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Wednesday, December 28, 2005

The Big Purple Thing That Isn't Barney the Dinosaur

So this has been plaguing me since, oh, I was seven or so. In the world of the McDonald’s mascots, each of Ronald McDonald’s acquaintances has some clear association with the food products his restaurant sells. The Hamburglar steals hamburgers. Mayor McCheese is a cheeseburger. The Fry Kids are made of French fries. And Birdie the Early Bird, horrifically, would appear to be unprocessed Chicken McNuggets. But exactly what is Grimace? McDonald’s sells no products that are purple or pear-shaped, but there he is nonetheless, all stupid and clumsy and purple and antithetical to the very fiber of the McDonaldland existence. (Please keep in mind that I was the same kid who was frustrated by the liberal interpretation of Santa Cruz geography in “The Lost Boys.”) Recently, I did some research and learned the story behind Grimace, seen below clutching a yellow feather for reasons I’ll never know.



Apparently, Grimace was created originally as a McDonaldland villain. Called “The Evil Grimace,” this purple meanie — whose name makes a hell of a lot more sense in the context of being evil — initially had four arms, all the better for stealing McDonald’s milkshakes, his addiction to which ostensibly drove him to a life of crime. I suppose this then would explain what Grimace’s food association is, though if he looks like anything that goes into McDonald’s shakes — and I wouldn’t be surprised if he did — I think I’m going to be sick. Note the next illustration, which depicts the Evil Grimace.



Like Smurfette or Donkey Kong, Grimace switched over to the good guy side shortly after his debut. No longer evil, he instead became clumsy and slow-witted — and also Ronald’s best friend. (You know how to pick ’em, Ron.) He’s been confusing inquisitive McDonald’s patrons ever since.

The mystery of Grimace has been explored by several websites in the past few years. Ask Yahoo ran an item on it, but also concluded that Grimace is, in fact, nothing. (The writer also likens Grimace’s lack of a clear species to Disney’s Goofy and Gonzo of the Muppets, noting “Maybe all this ambiguousness has something to do with the letter ‘G.’”) A website called The Straight Dope also tackled the question, with more amusing results. Cecil Adams, the site’s letter-answerer contacts a McDonald’s spokeswoman, who reads from the official McDonald’s description.
Grimace personifies the child in everyone… He is Ronald [McDonald]'s special pal. Everyone loves Grimace because of his innocent loving nature. He occasionally causes trouble in McDonaldland because he is clumsy, but his friends overlook this because he is so happy.
Adams continues:
You are gagging, I expect. So am I. [Spokeswoman] Jane Hulbert is… well, Jane is doing her best to be professional about this, but it's a struggle. Here's more: Hamburglar is a “fun-loving prankster.” The Happy Meal Guys are the “fun-loving personification of the hamburger, soft drink, and fries that compose the Happy Meal.” CosMc is a “wacky fun-loving alien who came to McDonaldland from outer space” and is “part vehicle and part creature.” (“I can't believe they pay me to read this,” Jane muttered at this point, but we promised we wouldn't tell the Kroc family.)
Perhaps the best results of such an investigation were yielded Ben Kosima at The Rubber Chicken. Instead of contacting McDonald’s directly, Kosima emailed a multitude of celebrities, including George W. Bush, the Olsen Twins, the Ninja Turtles, Cousin Oliver from “The Brady Bunch” and the guy who inspired Kramer from “Seinfeld.” Kosima’s conclusion: Grimace is a giant, cloned beetroot.

Well, I thought it was funny. And for the record, no, I don't know who the sailor-capped dog in the first Grimace image is, and I vow to never dedicate a blog post to finding out.

Sunday, December 25, 2005

Medusa Meets Monty Python

Perhaps you've noticed my tendency to discuss odd tidbits of popular culture, sometimes in groups that wouldn't necessarily seem to go together and sometimes in groups that don't go together. I like these little pieces of random and I think it shows.

