Never watch children's television with me.

[oddharmonic]

To counter their fabulous weekday children's programming (kids' stuff from 0700 or 0730 to 1800 except for an hour and a half in the early afternoon which is either arts/crafts or women's issues, then a half hour of a GED or ESL program), the statewide PBS in North Carolina puts their Saturday morning programming really early so there's crap to

Comments

[revme]

[con't from last]

But yes, I hate Maisy (If you're going to speak gibberish, does it have to be such a FUCKING AWFUL sound? I mean, god, scraping metal on metal sounds better than that. Unless they redubbed it since the last time I watched it with something that isn't like the past 6,000 years of Human Misery compressed into a single sound.) and Baby Bear is irritating. While Big Bird was never my favorite character, I liked that he was both Childlike but also Reasonable Eloquent. I mean, he wasn't about to go off and deliver a monologue on the use of old english from Shakespeare or anything, but he speaks very precisely and correctly, and if he DOES make an error, it's a reasonable one. None of that Bwaybwy Bweah cwahp. Or Elmo's sociopathic 3rd person. Correct English is AWESOME. People need to speak more correctly. Or at least a reasonable approximation of same.

also: "homeland of Wachovia" like "watch-over-ya"? Or is there another reference-type thing I'm missing?

[toddler_hiway]

Shakespeare wrote in modern english, but I probably shouldn't point that out because

a) It's lame
and
b) There's maybe a 10% chance that you said it just to get me to be lame and point out that Shakespeare wrote in modern english.

hell, I don't even like Shakespeare that much.

Also, I personally would watch Maisy if the sounds were actually metal-on-metal. The world needs children's shows that sound like Rejected.

[revme]

Yeah, it was one of those things where I sorta knew that, but was using Old English to mean "He done wrote lon' time 'go, so alla his stuff is ol'. An' it's in English, so it's therefo' Ol' English! Like that likker

[oddharmonic]

I'd have to get my hands on a copy of the original education report on Sesame Street (it pops up on eBay occasionally) for a cite, but I'm pretty sure one of the original proposals of what Sesame Street wanted to do was model correct English.

One of my favorite recent Big Bird moments was in Elmopalooza (1998); after they finally open the stuck door that's been preventing Jon Stewart from hosting the show, Big Bird takes the tape of "One Small Voice" to control room and before entering, he looks up at the sign and says "Con... trol... Room. Gee, all those years of living on Sesame Street sure paid off!"

Wachovia is a bank in the southeastern US. They have near-constant advertising on the NBC affiliate in Raleigh that range from forgettable to annoying.

[revme]

heh, I like those jokes. Like the one in the Muppets Christmas, where Ernie and Bert are talking to Doc (from Fraggle Rock), and they're saying things like "Hey, Doc starts with 'D'! Other words that start with 'D' are dog, door and domino!" and then Doc says that he knows and then something about the oddness of the conversation, and Bert goes "Where we come from, this is Small Talk."