My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

I’m sure that as comics fans, you’re bursting with anticipation to find out just what Geoff Johns has planned for the DC Universe after the “War of Light”. After all, those nine Corps didn’t go anywhere, and there’s plenty more potential stories out there! Well, you need wait no longer. I was recently invited to view a top-secret document that unveils the future of the emotional spectrum in the DC Universe after the “Brightest Day” ends next year!

As it turns out, plot-master extraordinaire Geoff Johns has already planted the clues in the existing books. You know how there are nine colors in the “emotional spectrum”, right? (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, Black, and White.) These correspond to the spectrum produced when you break up pure white light into a prism–the classic ROY G BIV effect. But modern scientists don’t recognize indigo as a distinct color within that spectrum! Everyone thought that was just an indulgence on Johns’ part, like continuing to list Pluto as a planet for aesthetic reasons, but the truth is far more shocking. The Green Lanterns (led by Hal Jordan, who is the smartest, fastest, strongest, and best-endowed of the entire Corps, according to the document) discover that there are actually dozens more “secondary colors” to the emotional spectrum, just like indigo! Each one corresponds to an emotion that is more specific than the primary spectrum, and has a very specific shade associated with it! (Thank goodness for modern comics coloring techniques. Back in the day, they just didn’t have the technology to render this stuff accurately.)

Some of the upcoming ring corps waiting to be discovered, according to Johns (there are actually going to be over two hundred new colors in the emotional spectrum, but I can’t list…or without the original document at hand, even remember all of them):

The Pink Lantern Corps: Pink corresponds to “joy” or “happiness” in the emotional spectrum, something sorely missing from the previous crossover. One of the big stories to come out of “The Greater Spectrum” will be an explanation of just how this emotion has been sealed away from the DC Universe over the last decade, and how DC reacts to it being freed.

Their oath: “In brightest day, in brightest night, let joy spread over all in sight; things aren’t that bad, they’re really great, so let’s go out and celebrate!”

The Brown Lantern Corps: This color represents “shame”, or “embarrassment”. Apparently, one of the big twists involved in the discovery of this Corps comes when Carol Ferris gets a look at herself in the mirror and sees just what she looks like wearing her Star Sapphire costume. “Oh my god!” she says. “Why didn’t anyone tell me I was dressed like this? I look like I should be dancing around a pole or serving drinks at ‘Hooters’! Oh, this is so humiliating.” It’s then that the Brown Lanterns make her an offer she can’t refuse…

Their oath: “In blushing day, concealing night, I wish I could escape all sight; the earth should open up a hole and then close up and eat me whole!”

The Aquamarine Lantern Corps: This color represents “intense competitiveness in what was supposed to be a friendly game”. In a shocking twist, it turns out that Guy Gardner’s been a member of this corps for years.

Their Oath: “That ball was out, I saw it land; that point was mine, this I demand! We’re keeping score, oh yes we are; and loser pays when at the bar!”

The Lavender Lantern Corps: This color represents “that feeling you get when you’re around someone that you’ve been friends with for years, but you’re not quite sure if it’s actually more than friendship or if it’s just your imagination, and you don’t want to ruin the friendship by asking, but you remember that time the two of you got drunk and made out, so maybe you should at least try for ‘friends with benefits’, but…it’s complicated, you know?”

Their Oath: “Um…yeah, that’s nice. Looks good on you. Say, do you know what we should do? Just hang out Sunday, just us two, and see what happens…or not, too!”

The Fuchsia Lantern Corps: Representing the emotion of “confusion over exactly how to spell ‘fuchsia'”, this corps is dedicated to making sure that everyone in the universe gets a helping hand from those who have been helped in the past!

Their Oath: “It’s F-U-S, no that’s not right, the S goes somewhere, is that right? That looks all wrong, this ain’t no breeze, I just can’t spell it, help me please!”

The Persimmon Lantern Corps: Secretly, the persimmon emotional color is one of the strongest forces in the universe; it represents “the last little surge of appetite you get when you think you’re full, but they wheel out the dessert cart and there’s one of your favorites out there”. Let’s just say that Hal’s going to have a hard time fitting back into that spandex after a fight with a Persimmon Lantern!