Last week, I came across and article that namechecks, among other things, Medusa, the basilisk, "The Ring," a Monty Python sketch, Stendhal Syndrome, Lady Godiva, a song called "Gloomy Sunday" and that creepy "Red Room" Flash site that allegedly infatuated my new little friend, Nevada-tan. These subjects wouldn't readily seem to share any quality warranting their presence in the same article. And before I read the Wikipedia entry on "Motif of harmful sensation," I wouldn't have expected anything other than something I wrote to include them all, either.

To explain, the motif of harmful sensation is a rather clunkily named phenomenon in which a person is killed or otherwise harmed simply by perceiving something, usually visually or aurally. For example, the video tape in "The Ring" causes people to die, whereas most video tapes do not. Looking at Medusa's face also kills people — though, by turning them to stone, though I suppose that total body petrification should kill someone as well. Looking at most other people, however, does not result in this effect.

I have been aware of this notion for some time, and even been attracted to it, though I never thought to put a name to it or anything. (If I had, I think I would have picked something better than "motif of harmful sensation." Maybe something like "thing-that-isn't-usually-bad-is" or "bad perception thing" or "gooberstumpis" or something.) The motif of harmful sensation, as the Wikipedia calls it, is quite an old concept that has arisen repeatedly in various world cultures.

Notable examples:
  • Like Medusa, the mythical medieval animal called the basilisk, a bird-looking serpent that could turn people to stone just by looking at them.
  • There's a plant called the mandrake that supposedly emits a human-like shriek when it is plucked. The shriek causes instant death.
  • The Stendhal syndrome is a supposedly documented effect in which people become dizzy or ill after viewing a painting or other work of art that they find particularly dazzling.
  • The Chuck Palahniuk novels Lullaby and Diary. In the former, hearing the lyrics to a certain song causes instant death. In the latter, a woman's drawings cause a severe form of Stendhal syndrome.
  • "Gloomy Sunday," also known as the "Hungarian Suicide Song," a little ditty that purportedly drove scads of Hungarians to kill themselves. (I've actually heard the Billie Holiday version of the English translation and like it quite a bit.)
  • The whole thing with the number of God in that movie "Pi."
  • A Monty Python sketch in which the British invent a joke so funny that anyone who hears it will die laughing. The joke is then used as a weapon against the Germans in World War II.
Best part of all, the article also mentions that creepy haunted eBay painting. In fact, the only glaring omission I see is that episode of "The Tick" in which the Queen of the Ottoman Empire tried to steal the Most Comfortable Chair in the World, a seat so accommodating that anybody who sits it in is unable to leave it of their own volition. But that might be different. Maybe.

I'm not sure why I find this so fascinating, but I think it might have something to do with that fact that these things, if they existed, would be forbidden to be perceived — unless you had a death wish, of course. So on top of never being able to see them because they're not real, I would be dead if I had seen them. Shoot.
[ link: the full article ]

Sunday, December 18, 2005

The Painter of Blight

Currently, I'm reading Joan Didion's Where I Was From. It drags in places, but this memoir of her childhood in California-cum-Golden State trivia tidbit history lesson makes some interesting points. About Leland Stanford. About The Gold Rush. About the transcontinental railroad. And, surprisingly enough, even about my hometown, Hollister.

But easily my favorite part is Didion's description of Thomas Kinkade, the man who calls himself "the painter of light," and who became my hometown's neighbor in the past few years. Didion draw a parallel between Kinkade’s work and the apparently commonplace practice of glossing over California’s history of hardship with a sweeter, more idealized version of the actual events — kitsch in the Milan Kundera sense. But her description of the paintings themselves nails their utter shittiness better than I ever could.

Sayeth the Didion:
A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.
Perfect. She got it just fucking perfect. I’m quickly becoming enamored of this woman.

