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

I finally silkscreened into reality one of the witty (I hope) t-shirt ideas I mentioned awhile back.

These </3 t-shirts are a really geeky double entendre: To IM addicts everywhere this is obviously a broken heart, but for the anal xhtml geeks among us it could also be a validated heart. Or, true, the end of a heart. I like to think it means my heart's written in valid xhtml. (OMG! Just like my blog! Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Anyway, this idea came up during deliriously dorky IM conversations with coworkers at my last job. We were thinking that a regular <3 looked like it was going to get caught by W3C's validator and wondered if </3 would *have* to mean a broken heart.

So now I've got six </3 shirts in four different styles for sale in my new etsy store. Sorry, fellas, there's only one [normal men's shirts now in action] for you right now (sporty style) because I messed up the other men's shirts by silkscreening the </3 upside-down, making it look like <\3. Still broken, but it totally ruins the xhtml joke. Oops!

But there are women's t-shirts (high-maintainence glitter and regular-type) and tank tops. And more men's shirts coming soon, I promise!

update: Men's shirts (finally managed to silkscreen them non-upside-down) and more women's sizes now available. Male model for the men's shirts still nowhere to be seen.

another update: Broken heart/valid heart shirts (and mugs and stickers and magnets and mousepads) are now available at zazzle.com/kenspeckle. Hand silkscreened shirts will only be available while supplies last or by special request.

Elizabeth Blair and Cookie Monster

Because NPR's In Character series has impeccable taste in fictional characters, they recently interviewed my favorite: Cookie Monster!

Elizabeth Blair starts the inteview like so: "We at NPR News have high journalistic standards. So I sat down with Cookie Monster for an exclusive interview."

The original Wheel Stealer, from the Muppet Wiki

She sounds like my kind of girl!

Anyway, first she covers Cookie's direct ancestor, the Wheel Stealer, who first arrived on the muppet scene in some unaired commercials for General Mills in which, of course, he devoured snacks. Wheel Stealer then went on to star in this hilarious training video for IBM, called "Coffee Break Machine":

Embedded video doesn't work in all RSS readers. You may have to visit the actual post.

You may be wondering, "Training for what?!?!?!" So am I, dear reader. So am I.

If you want to buff up on Cookie Monster's complete lineage, there's a page devoted to just that at the Muppet Wiki.

The highlight of the NPR segment, though, was hearing Frank Oz, the puppeteer who originated Cookie Monster—and, along with Jim Henson, invented him—validating my reasons for loving Cookie so, so much. Frank said:

He's a very sensuous monster, very tactile. As opposed to many of us, who need many things to make us happy, he only needs one thing. And that's a cookie. And he's insatiable. He's not intellectual, he's not that smart…

And the highlight of the b-roll video (which is actually more entertaining than the complete segment) would have to be Cookie's answers to a few questions from The Proust Questionnaire such as:

Elizabeth: What is your favorite word?
Cookie: COOKIE! Hahaha. What you expect?

Elizabeth: What is your least favorite word?
Cookie: Outtacookies! That one word: Outtacookies! Outtacookies! Yeah. That count? Not count, huh?
Elizabeth: For you, we'll make it count.
Cookie: How 'bout pusillanimous? Me not sure what that means, but me heard it once and it sound pretty icky.

Elizabeth: What sound or noise do you love?
Cookie: Oh me love uh, um-num-num-num. That me favorite sound.

Elizabeth: What sound or noise do you hate?
Cookie: Snoring. Me do not like snoring.
Elizabeth: Do you have friends who snore?
Cookie: Yeah. Pretty much all me friends snore. It a thing on Sesame Street. Everybody who sleeps, they snore. It drive me crazy.
Elizabeth: But you don't snore?
Cookie: Me not sure. Me sleeping. Me probably do, but me not hear it.

Elizabeth's full Cookie Monster segment and accompanying video are both available here.

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 »

Apparently hip typophile types have known about Bembo's Zoo since 2005, but since I only found out about it this week from word[is(not equal to)]art, it's time to share the awesomeness!

The flash version of Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich's children's book by the same name morphs the names of 26 animals written in bembo into illustrations of said animals using nothing but the letters that make up their name and the occasional punctuation mark.

Ok, it's a lot cooler than I made it sound. My faves are the unicorn (above) and flamingo (below).

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??

Today, in honor of web zen's recognition of the inherent awesomeness of vintage cookie monster clips (which I had to frantically update, since most of the videos I originally embedded had since been yanked from YouTube), I bring you a very silly "I'm a {inanimate object}" personality quiz [via back in skinny jeans]:

Mmmm. Tasty.

I also bring good news to my (countless!) RSS readers: I'm slowly weaning myself off that ol' quixotic dream of being a real, bad-ass link blogger. First, I turned off automated del.icio.us posting, now, I've finally removed that link splicing from my feed as well.

If you really want to know what I'm bookmarking—and how could you not?!?!—there's always the del.icio.us RSS feed.