Katy Perry skanks up Sesame Street, Facebook struggles and turning dog crap into power

- Finally. I’ve been saying for years that what "Sesame Street" needs to push itself over the edge is to skank it up a little bit. Sure, the show is heading into its 41st season of entertaining and educating kids, helping them learn to read, write and count with a cast of colorful characters who have become household names over the past four-plus decades. Still, the show has been missing that little something extra and for its season premiere, I think “Sesame Street” has found it. It, of course, is the pop music awfulness and all-around skankiness of one Katy Perry, who is giving a bad name to both the Perry family and everyone named Katy with her special blend of crap-tacular music and willingness to whore it up in any and all settings. How over the top is her act? Well, when the season premiere began previewing on the Web this week, a cast that included none other than Jude Law, Will.i.am, Colin Farrell, and Run-DMC's Reverend Run created nary a complaint, but Perry’s a two-and-a-half minute video led to angry comments from parents who checked out the video and felt compelled to post statements like, "Couldn't she wear something that was more. oh idk. APPROPRIATE" and "I DO NOT want my five year old lookin at [that]!" So what was the that that Perry was wearing? Perry was sporting a flesh-colored mesh top that went all the way up to her neck, which apparently is offensive to a lot of parents of young children. Now, I would take more offense to seeing Katy Perry singing a reworked version of her 2008 song "Hot N Cold" with Elmo (you can do so much better, Elmo), but I’ll go along with these outraged parents because their outrage has led to Perry’s performance being yanked from the broadcast version of the program. That’s right, Sesame Workshop, the company that produces the show, announced that producers have decided to pull the song. Anyone wanting to watch that crap will have to visit KatyPerry.com and suffer the shame of…….well, of being someone who actually visits KatyPerry.com. "'Sesame Street' has always been written on two levels, for the child and adult," a statement from the show explained. "We use parodies and celebrity segments to interest adults in the show because we know that a child learns best when co-viewing with a parent or caregiver. We also value our viewers' opinions and particularly those of parents. In light of the feedback we've received on the Katy Perry music video, which was released on YouTube only, we have decided we will not air the segment on the television broadcast of 'Sesame Street,' which is aimed at preschoolers." Never did I think “Sesame Street” would have to show the world the way when it came to taste in music, but I guess 41 years later, the show is still imparting life’s most important lessons to kids of all ages……….

- If you heard horrified screams from angsty teenagers, cooped-up soccer moms and tech-savvy grandparents around the world the past two days, fear not. Nothing truly terrible was happening to them (not that we know of); they were just in a panic because for a few hours, they were unable to like ungodly amounts of stupid things, poke people or tag themselves in pictures taken from uncomfortably close range because Facebook was down. After going down for several hours on Wednesday, the site went down once again on Thursday. "Today we experienced technical difficulties causing the site to be unavailable for a number of users," a Facebook spokeswoman explained in an email. "The issue has been resolved and everyone should now have access to Facebook. We apologize for any inconvenience." Thursday’s outage occurred early in the afternoon and was resolved by about 5:30 p.m. ET. Interestingly enough, Facebook insisted that Thursday’s issue was not related to the one from Wednesday, when issues with a third-party network provider shut the site down, or severely hampered its pace, for several hours. Those issues undoubtedly infuriated many of the social networking site’s 500 million users, especially those with no life who spend an inordinate amount of time on Facebook rather than getting out and actually living life in the real world. It’s why Facebook is the world's largest social-networking site and will continue to be. Some explanation for the outages could be found on Facebook's blog for developers, where a post said the site was "experiencing latency issues" with its platform. Cynical observers expressed doubt that the delay on the developers' platform was enough to cause the entire problem, but either way, service was restored late in the afternoon and it’s back to (no-life-having) business as usual for Facebook’s devoted users………..

- Holy (dog) crap. What better place than the city that is home to both Harvard and MIT to take something as omnipresent and foul-smelling as dog crap and turn it into energy? Honestly, dogs taking a dump and it becoming that filthy ground covering you step in is an issue no matter where you live, but not every place has someone quite like Cambridge, Mass. resident Matthew Mazzotta, who came up with the idea for a special methane digester that uses pet waste to produce power. "This is based off of technology being used in India and China. It takes cow manure, puts it into a tank and makes the perfect environment for the little microbes in the manure to put off methane, and this methane can then be used to cook or heat spaces," Mazzotta explained. His project got underway this summer, with locals placing their pet’s droppings in a biodegradable bag and then placing it in the methane digester. From there, the digester converted the poop into power and that power was plentiful enough to power a lamp post in the dog park. “You pick it up in a biodegradable bag. You pop it in here. It sinks to the bottom and the methane rises to the top. If you want to, there's a little wheel here...spins the inside in here. This eventually collects all the methane and it goes over to this lamp up here," Mazzotta said. Unfortunately, the project is coming to an end this weekend. The converted and lamp will be removed and many dog walkers who have made use of the contraption have lamented its departure from their lives. But rest assured, Mazzotta will continue to push for his invention to someday become a viable source of renewable energy. “The bigger implication is what if we start thinking about the city and how all the waste that we have as animals, put into our waste drains, can we tap that thing and actually power part of our city,” he theorized. Here’s hoping, Mateo, here’s hoping………