Merry Date Rape: The Truth About Bing Crosby's "It's Cold Outside"

I've been prepping for the holidays by breaking my tradition of avoiding Christmas music. (Bless you, Vince Guaraldi.) However, various factors have led me to the conclusion that the Christmas favorite "Baby It's Cold Outside" is, in fact, about date rape.

The most popular rendition of the song features Bing Crosby as the rapist and Doris Day as the victim who asked for it. As proof of my findings, I present the full lyrics to "Baby It's Cold Outside." Since the song is a duet, I've decided to put the man's lyrics in parentheses. And to hammer home the point, I will also interject my comments, which are indented.

I really I can’t stay
(But baby, it’s cold outside)
I’ve got to go away
(But baby its cold outside)
The woman has established that she wants to leave. The man is trying to convince her otherwise. RAPE!
This evening has been so very nice
(I’ll hold your hands — they’re just like ice)
Hold you hands — in my pants.
My mother will start to worry!
(Beautiful, what’s you hurry?)
And father will be pacing with fury
(Listen to the fireplace roar)
She wrongfully believes that her status as a rape victim will shame her family.
So really I better scurry!
(Beautiful, please hurry)
Well maybe just a half a drink more
Roofie colada.
(Put some records on while I pour)
The neighbors might think
(Baby, its bad out there)
Say, what’s in this drink?
Roofies. Lots of roofies.
(No cabs to be had out there)
I wish I knew how to break the spell
(Your eyes are like starlight now)
Glazed from the roofies.
I’ll take your hat
(Your hair looks swell)
I ought to say no! no! no!
And she is.
(Mind if I move in close?)
At least I'll say that I tried.
"Rape schmape. I give up easily, apparently."
(What’s the sense of hurtin’ my pride?)
I really can't stay
(Baby, don’t hold out)

But it’s cold outside!

I simply must go
(But baby it’s cold outside)
The answer in no
He knows. He ain't listening.
(But baby it’s cold outside)
This welcome has been so nice and warm
(Look out the window at that storm!)
My sister will be suspicious!
(Your lips look delicious!)
How is she still standing after all those roofies?
My brother will be there at the door!
"Waiting to hit me for being a whore."
(Waves upon a tropical shore!)
My maiden aunt’s mind is vicious
"Maiden aunt"? What the hell?
(Gosh, your lips are delicious!)
Well maybe just a cigarette more
(Never such a blizzard before)
I’ve got to get home!
(But baby, you’ll freeze out there!)
Say lend me a coat?
He's not gonna give you any more clothes, honey.
(It’s up to your knees out there)
Her knees would be much warmer on the carpet.
You’ve really been grand!
(I thrill when you touch my hand)
"And even more if you'd touch my penis."
But don’t you see?
(How can you do this thing to me?)
"Don't be like that, baby."
There’s bound to be talk tomorrow
(Think of my lifelong sorrow!)
At least there will be plenty of implied
We're way beyond implication here.
(If you caught pneumonia and died!)
I really can’t stay!
(Get over that old out)
But baby it’s cold outside!

The message: though it may be cold outside, nothing beats the warm embrace of non-consensual sex.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Lagoon Phone

How else should you deal with stress? Call 805 562-9054. It's the number for the payphone near the lagoon. Call it at ten to the hour on weekdays to fuck with people on their way to class. Or call on Friday or Saturday night and fuck with freshman walking to I.V. to party.

The best so far: pretending I'm an enraged parent looking for my daughter.

Saturday, October 29, 2005

The Death of Charlotte Braun

Wikipedia is an endless source of amusement for me. It has information, sure, but as a result of being constructed by anyone with computer access, it often has useless or sucky information. For example, all Wikipedia articles can be classified under some type of category. European Union member nations or racquet sports, for example. This week I stumbled upon the category for fictional cyborgs. You know, because you might be writing a paper on Seven of Nine and need another cyborg for comparison. Also, please note that no comparative category for real-life cyborgs exists.

