Things I Didn’t Get Around to Blogging About

Sorry guys. It’s been a rough few months. This is as far as I can take the following stray thoughts. It may be as far as they ought to be taken.

• The default “Caucasian” skin for both Legos and The Simpsons is the exact same shade of yellow. (meaningful?)
• The weirdly high number of redheaded women on The Office
• Unless I’m mistaken, you are not legally obligated to give your food truck a pun name. Also, most of the good puns are used up by now.
• Good name for a spring break-centered horror movie: Muerto Rico
• Who the hell let whodunit become a word?
• Perfect Strangers reconceived as a Skinemax porn (you would not have to change the title)
• Rhoda Morgenstern was the first Jewish person I ever encountered, and I’ve compared every Jewish person I met to her. (Is that anti-Semitic?)
• Good name for a linguistically savvy drag queen = Rosetta Stone
• Good name for a Golden Girls-inspired drag queen = Veranda Lanai.
• It’s inconceivable but somewhere, somehow, a person in the world is scrolling through their iPhone and saying, “You know, I really feel like listening to a Black Eyed Peas song. I feel I have not heard them enough in my life so far.”
• Squatters’ rights = finders, keepers? Or squatter’s rights > finders, keepers
• Horses poop while walking. Impressive? Efficient? Rude? All of these?
• Behind the Candelabra is a stupid title because it’s super easy to see behind a candelabra. You just look at them. They’re spindly. You don’t need, like, special access to get around them. Only the smallest of humans can hide behind a candelabra. (Maybe missed the time window on this one?)
• Word that is not used enough despite obvious comedic potential: assayer
• Bumper sticker that every public media fundraiser should have = “MAJOR DONORS give me MAJOR BONERS”
• Samantha Mathis (who is this person?)
• Why does English have the term o-ring?
• Why does autocorrect know the word cockrocket? Whom have I been texting that to?

You know how you can collect a bunch of soap shards and mash them into a ball and then you’re like “Oh, hey, new soap”? That’s kind of what I was hoping I’d do here and magically make content.

Yeah, sorry.

The Tree of Life

Note: I am reposting this from my Tumblr. It usually works the other way around, with the Tumblr serving as a means to promote this blog, but this one hastily-written Tumblr post actually resulted in more reaction than what my blog posts here do, so I said why not? Perhaps I stumbled into something that meant something to someone.

The man who made this illustration passed away this week.

Hiro Isono, the man who created promotional illustrations for the Secret of Mana games (including this one and this one), did something that not many artists working for video game companies can do: Rather than just drawing from the game itself, he envisioned the essence of the it, that spirit of adventure and all that, and in doing so he created an entryway into a colorful, new world. It helps that these games had a big impact on me, but I actually think the art stands up on its own. Why else make art than to dream up something up that doesn't already exist in real life and make the viewer wish so badly that it were real?

Encyclopedia Drew and the Bad Balloon

A short update.

Since I last reported on the evil balloon roommate I now have in my apartment, the situation has worsened. It’s now floating lower than it had before, so it’s basically aimed at my junk at any given moment. It’s still moving around the house, just more sluggishly. I suppose its declining health prompted what’s happened as I type this. See for yourself:

Literally, it’s sitting in the chair. And not just any chair. It’s sitting in the one seat that has a view of me working at my computer. As I type this, it’s pointed toward me, and I honestly feel like I’m being watched. No lie: I had an itch in my noise and I declined to scratch it because I felt like someone was looking at me.

I’m not kidding about this. If I stop blogging, that means the balloon got me and my soul is now trapped in the balloon and you have to come break into my apartment and pop the balloon so I can be at peace.

Help?

The Rustling Terror

Trigger warning: If you suffer from globophobia, this post may be very disturbing. I do not suffer from this hilarious psychological condition, and this is still kind of creeping me out.

When my friend +Michelle gave me a mylar balloon for my birthday last week, I realized that I’d never been given one before. I had a childhood full of the regular, stretchy, imminently pop-able balloons, but never their hardier, metallic counterparts. (They’re the humanoid robots of the balloon world, these things. They’re Robert fucking Patrick.) I should probably note that what Michelle gave me was also no mere circular balloon. No, it was the mylar Taj Mahal. Observe:

It’s large. In fact, I joked to Michelle that the balloon will make it feel like I have a roommate. It may be bigger than some of the children to whom its helium-filled brothers are given. It also differs from most balloons in that it has points — a head and arms, if you like.

Have I ever mention that my apartment is drafty? Well, it is. Perhaps you can see where this is going.

The first time: So I’m in the kitchen, washing dishes and I hear this peculiar scraping noise. Scraaaape. Scraaaape. Scraaaape — pauses in between and then the noise for a few seconds at a time. I stopped washing to hear the noise better. Scraaaape. It was getting closer. So I dried my hands and stepped into the dining room to immediately come face-to-face with the birthday balloon. I jumped. Were it a horror movie, it would have been punctuated by a blast of music.

