On the news that the Electric Company is coming back, Caro over at Sound Taste recalls "a bicultural childhood, spent mostly in the DR, but with yearly visits to Queens, where I gorged on Cocoa Pebbles and Underdog. For learning English, Sesame Street and other "educational programs" were key." [full post]

I have to confess that, owing to my lifelong habit of picking oddball also-rans, my favorite show was actually the thoroughly bizarre Vegetable Soup:

that special machete place: special machetes are everywhere, except when they're not

I've been worried about my friends in Kenya, so it was quite lovely to get a few emails from Binyavanga and to see his op-ed in the New York Times.

I'm not sure exactly where he is right now, but these lines from his op-ed indicate to me that although he might not be completely alright in the grand scheme of things, he remains at the very least himself:

My further suspicion is that Mr. Odinga wants to sell to Kenyans and the world a sort of Ukrainian “people’s revolution” — where protesters take to the streets and change the order of things, and are seen to be throwing happy pink petals on television, so America can say, ah, the people have spoken.

But rather than matters leading to a popular but peaceful uprising against a flawed election, we are likelier to suffer an escalation of retaliations and a descent to that special machete place that nations rarely recover from.

That special machete place!? Throwing pink petals on television, so that America can say, ah, the people have spoken!? How the fuck did that get past an op-ed editor?