Other articles are quite gratifying.Take Charlotte Braun, for example. I have read Peanuts all my life but had never heard of this character, whom Charles Shulz apparently created to be some distorted, female version of Charlie Brown. Unlike Charlie, Charlotte was mean and pushy and even louder than Lucy. But Shulz tired of her quickly and blinked her to the cornfield, never to be seen again. (Later, he created Charlie's sister Sally as a new and improved female twist on Charlie.)

Shortly after Charlotte went away, Shulz received a letter from an avid Peanuts reader who disliked the character and requested that she be eliminated. Shulz responded by asking the reader if she felt comfortable being responsible for the death of a child, and enclosed in the post script a sketch of Charlotte with an axe in her head. It almost seems to urban legendy to be true, but the letter was apparently donated to the Library of Congress, which posted a scan of it online. Amazing.

Charlotte Braun, rest in peace.

Sunday, October 9, 2005

Sheep Hypnotist

According to a book on border collies I was leafing though the other way, one of the more interesting characteristics of the breed is its "strong eye." Apparently, the border collie has an especially strong gaze that it can use to stop a sheep dead in its tracks. The way the book was written, this stare works like some kind of canine-ovine hypnosis, and by holding the sheep's attention, the border collie can make the sheep go wherever it wants to.

This is my dog.



To me, he looks too damn happy to be some stern sheep hypnotist. His canine brain is riddled with the same faults that plague some people with ADHD. He'll hold your gaze, providing he doesn't see a bug. Or hear a bug. Chief is a good dog, for sure, but I just don't think he's the kind of border collie with a stern mind-controlling gaze. He's too frantic and scattered. Citing this photo as evidence, I'd say his expression is more like that of some slightly senile old relative confronted with a surprise party — he's excited and seemingly caught off guard, but you can't help thinking that the startled glee is more a natural condition than a result of the immediate situation.

And with that, I'll shut up about my fucking dog.

Friday, October 7, 2005

Goblin Market

Check out this week's Independent if you get a chance. It's not much, but it's something and I don't completely hate it. Normally, I wouldn't be able to access this kind of article online, but Jen — one of the kids who runs the Empty Garage — was excited enough about it that she clipped and scanned it. Here's for eager young go-getters.



And there you have it.

[ two more, and soon getting lonely ]

Monday, October 3, 2005

Color With Remarkble Leg Power

Just in: The word "puce" — meaning a grayish-purple color — literally means "flea-colored." As in, "Your purse is the loveliest shade of flea-color I've ever seen! I adore flea-color!" I couldn't imagine why fleas got their own color name as opposed to, say, any other worthwhile animal.

Learn your colors today, for they may change by tomorrow.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Do You Wish That Your Legs Grew Long?

A few days ago I asked Spencer a question about spiders. “If you’re in the shower and you see a spider in there, do you deliberately wash it down or do you do you own thing and let the little guy fend for himself?”

And after that, we drifted to the subject of the daddy longlegs. Not any specific one, but just the idea of them. Now that I think about it, they’re probably the first spider I consciously remember seeing. They’re so omnipresent, despite being so slight. Just thinking about what they look like, I feel like they’re the product of some sci-fi writer’s imagination: a tiny, dot of a creature, suspended in the air by nearly invisible legs. Some stray period or the dot from a lower-case “i” that grew legs and walked off the page.

When I thought about it more, I realized that I didn’t even know how the term “daddy longlegs” should look in print, as I can’t remember ever seeing it. “Daddy Long Legs”? “Daddy-long-legs”? The name itself sounds weirdly old-fashioned and Mother Goose-like, when you actually think about what you’re saying. And then I haven’t got a clue how to pluralize it. Surely I’ve seen more than one of these weird arachnids in some corner of an room before, but I can’t think of a logical way to say that there’s more than one. “Look, I see two daddies longlegs?” Or “Shoo away those daddy longlegses.” Not a clue.