Their Oath: “Oh, no, I couldn’t, I’m too full; just half a slice then, almost null–is that a brownie that I spy? I’ll try that then, with pecan pie!”

The Taupe Lantern Corps: In a word, “pretension”. When an entire audience of a new avant-garde piece of performance art is empowered by the Taupe Lantern, Hal must endure endless lectures about where they are, as artists, and defeat them in their coffee-house lairs!

Their Oath: “It’s brilliant, love, so avant-garde; you’re brave and noble, it’s so hard/ to truly find someone who sees/ expressionistic forms in cheese!”

The Ivory Lantern Corps: Ivory, as it turns out, represents “the frustration you have when you can never quite get it to look the way it does in commercials or on the picture on the box or even the way it did when you bought the damned thing, no matter how many cleaning products you use”. It turns out to have a lot of untapped power for the citizens of Earth.

Their Oath: “I’ve scrubbed and scrubbed, all day and night, but perfect shine escapes my sight; let those who sold me OxyClean/ beware my anger, sharp and keen!”

The Cyan Lantern Corps: Cyan’s power, though brief, is quite strong; it’s “that vague feeling of uncertainty and trepidation you get after you order from the drive-in but before you actually start eating, when you don’t know if they made your order right or whether this is the day that the guy making it decides to spit on your burger”. (I’m not at liberty to divulge the story involved with this color, but let’s just say it involves Jon Stewart and an irate Wendy’s employee.)

Their Oath: “Did I say ‘plain’? Did I say ‘diet’? The only way to know is try it; I hope this time, they got it right; I’ve come back through three times tonight!”

The Beige Lantern Guys: Ironically, this color represents “apathy”, and as a result, there is no Corps as such. Getting them to participate in the final battle of the crossover could be Hal Jordan’s greatest challenge!

Their Oath: “In brightest day, in…you know what? Fuck it. Let’s just watch TV.”

Recently the Legion of Super-Heroes have reinstituted that greatest of Legion traditions: the election of a new leader. Now, there are those cynics who will claim that whomever the fans select is immaterial because DC Comics will just “find” a bunch of votes for Element Lad again, but I believe in the direct democracy that elected Polar Boy, Timber Wolf, and Wildfire twice apiece. Justice will out, my friends. The will of the people – by which I mean a small handful of obsessive nerds – will prevail.

Now, certain parties on the Internet have begun a campaign for Quislet as next Legion leader, for much the same reason that people enjoy a good fart in somebody else’s face. It must be said: Quislet would certainly be an amusing choice for Legion leader, if you’re one of those freaks who masturbates to old Jimmy Olsen comics “because they’re so trippy” and can put aside the fact that, kitsch value aside, the comics themselves are really kind of stupid in a not-very fun way. Also Jimmy Olsen’s bowtie is a crime against nature. Man, was I disappointed when it turned out that Jimmy Olsen wasn’t dead last year. Where was I again? Oh, right. Quislet. Yes, Quislet is awesome, but he is awesome in small doses. Much like you do not want to drink Jolt Cola every day or watch more than an hour of Sealab 2021 at a go, Quislet’s awesomeness is best delivered in small doses, lest it force one to build up a tolerance to awesomeness and thus become jaded.

Who, then, should be leader? One of the standard go-to candidates like Brainiac Five (will blow up universe), Element Lad (will not stop Brainy from blowing up universe) or Mon-El (can survive universe blowing up, will likely be blase about it)? An outsider candidate like Colossal Boy (stupid), Dawnstar (aloof), Timber Wolf (violent and stupid), Chameleon Boy (delusions of grandeur), Chameleon Girl (only on team because of “connections”), Sun Boy (vain and stupid), Polar Boy (naive and stupid), Ultra Boy (stupider than the rest put together) or Dream Girl (either near-powerless or near-omniscient, depending on writer, and therefore unreliable)? Cosmic Boy for the hundredth time, hoping that he’s not going to burn out any time soon? Or maybe we can just be nihilistic and vote for Earth-Man, because voting for the psychotic is so daring.

