My kids created this after seeing something similar on the ending of an episode of Curious George. See, TV isn’t all bad. The theater is basically a box with one side cut out and covered over with a sheet of white paper.
The other shape with the cat (above) is an airplane. Of course.
They used chopstick pieces as holders. I’m loving the cardboard factory that is our dining room right now. Each package that enters the house is eyed as building material.
Our five-year-old wants to make a ball (sphere) of cardboard. Hmmmm……which gives me an idea…..
By Mark Peters
With the arrival of the new Muppet movie, Kermit, Miss Piggy, Beaker, and our other felt friends are everywhere. There’s no escaping Jim Henson’s creations, and few of us would want to (unless the movie happens to suck, which is doubtful, given the stewardship of Jason Segel, who showed major Muppet mojo in the heartbreaking and spit-taking Forgetting Sarah Marshall). It’s a good time to look at the history of the word Muppet, which has some meanings that would make the Swedish Chef bork with outrage.
Thanks to interviews with Muppet creator Jim Henson, we know Muppet is not a blend of marionette and puppet, though that theory has been appearing since 1959, just four years after Henson invented the crew, who appeared in pre-Sesame Street and Muppet Show fare such as commercials for Wilkins coffee. I love this part of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of Muppet: “Any of a number of humorously grotesque glove puppets.” That phrasing seems humorously grotesque itself, but if it helps a Martian understand a Muppet, I guess it’s worthwhile.
In the eighties, the word took on several meanings. Since 1983, a muppet has been “A lure made to resemble a young squid.” I don’t want to give my enemies (arch or mortal) any ideas, but since calamari is squid, I’m pretty sure this kind of muppet could lure me anywhere. In British prison slang, a muppet is “A prisoner with psychiatric problems; a vulnerable inmate liable to be bullied or harassed by others.” As this 1998 use shows, Muppets aren’t the only Henson creation to carry this meaning: “Their favourite targets are the fraggles, the nonces and the muppets. But anyone showing tell-tale signs of fear is a target for Britain’s jail bullies.”
A muppet can also be an idiot, though I have no idea why, since the Muppets are among the least idiotic members of the puppet community (Elmo excluded). However, this part of the OED’s definition sort of rings true: “someone enthusiastic but inept; a person prone to mishaps through naivety.” With the exception of curmudgeons (RIP Andy Rooney) such as Oscar, Statler, and Waldorf, the Muppets are brimming with optimism from their pieholes to their puppetholes. Green’s Dictionary of Slang also has examples of muppet meaning a child or a cop.
These Muppet meanderings are similar to the meanings smurf has taken on over the years. While most know Smurfs as blue elves with a disturbingly low female population, other smurfs or smurfers make smurf dope: blue crystal meth. A smurf is also “an inexperienced or short prison officer,” as Green’s puts it, and a gay man who’s youngish and blonde. Plus, smurf is one of the most awesome euphemisms for the f-word in the known universe, as seen in words like clustersmurf, mothersmurfer, ratsmurf, and fan-smurfing-tastic. If I didn’t know better, I’d think smurf has an acronymic origin, like fubar and milf. Despite the PG origin, something about smurf feels blue in the naughty sense.
When a word is as fun to say as Smurf or Muppet, there’s no stopping how people will use it. Now that the Muppets are back, who knows what this mega-appealing word will soon describe? I have no idea, but let me suggest a meaning, Urban Dictionary-style, that I’ve used and suspect others use: “A harmless, lovable person.” I used this sense when I called my friend Neil a Muppet a few years ago, as Neil was stuck giving a presentation that typically made students reach for pitchforks and torches. This pernicious presentation made presenters long for a force field, or at least student-proof chicken wire. In calling Neil a Muppet, I
Blog contributor Marjorie has been posting a series of posts on children’s author’s memories of their grandparents. Her last post in the series is here. I read these posts with much interest since I have been investigating my own grandparents’ history (as well as my memories of them) especially lately on this visit to Japan. Both sets of my grandparents were in Japan and I could only visit them peripatetically over the years. Now they are all gone, but my maternal grandfather, Toshiro Saito, passed his memoir onto his children. I was very interested in this document, but alas, I could not read such complicated Japanese! It took me a few years, but I managed to translate the entire document with the help of my aunt. Recently I was able to publish two sections of the memoir in Canadian journals - one section entitled “Puppet” covering my grandfather’s memories of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 in on-line journal The Winnipeg Review, and another section, ”At War’s End in Indonesia,” about my grandfather’s experience of the end of World War Two in The Malahat Review. The latter contains his account of embracing his ten year old daughter, my mother, on his return to Japan after an absence of nearly four years during the war. Translating my grandfather’s memoir gave me a new appreciation for the printed word and the importance of keeping a record of one’s memories — that’s the job authors do every time they set down a word in print. They remember, and share, and that is their gift to the reader. I strongly urge you to check out the rest of the posts in Marjorie’s wonderful series. (The photo, I’ve posted, by the way, is of my grandfather’s gravestone in Kyoto with the magazine his work appeared in.)
Titirimundi, international festival of puppets, arrives again at Segovia, Spain.
i,ll see funny puppets at beatiful places in my city...please don't go
http://beatriztrello.blogspot.com/2009/05/gente-de-hilo-y-madera.html
They used chopstick pieces as holders. I’m loving the cardboard factory that is our dining room right now. Each package that enters the house is eyed as building material.