- Can HBO actually make people care about hockey? The network and its sports department must believe so because it announced Thursday that the Washington Capitals and Pittsburgh Penguins will star in an HBO series centered around their showdown in the NHL’s annual Winter Classic, which will take place on Jan. 1 at Pittsburgh's Heinz Field. In a joint announcement, the league and the network stated Thursday that four hour-long episodes of HBO's "24/7" franchise will air before and after the contest. "I've got to believe there's going to be some sort of distraction where they'll probably be given access to places we normally are pretty private about," Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau said. "But, listen, it's for the growth of the game, and it's not too often that hockey is going to be featured on HBO. ... Anything that makes hockey grow is great by me." The project has its genesis in an invitation from HBO to several NHL officials to watch a screening of its "Broad Street Bullies" documentary about the 1970s Philadelphia Flyers. The next ingredient in the recipe for certain apathy from most sports fans came when the league picked Sidney Crosby's Penguins and Alex Ovechkin's Capitals to play in the fourth incarnation of the Winter Classic at the outdoor home of the Steelers. "When we learned who the two teams were, it piqued our interest," HBO Sports president Ross Greenburg said. "It helped, there's no question. You're taking the two biggest stars in the sport and the two biggest rivals and putting them on the ice." To be fair to the NHL, it is riding (somewhat high) after the deciding game of Stanley Cup finals between the Flyers and Chicago Blackhawks drew the NHL's highest rating in 36 years. "It's great television," Greenburg said. "I'm getting chills thinking back to that scene that was set in those two buildings in the finals." Normally, HBO’s “24/7” series focus on things people actually want to see, like world championship boxing matches. Of course, HBO has also done well with lame, dud-tacular subjects like NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson, so this could work. Anyone actually interested in watching this show can check it out when it premiers Dec. 15 and airs each of the next three Wednesdays……….

- Why do I suspect that Iranian despot Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not the least bit surprised when delegates from the United States and other nations walked out of the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday as he delivered a that slammed Washington, capitalism and the world body itself? Something tells me that the dictator knew exactly how his comments would be received and he basically pushed the U.S. diplomats out the door when he spouted various conspiracy theories about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. "Some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack," Ahmadinejad told the General Assembly. Old hat, nothing new there, but still offensive. He tagged those comments with a claim that the attacks were aimed at reversing "the declining American economy and its scripts on the Middle East in order to save the Zionist regime. The majority of the American people, as well as most nations and politicians around the world, agree with this view." That was the kill shot for most of the diplomats as representatives from the United States, Britain, Sweden, Australia, Belgium, Uruguay and Spain walked out. Not having been there, I can only imagine what a ranting, raving dictator accusing the

U.S. government of being involved in the attacks or allowing them to happen as an excuse to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq while the entire room cleared out like someone just dropped an especially rank-smelling fart must have looked like. By the time Ahmadinejad spoke, President Barack Obama already had delivered his address to the General Assembly and had left the grounds. The first U.S. response to Ahmadinejad’s speech came from White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, who said the president "found the comments to be outrageous and offensive, given how close we are to ground zero.” The U.S. was joined in its outrage by the entire European Union, with an EU diplomat saying that all 27 member nations had agreed to walk out if Ahmadinejad made inflammatory statements during his address. Not that any of this fazed Ahmadinejad, because he plowed right ahead in comparing the death toll in the September 11 attacks to the casualty count in the wars in Afghanistan in Iraq. "It was said that some 3,000 people were killed on September 11th, for which we are all very saddened," he said. "Yet, up until now in Afghanistan and Iraq, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, millions wounded and displaced, and the conflict is still going on and expanding." He wrapped his diatribe by blasting away at capitalism in a continuation of his Monday address at the Millennium Global Development Summit. Thanks for the entertainment, M., although I may have been the only one listening to your lunacy……….