!"

Anyway, the most recent round of Congressional hearings made me realize that the format makes a perfect framework for a role-playing game, a la The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Each player takes their turn in the spotlight and is asked to justify some despicable behavior or advocate for some bizarre appropriation. In fact, it could just be a theme hack of TEAoBM, but you'd want to have a balance of really hostile Congresspeople and those who just threw softballs. I guess the TEAoBM "story complication" mechanism could handle both.

At one point in November I had the idea to watch every stupid Christmas special ever created and write reviews. Yeah, you may have noticed a pattern to my terrible ideas. Fortunately this didn't happen, but I did go as far as recording a bunch of those specials on the PVR.

For me the only Christmas special is A Charlie Brown Christmas, with its existential crisis resolved by a Kierkegaardian leap to faith. Also because it was the only Christmas special I'd ever seen until a few months ago, when I saw some Rankin-Bass specials while playing with Maggie. I liked the animation but the stories were a mess. But my point is that all these specials were lying around on the PVR, and yesterday for some reason we watched a Muppets special called "Letters to Santa".

Man, it was terrible. I've never seen anything so bad that involved Muppets. Kermit has been toned down into blandness, even though his negative traits were never really that negative. I don't even recognize Gonzo. On the plus side, its relentless demonization of the TSA provides valuable counterprogramming for today's youth. (Yet the USPS was lionized! I've never seen a television program play such favorites with government agencies.) A pleasant sense of vertigo arose from Jane Krakowski never revealing that she was actually her 30 Rock character doing a terrible Muppets/NBC holiday special while coked to the gills on Teamocil. And Sam the American Eagle is always good, but at this point the Muppets have a problem similar to the Simpsons, where there are so many bit players who have to come out and do their schtick that whatever you're trying to illustrate bogs down.

In this case, though, the main plot was so inane that the show was actually at its best when bogged down in schtick. But afterwards we re-watched the great Steve Martin scene from The Muppet Movie, to cleanse the palate. Now that's a celebrity cameo!

We watched a Sesame Street video in which the Sesame Street subway station was visible. The lines accessible from that station are the 1, 2, A, and B. I say this puts Sesame Street in the West Village around 4th street. The Muppet wiki has more.

First there was Bert hanging out with Osama bin Laden. Then, many years later, in fact a couple days ago, Sumana went to the Bangalore equivalent of a county fair. There were a number of public-service-announcement posters including an anti-suicide poster listing common causes of suicide and telling you to look for the warning signs. Fair enough, except the background image of the poster was this Internet-gag picture of Elmo offing himself.

I can see the thought process--it's certainly eye-catching, and if it weren't Elmo it might even be disturbing--but I don't know how they got the Elmo picture in particular. An image search for "doll suicide" pulls up arty pictures and goth porn. Someone had to think to search for "elmo suicide", and at that point you're really in on the joke.

Yesterday I heard something to the effect that only a trained Muppeteer may operate a genuine Jim Henson Creature Shop Muppet. If JHCS sees a random person performing with a Kermit they'll come after said random person.

One, is this true? Is there some sort of Muppet license? Two, what's the legal argument? Is there no right of first sale for Muppets? Does sticking your hand in a Muppet instantiate the trademarked character, the same way drawing (or saying the name of) Mickey Mouse would?

Sumana's coworker Jacob has a Muppet obsession similar to mine. He sent us these 10-second coffee commercials from the 1950s featuring a proto-Kermit beating up on a proto-Waldorf for not liking the brand of coffee advertised. Sample commercial:

Proto-Kermit: Have some Willkins coffee?
Proto-Waldorf: No thanks, gimme Brand X!
[Proto-Kermit shoves an X-shaped branding iron into Proto-Waldorf's chest.]

I've never seen such violent Muppets.

Sumana went with coworkers to see Avenue Q. I'd been looking forward to seeing Avenue Q as well, because it looked like someone had finally done a musical that really explored the symbiotic relationship between Muppet and puppeteer. But much of my interest was crushed when Sumana revealed that the puppeteers are not characters in the musical! Any more than they are on brand-name Muppet shows. The only human characters are the ones who aren't operating Muppets.

The puppeteers are visible, they walk around the stage and they emote along with their Muppets, but in the fiction of the show they're supposed to not exist? Or they're supposed to be the insensate bodies of the Muppet characters? I dunno how it's supposed to work. How do Muppet operators see their Muppets? I always thought it was like the relationship between ventriloquist and dummy.

