Muppets | Pushing the envelope with tits?!

In the following Muppet sketch, an obviously uncomfortable Sam the Eagle performs the Gilbert & Sullivan song "Tit Willow" from The Mikado. Try and imagine Sesame Street, or any other kids show where the main gag is getting a character to say the word "tit" repeatedly:



The subject matter of the Mikado's Titwillow song is actually quite somber, and as someone who is familiar with the works of Gilbert & Sullivan (thanks mom!) I understand it isn't hard to do a rendition without any innuendo. After all, the subject matter is a heartbroken bird who considers suicide by drowning himself in a river. But Henson and crew intentionally converted the song into a comedy skit, pushing the envelope in only their first season. There is enough evidence in the skit itself that their intention all along was to repeatedly say "tit" on a children's show and see if they could get it passed censors, and they were successful due to circumstance of location.

The first season of the Muppet Show was shot in Elstree, England just north of London. And while many Americans are aware of the different meaning of British words like flat, telly, and rubber, most aren't aware of the local British fauna. In England, the word "tit" doesn't immediately bring to mind a part of the female anatomy, but rather one of a variety of common birds. During casual conversation, one could mention the word "titmouse" without so much as batting an eyelash or smirking, and your average Brit is likely to see the following mental image:





Say "titmouse" to any American and expect the following reaction:

a) surprise
b) questioning stare
c) uncontrolled giggling
d) all of the above

Even if the American you are conversing with is an experienced ornithologist, bird watcher, or board member of the National Audubon Society, the word "titmouse" invokes the following mental image:







My first experience with the British version of the word "tit" was Junior year as an undergraduate student when I purchased a textbook for my behavioral ecology course. I did a quick flip through of the book, as any student would, to see what was in store for the next semester. The very first image I stopped on was a chart entitled "Distribution of Great Tits in England." After a double take, I decided I was probably going to enjoy behavioral ecology a lot. Of course, the great tit (Parsus major) is another song bird related to the titmouse, and blue tit, and a google search about them (in protected mode, of course) reveals many informational web pages pertaining to ornithology and ecological research, though you wouldn't know that from the page titles alone:

Great Tit Photos
Great Tit information
Definition of great tit
Different responsiveness of Indian and European Great Tit
Variation in the number of spermatozoa in Blue Tit and Great Tit
Glimmering great tit

As it would turn out, great tits are a common research bird for their wide distribution and ease of identification (NOTE: The great tits of England are not related to the boobies of North America, such as the blue-footed boobie found in the Hawaiian islands). Therefore, looking through the search results can be as entertaining as the web page titles themselves. From the first five pages of google search results, we learn the following important facts, all from ornithology and ecology research sites:

• "most Great Tits do not migrate"
• "Great tits usually come out at the first signs of spring"
• "Great tits in Britain seem to be adapting to climatic change, scientists report,"
• "In Great Tits, males sing vigorously at dawn in the vicinity of the female's nest hole"
• "Great tits stay away from conifer forests"
• "great tits might be useful biomonitoring tools"
• "Great Tits and Blue Tits are common wherever there are trees in Berlin, which is pretty much everywhere."

I could go on, as like most males of my species I am fascinated by Parsus major (great tits), but I digress from my original argument re the Muppet Show and coincidence of location. Being in England and a children's show, you get the benefit of the doubt that a tit willow is a bird and nothing more.

There are two more obvious points of evidence in the intention of the Muppet creators. The first is in their reconstruction of the song itself. The Gilbert & Sullivan version of the song is always performed as a solo. The version in the Muppet sketch has been hacked, not only to remove the middle verse about suicide by drowning which might not go over well on a children's comedy, but more importantly to be set up as a call-and-response style duet where Rowlf does most of the song, and Sam the Eagle must recite in response all the bits about "tits" and "dickie birds."

The other and more damning evidence is their placement of Sam the Eagle as the personality opposite Rowlf. During the first season of the Muppet Show, many of the characters were still in development. Even Miss Piggy ping ponged between different voices for a number of episodes before she settled into the Frank Oz character we know today. Until the Tit Willow sketch, Sam the Eagle was only used in two regularly occuring scenarios: to introduce the wholesome singing pair of Wayne and Wanda, and as the conservative voice on the Muppet parody of Crossfire, where Sam was essentially portraying William F. Buckley. At the beginning of the sketch, Sam has to ask, "is this cultural?" to which Rowlf replies "It's light opera!" And then over the course of the sketch, Sam looks around, nervous and suspicious at each mention of the word "tit".

