Gabba Gabba what?

Among the stranger things that my brother found while out in Boston was this horrifying striped apparition, which he planned to give to his friend as a birthday present - I hope that the two foot high grinning monstrosity survived being crammed into his suitcase. It's from a psychedelic children's programme called Yo Gabba Gabba, which is apparently a bit of a phenomenon among university students now, perhaps this undergraduate generation's Boohbah. And I thought that that and things I grew up with like Bagpuss were a bit weird, but the Americans seem to have outdone us all this time.

As an attempt at explanation, he got me to watch a segment of Charlie Brooker's TV commentary programme "Screenwipe". e_to_the_ipi had been trying to get me to watch this for some time - this man used to write for PC Zone and was apparently the inspiration behind Ben Croshaw's entire persona on Zero Punctuation (and you can really hear the resemblance), therefore tying together separate elements of the past and present of my life. I've been exploring more of his videos, and he also has a wonderful commentary on an awful bit of televisual garbage called "Sweet Sixteen" that I was subjected to one afternoon - this very neatly illustrates why the British don't like the Americans in general, because we only see them through television like this!

Also available is a video of Elijah Wood having been transported into this multicoloured nightmare and forced to dance with its inhabitants, which seems to have proved extremely popular - but personally I still can't get that stupid "I like fish" song out of my head and I blame him entirely for it.