On the satelite radio on the way to Bakersfield we heard the title song for Jesus Christ Superstar. I noted that it sounded like it was being played by Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. This opened up a fruitful discussion about a Muppet version of Jesus Christ Superstar. The problem is that Big Bird would have to play Jesus, for the same reasons he would have to play Gandalf in the Muppet Lord of the Rings, and I don't think Big Bird could carry a whole Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.

So I proposed that the Muppets could do the book of Acts instead. That's more of an ensemble piece, so it would work better. Plus that makes it possible for Kermit to play the part of Paul, which is excellent because the Muppet Panic was invented to depict the conversion of Paul.

This has been linked all over, but I enjoyed it a lot: Over Time, a student short featuring puppets that are not quite Kermit the Frog. It's funny and it's (off-brand) Muppets, but it's also got an interesting take on the relationship between puppet and puppeteer. Better than those dang pizza ads that's all the real Muppets are doing nowadays.

I think Brendan and I thought of this on the way to California. Here are previous theories, all of which pale in comparison to the shiny new theory.

The new theory is that the hippie Muppet is trying to communicate with the Snowths, but the only thing he can get across in their language is the phrase "Manahmanah", a context-free friendly expression that translates roughly to "Hey hey!" So the lyrics of the song, translated, go something like this:

Hey hey! (It's good to see you)
Hey hey! (I said it's good)
Hey hey! (It's good to see you, to see you, to see you, it really is a good thing that you came)

Then the hippie Muppet whips out his Advanced Snowth and starts talking about how lovely the Snowth country is, and asking where are the most beautiful landscapes, and they can't understand a word he's saying.

Last night I watched the ambitiously obscene La Grande Bouffe (IMDBwhack: "antique-car"), which translates as "The Big Blow-out" but which I shall hilariously mistranslate as "The Big Beef". The brilliant conceit of this movie is that four Frenchmen[0] decide to commit suicide by eating themselves to death. I feel churlish complaining about such a gifted premise, but we're never given any clue as to their motivation for doing do. There are hints that this appetite for deadly overindulgence is born of some Fight Club-ish desire for the jaded modern soul to feel something real and true, no matter what the consequences. But what actually happened was the film made it look like any given Frenchman wants to commit suicide, and lacks only the resources to do so in truly spectacular fashion. This, I suppose, was the 70s.

If I, myself, were planning to commit suicide by eating myself to death, then I, like the characters in the film, would want the relevant food to be really good. Unfortunately, I would then feel guilty about putting the cooks (for such there would have to be) through all this trouble to make all this food that I was just going to use in a suicide attempt. The characters in the film cleverly sidestep this problem by enlisting among their number a gourmet chef, whom they all assist in preparing the food. I really like this idea, and to me it's the most touching part of the film. It's not a big, wasteful, impersonal catered bachanal like I was expecting: the characters are intimately involved in preparing the instruments of their suicide.

Oddly enough, the last half-hour, the climax of the film, is pretty boring. But there are some funny scenes near the beginning, and great French movie lines like "Le deluge universal... du merde."

There is lots of pointless French movie sex in this movie. Also, the characters die like Muppets (I don't think I'm giving away anything when I say that people die in this movie). They're living, living, living, then suddenly they sort of thrash around and stretch out, dead. This fits into my mental picture of Muppet death, in which the animating force, or "hand", leaves the Muppet body and lays out the Muppet prostrate on the nearest table.

To get into the spirit of the film, I gorged myself on the following food while watching it:

• 1 bowl pasta with cheese and avocado (aka "I Have No Vegetables And I Must Eat" Pasta, similar to Trader Joe's Super-Carbohydrate Monopoly Pasta)
• 1 slice toast
• 1 can Hansen's grapefruit soda with added grenadine
• 5 Girl Scout Cookie Thin Mints

I was pretty full after that, but I survived.

[0] Three of the Frenchmen are actually played by Italians. Sure, why not. I couldn't tell.

Feeding my "Muppet biology" obsession comes word that the South African-produced edition of Sesame Street is introducing an HIV-positive Muppet. I think this is a good idea, to the extent that "we need a character with x property" is ever a good idea, but I couldn't figure out how a Muppet could catch a human disease. Then I realized: she got it from her puppeteer.