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On May 7, 2019, a disturbed student hiding guns walked into the STEM High School in Highlands Ranch, a suburb of Denver, Colorado. His intention was to kill as many students as he could.

He pulled out a gun and yelled, “Nobody move!”

Rather than being a helpless, frightened victim, 18 year old senior Kendrick Castillo, who was close by, attacked the gunman. Castillo was shot in the chest and died, but his actions inspired several other students to do the same and gave them the time needed to close in. The gunman was disarmed and held until police arrived to arrest him. The gunman is now serving life without parole in the Colorado Department of Corrections.

Kendrick was just three days away from graduating.

At the same time, that gunman’s partner entered the middle school across the street with the intention of doing the same thing. She (born female but claiming to be transitioning to male) was tackled and disarmed by a security guard and held for police. She is also now serving a life sentence in the Colorado Department of Corrections, but because she was 16 years old at the time, she is eligible for parole after 40 years.

Kendrick Castillo was the only death, though eight other students were wounded.

I intentionally did not use the names of the shooters. They do not deserve that recognition. This is a picture of Kendrick Castillo, a face that not enough people have seen and whose story not enough people have heard of.

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It turns out the cookies are real — sort of.

They are baked at the home of Lara MacLean, who has been a “puppet wrangler” for the Jim Henson Company for almost three decades. MacLean started as an intern for Sesame Workshop in 1992 and has been working for the team ever since.

The recipe, roughly: Pancake mix, puffed rice, Grape-Nuts and instant coffee, with water in the mixture. The chocolate chips are made using hot glue sticks — essentially colored gobs of glue.

The cookies do not have oils, fats or sugars. Those would stain Cookie Monster. They’re edible, but barely. “Kind of like a dog treat,” MacLean says.

Before she reinvented the recipe in the 2000s, the creative team behind “Sesame Street” used versions of rice crackers and foams to make the cookies. The challenge was that the rice crackers would make more of a mess and get stuck in Cookie’s fur. And the foams didn’t look like cookies once they broke apart.

Cookie has been portrayed since 2001 by David Rudman, who took over the role from Frank Oz. Rudman’s right hand moves the mouth, which is eating, and his left hand holds the cookies. Both work in concert to break the cookies, which means they have to be soft enough to fall apart.

Rudman said soft cookies are best, adding, “The more crumbs, the funnier it is. If he eats the cookie, and it only breaks into two pieces if it’s too hard, it’s just not funny,” he said. “It looks almost painful. But if he eats a cookie and it explodes into a hundred crumbs, that’s where the comedy comes from.”

MacLean has perfected a recipe that is “thin enough that it’ll explode into a hundred crumbs,” Rudman said. “But it’s not too thin that it’ll break in my hand when I’m holding it.”

Not every (human) guest realizes that the cookies aren’t meant to be eaten. Adam Sandler appeared on an episode and decided to share in the muppet's delight by spontaneously eating a cookie with him on set.

“As soon as the cameras cut, he was like, ‘Blech!' ” MacLean said.

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* * * News Interruption * * *

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White voice with makeup...

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Paul Harvey 🤔

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Warm weather warning…