Today, in my inexplicable ongoing coverage of all things Cookie Monster, I bring you what may be the best Colbert Report clip of all time, featuring you-know-who as a surprise guest.

Embeded video doesn't work in all RSS readers, so you may have to visit the actual post.

It seems that our friend Stephen Colbert has just learned of the tragic song "A Cookie is a Sometime Food" and Cookie's even more tragic relegation to fruit propagandist.

Best quote, from Cookie in response to Colbert's uncontrollable cookie cravings: "Me been there. Yeah, yeah. Me have crazy times in 70s and 80s. Me like the Robert Downey Jr. of cookies."

This reminded me of Cookie's 2006 appearance on The Martha Stewart Show, which is almost too funny to be real. Provided below for your enjoyment, in two parts:

part one

part two

And now I'm wondering two things: 1) What other non-muppets appearances has Cookie Monster made, and 2) How did this become a Cookie Monster blog anyway?

previously: cookie monster roundup, the finest in cookie monster still imagery, cookie monster on NPR

A few months ago I came across a copy of Sins of New York on the outdoor bargain table of Argosy Books. Sins of New York is an amazing compilation of stories and illustrations from The National Police Gazette, a 19th-century tabloid which, according to wikipedia, "was well known for its engravings and photographs of scantily clad strippers, burlesque dancers, and prostitutes, often skirting on the edge of what was legally considered obscenity."

Edward Van Every compiled stories from the Police Gazette for Sins of New York in 1930, by which time its popularity had substantially waned, intending to select, according to his foreword, "the Gazette's worst features" and to "confin[e himself] to the sins that went on in New York." Van Every did follow up with a collection of non-New York Gazette stories called, appropriately, Sins of America, images from which have been dutifully scanned by The Nonist.

So, here are a few of the choice engraving reproductions from Sins of New York. Pretty hard to believe this passed for salacious in New York City not so long ago, eh?

How She Cured Him
A young wife astonishes her erratic husband by emulating his example, and causes him to promptly abandon the vagabond habits of his bachelor days.

Check out the expression on the husband's face! Also worth noting is that the wife is reading the Police Gazette!

The Female Rights' Musketeers
What may be expected if the schemes of certain strong-minded women in America are realized.

This dystopian image pretty much speaks for itself.

Beauty and the Beer
An incident of the beer-maker's strike in New York—How the dashing daughter of a brewer supplied the place of one of her father's striking employees—A pretty girl's practical protest against teetotalism.

I'm not sure this was so much a protest against teetotalism as a rich chick ensuring her wealthy family would have enough dough to keep up their lifestyle despite labor movements, but at any rate "Pretty Girl's Practical Protest" is definitely a phrase I'm going to be keeping on hand for later use.

Would-Be Voters
A bevy of strong-minded Amazons make a sensation at a New York uptown polling place.

Fantastic!

Cupid in Tompkins Square Park
A place which cupid has made his favorite stamping ground, and where the stern paterfamilias is wont to appear.

Gotta love the detail of the upper right corner:

Sign: "Keep Off the Grass" Editorial: But they don't!

She Grabbed the Reins
The sensation produced on a Broadway car by an impatient young lady passenger.

And who hasn't wanted to do that during their morning commute??

If you can't get enough, policegazette.us attempts to recreate the effect of the original Gazette with today's news—although, to tell you the truth, I think we all know Drudge comes a lot closer to the intended effect.

Wow! Castro resigned!

It's an historic event of almost impossible weirdness. Castro's 49-year reign as the seemingly eternal president of Cuba means that a) pretty much no one under the age of 60 can remember him not ruling Cuba and b) he's become this mythical, timeless, ageless figure, who must, in our collective imagination, must be 153 if he's a day over 30—more fictional than real and more legend than person. Castro also never seemed to look any different until he suddenly showed up on Drudge last night finally looking his age and, somewhat humorously, sporting an Adidas track suit.

Castro in a track suit. Photo from Drudge and this New York Times slideshow, which credits it thusly: "Tv Cubana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images." Unclear how the photo relates to his resignation, but it seems to have been taken recently.

Anyway, I wanted to take this opportunity to share with you a little poorly drawn cartoon I made while bored to tears in my high school Latin American history class. The only thing I recall from our section on Cuba was learning about the methods used by the Castro regime to maintain his cult of personality.

Apparently—or so our teacher told us—children's books that were ubiquitous enough to be equivalent to Dick and Jane in the cultural consciousness of Cubans were filled with stories of Castro's heroism, including his single-handed invasion of a small village, and an incident of mythic proportions in which Castro was somehow tossed into the sea by enemy forces but refused to let go of his guns, even though he was in danger of drowning. During the revolution, see, resources were scarce, and Castro was so committed that he was willing to risk his life to conserve weaponry. Somehow, this story was supposed to be touching reading material for small children.