No, my friends, there is only one candidate who can offer real change to the Legion. Only one candidate who understands that the Legion is not merely a force for superheroics, but whose understanding of societal needs is advanced enough that they know that the Legion must seek to organize within the greater interstellar community for real and lasting change for the better. Someone who understands that superpowers must be used proactively, and not simply in an X-Force “kill them first” way but in a way that makes everything better. Someone who understands that the only thing worse than the Fatal Five is fatal hunger. Someone who understands that the missing key to make socialism work forever is teleportation!

So Google has decided that the best way to advertise its various products is to get you, the user, to do it for them:

The crowdsourcing of advertising in ways like this always interests me because originally the point of these things was to get innovative advertising at lower cost: enticing people to submit creative marketing work on spec by dangling a prize has only really started to come of age. However, what’s new in this case is that nowhere on Google’s Demo Slam website can I find even a hint of a prize. It seems that the prize is bragging rights. (It’s entirely possible that Google will give out some neat prizes to the people they consider winners or the ones they really like, but somehow I don’t think the prize will be “a bunch of money” so much as it will be, I dunno, a few Android phones or something.)

And here’s the thing: I’m going to guess that people are still going to jump at the chance to advertise Google’s stuff for them. Partially this is because people like Google as a company and like Google’s products (even if, in some cases, they probably shouldn’t). Partially this is because people want to be famous or at least recognizable, because personal fame is now a sort of currency, and advertisers are rapidly coming to realize that said fame is perceived to have value in and of itself and don’t need to add money to sweeten the deal.

Or maybe just saying “chubby bunny” with marshmallows in your mouth is awesome. I dunno.

Your judges are the usual four.

Amanda and Denys: salsa. A pretty strong routine from Gustavo MOTHERFUCKING Vargas, but he goes for the triple leg lift and Denys blows it a bit. Pity; that’s a really difficult move (and one that I don’t think blends well into a routine generally; it’s just too stunty) and it was a icky ending to an otherwise stellar bit of salsa, complete with an absolutely brilliant stunt at the beginning (a giant lift which then had Denys doing his salsa basic while lifting Amanda, which – kudos, CTV camera team, for deciding to not film that, once again demonstrating why Canadian TV is Canadian TV).

Jeff’s solo: He goes Ukrainian again, but this time with slightly more dramatic costume (pants, boots, no shirt, very King and I) and works in a bunch of his contemporary acrobatic tricks. Best solo he’s done all season.

Janick and Denys: contemporary. WIND MACHINE! I liked the choreo’s first two-thirds and then it devolved into a lot of running around, which is a shame because there were some really neat bits in it up until that point – Nico and Wynn have done better. Janick and Denys danced this quite well and I have no complaints on that front. Also, WIND MACHINE. I mention it twice because it was cheesy AND kind of awesome.

Amanda’s solo: Felt like an end-of-the-season solo: this looked really tired, and sloppy. Falling out of that pirouette was especially not so much with the thereness.

Janick and Jeff: jazz/fusion. You know, I’ve been waiting all season for a season-defining routine and it finally showed up tonight. This… thingy from CHEESEMAN~! was spectacular: weird and well-conceived (I mean, dressing up the dancers as King and Queen – or Queen and prince-consort, whatever) and danced absolutely perfectly. Simply a brilliant bit of work here.

Denys’ solo: Exactly as strong as you would expect.

Amanda and Jeff: contemporary. And we get our Very Serious Routine of the night about domestic violence, which I felt was very meh; it didn’t feel sufficiently violent or malevolent to me, not in the movements for the most part (other than Jeff grabbing Amanda’s wrist right at the beginning). Very good acting, certainly, and the dancing was exactly as strong as you would expect, but… not convincing for me as a piece. YMMV.

Janick’s solo: A decent hip-hop/contemporary blend as per usual with good performance quality.

Top four: contemporary. Wait, what? No same-sex partner dances? An entire final show without a single hip-hop number and only one ballroom routine? Janick and Jeff didn’t even have to dance out-of-genre all night when dancing three times, for crissake. Fuck you, show. No, really. Fuck you; this isn’t even a time thing forced on you by CTV because in previous years you’ve always managed to cram in six partner dances plus four solos in one hour. I’m not even reviewing this because it’s a group number and I just can’t be bothered to care. Whatever.

