Alex Groh is an unofficial sort of cookie monster. He claims to subsist on cookies, jilting his loving refrigerator in the process, and only getting out of bed to draw and get milk for his cookies. This may be exaggerated for comedic effect, but that’s really not a bad quality in a cartoonist. Alex Groh draws a webcomic called Last Words and cookies and the blood of small children are his inspiration.

The comic strip stars the severely psychotic Loc with his trusty kitchen knife. No whining if you get cut. And remember to keep a magnet under your pillow, so your computer can’t come assault you while you are sleeping.

Alex Groh says just because I’m looking at porn doesn’t mean I’m not working and Emo Panda wants you to join him in therapy. Until Emo Panda whisks you away to wherever they hold therapy sessions for comic strips, what did you do for the 4th of July?

Carny: We have a WINNER! Choose your prize.

Little Girl: I want the blue Elmo!

Carny: Here ya go! One blue Elmo for the young lady!

Jeff Schuetze: Blue Elmo? Did you hear that? Cookie Monster is not a blue Elmo!!!

Sean: We are totally old.

Jeff Schuetze: And he eats COOKIES!!!

Actor/comic strip guy Jeff Schuetze (pronounced “shoot-zee like a gun”) writes a web comic called JEFBOT. His strips are mostly about pop culture and his trials and tribulations as a SAG actor. Although he generally brings readers a new comic twice a week, he does something unusual but clever in the world of comics and lists his acting resume on there. I always wanted to see what Dogbert’s Scott Adams’ resume looked like alongside the Dilbert comics, moreso when he still had a day job. At any rate, Jeff Schuetze’s acting curriculum vitae includes a special skills and abilities list. Having looked over mountains of headshot submissions myself, I can confirm that it is fairly common for someone to list unusual talents on the back of a photo or on an attached piece of paper, the sorts of oddities which might make them a better candidate for a booking. Jeff Schuetze’s list includes biking, bowling, hydroslide, ju-jitsu (brown belt), ostrich jockey, programmer, soccer, surfing, tennis, ultimate frisbee, and videogames. While including the list is common, I’d have to say that is a unique and interesting list. I googled hydroslide and I can’t figure out how it differs from regular water-skiing. I’m dying to know what exactly that is and how the artist became an ostrich jockey and what that entails.

JEFBOT is fun in general, but it probably comes as no surprise that I especially loved the cookie monster webcomic. It is actually currently my desktop on one of my laptops. All the recent legal coverage we’ve been doing, followed by getting the court documents from Verne Troyer’s manager had me thinking about my old crush Cookie Monster. So it was very nice to see someone else who remembers Cookie Monster from his glory days as a cookie-gobbling star, before he was forced to sell out and hawk health food.

In case you all were wondering, yes, I did hear from the Children’s Workshop in-house legal department when I wrote Cookie Monster was the first bad boy I ever loved. Given that I was one of many people who covered Mr. Monster’s surprising conversion to “Cookies Are a Sometimes Food”, I was surprised to get lawyer mail on that one. Then again, I did serious journalistic research for that article and I unearthed and exposed the business partnership that Sesame Street was involved in with Earth’s Best health foods. More and more, I realize that I get the most brutal pushback whenever I actually do serious well-researched hard journalism. And people wonder why it is getting more difficult to find proper even-handed journalistic coverage of anything anywhere.

Anyhoo, JEFBOT is a humorous entertaining read and I recommend webcomics fans check it out.

Every once in a while, I like to watch old black and white movies. I’m particularly partial to ones where men speak in clipped strong rhythms and people get murdered. But I’m open-minded and my TiVo recently suggested that I try watching The Wild One.

The Wild One is the classic 50’s flick where Marlon Brando’s Johnny character, when asked what he was rebelling against, famously answered “What’ve you got?” It is difficult to watch the movie in the present day and fully grasp the impact it had at the time. Supposedly many people felt that James Dean was a Marlon Brando wannabe and Brando’s swaggering performance in The Wild One informed the later acting careers of men like Steve McQueen and Jack Nicholson. The rival motorcycle gang, lead by Lee Marvin’s Chino in the movie, is called The Beetles and is believed by many people to have inspired the name of the band The Beatles with an a. I’ve seen mention that Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols had a jacket based on Brando in The Wild One or possibly even the specific jacket used in the film, but I haven’t been able to find confirmation more solid than rumor on this. Regardless, even today, everyone from lesbian drag kings to Leonardo DiCaprio takes inspiration from the seminal role of troubled Johnny Strabler. Heck, I personally even commissioned a Cookie Monster Brando before I ever saw the movie in its entirety, so ingrained is this flick in the American consciousness.