Unable to imagine how incidents involving mass slaughter and firearms could be appropriate material for children's literature, I had to attempt to sketch out part of such a book for myself. Here it is for your horror and enjoyment.

More importantly, though, you now know why the art world mourns my failure to become a visual artist on an almost-daily basis.

In case you were wondering what pagan ritual our culture Christianized, then secularized, to come up today's deliciously cheesy and hypothetically romantic Valentine's Day: It's Lupercalia.

According to wikipedia and this hilarious History Channel video, Lupercalia was celebrated in honor either of Lupercus, the god of the shephards who happened to raise the founders of Rome (in the form of a wolf), or Faunus, the Roman god of fertility.

Anyway, description of the usual activities of Lupercalia, from the wikipedia article:

The festival began with the sacrifice by the Luperci [the "brothers of the wolf (lupus)", a corporation of priests of Faunus…] of two male goats and a dog. Next two patrician young Luperci were led to the altar, to be anointed on their foreheads with the sacrificial blood, which was wiped off the bloody knife with wool soaked in milk, after which they were expected to smile and laugh; the smearing of the forehead with blood probably refers to human sacrifice originally practised at the festival.

The sacrificial feast followed, after which the Luperci cut thongs from the skins of the victims, which were called Februa, dressed themselves in the skins of the sacrificed goats, in imitation of Lupercus, and ran round the walls of the old Palatine city, the line of which was marked with stones, with the thongs in their hands in two bands, striking the people who crowded near. Girls and young women would line up on their route to receive lashes from these whips. This was supposed to ensure fertility, prevent sterility in women and ease the pains of childbirth. This tradition itself may survive (Christianised, and shifted to Spring) in certain ritual Easter Monday whippings.

painting depicting Lupercalia lashings, screenshot from the History Channel's V-day video

Well, ladies, we've come along way since mid-February was reserved for lashings! Happy Valentine's Day! Don't forget to save your secret geek crush one of these brilliant scientist valentines from ironic sans.

So two weeks ago when we were all having a chuckle at Google ad sales people's surprising faith in the future of scannable barcodes for tracking print ads, I wanted to post a few notable barcode arts & craft projects. As I commented on Sean's post, geeky artists and are way more likely to increase the virtually nonexistant adoption of barcode cameraphone scanning in the U.S. than…uh…advertising—and it's still a long shot.

But then I got extremely distracted by the primaries, so I never posted it. Well, now that Super Tuesday is over and our hopemonger (best new word ever) is finally ahead in the delegate count of everyone except The NYT (which seems to be refusing to count even one more delegate until Hillary starts wining), voilà!

QR code needlepoint

This awesome needlepoint QR code by tikaro apparently uses semapedia to point to the wikipedia article on pillows [via craft].

QR code cake

Flickr user Magitisa must have an incredible amount of patience, because she stenciled a QR code onto a cake [also via craft].

every barcode

In case you forgot what barcodes used to look like, there's the non-cameraphone-compatible Every Barcode animation by the barcode-obsessed Scott Blake of Barcode Art. He's got plenty of other barcode goodness, but Every Barcode is definitely the best—how can you beat a flash animation that cycles through all 10,000,000,000,000 possible barcodes (if you let it run for ten years, that is)?

space invaders scarf

This extremely geeky scarf, made by a strange collaboration between British knitwear designers Office Lendorff and "mobile enthusiasts" (although it's not really clear what they do when not encouraging knitwear enthusiasts to knit QR codes onto scarves) Kaywa features a secret QR code knitted below a pixelated Space Invaders pattern. According to one purchaser, the code reads "insert coin for new life."

eRuv: A Street History in Semacode

And, of course you all remember the previously kenspeckle eRuv project, in which Elliott Malkin bravely plastered the Lower East Side with semacode posters that pointed to old photographs of the former Third Avenue El.

Ever since my YouTube-scouring Cookie Monster roundup, kenspeckle-reading Cookie fiends have hounded me daily, begging for more Cookie media.

Unfortunately the number of vintage Cookie Monster clips on YouTube is (inherently) not increasing, so to tide you all over, here's the finest Cookie Monster imagery available on flickr (in order of flickr's possibly-some-day patented computation of interestingness).

Cookie Monster Cupcakes by princess of llyr

Are You There God? It's Me, Cookie Monster by jason.s

Good thing "interestingness" isn't patented yet. Any algorithm that ranks this pic below the cupcakes needs a lil' tweaking. [also recently seen on ffffound]

Cookie! by Hoser Dude

I like this one because he looks sad. Must've been a day without cookie.

For even more Cookie pics, make the jump.

read on »

It's been, like, a full two minutes since Sean sent me LOLinator [via tech crunch], and the humor has still not worn off!

Especially since the LOLified version of my last over-excited post is actually disturbingly similar to the version not actually written by a kitteh.

Or was it??