…my brother Greg’s nickname would be Akhtar.
You see, when Greg was a toddler, he wasn’t the happiest child. One might even venture to describe him as a bit of a grouch. So much of a grouch, at times, that he earned the nickname Oscar. As in, the Sesame Street character who lives in a trash can and has one mood, that of perpetual grouchiness. (To be fair, Oscar is a grouch; he can’t be expected to be anything other than what Nature designed him to be.)
Eventually Greg outgrew the grouchiness, his happy nature only very occasionally marred by the odd dark mood, which is probably more than can be said about most of us. Even so, Oscar remains a joke in our family, and over the years Santa Claus has deemed it appropriate to stuff Greg’s stocking with various and sundry Oscar the Grouch paraphernalia, the most notable being a plush Oscar who can be stuffed down into his can, which, thanks to my cunning, accompanied Greg to Baylor University.
But if only our family had been Pakistani, the stuffed Sesame Street character on Greg’s bookshelf would have lived in an oil barrel and been called Akhtar.
(Did you even know there was a Pakistani version of Sesame Street? I didn’t.)
This post was brought to you by the letter L, the letter R, the number 7, and the blog Mental Floss, where you can learn other Muppet trivia with which to impress your friends. Like the compelling backstory of Miss Piggy:
“Frank Oz once said that Miss Piggy grew up in Iowa; her dad died when she was young and her mother was mean. She had to enter beauty contests to make money.”
Poor Miss Piggy. She’s become so human and sympathetic to me now. I really get her.
Well, except for that whole frog-love thing.
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