Because I have small children, I have the, um, pleasure of having Sesame Street on my DVR for their entertainment. That should explain why a grown man is going to share a wee story about a kids’ show.

So, in the current Sesame Street series, there’s a segment called Abby’s Flying Fairy School. It’s about fictitious fairies and magical creatures. In it, there’s a creature called a gerbilcorn. Think gerbil with a single horn on it’s head — like the fictitious unicorn.

The gerbilcorn lives in a cabinet, but they call it a hole–for reasons that could only be clear to, well, people whom I’m not so sure one would want involved with children.

In an episode of Flying Fairy School, the gerbilcorn wound up sequestering itself in his cabinet, er, hole. Abby, the schoolmaster?, told her students who were trying furiously to extract the creature:

No person, fairy, elf, or troll

Can open the door to a gerbilcorn hole

Don’t get it? Okay, read it out loud. No? Try looking up the definition of the colloquial word, cornhole.

When I heard that the first time, it occurred to me that there were some writers sitting in a room somewhere coming up with the concept for the show with only that joke in mind. How else could one explain the concept of a gerbilcorn?

I’ll see if I can grab a video of that segment so you can see it in context. It’s amusing, but curious.

In more Abby’s Flying Fairy School entertainment, there was a segment where one of the faries, named Gonnigan (pronounced “gone again” — yeah, they use that joke, too), had been magically turned into a prince. Gonnigan was upset about having to be turned back into a fairy. The schoolmaster replied, “you’ll always be the fairy who was formerly known as a prince.”

It’s a play on the reference to the pop musician called Prince. He had changed his name from Prince (presumably from some other traditional name as well) to the two symbols for male and female — as representation for his sexual orientation. Because his new name was for practical purposes, unpronounceable, he became known as “The artist formerly known as Prince.”

So, Sesame Street’s producers like referencing rodentia in rectus and make references to gays and bisexuals as fairies. Not quite the same polite, tolerant, kid-friendly Sesame Street of my childhood.

Guess what’s getting deleted from my DVR right now?