Despite this, watching today, it is difficult to know what mood the movie could have evoked when it came out in the 50’s. The movie was released in America in 1953 and was banned in the UK upon its overseas release in 1954. Ben Maddow, one of the writers on the film, went uncredited at the time, probably because he was blacklisted due to McCarthy era paranoia. So the movie is about rebellion. It inspired generations of rebels. The bike Brando rides is apparently his own personal Triumph. Even one of the writers on the movie was an outlaw. So it just seems like the movie should feel truly menacing. But it honestly feels more filled with innuendo and symbolism than menace.

Rebel Johnny has a second place trophy strapped to his bike, which has given thousands of film students what to talk about for half a century. Chino keeps stressing that he really misses Johnny and really wants to “have a beer” with Johnny to the point where the viewer becomes certain there is some sort of homosexual code in the invitation. The man driving the car which injures one of Johnny’s motorcycle club followers is said to be hopped up on vitamin pills and overstimulated. Were they prescribing Dexadrine to seniors in the fifties? I have no idea, although I’m terribly curious. I think of leather jacketed bad boys as being feral and rail thin grifters, but the BRMC or Black Rebel Motorcycle Club guys all appear to be gainfully employed and capable of paying for their beer and coffee and maybe a nice sandwich.

Johnny Strabler and the guys just don’t seem that dangerous by today’s standards. It is hard to tell how much of that is attributable to the times or the intentions of the moviemakers. Sunset Blvd. for example is a far darker movie and it predates The Wild One by only three years. Perhaps McCarthyism lead to a lamer approach to cultural danger in movies. Perhaps the filmmakers wanted to create something camp, although this seems unlikely for a director like Laslo Benedek who first became known in America for doing the first movie version of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, also a darker movie now that I think about it.

But maybe in 1953, a large group of guys dressed all freaky in leather and what my grandmother used to call “dungerees” were just terrifying. I certainly know some people in the here and now whose posturing for what they perceive as the normal folk makes me roll my eyes. And would probably come across campy in a movie. Yet a group of thirty or forty of them dressed to kill would probably frighten most small town dwellers. Marlon Brando’s Johnny Strabler is easily grabbed and beaten by the proper men of the town. This would probably be the same fate that would befall a lot of people whose eyeliner and hair frighten and horrify even now. You really can’t judge who will be dangerous by what they wear. A leather jacket or colored contact lenses might make a person doable, but it doesn’t make him dangerous. The same can be said for a suit. You just can’t tell what a cornered person will do by the cut of his gib. Actually, liking the cut of someone’s gib is a nautical reference, but doesn’t it seem like it should refer to haberdashery?

When Kevin, from that shadowy organization known as The Brotherhood, asked if Blue Blood wanted to kick in to rent a double decker bus to tote 70 Santas around San Diego, I was definitely down. I already own multiple Santa hats. For some reason, I really really like Santa hats. My only difficulty was in getting some street legal (yet still slutty) lingerie for the occasion, but I prevailed. Forrest Black actually found the most awesome blue Santa outfit. He was like a cross between Santa and Cookie Monster! Superna managed to put pigtails through holes in her hat, which was adorable. The naughtier shots from our evening on the town will be posting to BlueBlood.com and I’ve got some less naughty snapshots and funny anecdotes, but, for now, this really shows how much fun it was.

The video features yours truly, Forrest, Superna, and Individual and some random guys from Google or Qualcomm who found the lure of the Santa bus too powerful to resist. (Yes, Lange, this is what we all looked like singing your Happy Birthday medley, complete with Individual’s degenerate footnotes. Is it wrong to plan to drunk dial someone? What if it is their birthday and they are in another city?)

