The Muppets Take Ramallah

The New York Times ran a fascinating article about the continuing attempts to make a tenable Palestinian version of Sesame Street.  Here's a link.  Sesame Street has been making contextualized versions of their show for a lot of years... including locally produced segments, Muppets unique to their version of the show, and characters interacting with issues and themes that children in that culture may face.  As you can imagine, doing all these things and also sticking to Sesame Street's values of education and tolerance can be complex, especially in war zones and the third world.  In any case, it's an interesting article that is worth your time.

Now, if you're saying, Matt, I am sick of you putting links to articles from the NYT, I want something a little less meaty and a little more based on grown up fans of the muppets discussing trivia, puppeteers, history, comics, et cetera, then say no more.  You should go visit Tough Pigs.  And now I have done my good deed for the day.  I intend to celebrate by refusing to help an old lady cross the street.

They used to get more love

There's a great article in the NYT this weekend about the search for a gender-neutral singular pronoun and the rise and fall and rise again of the plural pronoun as a solution to that problem. If you enjoy language, trivia or social and cultural insights, I think you'll find this article interesting.

It was interesting learning to speak a little Chinese, because in the spoken language there is no differentiation made between he/she. Everybody is ta, male or female. Ta went to the market. Learning the gender pronouns in English took some time for our Asian friends, so we would occasionally be treated to sentences like, "My boyfriend is coming to visit this weekend. She is very wonderful."

An interesting sidenote is that while in Chinese there is no differentiation whatsoever in the pronoun used for he, she or it, the written language does have that distinction: 他(he), 她 (she), 它(it), all three pronounced ta.