Final order should be: 1.) Denys 2.) Jeff 3.) Janick 4.) Amanda
Final order will be: 1.) Denys 2.) Janick 3.) Jeff 4.) Amanda

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist. Find the extra bonus Youtube link for double points!

As you may or may not be aware, DC Comics is getting ready to launch their foray into the world of MMORPGs with an online game that’s coming out sometime next year. (As with pretty much every MMO, “sometime next year” was “sometime this year” until they decided that it needed more work. You definitely don’t want to plan your life around the launch of an MMO, is all I’m saying.) The hope of the developers…well, the hope of the developers is that it’s going to be a spectacular success that will dethrone “Worlds of Warcraft”, be universally hailed by gamers everywhere, and make them all so much money that they can buy their own giant robot made out of smaller robots. But the realistic hope is that it will knock over “City of Heroes” as king of the much smaller “superhero MMO” mountain.

My guess is that it won’t. This is not the same thing as saying it’ll fail; I want to stress right off the bat that I think it’ll make money. It’s actually pretty easy to make money on an MMO, because you’re charging people $10-15 a month to play a game you’ve already paid the development costs for. You’d have to make a spectacularly bad game in order to fail to cover the costs of server maintenance and QA with a subscription-based model, and very few people have made spectacularly bad games. (That said, it is theoretically possible for the game to fail, long-term, if the game gets enough negative reviews that DC decides to pull their license with Sony when it comes up for renewal. But that’s pretty unlikely.)

But just because it doesn’t fail, doesn’t mean it’s going to succeed. And I do think that DCUO is going to wind up in that same shadowy limbo of “making enough to keep going” that Champions Online wound up in, instead of making the push to topple CoH. (Full disclosure: I have a 72-month veteran’s badge in CoH. I don’t know that I’d call myself a raving fanboy, but I’m not unbiased and I know that the hardest thing about bias to recognize is how much of it you have.) DCUO has a lot of the same problems CO did–it’s much easier for CoH to zip in and copy their relatively small innovations than it is for a new company to design an entire game from the ground up that does everything CoH does and does it better and then add new things on top of that. CoH might have an older game engine, but it’s also got the benefit of six years of additional content and depth of development. (Although thankfully, DCUO is not making the colossal mistake CO did of not having villains available at launch. That right there was a deal-breaker for many.)

But DCUO has the DC superstars! That’s got to count for something, right? Well, it does and it doesn’t. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword, honestly; on the one hand, it does have a brand recognition that CoH doesn’t. Superman is more exciting than Statesman, Batman is more exciting than Manticore, and so on. But on the other hand…let me put it this way. Imagine buying a game called, “DC Universe Online”. Imagine getting home, spending the half-hour to an hour that it takes to install the game, jumping through all the hoops to get registered, logging in…and finding out that you can’t play as Superman. Or Batman. Or Robin, or Wonder Woman, or Elongated Man, or even frickin’ Turtle Boy. Instead, you help those characters. That’s right, you’re the DC Universe’s newest sidekick! (Or, for those of you who would rather play a villain, you’re the Joker’s newest henchman. The strict continuity-correct version of the game has you getting shot in the face by your own boss at level five.)

The interesting thing about this is just how small a mountain we’re talking about, by the way; CoH probably has about 125,000 subscribers (although it’s gotten something of a bump from its recent expansion) while WoW, king of the MMO market, has about ten times that. It really shouldn’t be all that difficult to set your sights higher than CoH, and yet the first game to go head-to-head with it failed. Part of it might simply be the “sunk costs” factor; for me to go to a new super-hero MMO means giving up six years of character development, perks, and time, and DCUO is simply not convincing me that it’s worth that right now. That might change, of course; part of the “fun” of blogging is being forced to eat your words in a year’s time. But my guess is that DCUO is going to be a modest success, which will be a failure by the standards it has set for itself. Only time will tell if I am correct.

Space Cowboys minus the outer space plus a whole lot of guns (including the extra half hour the movie really doesn’t need).

Hello! This is Karen back for another round of guest blogging So You Think You Can Dance Canada!

