In which Philip Glass writes music for… “Sesame Street.”

For years, I’ve said that “Sesame Street” teaches kids one thing — to watch TV. So while I’m not sure it’s filling an educational need, I am sure that it has a 43-year history of getting very cool creative people involved, from Jim Henson to Bill Irwin to Eric Idle to Cab Calloway to Jughead Jones (?). Maybe it’s not an educational program that we’re all funding. Maybe it’s an arts program.

In this video, you can watch the daughter of a Dutch filmmaker age 12 years in 3 minutes. It’s fascinating to watch because it shows just how quickly our lives pass. Just yesterday, I emailed a photo of my wife and me with our first-born when he wasn’t yet one year old. My caption: “Look how young we were before these rotten kids aged us 20 years.”

This video also holds relevance for me because I have a daughter who is now 13 (and will soon be 14). Note in the video how, from age 10 on, the girl is gabbing incessantly in every frame. We’ve had a similar experience at our house. As for the aging aspect, I aged 12 years in 3 minutes just last night when she recounted something she’d watched on Netflix streaming with her friend. For just a moment, I considered blocking the service — then remembered watching secretly “Satyricon” late at night on an early pay service at my brother’s apartment at age 11. At least she told me. I told no one — until now.

Prediction: This year, Dick Clark will do an even worse job with that countdown.

The underused Maytag Repairman of yore has nothing on the nation’s loneliest salesman — the guy trying to do sales at the world’s only Blackberry store. It’s no threat whatsoever to the Windows Store, let alone the Apple Store.

I’ve been a fan since the very early days. (1980, with an Apple II+.) But today you’re really pissing me off. Here’s why.

I have a MacBook Pro. And an iPhone. And an iPad that I will never get back from my wife. And a company with servers and lots of clients. An and assistant. So all of my stuff has been set up to sync automatically so that when I make a change in my iPhone, or on my desktop, or when my assistant makes a change to my schedule from her computer, it’ll all be in alignment. That was all through a piece of software that you developed, and that you hated, called MobileMe. Yeah, it kinda sucked. Steve Jobs even made light of it in one of his famous presentations of new Apple products. It’s written up negatively in that recent bestselling biography of Steve Jobs. But y’know what? It worked for me.

Then two days ago I found that none of my stuff was syncing. I know you know why:  because you shut down Mobile Me. Everyone must move to iCloud. OK, fair enough; I get it. I was ready to make that switch. But to make that switch, to embrace the iCloud that now I must embrace, I learned this morning that I’d need to “upgrade” my OS to Mountain Lion. So while the tech guys were here this morning, and after they delivered that bad news, they set up my laptop and God knows what else to download and install the insipidly named Mountain Lion, while I was out most of the day drumming up business. I just got back and went to use my laptop and here’s what I found.

Everything has changed.

I am extremely scheduled. The Normandy invasion was less planned out than my calendar, from now through… infinity. I have meetings, speaking engagements, lectures, workshops, running kids to innumerable essential private lessons and classes, reminders to do this or that — and now my calendar looks utterly different. Maybe it’s just stylistic — that now the design of it looks like something from the Arizona territory circa 1878 — but hey, wasn’t Steve Jobs all about style? Wouldn’t he be pissed? I am.

My mail? Whatever surgery your new big cat OS is performing, it’s taken 30 minutes so far and shows no signs of abating. Here’s what I wanted to do:  Send. An. Email. I’m sure it’ll be whizbang terrific when you’re finally done “improving” it — but I don’t care. I just wanted to use it.

I also got a weird little video that popped up on my screen and showed me two fingers massaging icons up and down. I don’t know what it means. I hesitate to find out. I don’t think I need it either.

To be fair, I’m betting I’ll actually like some of these changes, once I understand them. But I didn’t want them. I didn’t ask for them. They were shoved down my throat because here’s what I actually wanted:  for my iPhone to sync with my laptop. Everything worked flawlessly until at some point you decided it had to change. And that’s why I’m pissed.

In 1984, you famously ran a commercial of a runner slinging a hammer through the screen visage of Big Brother (read, at the time, IBM). Now I think it’s you, and I’m wishing I had a hammer.

If the “incredible offer” made to me by The New Yorker to subscribe for “only” $64.99 a year doesn’t strike you as so incredible either, you can do what Michael Tsai recommends: Call them and pay only $39.99 a year.

So some members of the Secret Service has been caught with prostitutes while on a foreign visit with the President. I’ve given the Secret Service little thought, but now that I’m thinking about them, I have to wonder:  How secret are they really, since we know they exist? If they were really secret, we wouldn’t know they exist, right? (And since we do, isn’t it therefore the height of arrogance for them to be called the “Secret Service”? This reminds me, for similar reasons, of “the Moral Majority,” whose spokespeople are generally in the minority, and are frequently trundling off to prison with their pants down around their ankles.

Wouldn’t you think the Secret Service would keep their indiscretions, y’know, secret? So instead of the Secret Service I think we should hire ninjas. Whatever the peccadilloes of ninjas, we know nothing about them. All in all, they are far, far more secret.

This perfectly illustrates why Europeans think what they think of Americans. Exciting, no?

Thanks to Mark Chaet for letting me know about this.

I just got a “Rate Reduction Notice” from The New Yorker magazine. Evidently, as a “preferred subscriber,” I am entitled to “specially reduced rates” when I extend my subscription now. In this case, my special rate reduction would put me at $64.99 for the year — an incredible savings of $216.54 off the cover price!

My first question when I got this was: Why am I a preferred subscriber — are there subscribers who are unpreferred, and why am I better than they?

My other questions, of course, were: when is my subscription up, and what did I pay last time?

Here’s when my subscription lapses: August of next year. And here’s what I paid last time: $39.95.

Whether or not it pays to read The New Yorker, it certainly pays to read their promos carefully.

“The Avengers” movie premieres in a few weeks. Jack Kirby was the co-creator of Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, Nick Fury, and even Loki. Without Jack Kirby, there’d be no Marvel Universe, and none of the multi-billion-dollar global enterprise associated with the hundreds of characters he created for Marvel (or for DC, for that matter).

Here’s a remembrance of Jack from his son Neal, about what it was like to grow up as Jack Kirby’s son. I met Jack Kirby twice in my life, once as a 14-year-old and once as a grown man, and both times I was speechless. I’ve met Pulitzer prize winners, presidents and governors, billionaires, movie stars, rock stars, and people of all stations of life — but I was only ever in awe of Jack Kirby.