Also.Also.Also: Elmo Ruined Sesame Street and Other Stories to Start Your Week

I feel very strongly that you should have an Emergen-C pack today and then every day from now until like March. Are you getting enough sleep and sunshine? What about water? When was the last time you laughed out loud or flipped upside down and thought about what it would be like if you had to walk on your ceilings? That used to be one of my favorite pastimes, like “I would definitely trip over that ceiling fan daily.”

Queer as in F*ck You

+ Laura Jane Grace Opens Up About Trans Identity in 2015.

+ Janet Mock talks with Sasha Wortzel and Reina Gossett about Happy Birthday, Marsha!

+ As LGBT Groups Shift Focus, Foundation Support Decreases while Individual Donors Increase by Jeanne Allen.

+ Chief of Beijing Queer Chorus Discusses the Support It Provides, Its Successes, and Upcoming Shows.

+ Life Misunderstood: Asexuality by Casey Gilfoil


Doll Parts

+ Transgender Actress and Warhol Muse Holly Woodlawn Has Died.

+ Remembering Massacred Women Engineers with a Hairdryer Hackathon.

+ See 19th Century Portraits by a Pioneering Woman Photographer by Stephanie Eckardt.

+ Did Cara Delevingne Rip Off a Vintage Feminist T-Shirt Design? What will you do with your one wild and precious life?

+ Every 16 Year-Old in Sweden to Receive Copy of We Should All Be Feminists.

+ Women in Music 2015: The 50 Most Powerful Executive sin the Industry.


Saw This, Thought of You

+ How Corporations Profit From Black Teens’ Viral Content by Doreen St. Felix.

+ 9 Discontinued Cheetos Snacks. I remember liking the paws.

+ Wait this might actually get me into cross-stitching.

+ Why Mariah Carey’s Christmas Hit Will Be Around Forever and ever amen.

+ How Elmo Ruined Sesame Street. THIS IS IMPORTANT.

+ The Best Board Games You’ve Probably Never Played Before. I can personally vouch for Ticket to Ride!

+ I don’t care that this might be impractical, it’s fucking lovely and festive.

+ Krampus talk.


And Finally

Sobbing/shrieking.

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lnj

lnj has written 310 articles for us.

66 Comments

    • Scrolled past the link and saw your comment, so clearly had to go back and click on it. Saw that last week, because ‘Straya. Nothing would surprise me here! Though I don’t think I’d like to come across it myself…

    • Ikr?!! It’s like the a reptile boogie-lizard. It’s probably not a good idea to look at that picture before sleeping.

    • Is this the time to tell you all that we have one of these where I work? My students and I think it’s a huge treat when we see him, and often leave leftover lunch scraps out for him. They actually help to keep the snakes/vermin in check.

      Yep. We’re pretty tough here in ‘Straya.

  1. Oh, man. I did the ‘hang upside down and think about what your house would look like if you lived that way’ thing a lot as a kid, but when I describe that experience now, people look at me like I’m crazy. I thought I was the only one! :-)

    • I thought everyone did that!

      But I also thought everyone played the game of jumping from furniture to furniture because the floor was lava, but I was talking to a friend about that recently and she said she’d never done that as a kid.

    • ok the floor being lava, your bed being a spaceship, and spending untold hours considering your life in an upside-down house are like, the three tenets of childhood!

      • Yes! I also used an old red reflector from the back of a bike as my spyglass to an alt universe where everything was shiny and rose-colored and slightly kaleidoscoped.

        Brb, getting lost in how amazing being a kid always was

    • My favorite game was to walk around my house looking down at a hand mirror pointed at the ceiling. Ran into a lot of tables.

    • does anyone remember the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books, where her house was built upside down? I think that inspired this particular game in me.

  2. I’m pretty sure seeing that mega lizard climbing my house would be the greatest moment of my life. I LOVE REPTILES.

    • I can’t even – how would you interact with it? IT’S THE SIZE OF MY DOG

      As a kid I loved my pet snakes, but somehow when I grew up I developed that squirrely mammal reflex where reptiles make me want to shriek and flail. When I was six, I would regularly hold Chloe, my ball python, but now just the idea of holding a snake fills me with an animal instinct to run away. AND THAT PICTURE, oh man. I backed my office chair away from my monitor.

      Do you have any pet reptiles? Do they have personalities?

      • I probably wouldn’t interact with it at all aside from taking a ton of pictures from a safe distance and staring at it in awe. I just love looking at them! When I was younger, some of my favorite shows were all of those weird Animal Planet dudes who were always like, “CHECK OUT THIS GIANT SNAKE! OMG IT COULD KILL ME I WILL GRAB IT.” And whenever I go to a zoo, the herpetarium is usually a highlight for me. I think I just like thinking of them as dinosaurs that we decided not to call dinosaurs for some reason.

        And nope, I don’t have any pet reptiles. But I’ve always thought of Galopagos tortoises as my patronus. It makes me think Hufflepuff that accidentally got placed in Slytherin.

    • Reptiles are hella chill, like cold-blooded. Y’all can just hang out together and the lizard will be like “damn you’re warm” and you can be like “damn you’re room temperature, that feels amazing in hot AF Australia.” I’m for it! Giant lizard couch buddies for life!

