A fifteen-minute snippet of Life As We Know It: wandered over to the always-interesting SF K Files, where I read about how anxious everyone is about their kids starting kindergarten. Hey, me too. Message: don't make a big deal, and the kids will be OK. Among the 158 comments are a bunch from someone who teaches second grade in the East Bay. Some of the commenters are mad at him; others agree that hovering parents can be a pain, even well-intentioned ones. So I look over his blog for a few minutes. While there, I see a link to the excellent Edge of the American West, so I hop over there and note that the top story at the time is a link to another academics' blog with a Cookie Monster (well, really Kermit) video on YouTube. Hilarious. Make sure to watch to the very end. Then I watch more Cookie Monster vids. And then on to whatever we call all these recontextualized vids (mashups? we should have evolved a more interesting term than that) all over YouTube--The Skeletor Show, all the Soulja Boy synchs (best one here), and now muppet metal. Also with Ernie & Bert doing blast beats. Kinda hard to handle for the full 2 1/2 minutes, but you get the idea. Cookie v. Martha Stewart.
Which then leads me on to the best one, a closing of the circle if you will: Cookie Monster to death-metal guitar. Since the classic term for that kind of singing has always been Cookie Monster (or "Cookie Monster on PCP": when will some alt-OED trace that one back? well, here is a deeply outstanding article in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal, pursuing that question), this makes perfect cultural sense. Cookie kinda headbangs already, too. Herein, the Napalm Death classic "You Suffer," all 2 seconds of it, which the article calls "a virtual tribute to Cookie Monster."
Does this count as scholarship?