Cookie Monster was the first bad boy I ever loved. I adored his unfettered capacity for pleasure. He was deeply into consuming cookies and he didn’t care who knew it. If there were no cookies available, he would eat a cardboard circle if he had to. He would eat that cardboard circle with no shame. He was so ready for anything, he would eat the moon, if he could get to it. The scope of his desire was infinite and proud. He could see no 12 steps coming. He was Cookie Monster and he was prepared to shout his joyous desire aloud. If you baked him a flat crisp cake of sweetened dough, he would let you know how much he enjoyed it. You wouldn’t have to wonder whether he was experiencing pleasure because he would let you know about it and he didn’t care who was watching. Cookie was the kind of Monster where you had to understand he might take just as much joy from someone else’s baking. He wanted cookies and he wanted them from everyone he met. But, if you didn’t require monogamy of him, there was no one else with such contagious happy hedonism. CM’s turn as Alistair Cookie on the intellectual Monsterpiece Theater showed his smart side, but it was still his intense googley-eyed passion which inspired us all. Cookie just knew how to make people feel good. He embodied unrestrained id in its most beautiful and fulfilling form.

Sure I enjoyed the curmudgeonly insight and willingness to speak his mind exhibited by Oscar the Grouch, but it was Cookie Monster I dreamed about. It didn’t matter if he was a little heavy around the waistline. His charisma overrode all that. He made everyone around him share his sense of satiation as they marveled at the magnitude of his consumption. This was why all the girls and, let’s face it, the boys loved Cookie Monster. As time went on, he was even idolized by a new generation of entertainers such as Bart Simpson whose cowabunga catchphrase is an homage to his blue predecessor. Despite his lifestyle, or perhaps because of it, Cookie has been beloved enough to be welcome everywhere from celeb galas to the White House. He campaigned for milk, but only as something to wash cookies down with.

Somewhere there is a photo of my father in a hallway at our home in Scarsdale, New York posing like Cookie Monster to entertain me. His musician’s ear gave him the ability to do the Cookie Monster voice so well, although he wasn’t down with pigging out or the whole making crumbs thing. I have so many happy memories associated with Cookie Monster. I don’t see him as much as I used to, but TiVo lets me slip off to visit him at Sesame Street from time to time, no matter what is going on in my regular day-to-day life. He is always the same and he always makes me smile. If it is his fault that I overeat as an adult, I love him too much to care.

Some time ago, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart ran a special report about whether Cookie Monster was a bad role model for children. The show suggested that maybe children were overeating sweets because they saw their fuzzy blue hero do it. They interviewed a child chomping a large cookie. They showed one of the show’s reporters, Steven Colbert or Ed Helms I think, chasing after a Lincoln Town Car trying to get a comment from a blue figure in the back who never makes eye contact. I laughed out loud. I might have moved on to more mature relationships myself, but Cookie Monster was still a rock star, still doing it his way. No one was going to tame my Cookie or tell him what to do.

So you can well imagine my horror when I saw the recent press info. They make no mention of the Daily Show segment, but they make it clear that Cookie Monster is now being forced to promote vegetables and sing a new song called “A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food” to teach healthier living to a new set of fans. Maybe he is bowing to media scrutiny. Did he sell out because of Sesame Street’s new business partnership with Earth’s Best health foods? I like to think he wouldn’t do that, but maybe he blew all his early paychecks on baked goods and really needs the money. Maybe he got busted boosting something tasty fresh out of the oven and this is part of his community service. I just can’t see my beloved Cookie doing this willingly. McDonald’s is one of the underwriters of Sesame Street, so I feel like there is something truly insidious about curtailing Cookie Monster’s one true pleasure. How much do they really care about health if they are taking money from Mickey D’s? Something just does not add up. The Sesame Street site now showcases a game, sponsored by the letter G, which is called “Toss a Salad with Cookie Monster.”

Maybe Cookie Monster is just getting old. I guess we all age faster than we want to. As the years go by, the cookies take a greater toll. The big CM is turning 36 now. DJ Larry Levan of New York’s legendary Paradise Garage, who mixed the smash hit Cookie Monster and the Girls LP, died when he was only 38. Rock stars usually have to die at 27 if they want to be remembered at their best, but Elvis still gets painted as he was young and beautiful, snarling and full of life, ready to take on the world. I will choose to remember Cookie Monster at the height of his fame and success, as my blue hero who belted out “C is for Cookie” for the whole world to hear.