{"id":2563,"date":"2010-02-01T09:41:35","date_gmt":"2010-02-01T14:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=2563"},"modified":"2020-07-06T10:51:49","modified_gmt":"2020-07-06T14:51:49","slug":"cookie-monster-after-visiting-room-101","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/02\/01\/cookie-monster-after-visiting-room-101\/","title":{"rendered":"Cookie Monster after visiting Room 101"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncc-1776.org\/tle2010\/tle555-20100131-04.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">L. Neil Smith<\/a> looks at the sad remains of a once-great Muppet:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>My only child turned twenty years of age early last month, so it has been some time since I kept daily track with her of the various comings and goings of the diverse and colorful inhabitants of <em>Sesame Street<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Thus it was with considerable dismay that I recently learned that my favorite of these denizens had been abducted, tortured, brainwashed by the vile forces of political correctness, and returned to society a broken, pitiable shadow of his former self, rather like Winston Smith in <em>1984<\/em>, after rats had been used to force him to scream &#8220;Do it to Julia!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A product of merciless North Korean-style mind-conditioning, the great blue googly-eyed Cookie Monster now mouths mindless, robotic platitudes and slogans like &#8220;cookies are a sometimes snack&#8221;. He even eats broccoli &mdash; the Green Death &mdash; in public, like a circus geek consuming broken lightbulbs and handsful of worms. Gone is the joyous hedonist we knew who was a living exemplar of Robert Heinlein&#8217;s famous dicta, &#8220;<em>Dum vivamus, vivamus!<\/em>&#8221; and &#8220;Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He has become just another &#8220;progressive&#8221; icon, different-looking on the outside, yes, but filled up on the inside with the same bland, gray, unappetizing pablum as Smokey the Bear, Bono, and Janeane Garofalo. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>L. Neil Smith looks at the sad remains of a once-great Muppet: My only child turned twenty years of age early last month, so it has been some time since I kept daily track with her of the various comings and goings of the diverse and colorful inhabitants of Sesame Street. Thus it was with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,66,57],"tags":[59,1382,322,478,101],"class_list":["post-2563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-health-science","category-humour","tag-addiction","tag-lneilsmith","tag-nannystate","tag-robertheinlein","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-Fl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2563"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58507,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2563\/revisions\/58507"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}