For decades, parents and educators have extolled the virtues of Sesame Street. Millions of parents have plunked their children down in front of that staple of public television, confident that their children’s minds were soaking up all kinds of educational goodness. I know, I was one of them. I spent countless hours lying on the brown corduroy sofa in our family room in the company of Grover, Oscar, Kermit, and the rest. But I’m here to tell you that Sesame Street has inflicted untold amounts of psychic damage on the nation’s youth.

After reading a BoingBoing post where readers shared the Sesame Street skits that induced childhood terrors and panic attacks (the orange singing Carmen, the yip-yip aliens), I was reminded of Don Music. This spawn of Jim Henson’s dark imagination, with his manic eyes and violent self-injurious behavior, would completely freak me out every time he appeared on the screen. I would tearfully beg my mom to turn off the television until that horrific puppet was finished terrifying the other children of America. To this day, the sight of long-haired keyboardists makes me break out in a cold sweat.

Beware, parents. Sesame Street may teach your kids the ABCs and the importance of sharing, but it will also teach them the true meaning of fear.

Robert Charles Wilson has become one my favorite science fiction writers because he melds intriguing ideas with fully realized characters and an elegant narrative style. Unlike many SF authors, his scientific musings never overwhelm the underlying story. Spin follows the intertwined lives of twins Jason and Diane Lawton and their childhood friend, Typer Dupree. On a cold autumn evening, they watch the stars and moon disappear from the sky. The sun continues to rise and set every day, but the confused and scared inhabitants of Earth soon realize that something much more momentous is happening. Whatever made the stars disappear has also disrupted satellite communications. Probes sent into space (and then returned to Earth) reveal that the planet has been enclosed in some kind of artificial membrane. And for every year that passes here on Earth, 100 million years are elapsing beyond the membrane. In the span of a few decades, Earth will be incinerated by an aging sun.

This phenomenon–the Spin–defines and shapes the lives of these three friends. They cope with impending doom in different ways–by joining religious cults, by overseeing a determined scientific quest to determine the intent of the Spin’s unseen creators, or by simply attempting to lead a relatively normal life. Wilson constructs a plot that is cinematic in scope but that remains grounded in the intertwined paths of Jason, Diane, and Tyler. His slow reveal of the Spin’s true purpose is expertly handled, as is the unfolding destinies of the three main characters. This is one of the best SF novels I’ve read in some time and it richly deserves the accolades that have been heaped upon it.

I’m now reading Lee Child’s guilty-pleasure thriller The Hard Way.

The mailbag has contained a few requests from new arrivals in the disability blogosphere (bleh, that word still feels clumsy) to promote their sites. Here they are, in no particular order:

• It’s not really a blog, but Disapedia features articles and Wikipedia-ish entries on topics of general interest to the disability community.
• Matt Schneider blogs about things both geek and gimp over at mattschneider.com.
• At Pitt Rehab, Greg blogs about Nala, his service dog, and life in Pennsylvania.

I’m always happy to post links to new and interesting disability-themed sites, so don’t hesitate to e-mail them to me. A link from The 19th Floor is sure to increase your traffic by a factor of…well…okay, not much. But if you guys keep at it for a few more years, you too could get a whopping fifty hits a day.

I’m streaming the Live Earth concert; Bloc Party is currently performing at Wimbley Stadium. They’re putting on a good show, but I’m always a little dubious of grand, issue-centered concert events like this. Remember the big Live 8 concert from a couple years back? A lot of people probably don’t probably don’t. And even if they do, I’m not sure most people could tell you what the fuss was all about. In the end, I’m not sure that concert did much to create sustainable awareness around debt relief for developing countries. The kids may show up for a concert to spread the word that Global Warning Is Bad And Someone Really Should Do Something About It, but a lot of them are going to drive home in their Pathfinders to their oversized homes in the suburbs. Concerts are good PR and I’d probably be there myself if I could, but the real solutions to climate change are going to inflict some real pain, especially to everyone’s wallet. So far, I haven’t heard anyone at this concert mention the word “sacrifice” to the audience.

I don’t remember playing with Transformers when I was a kid, but I did watch the cartoon on a fairly regular basis after school. It never struck a powerful chord with me, but it was serviceable entertainment. I would use the same word to describe the movie: serviceable. It has all the testosterone-infused trademarks of a Michael Bay film: eardrum-shattering explosions, impossibly hot women, more military hardware than you’d see at an arms dealers’ swap meet, and a script that defies all logic and common sense. But it’s still fun. After all, it has giant alien robots blowing stuff up. Despite my refined sense of cinematic aesthetics, I’m genetically predisposed to enjoy this movie. It’s not likely something I’ll add to my library, but the spectacle was worth the price of admission.