Alright, so it’s Top 8 Week and instead of doing two pairs dances, the dancers are doing one pairs dance, one solo, and one group number. WTF, CTV?

Your guest judges are Sexy Rexy, Canada’s ballet heartthrob, and Sergio Trujillo, who is a Broadway choreographer from Toronto. Jean-Marc is growing out his hair and it’s still in an awkward phase.

Leah Miller Dress Report: it looks like one of those toilet paper dresses that women make at bachelorette parties or to enter Charmin crowd-sourcing contests. B-

Awkward Commercial Promotion Report: Thanks to Degree clinical-grade deodorant for profuse sweaters, a viewer will win an exotic vacation!

Mackenzie and Janick (hip hop): Great Luther Brown number; ten times more interesting than half the hip hop numbers on the American show, blah blah blah. Mackenzie and Janick definitely hit this, but I don’t think they sold the swagger that Luther wanted them to sell. Jean-Marc suggests that Luther should run in the Toronto mayoral race, which is an awkward thing to say but not the worst idea he’s ever had. The costumes reminded me of World of Goo, or maybe a sexy oil spill.

“You move so well, gosh!” says Leah Miller, who has presumably graduated from middle school.

Jeff’s Solo: the dancers are asked about their favourite thing about their hometown. Jeff says he loves the spontaneity of Alberta thunderstorms and dances to Radiohead with those lovely legs, so I’m sold.

Natalie’s Solo: Am I going to comment on all these solos? Oh, okay. Watching people dance to Alicia Keys is uncomfortable. It’s Natalie’s birthday, yaaaaaaaay.

Danielle and Denys (contemporary): Sabrina Matthews of the icky suicide-attempt dance from several weeks ago does “A Tribute to Our Fallen Soldiers.” It’s pretty okay. Sergio calls Denys, “a true little Baryshnikov,” which is a decent comparison. Denys is hands down the best dancer in this competition and I love him for it, but I don’t usually love-love him if you know what I’m saying. Nevertheless, he’s looking reeeeeeeeeal good in this hot Communist soldier, Joseph Fiennes in Enemy at the Gates-kinda way and it’s doing it for me.

If Denys is Baryshnikov/Joseph Fiennes, then Danielle is the Winona Ryder of dance. Like Winona Ryder, I can’t really picture spooky-sweet Danielle as a grieving soldier’s wife. If there were a God, he’d give me Reality Bites: The Musical. Or maybe Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Musical. Denys could play Gary Oldman. That would be believable.

Amanda’s Solo: Amanda is from Mississauga. What is there to love about Mississauga? Amanda says the Port Credit Harbour. Good save, Legs McGee! Her solo is eclectic and fierce.

Sebastian’s Solo: Sebastian is a Toronto boy who loves diversity and dances to Stars’ “Your Ex-Lover is Dead” so I have to like him, but this solo is kind of a mess. Good musicality.

Group Number: a sexy pilot and flight attendant jazz number by Sean Cheeseman. I’m not into it. The guys are all over the place, but Denys is flawless. He is the Captain OF MY PANTS.

Amanda and Jeff (contemporary): Mandy Moore choreographs a piece about early-onset Alzheimers. Two contemporary tearjerkers in one night, eh? Looks like a Sabrina Matthews-Mandy Moore throwdown!

Amanda and Jeff both have the most incredible legs and this dance does everything to showcase them, so it’s beautiful. Jean-Marc cries for the second time this evening, but it seems more genuine than his tears for The Troops. Point goes to Mandy Moore.

Leah Miller says something like, “Gee golly, that dance there shore was purty, you guys!” and continues to be grating.

Denys’ Solo: My ladyboner diminishes as Denys dances his effeminate solo. He has suddenly transformed from Joseph Fiennes into Chris Kattan as Mango. And, of course, I love Mango, but for very different reasons.

Janick’s Solo: Jannick is from New Brunswick and likes nature and dancing good solos.

Sebastian and Natalie (cha cha cha): superfail for Sebastian, who is dancing through a hip injury and is wayyyy outside of his comfort zone. But man, does he ever try. Natalie is great, as usual, but has a very unmemorable personality, as usual.

