Happy Sesame Street Day!
Premiering on November 10, 1969, Sesame Street has been a cornerstone of my reading life for my entire life. “C is for Cookie” is one of my earliest alphabet memories and The Monster at the End of This Book helped set me on the path that led to a Master of Arts on the design of books and now has me going back to school again for a Library degree.
One of my favourites that I still own from my childhood is Sherlock Hemlock and the Great Twiddlebug Mystery or The Mystery of the Terrible Mess in My Friend’s Front Yard, published in 1972 by the Western Publishing Company Inc. in conjunction with the Children’s Television Workshop.
Re-reading it now, it is chock-full of surprisingly sophisticated ideas, like the need for humility and reality checks but also having confidence in what you know, Occam’s Razor but also a refutation of Occam’s Razor, and the importance of obscure knowledge when interpreting facts and clues. Can’t say if it’s correlation or causation, but it’s possible some of this rubbed off on me.
And finally, because I had to…
Happy Reminiscing!
– Winston