I will use this email to clarify several issues for readers in the dark. From a reader:

It isn’t a yarmulke. It’s a zuchetto.
Maybe we Catholics thought you Jews looked pretty cool in them–that’s the best reason I found so far.
I don’t know why I’m explaining this to you and I am getting the same feeling when I answered a rhetorical question and was told it’s a rhetorical question.
There’s something else snide in here, like I barely got the thing about Big Bird and the snuffalufagus and completely missed the joke about the coins stamped with the 410 BC.
I don’t get it…

A. I know it’s not a yarmulke. The joke was simply that The New Republic is famous for having an unofficial Jewish orientation in the same way some thing NR has an unofficial Catholic orientation. I should also add, “A yarmulke by any other name…”

B. The Snuffy/Big Bird thing. The reason it was “dated” was that Snuffy is no longer Big Bird’s secret friend. Everybody knows about him. When I was a kid — hence the standard timeframe for my juvenalia — Big Bird could never get the other Sesame Streeters to believe Snuffy existed because Snuffy would disappear when strangers approached. My understanding that they cancelled this schtick when someone got worried that kids would take away the lesson that adults wouldn’t believe them if they said child molesters or some such were harrassing them. This was not a concern for the producers of the Flintstones apparently, even though Mr. Kazoo certainly gives off far more of a molester vibe than a giant woolly mammoth-like creature who walks and talks at 2 miles per hour and has no opposable thumbs (opposable thumbs strike me as essential tools for most perverts).

3. The joke about the coins stamped 410 B.C. is simple. How would the people making the coins know it was 410 years until Christ’s arrival?

Update Perhaps it’s the Great Gazoo not Kazoo. Google is unhelpful on this. But I really don’t want to have the issue settled. Let’s keep it a delightful mystery.