All that paper, wastage bastage! ('Sesame Street' Wednesday)

I'm a man who cries when paper gets wasted.

I've seen paper wasted all too often in my time. School was the site of much paper wasting. One of my teachers in 6th grade threw a shitfit because I wrote on both sides of a piece of paper for an unimportant assignment. He insisted I use only one side. That was the same year another teacher made us buy a whole pack of file cards just so we could write the symbol for a chemical element on each card. And in college, I rescued gobs of blank paper from the recycling bin.

But that's nothing compared to the wastage of high school. In typing class, people squandered so much valuable paper that - little by little - I took home much of the paper the classroom had so they wouldn't have much left to waste. Some of these kids in high school would type one word or draw one stick figure on a sheet of paper and wad it up and throw it in the trash.

'Sesame Street' has always been about good stewardship of the planet's resources. This '90s-era clip is no exception:



I was a little too old for the ol' Ses by the '90s, so I didn't get to see that segment in my youth. But it features Bob reading a storybook called 'The King Who Wasted Paper', which was about a king who wasted paper.

He wasted paper, and he wasted paper. That's all he ever did in life. Just like some of my old classmates.

Ironically, it appears as if much valuable paper was crumpled during the filming of this skit.

On another amusing note, notice that the Royal Paper Maker's voice sounds like Mr. Burns of 'The Simpsons'.

I'm waiting for Go West to record a new version of their song "King Of Wishful Thinking" called "King Who Wasted Paper" as a tribute to this 'Sesame Street' segment and to the monarch's change in his wasteful habits.