The erosion of the Elmo brand.

The Daily News has a story about Charla Nash, the woman whose face and hands were ripped off by a chimpanzee back in 2009. She just settled her lawsuit against the estate of the chimp's owner. She's getting a mere $4 million from the estate, but wants $150 from the state. The state, her claim says, ought to have seized the dangerous animal, which according to the Daily News "could eat at the table, drink wine from a stemmed glass, use the toilet and bathe and dress itself."

Yes, horrible and bizarre, but what's that got to do with Elmo? I wouldn't have thought about Elmo if it hadn't been for this Elmo story in the sidebar next to the picture of the chimp:



"Hairstylist claims he had sex with Elmo puppeteer, too" links to "Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash was a 'gentleman,' says former Long Island lover amidst 'Sesame Street' star's underage sex scandal."

He said he saw Clash about 30 times over a two-year period and that the puppeteer wined him and dined him, and even once sent a car to Long Island to pick him up for a date.

“I feel someone who is a liar and a molester will just keep on the pattern. That’s not the type of guy I met... He was straightforward and if I wanted to have sex and have a hookup then that was my choice....”

That's an interesting example of someone trying to provide helpful evidence and not seeing the way the other side will use it. How to successfully woo a very young guy? Send a nice car over to fetch him. Let him sit at the dinner table and drink wine from a stemmed glass.

Suddenly, I remember Elmo's role in the Charla Nash story. Nash had come over to help the owner, Sandy Herold, get the 200-pound animal into the house, and here's how The Daily News describes it:

Herold has said Travis attacked because he was being protective of her and didn't recognize Nash, who had recently changed her hairstyle, was driving a different car and waved a red Elmo doll at him.

Oddly, the long Wikipedia article on Travis the chimp doesn't mention Elmo.  In fact, the Elmo detail is missing from old articles where I would expect to see it. (For example, this Time piece focusing on the owner's explanation: "Nash arrived in an unfamiliar car and emerged with her hair done in a radically different style from what Travis was familiar with. Herold speculates that perhaps the chimp didn’t recognize Nash and viewed her as a threat.") Maybe PBS got the bad Elmo publicity scrubbed from various websites. The Elmo mention I found was in The Daily News, the news site that put the new Elmo story in the sidebar right next to the picture of the chimp that was crazed (perhaps) by Elmo.

But Elmo himself did nothing wrong. He's only a puppet/doll. A brand.

"Give it a little touch, a little push/Make love to the canvas."

"There are no limits here... this is your world... you're the Creator..."

It's the 70th birthday of the late Bob Ross... which I noticed because Google has a doodle about it.

Is "horses and bayonets" Obama's new thing — after Big Bird and Binders Full of Women?

Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams says these things aren't working:

Where are those glorious debate memes of times gone by?...

There was Battleship. And there was the night’s biggest winner, Obama’s smooth dis to Romney, “You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed.” Faster than you could tweet “Oh, snap!,” the inevitable Tumblr was born.

Yet the whole thing felt less fun this time around, and a lot more forced. 

Big Bird and Binders Full of Women were words that came out of Romney's mouth. "Horses and bayonets" was inserted by Obama. It's one thing to have fun with Romneyisms, quite another to accept a faux-Romneyism cooked up by Obama... especially when Obama is making fun of the military and what comes out of his head is an old children's game — suggesting that he thinks this real-life killing and dying is some kind of game — and an image of the historical military — which seems to be about the movies he's watched, not anything that about Romney.

Bob Schieffer was a little doddering, but couldn’t match Jim Lehrer for FAIL worthiness. Josh Romney did not make with the crazy eyes. In short, as we all learned long ago from “Mean Girls,” you can’t make a thing a thing any more than you can plan for spontaneity.

Speaking of movies, I've never seen "Mean Girls." I don't get the reference. I'm not in your "we all." Is it the making a thing a thing thing or the plan for spontaneity thing?