Danielle’s Solo: Lovely solo.

Mackenzie’s Solo: Couldn’t care less about this guy.

Verdict? Sebastian is toast.

FLAPJACKS: We totally need to set up a D&D game.
ME: There is never a time when that sentence is true.
FLAPJACKS: But I wanna be a paramander!
ME: That sounds dirty.
FLAPJACKS: No, seriously! They’re a variant class from first edition AD&D.
ME: …this is out of an old copy of Dragon magazine, isn’t it.
FLAPJACKS: Possibly. Why?
ME: You do realize some of the variant classes in Dragon were… stupid, right? Jesters? Timelords? Courtesans? Accountants?
FLAPJACKS: Wait, “timelords”? Does that mean Doctor Who shows up in Dungeons and Dragons Land to fight dragons?
ME: First off, “the Doctor.” Second off, he wouldn’t fight the dragons. He would just have tea with them and maybe a bit of a chitchat. Until the red dragons would try something stupid and genocidal, at which point he would have to unleash something bad upon them.
FLAPJACKS: I was kidding. Doctor Who isn’t in Dungeons and Dragons.
ME: The Doctor is in everything. Except Noddy.
FLAPJACKS: Anyway I forgot why we were talking about Doctor Who when I want to play a paramander.
ME: You still haven’t told me what the fuck a paramander is.
FLAPJACKS: It’s like a paladin, but it’s true neutral.
ME: So they charge into battle yelling “for the glory of… everybody equally!”
FLAPJACKS: You know true neutral doesn’t work like that.
ME: True neutral doesn’t work at all. It’s a stupid alignment. Most of the alignments are stupid. That’s why they’re fun.
FLAPJACKS: You’re ruining this.
ME: Wait, so lemme get this straight. First they made paladins. Then, because D&D nerds like Frank Frazetta artwork a lot, they made anti-paladins, because anti-paladins couldn’t think of a better name.
FLAPJACKS: “Anti-paladin” is cool. Like antimatter.
ME: It’s a word for people who couldn’t invent words. I admit that “paramander” sounds neat. I’m not sure what it has to do with being true neutral, in between the lawful good paladin and the chaotic evil anti…
FLAPJACKS: What?
ME: I’m just guessing here, but I’m willing to bet whatever terrible Dragon magazine article that had the paramander in it had a paladin equivalent for every other alignment, didn’t it.
FLAPJACKS: Well. Yes.
ME: Like?
FLAPJACKS: There’s the chaotic good garath…
ME: So basically they’re saying that chaotic good paladins are all Scottish.
FLAPJACKS: I don’t – actually that kind of works.
ME: Of course it does. Next?
FLAPJACKS: The lyan, which is lawful neutral.
ME: Uh huh.
FLAPJACKS: The illrigger, which is lawful evil.
ME: He sounds piratey.
FLAPJACKS: Well, he wears platemail.
ME: That’s not very piratey. Illriggers have a very bad name. And not just because they’re evil. You’re an evil warlord, you need some pirates, somebody tells you “oh there’s this ninth level illrigger” and you’re all “well, I’m set” and then this knighty-guy shows up and you’re all “wait, where’s the illrigger I sent for?” And he’s all “I’m here” and you’re all “whaaaaaaaa?”
FLAPJACKS: You’re taking all the fun out of this.
ME: It’s first edition AD&D. It’s entirely likely that I’m injecting fun into it. What else?
FLAPJACKS: There’s the myrikhan and the arrikhan, which are the neutral good and neutral evil ones.
ME: Those sound like very “ninth-grader doodling on back of notebook” types of names.
FLAPJACKS: In the original Creation Argots their names mean “godservant” and “beastservant.”
ME: In the original what now?
FLAPJACKS: It says it in the article. Dragon magazine would not lie to me.
ME: Unless it was saying “hey, ‘baatezu’ is WAY cooler than ‘devil’ is. And ‘tanar’ri’ is much more awesome than ‘demon.'”
FLAPJACKS: Point.
ME: Wait, we haven’t done chaotic neutral yet.
FLAPJACKS: …I don’t want to.
ME: Come on. How bad could it be?
FLAPJACKS: …the fantra.
ME: The “fantra.”
FLAPJACKS: Yes.
ME: Wow.
FLAPJACKS: I know.
ME: Why do you want to play a paramander again?
FLAPJACKS: Because they get lots of cool powers.
ME: Neutral powers.
FLAPJACKS: Okay, I’ll just go play World of Warcraft instead.
ME: Fine.
FLAPJACKS: Can I borrow twenty dollars to renew my account?
ME: No.
FLAPJACKS: Can I borrow thirty dollars to not sit here and talk to you about paramanders?
ME: Done.

