QotD: Celebrational Muppetational!

Who is your favorite Muppet? Why?
QotD submitted by knitwitology.vox.com.

Sgt. Floyd Pepper. Easily. 'Cause he was, as part of a cast better crated, effortlessly cool and laid-back. Plus, you knew he could bring the funk when he wanted.

And, it seems, that you can buy an articulated action figure of the mustachioed bassman, which makes no sense to me. Why not a plush toy for the kids or--I don't know--a puppet for the nerds who can't work up the nerve to actually talk to other people.

I'm not going to lie to you; I used to harbor aspirations of being a ventriloquist. I also practiced magic. The torn and restored rabbit kind, not the wiccan devil-summoning kind. You can probably imagine how supremely unpopular I was in grade, middle, and high school. And yet I was happy. You know why? Puppets.

That's actually untrue. I'm sorry. The actual reason I wasn't terminally suicidal in school was because I choose to be intentionally oblivious of the sheer number of people who wouldn't be caught dead in my company. Of course, this is all in retrospect. At the time, I was a clarinetting magic-making puppeteer, a fucking king-maker.

Anyway, I had--have, actually, as they're probably in a box somewhere--two ventriloquist dolls: a cheap Charlie McCarthy knock-off that my mother purchased from the J.C. Penny catalogue one Christmas and a dog puppet that tried so hard to distract from his and my uncoolness that it wore hot-pink tie-dyed clothes and sunglasses.

My conscience is clear on Charlie McCarthy. I got it as a gift. You get lots of things as gifts that you don't actually want. Calendars, for instance. Please give me no more calendars. I neither want nor need a one-a-day calendar of pithy Tim Allen sayings or a glossy wall-hanger of the best in black and white roadside cafe photography.

But the dog. Oh, the dog. I wanted it bad, but you've got to understand the circumstances. I was 13 years old in the Mall of America, the biggest shrine to commercialization you're going to see this side of television. My eyes had grown numb to the spectacle of six floors of stores upon stores when, suddenly, I happen upon this kiosk manned by a bored high-school graduate and a talking dog.

Marketing wonks will quote you statistics and data compiled from double-blind studies and focus groups, but I'm going to lay it out easy for you: if you want to catch the eye of the ever-valuable tween-aged boy and girl, all you need is a talking dog.

I realized, of course, that the dog couldn't actually talk and resembled more an albino sloth with an arrestingly '80s sense of fashion than a mutt, but I was smitten. Here was my chance, I thought. Here was my chance to finally get some of that popular mainstream attention. Thank God that failed.

God, the more that I think about it, there's a good chance I brought one or both of those to school at some point. Strangely, I never had trouble with bullies. I think they felt sorry for me.

Eventually, I stopped talking without moving my lips, dropped the clarinet, and picked up the bass. And it's much easier to play when you don't have your arm up a big floppy dog sock.

- Tyson