But back to the landscape of Obama's mind — where kids fiddle with plastic Hasbro toys and old war movies play, from which he concocted a Romney gaffe that Romney never gaffed — why is there no picture there of the horse soldiers of the Afghanistan War?

The U.S. special operations teams that led the American invasion in Afghanistan a decade ago did something that no American military had done since the last century: ride horses into combat.

"It was like out of the Old Testament," says Lt. Col. Max Bowers, retired Green Beret, who commanded the three horseback teams.

"You expected Cecil B. DeMille to be filming and Charlton Heston to walk out."

It was like a movie, but it really happened, and those men were heroes. Is it so hard to call them to mind, now — in these days of unmanned drones, who kill when you point at a name on a card, or hover overhead and watch as — it can't be real — our ambassador fights for his life for 7 hours?

"Let me give you a quote that he said just four years ago: ‘If you don’t have any fresh ideas, use stale tactics to scare people'..."

"... If you don’t have a record to run on, paint your opponent as someone people should run from. Make a big election about small things... That’s what Barack Obama said when he was running for president in 2008. That’s exactly what Barack Obama has become now that he is president in 2012, and we’re going to change it."

Said Paul Ryan, last night, in Daytona Beach, Florida. I think that's a bit unfair. What about Big Bird? Big Bird isn't little. It goes without saying: Big Bird is big.

Hey, remember that great old Neil Young song about Big Bird?

Blue, blue windows behind the stars, yellow moon on the rise
Big Bird flying across the sky, throwing shadows on our eyes
Leave us helpless, helpless, helpless

The chains are locked and tied across the door... put y'all back in chains....

Obama makes an O.J. Simpson joke and he can't get the name of the SUV right.

"Elmo has been seen in a white Suburban!"

He turned the Ford into a Chevy. Maybe that was intentional, since he saved General Motors and not Ford.

Or did he pick Suburban because he hates suburbia? Stanley Kurtz has written a whole book on that subject, which he summarizes here. Excerpt:

The centerpiece of the Obama administration’s anti-suburban plans is a little-known and seemingly modest program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative. The “regional planning grants” funded under this initiative — many of them in battleground states like Florida, Virginia, and Ohio — are set to recommend redistributive policies, as well as transportation and development plans, designed to undercut America’s suburbs. Few have noticed this because the program’s goals are muffled in the impenetrable jargon of “sustainability,” while its recommendations are to be unveiled only in a possible second Obama term.

But jokes about "Sesame Street" characters are so much more fun to play around with right now... la la la... as we run up to the election.

Obama’s former community-organizing mentors and colleagues want the administration to condition future federal aid on state adherence to the recommendations served up by these anti-suburban planning commissions. That would quickly turn an apparently modest set of regional-planning grants into a lever for sweeping social change.

Big Bird... tee hee... Elmo... ha ha... woman with a slashed throat... blood everywhere....

PBS effort to expand arts coverage yields "the usual safety-first pledge-week fare."

Says Terry Teachout (in a very amusing WSJ column). Excerpt:

This week the network launches its new arts initiative with a "festival" of nine arts-related programs... 

Except for [one dance show], all nine programs are carefully designed to please those members of the gray-ponytail set who prefer politically correct popular culture to high art. Straight plays? Who needs 'em? Jazz? Bor-ing. As for the visual arts, they don't even exist in the unserious, unchallenging world of the PBS Arts Fall Festival. Instead we get recycled Puccini, goosed-up Gilbert and Sullivan and yesterday's grunge rock....

[I]n theory, PBS isn't commercial—except, of course, that it really is. It's an audience-driven business that dons the discreet fig leaf of public service in order to justify the government subsidies, corporate contributions, foundation grants and individual donations that keep it afloat. And what do we get for all that money? "Antiques Roadshow" and "Masterpiece Mystery!"

Ha. I'm on the same page as Teachout, including being kinda interested in "Give Me the Banjo."