…is this article suggesting that the natural home of hippies is the Tea Party.

No, really. Among the article’s highlights:

– taking an anti-war poster with “Great Society” on it, the point of which was that Johnson’s rhetoric about the Great Society were belied by his actions in Vietnam, and arguing that posters like this meant that hippies actually hated government anti-poverty programs and civil rights

– arguing that conservatives believe that humans are inherently flawed and selfish, just like hippies do

– saying that hippies rejected “artificially constructed collectivist utopias,” which is about as a good a four-word definition of the commune movement as one could manage

– suggesting that the reason Democrats lost in 1968 is because hippies all voted for Richard Nixon

– further arguing that Democrats protesting the 1968 Democratic convention and not the Republican convention is proof of this (conveniently ignoring that in 1972 hippies protested the Republican convention, but whatever, that’s four whole years later)

– glossing over the fact that although both hippies and Tea Partiers believe in “accepting the natural order of things,” that their respective definitions of what that might actually be are wildly divergent

– and, of course, a political spectrum diagram that tells us exactly where “bums” and “trustafarian anarchists” lie on the political spectrum (although it does leave out “those damn kids listening to their Black Eyed Peas” and “my neighbor whose dog keeps digging up my azaleas” on the author’s list of personal bugbears, although I am sure they are both evil commies)

Seriously, folks. This thing is a work of art.

Like most people, when I saw the Youtube video of Grover parodying the Old Spice Man, I thought it was wonderful: cute and hilarious and a bit educational all at once. But it made me think about how, back in my second year of university, a girl in one of my classes insisted that Sesame Street was a bad thing because it trained children to watch television. By making children familiar with the form of the thing, she said, it indoctrinated them into passively accepting different elements in the same form. One of her favorite arguments in this regard was the presence of Guy Smiley as a tool to help kids learn how to watch game shows.

At the time I thought the idea ridiculous. I grew up with Sesame Street longer than most because I was the oldest of four siblings, so if they were watching Sesame Street while I did older-kid play in the background, I was watching Sesame Street as well. The reason I thought the idea ridiculous was that I knew full well that Sesame Street challenged authority on a regular basis. I mean, Bert and Ernie alone should be enough to make that point; every Bert and Ernie sketch is basically Ernie being a bit of an asshole to poor old Bert. But see also the treatment of Herry Monster as a sensitive, gentle giant who likes playing with dollies; Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster in toto; the realistic treatment of Mr. Hooper’s death, which went against every children’s TV convention in the book.

But of late I grow less sure. Part of it, of course, is probably just things-were-better-when-I-was-a-kid-itis. There is no innate need for Herry Monster on Sesame Street as compared to other monsters. Bert and Ernie still do the same schtick, which is the best thing you can hope for. Cookie Monster is still Cookie Monster. (Although Grover is superior to Elmo. I will not concede this point. Ever.)

But of late, the trend in the show seems to be one of parodying not just the general form of culture (as Guy Smiley did) but of specifics: 30 Rock, Mad Men, Law and Order. Although Sesame Street has never been too complex for kids, these sketches seem even simpler. They don’t seem as designed to teach kids; they seem instead designed to reinforce the brand for adults, and to allow kids to understand the cultural references their parents make. (The Law and Order sketch is the best example of this – there’s no reason to make fun of the CHUNG CHUNG noise because the CHUNG CHUNG jokes really only make sense if you understand what the CHUNG CHUNG noise’s significance is.)

Or maybe I’m just kvetching. One thing of which I am more sure, though: Feist’s re-writing of 1234, cute as it may be, is no Lena Horne singing “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” I can’t help but think that there is something to that point.