The Friendly Giant was a children's television show that aired on the CBC for almost thirty years. Much like many children's programs it focused on a human actor and his puppet sidekicks. However, unlike many children's programs, the human actor played a giant (named Friendly) and one of his puppet sidekicks was Rusty, a rooster that lived in a sack that hung from the giant's castle wall. The other sidekick was a giraffe named Jerome who stuck his head through the castle window to converse with Rusty and Friendly.
The show would always start with a shot of a giant boot in the middle of a small town. You would then hear Friendly asking his viewers to "look up, waaaaaaaay up" in order to see him and then he would welcome them into his castle. Inside the castle Friendly would arrange some tiny chairs for the children watching to sit in. Of course, the chairs weren't actually tiny. They were normal-sized chairs that only appeared tiny due to the fact that they were being held by a giant.
This show ran for many, many years and generations of Canadians were practically raised by this giant and his animal companions. Sometimes Friendly would tell stories and other times the trio would play instruments. It was an entertaining, and definitely bizarre, show. I would have liked to be in the room when the show was proposed to the network.
"Okay, we're going to have a show about a giant.
Except this giant isn't mean, he's friendly.
He's so friendly that his name is actually 'Friendly!'
He lives in a castle with a rooster and a giraffe.
Well, the giraffe lives outside the castle, but the rooster lives inside in a bag that hangs from the wall.
Of course, the rooster is also huge in size as a regular-sized rooster would be too small for a giant to interact with.
Oh yeah, the animals also play instruments."
And thus a children's classic was born!
[http://www.howtospotacanadian.ca/2009/02/they-spent-childhood-watching-giant.html]
Imagine a giant raccoon passed gas and perhaps the resulting gas might have created the vast variety of life we see on Earth. And if you don't accept the giant raccoon flatulence theory for the origin of life, you must be a fundamentalist Christian nut who believes the Earth is flat.
[Ann Coulter]
However, Coulter asserts that students in the public school system should have the opportunity to debate evolution versus intelligent design in a classroom setting. One group that supports her view is the Discovery Institute and its Teach the Controversy strategy.
[wikipedia]
The world's largest general scientific society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, representing 262 affiliated societies and academies of science and 10 million individuals, has said that "although advocates of Intelligent Design usually avoid mentioning a specific creator, the concept is in fact religious, not scientific" and that efforts to teach "the controversy" are flawed as "there is no significant controversy within the scientific community about the validity of the theory of evolution. The current controversy surrounding the teaching of evolution is not a scientific one."
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