I was watching some old Warner Bros. cartoon recently, and there were these gangster characters in it that referred to a bird as a “boid”, and it reminded me of some news story I had seen from a few years ago and the images it conjured up for me. The story was about how the Sesame Street brand Elmo juice boxes had practically cornered the market on children’s juice boxes (you know, the little cardboard kind where you stab them with the straw on top), but since now it had been established what a big, lucrative market it was, that other, smaller companies were trying to horn in on this enterprise with new organic juice boxes and such. In any case, since it was supposedly practically a monopoly according to the news story, I somehow imagined it as being this gangster empire that intimidated everyone else out of business, and it was all run by Elmo*, who was all sweet and innocent on TV, but was in real life a brutal mob kingpin who dealt harshly with competitors to discourage them. So the picture I had in my mind was of this big, ultra-classy head office, with Elmo at some huge desk with big ostentatious rings on his fingers and in a gangster suit, saying to some subordinate: “Send da boid down there to teach these guys a lesson!”, and Big Bird was standing in the doorway with a baseball bat and brass knuckles. And since Elmo spends all his time teaching people lessons (of a different type) on Sesame Street, having him say: “teach these guys a lesson” seemed especially apropos.
* (Remember how all of the head gangsters in the old Warner Bros. movies were really short? Perhaps this is partly why this idea suggested itself to me.)
