Palabra Jot

Does anybody have $495.00 I could borrow? See, the thing is that I finally found what I've been looking for: my childhood. And I can have it back for $495.00.

When I was very young, I watched a lot of daytime PBS. PBS was infinitely preferable to the boring soap operas on every other station, and when you only got 11 channels, one that taught you conversational German and math with decimal points was of obvious merit.

Well, memories are a funny thing, and for years, all I could ever recall of one particular show was that it involved a grasshopper writing news stories. Of course he'd have to edit them, and in doing so you were expected to learn how to construct compound sentences. It was surprisingly good.

So for years, I had this vague image in my head of a little grasshopper at his typewriter, repeating his motto: "Palabra jot. Palabra jot." The proofreading portions of the show were my favorite. A disembodied glove would sail around the screen, blasting periods and dragging whole clauses around. You have to realize that this was in the days before cut-and-paste, so this sort of thing was gangbusters.

I remember the glove would make funny noises. Rather, the grasshopper would command the glove to edit the text, and the process it used made funny noises. Dragging words around would involved a shuffling "shicka shicka shicka" sound. My favorite was when it would delete a period, making the most memorable sound in my life. Ask me to make it for you sometime, and I'll do my best to recreate it: it's sort of a "pocka pocka pocka pocka POK!", with an increasing tempo, growing in urgency until finally popping and blowing that dot out of the fuckin' solar system. I still make that sound for my own benefit from time to time whenever I make something "go away", whatever that might mean: repartitioning a hard drive or dispelling an incantation of Invisibility Purge.

I said I needed $495.00, and I do. For that is the amount it would cost to buy this series. Now I have all the facts: the show was called The Write Channel, and it was produced in 1979 by the Mississippi Authority for Educational Television. It ran for 15 episodes at 15 minutes each and was designed for students from third to sixth grade. The grasshopper was named R. B. Bugg and he worked for station WORD. Mmm, good times.

So help me out and make the checks payable to.... Aw, hell. Who am I kidding? If I can't even get rid of all my Gmail invites for free, you're never going to send me money. You can go to hell. I'll buy my childhood back with your help or without it.