I already had immense respect for Henson and crew, but discovery of this sketch raises that respect to a new level. Not because of the childishness of "tit" humor, but because of their willingness to take an obvious risk. Also in their ability to add layers of wit and sophistication to something that would have been good enough for the intended audience had it merely been colorful and loud puppets. There is something for everyone, of every age to find and cherish in their work. It can be enjoyed one way, the way my two-year-old son enjoys watching them now. It can be enjoyed another way for the nostalgia it kindles in someone like myself. And it can be enjoyed on the devious level, where my sense of humor resides, above and beyond anything I was conscious of when I first experienced the show as a child.

Chemistry | Balancing Redox Reactions

I was catching up with my friend Scott on the phone the other day... to be honest, friend is a huge understatement. Scott was my college advisor, developmental biology professor, summer employer, mentor, helped me get my first job out of college, and helped me get my first Softimage license so many years ago. My son's middle name is Scott because the real Scott is such a mensch, so let's call him my mentor because no friend ever did so much while asking for so little. Scott knew my mind when I was a student, and he knows me now, so I have been asking his advice about returning to school after all these years.

Scott brought up an old routine by Father Guido Sarducci called the Five Minute University, the gist of which is in five minutes you can learn everything you would remember from school five years after graduation. For example, if you took two years of Spanish, five years later you'd most likely have forgotten all the vocabulary and conjugation rules, so for Sarducci's FMU, all you need to learn is "Como esta usted" and "Muy Bien." Want to take the FMU economics class? Supply and Demand. Buy Low, Sell High. The cost of tuition at FMU is $20.00 per student, which might seem like a lot, but also includes snacks, photo of cap and gown, and diploma.



While the FMU approach might be acceptible for most job applications, it's not going to suffice for my personal ambitions. So in the spirit of the contrarian that I am, I decided to go back and review General Chemistry, and more specifically to see if I could rekindle the process of balancing Redox reactions, something I remembered from AP chemistry in high school. Coincidentally, in my experience AP chemistry was a class where students frequently asked the question, "Do we have to know that for the test?" The teacher was fond of replying "Some people drink from the fountain of knowledge, others just gargle." Most of us could tell that the meaning of that quip went over the heads of the intended targets. It was only years later I noticed that same line in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations which was attributed to Robert Anthony Newton, a famous accounting professor at the Harvard Business School, and not my high school chemistry teacher. Bummer.

The art of balancing chemical equations in general is called "stoichiometry", and for real basic equations you only have to make sure the number of atoms on the left side equal the number of atoms on the right side. That's easy enough to qualify for FMU status. I remembered Redox reactions being much more difficult, because they have hidden attributes dealing with electron transfer and balancing charges and water molecules with acids and bases.

Talking about oxidizing and reduction agents, double displacement reactions, titrations, molarity, and molality, that may sound obscure to 98% of the laypopulation, but those words can strike terror into the minds of anyone taking general chemistry, and they are definitely out of the scope of the FMU curriculum. I've spent many hours of the past few weeks practicing stoichiometry and balancing Redox reactions (sorry Father Sarducci) and here's my recipe:

1) Break the reaction into two half-reactions.
2) If the oxidation states of the non Oxygen, Hydrogen atoms are obvious to calculate, figure out which species is being oxidized, which one is being reduced, then add free electrons to that half-reaction.
3) If the oxidation states are not obvious, balance the charge with H+ for acidic reactions, or OH- for basic reactions, then balance the Oxygen and Hydrogen in the half-reactions with H2O. Balance resulting charges with free electrons.
4) Using multiplication of all half-reaction species, equilize the number of electrons in each half -reaction so they can cancel out when the two half reactions are added together.
5) Add the two half reactions, canceling out the extra H2O's, H+'s or OH-'s

Coming up next? The chemistry of gases. The FMU part of my brain only remembers the words "Boyle's Law", the phrase "Standard Temperature and Pressure" and the formula PV=nRT.

Word of the Day | Pareidolia

From the wikipedia definition:

Pareidolia (pronounced /pærɪˈdoʊliə/) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse.

Random water stain? Or blatant Toys R Us Advert?