The second time: I’m reading in bed. Straying over the top of the page for a second, my eye catches movement down in the darkened hallway. At the other end of the hall is the dining room, empty but illuminated enough by the streetlights outside that I can make out the silhouette of the balloon pass by the doorway… very… slowly. It makes little crinkly noises as it moves around my apartment.

The third (and final) time: I won’t even try and build up suspense with this one. A few nights later, I woke up and the balloon was in my bedroom, right by bed, kind of like it was looking over me. I know I said something out loud — maybe “Oh Christ” or maybe just “nope” — and I immediately locked it in the closet.

I’d just pop the ballon now, but I’m worried doing that will release the ghost that’s maybe causing all this creepiness and who is perhaps better off trapped in a mylar prison. Seems logical, right? This is the wisdom you get with age.

An Hilariously Outdated Racism Set to Music

First up, yeah, this is a racist thing. It’s not a product of its time. I mean, it is, but that’s not an excuse that makes this song any less embarrassing. Titled “You Bring Out the Savage in Me,” the song initially appeared in the 1935 British comedy Oh, Daddy!, and the cringe-worthy thing about it is that it mashes together this  ambiguously defined but essentially non-white group into the same category as unevolved, primordial man — and all to make a metaphor for horniness. That offensiveness aside, this song still has value because it’s helpful to watch it in 2013 and say “Oh, holy shit — this was ever okay?”

Here’s the song, as sung by Frances Day:

Please note her Marie Antoinette-looking white feather headdress, the back-up dancers’ black afro wigs (which kind of read as Gilly wigs in this context), the dancers’ faux grass skirts, and the dancers’ peculiar aversion to eye contact.

But here’s the catch with “You Bring Out the Savage in Me.” It was also performed by the African-American jazz singer Valaida Snow. I can’t decide if this song being performed by a black woman makes it better, in the sense of thumbing her nose at the attitudes it represents, or worse, in the sense of embracing them. (I’d post a video here, but none seems to exist online. There’s this, but it is totally not Valaida Snow singing the song in question. In fact, it’s so not Valaida Snow that it’s almost funny.) And before you make up your mind, check out the lyrics:

Way back in another generation
Long before our present civilization
One of my ancestors lived in a cave
Though to look at me you’d never know it
Since we’ve met I’m starting to show it
Here’s my excuse every time I misbehave
My blood boils with a tropic heat
And the rhythm of my heart is a tom-tom beat
For you bring out the savage in me
Your primitive words reach my ears
With the passage of a hundred million years
For you bring out the savage in me
Oh, all that madness and in
How was I to know
What was sleeping within me?
Just like Tarzan, you’ll be my ape-man
And I’m getting so ferocious you can’t escape, man
You’ll find out how wild I can be
Because you wake up the savage in me

Thoughts?

The Grim Specter of Death (a Birthday Post from Drew!)

Yesterday, I turned thirty-one, and I treated this birthday as a non-event, since the big three-oh didn’t mean the end of the world any more than 2012 meant the end of the world. I had the day off work, and I tried to spend my time doing the things I always want to do — happy-making, me-centric stuff, with less of a focus on what I have and haven’t accomplished one year further into my life. Please keep that in mind when I show you the painting I can’t stop looking at, and understand that no, this is not a plea for help in my battle against the grinding passage of time.

“the white peacock,” via wikipedia, via the vienna academy of fine arts

I find this beautiful. You may find it horrifying — it’s five dead birds and a dead rabbit, after all — but I think it helps to look at how lovingly and carefully these animals were painted. Click on the photo for the bigger version, and you’ll see individual feathers and hairs. But they’re not realistic depictions of hunted prey. As this sporting journal article notes, they’re idealized: You can’t see any puncture wounds, and they simply seem to have died in an immaculate state. (Spencer notes that the painter’s name was Jan Weenix, and maybe the animals just heard his name and died laughing.) The article goes on to say that such game pieces “weren’t commemorating a specific hunt, or morality tales on blood sports, or demonstrations of putting food on the table,” but instead were “status symbols for the bourgeois painting-purchasing class to hang in their country estates,” which makes me think of them as the seventeenth-century equivalent of those knock-off vintage booze posters you see in every home wanting to suggest some vague notion of old-timey class. That doesn’t bother me. I’m just looking at the painting in 2013 — in my thirty-first year, apparently — and appreciating it as a depiction of ordinary objects, rendered with a level of care that makes them seem like more than what they were, if they ever existed in the first place. (Do white peacocks exist?)

I suppose there are worse ways to begin a new year than appreciating something for what it is.

Priscilla, Queen of the Tundra

When Empire of the Sun released “Walking on a Dream,” I thought the song was catchy in a way that made me scared that I’d soon hear it in commercials and movie trailers and then eventually hate it — you know, in the way that “Little Talks” has been ruined for me. It got some mainstream play, but in the end, I never felt overexposed to this song, so when Empire of the Sun announced their forthcoming album, Ice on the Dune, I got excited. The lead track sounded great. Everything was shaping up for a primo musical experience.

Then I saw the album art.