  3. Also ok the first time I was nannying and a child exposed me to Elmo’s world I was like KILL IT WITH FIRE

    #classicsesamestreetorbust

  4. i always feel a warm glow in my heart when you post any links i use in the AAA. also, i saw krampus yesterday and it was.. kind of depressing actually.

  5. Ok I liked the Elmo article, but I think the author didn’t recognize one way that Elmo is valuable.

    If I were to raise a kid, I would want them to go through a selfish, me-centered phase like Elmo, to start their life looking at the world the way Elmo does. Some kids grow up in circumstances where they don’t get to have a childhood, they have to take care of their siblings and/or parents or learn to prioritize other people in order to survive. They never learn who they are and what they want because their life revolves around others.

    So, Elmo has value. But yes, the real world doesn’t cater to self-centered people. Unless you’re talking about men ahahahahah jk kinda not really.

    • “But yes, the real world doesn’t cater to self-centered people. Unless you’re talking about men ahahahahah jk kinda not really.”

      HARD SAME

  6. Here to second Ticket to Ride! It the perfect game if what you really want is your fam/friends to stand around a table for a half hour talking to each other, but not mad about anything.

  7. The only time I have ever seen value in Elmo was when, young and intoxicated, I witnessed my friend’s dog maliciously humping a tickle me Elmo doll belonging to said friend’s little brother. The dog was having the time of its life, Elmo was vibrating and giggling. Under the circumstances it was hilarious, especially given my hatred for the red muppet.
    Team Oscar forever.

  8. Thank you for posting about the plague that is Elmo. I work on Sesame Street and he is the bane of my existence.

    • Whaaaaaaaat you work on Sesame Street?!?! Is it magic? Does the air smell like cookies and crayons? Do you know Bert and Ernie? How bout the letter M? *squeeing forever*

  9. ok the lizard is cute. big. BIG. but cute.

    In contrast to this fucking awful crab that is a real crab and haunts my nightmares. I almost hope the html doesn’t work.

    • Ahhh, coconut crabs! My wife has been to Christmas Island a couple times for work and she says they draw ACTUAL CHALK OUTLINES around them when they get run over on the roads.

      • I know that giant things in the animal kingdom are often lazy and give zero fucks about us but my wee primate brain screams killitohdeargodkillitbeforeitnoticesyoooouohgoditsnotevensymetricaaal.

        However some part of me is still wants to celebrate biodiversity, makes a sad face the poor things get run over because humans ruin everything we touch and wonders what ecological imbalance would occur if they went extinct.

        INTP, that’s me.

    • That is not a crab. That is a small monster that should be sent back to whatever watery hell-scape it came from.

    • Imma need a bigger shovel…………and a shield, full plate mail, a sword and some tar because it needs to be killed with fire while I do my best impression of having an exoskeleton.

  10. re: board games! you know what is such an amazing game that no one has heard of but is so much fun? DIXIT. I have played it with family and friends of all ages and everyone loves it. it doesn’t have very many rules (which is my favorite kind of game) and people learn it really quickly. y’all should look into it.

      • it is sorta like apples to apples yeah! but the experience of playing it is nothing like apples to apples which sounds nonsensical but once you play it you’ll get it. there is more strategy and creativity I think. and the artwork is so very gorgeous if you are into looking at beautiful and interesting things. I think they make expansion packs now so you can get more diversity in your illustrations.

        I brought this game to play with my partner’s family including her twelve year old cousin at thanksgiving and boy was that ever a lesson in adolescent metaphorical thinking. her brain was the weirdest but in the best most facinating way.

      • I own this game, and it’s great! The player markers are bunnies! My friend who gets stressed out by some board games loves it.

  11. Eeeee that lizard is a water monitor! They’re so cool!

    One time I was at Lane Cove National Park and there was this MASSIVE water monitor, like probably at least five feet long, and it had scared off a family from their barbecue grill and was eating hamburgers off the grill while the family cowered nearby.

    STRAYA MATE

  12. Did anyone ever watch Between The Lions? I feel like it picked up most of the subversive elements that Sesame Street dropped in the 00s. I’d watch it when I was in middle school, with my 3-years older sister, and it was super entertaining for all of the references and internet-meme-style humor it employed, which we suspected flew over the heads of the target-age kids.
    Plus Fred Newman, of Prairie Home Companion sound effects man fame, had a segment, and as big PMC fans, we got a huge kick out of realizing it was actually him, and we could actually see his face now!

    • i LOVED between the lions! i watched it with slade and felt like it filled in where reading rainbow might have missed out on preschool kids.

  13. Emergen-C got bought by Pfizer! Ener-C is the new independently owned Vitamin C that you gotta rock daily!

  14. That Elmo article was more of a ride than I was expecting. I never realized how complex Sesame Street was before.

  15. Elmo is like an adorable girl you approach at a party and the moment she starts speaking you walk away like “biiiig mistake”

  16. and Venezuela just elected a trans representative <3 I don't know about her politics but the news are still super exciting!

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