What's that you say? You say you didn't get enough classic Sesame Street clips in my Cookie Monster roundup?

Your wait for more vintage goodness from where the air is sweet is over. Here's a collection of all the Yip Yips to be found on YouTube [thanks, Sean!].

I had an explanation for the Cookie Monster post (channeling the id), so why Yip Yips? Well…maybe their Martian pidgin contributed to the evolution of lolcat kitty pidgin.

Embedded video doesn't work in RSS, so you'll have to go to the actual post.

update: Holy collapsing personal blogosphere! Patrick and Asim dutifully alerted me (within 12 hours of each other, no less) to the fact that Patrick posted the exact same collection of videos a whole week or two ago.

How did I miss this? I guess decreased posting volume hasn't been the only effect of my frantic thesis-finishing—I'm nearly 5,000 posts behind in my bloglines reading. But seriously. This is the sort of thing that makes a girl want to crawl into a hidden div and…well…hide.

If you stand for everything good and right (in terms of first dibs and whatnot), you'll go watch the Yip Yip videos at Patrick's post. If you're lazy, you'll watch them here.

Yip Yips Meet a Computer

Buttons! (No, not the ones on your clothes.)

Yip Yips Meet a Telephone

First Yip Yip skit ever.

Yip Yips Meet a Clock

Must be Earth person: It tocks!

Old MacDonald has a Spaceship

Yip yip, yip yip, yip.

Twice now I've been able to find answers to questions that search engines couldn't provide (yes, they still exist) just by posing them in online arenas in which I had no right to expect answers.

The first time my question was rhetorical. After reading the wikipedia article about Stephen Colbert's controversial performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association, I wrote a post asking…well…no one in particular…how Colbert managed to get invited to speak there in the first place.

Given the, shall we say, rather small readership here at kenspeckle.net, I was astounded to receive a reply from one of the article's editors who apparently keeps close tabs on its url (Hi again, Raul654!).

Then my brother pointed out this extremely mysterious bug upon picking me up at the Tampa International Airport last Thursday. Neither of us is exactly what you'd call an entomologist, but we were both fascinated by the optical illusion of the bug's wings that make it look like a model airplane and its complete immobility despite our intrusion on its personal space with not one but two camera phone pictures.

Since there's no way to do a reverse image search—yet—I figured I'd try my luck with the void once more, but this time I chose a bigger void than the itsy-bitsy kenspeckle audience: flickr! I only had to wait one day for the correct answer. It's a white-lined sphinx moth, aka Hyles lineata. There's a great closeup of one at photo.net.

Now I just need to figure out how to get the internet to tell me what the heck the name of the extremely steep hill between E. 102 and E. 103 Streets on Lexington Avenue is. I'm convinced it's the steepest hill in Manhattan, and it must have a name.

On Madison Avenue, no less. Further research has revealed this unexpected edifice to be the façade of an old armory built in 1894, so it never saw any actual battles, but nonetheless you can imagine my surprise when I came across it during my futile Friday afternoon quest to locate a coffee shop that was not a Starbucks but that nonetheless encouraged use of their electrical outlets. [As a side note, those wishing to hop into the coffee shop game might want to consider this as a selling point, since I ended up overpaying for coffee that I knew I would not enjoy just to get some laptop juice out of the deal.]

According to The City Review, the Squadron A Armory, which is between 94th and 95th Streets, was built to resemble "a fourteenth-century French fortress, complete with square towers, round turrets and a crenellated parapet," but it never really served a…fortifying…purpose. The New York Times explains that Squadron A (a division of the National Guard) only ever fought "in Puerto Rico, in France and along the Mexican border."

The actual armory building mostly served (per NYT) as an "immense riding ring with elaborate social quarters, which it used for polo, dances, badminton and horse shows." In 1969, most of the armory was torn down to build the Hunter College Elementary and High School, but the Madison Avenue façade was declared a historical landmark right before it was destroyed, and now protects the playground behind it (The City Review has an interesting shot of the playground, towards the middle of their article on the armory).