It’s, um, expressive and colorful.

Granted, the first album’s art suggested a meeting between Blade Runner and Liberace, but when that album came out, I drove an older car. My new car actually displays the album art of whatever I’m listening to, so I have to look at this gay cosplay version of Final Fantasy — which, of course, would be called Anal Fantasy — whenever I listen to the song… which is kind of often. 

Can we stop and take a look at what someone thought made sense as an image that people would see and use as evidence in deciding whether to buy this album? If you’re more of an “outside kid” than I am and therefore don’t understand my comparisons to Final Fantasy, please examine this promo art for the tenth game in that series.

Now, imagine that this game — still with the saturated color, dramatic but ambiguous poses and unrealistically smooth skin textures — featured not only the hero but also this badass sorceress who had gnarly ice powers as well as, like, some major lady-tude and an enchanted headdress that gave her additional sartorial ferocity. And also she was interesting-pretty. And then a lot of dude-on-dude sex happened. Then you’d pretty much have the Ice on the Dune album art, just as a game. I’ll be honest: That kind of sounds like a video game I’d play. And I think it’s cool that Empire of the Sun — neither member of which, as near as online research can tell me, seems to be gay — went that direction for their new album. I’m just baffled as to why they did so whenever the album art pops up on my car console. It’s a weird reaction, I know — not so much judgment but just “Someone sure made some distinct choices, and I just want to know what their logic was.”

Also, if you want to make the video game I described, I’d basically have to buy it. Just saying.

Mary Tyler Moore and the Menstrual Mystery

I’m not so out of touch with the female anatomy that I don’t know what it means to get a visit from Aunt Flo. But what I lack in knowledge of the female body I make up with a command of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and that counts for a lot. So here’s the thing: Other than that metaphorical monthly visitor, there is another famous Aunt Flo. She’s a minor recurring character on Mary Tyler Moore, and she has the odd distinction of being the only one to make an appearance on the spin-off Lou Grant, the hour-long drama that Mary’s boss ended up on following his WJM newsroom days.

Isn’t that weird? Not just that a character from a long-running sitcom ended up on a non-comedy spinoff, but that of all the characters on Mary Tyler Moore, it wasn’t Mary or Rhoda or Murray who ended up popping up on Lou Grant but Aunt Flo, who had only appeared three times on Mary Tyler Moore. You’d think they would have eliminated any connection between Mary Tyler Moore and Lou Grant, to underscore how different a series the latter was from the former. And they basically did that, save for this one spare appearance of Eileen Heckart in the fourth season of Lou Grant. I think it’s especially odd that of all the characters to reappear, it would be the only one whose name basically means “menstrual discomfort.” But whatever, her name is Florence and she’s Mary’s aunt, right? Nope. She’s actually not even Mary’s aunt; she’s her cousin. Here, watch:

So then my question is this: Were the Mary Tyler Moore writers just making a period joke, if they went out of their way to call a character Aunt Flo?

I mean, I guess first off I’m not sure people would have known that expression back in 1975, when the episode aired. Unfortunately for me (and I guess her), Aunt Flo doesn’t merit an entry in most dictionaries. Wiktionary has one, but it doesn’t give any indication about when people starting using this cute little personification. So here’s what I did: I searched Google Books for “aunt flo” to see when the period jokes start. The result of my less-than-scientific process? A 1999 article on home remedies that mentions Aunt Flo alongside another euphemism for menstruation, “falling off the roof,” which I have never heard before but which sounds especially awful. Unless I missed an entry, it’s the first mention on Google Books of an Aunt Flo who’s not an actual aunt. And yeah — there are a ton of non-metaphorical Aunt Flos, and it’s kind of weird to read about this Aunt Flo or that Aunt Flo talking or writing a letter or arriving at a party or throwing her arms around her nieces and nephews in a warm embrace. Also, many an Aunt Flo has died, apparently, and that takes the metaphor to unpleasant, new territory, and I won’t even talk about the mention of Aunt Flo in the context of bed linens. Even this 1995 book about sexual dynamics in pop culture mentions Aunt Flo the character but not Aunt Flo the phenomenon. So I suppose the Mary Tyler Moore writers weren’t making a subtle off-color joke when they decided Mary should get a visit from her Aunt Flo.

So, now, two questions.

First, could it be possible that Aunt Flo only entered the English language in the 90s, around the time that Cher Horotwitz framed the whole process in much cooler terms when she complained about surfing the crimson tide? I would have guessed that Aunt Flo would be much older, but then again I wasn’t talking about menstruation in the 80s. It’s 2013 and I’m pretty much only talking about now for the first time.

Second, if this expression isn’t as old as I thought, is it possible that Aunt Flo the Mary Tyler Moore character could have helped it become popular? If not through the original airings than through the TV Land reruns? If this is the case, I would like to think the Eileen Heckart found out and reacted with a mix of pride of horror.

And if there’s a better way to research when a certain phrase entered the English language, tell me. If there’s additional information about menstruation that you may have, I’m good, however. You keep that.