I looked it up in the dictionary and then on the Wikipedia. It turns out that the term itself doesn’t really mean anything, as it refers to a different bug or spider or whatever depending on where you are. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, it’s “Any of various arachnids of the order Phalangida, with a small rounded body and long slender legs.” It’s also apparently called the harvestman, which lends the critter even more of a human character than I feel comfortable with. A daddy longlegs can even apparently be a fly — the crane fly.

For the first time in a while, researching something has led to it becoming even more ambiguous than before. A week ago I figured I would have been able to explain what a daddy longlegs was to someone who didn’t know. Now I’m not so sure.

Monday, September 19, 2005

Please Turn on Your Magic Beam

So if the world weren't horrifying enough for you, consider this: British scientists have discovered a symbiotic bug that eats tongues then attaches itself to the root of the former tongue and acts like a new tongue. The bug, Cymothoa exigua, feeds exclusively on fish tongues — thank God — and drains the tongue of its blood. Most surprisingly, the host fish doesn't necessarily suffer. The bug is so adept at mimicking tongue actions that the fish can continue to live with its squiggly new licker. So it's not a parasite. Just a new little friend.

It's like a helper monkey for fish, if the helper monkey rendered the person handicapped beforehand.

And I can't remember every having typed the word tongue so many times.

[ Source: BBC News, via Boing Boing ]

Saturday, September 17, 2005

Theater of Unexpected Inactivity

I’m just pissed about Francis Fregoli.

You’d think I’d be upset because I didn’t realize that The Theater of the New Ear consisted of what essentially were radio plays: “Anomalisa” and “Hope Leaves the Theater.” I purposely didn’t research the plays before hand, but I immediately felt suspicious when I walked into the theater and saw that the stage had no backdrop. When the cast of “Anomalisa” walked out on stage and seated themselves at miked desks, I knew something was up. A talkie, in the literal sense.

Not that it wasn’t entertaining. I actually liked it a lot. I’ve always had a thing for radio plays and voiceover work and stuff like that. I just wish I knew ahead of time. What I can’t get over is Francis fucking Fregoli.

The program states that “Francis Fregoli is the pen name of an established writer who wishes to remain anonymous.” He wrote “Anomalisa,” and though it’s my less favorite of the two plays I saw, I’m really annoyed that a simple internet search won’t turn up who Francis Fregoli is. No, instead I get plot summaries. “‘Anomalisa’ concerns a motivational speaker and his one-night stand with a pitiful deformed woman.” And that about sums it up. I think I like the end best, because at that point Jennifer Jason Leigh plays the singing voice of an antique Japanese sex doll that oozes semen. And she does a good job. Oh, actually I think my favorite part is that Jennifer Jason Leigh is a midget — seriously. Oh, and actually I feel bad saying that because the second play had Peter Dinklage, who actually is a midget. But I knew that about him already. Not her.

I attended the play primarily for the second half, “Hope Leaves the Theater,” which was written by Charlie Kaufman, who is kind of a hero of mine. I like how ambitious his stuff is. But I’m not yet entirely convinced I really liked “Hope.” It’s po-mo to an extreme. It breaks the frame of narrative seemingly just for the joy of breaking the frame of narrative,

The setup: in the program for the play, Kaufman has listed the three actors — Hope Davis, Dinklage and Meryl Streep — and all the roles they play. Streep, for example purportedly plays Sally, Kelly, Jane, the Empress of Japan, Mrs. Finnigan, Boy #2, Joan of Arc, Daisy, Teresa D’Useau, Radio Man, Sailor #1, The Killer and Broken Katie. Furthermore, Kaufman also lists a breakdown of the play’s scenes:

I quote:
Scene one: Elevator
Scene two: Elevator. Ten minutes later.
Scene three: Joe’s living room. Dawn.
Scene four: The “kitchen.” Later that day.
Scene five: Offices of Rolling Stone magazine, 1969.
Scene six: Engine room of an Argentinean freighter, 1943.
Scene seven: The void. Thursday, 6:53 a.m. EST.
Scene eight: Elevator. Exactly thirty years later.
Scene nine: Joe’s living room. Midnight of the same day.
Scene ten: The void. Early morning.
Scene eleven: The eye of a hurricane. Easter Island. Now.
Scene twelve: Elevator. One thousand years later.
Scene thirteen: A field of marigolds.
Which is great and enticing and all that. But the play never actually shows any of this, really. It technically starts before the lights go down, with Hope Davis sitting on stage but voicing the thoughts of Louise, an angry, miserable woman sitting in the audience. She hats Charlie Kaufman, likes Meryl Streep, thinks she could have been the third Coen brother and is annoyed by the British couple sitting next to her. The play starts, but Davis stays in her head — until her cell phone rings. Streep breaks character and angrily rebukes Davis’s character, who leaves the theater.

Only Hope Davis herself never goes anywhere. We just follow her narrative as she walks away from UCLA, on the bus, into her house, with Streep and Dinklage supplying the voices of the people she passes by on the way. And it’s convincing, too. I didn’t even care that I didn’t get to see the scene in the offices of Rolling Stone. I was impressed enough to see how the actors would break character and address each other and all that.

The downside was that the play concludes with Dinklage playing a smarmy critic giving “Hope Leaves the Theater” a bad review. And he addresses the play’s problems — like it being “too precious” — and basically eliminates the need for you or me or anybody else to bring them up. And I feel like that’s cheating — writing a post-modern play but then using its post-modernism to evade actually criticism. “He’s so good he knows what he did wrong — and he told us!”

I still like Charlie Kaufman and “Adaptation” and “Eternal Sunshine.” I just haven’t made up my mind on this one yet. I only know that I'm pissed I can't find out who Francis Fregoli is.

Did I mention that Jennifer Jason Leigh is a fucking Hummel?

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Mr. Whackier Damage

More of the same, I'm afraid. So in one column, we've got the following:
  • I am wrecked.
  • wreck media
  • Me wear dick
  • We cream, kid.
  • wrecked Ami
  • Ewe dick ram
  • Mr. Weak, iced
  • We rim a deck.
  • Wee dick ram.
And in other group altogether:
  • Magic wreaked harm.
  • A grim, charmed wake.
  • Mr. Whackier Damage
  • I'm a charmed gawker.
  • "Ah! Merge a warm dick!"
  • Had warm meek cigar.
  • I'm a marked crew hag.
  • Ham, warm dick agree.
Have you got it yet?

[ source: Prance Closer ]

Saturday, August 13, 2005

Flavor Grenade

Today I stumbled upon a list of varieties of the pluot — the plum-apricot hybrid crossbred by scientists in the last few decades. Varieties of any common produce often have these beautiful, evocative or otherwise quirky names that try to get at the heart of their fruity goodness, and this relatively new Frankenfruit is no exception. So in the tradition of Vitamin Q, an immensely enjoyable blog that compiles lists of such things, I thought I'd list today's findings. The better names of pluot varieties include the following:

  • Blue Gusto
  • Candy Stripe
  • Dapple Dandy
  • Flavorella
  • Flavorglo
  • Flavor Grenade
  • Flavor Heart
  • Flavor King
  • Flavoros
  • Flavor Prince
  • Flav-o-Rich
  • Flavor Queen
  • Frugi
  • Last Chance
  • Red Ray
Honestly, I'd have named the fruit the "plumicot" instead of the "pluot," but even I can't turn up my nose at the likes of "Flavor Grenade."

Thursday, August 11, 2005

I Didn't Mean To

Systemic hypoplasia. Don't get it.

I'd wager most of the people reading this post right now already now whether they have it, though. Those with the disease do not physically age like normal people and therefore look younger than they really are. The disease varies from victim to victim — one person could be forever trapped as a prepubescent sixteen-year-old, while another could look like he or she was a twelve. In rare cases, victims of systemic hypoplasia look like children all their lives.

I'm reminded of this strange affliction because I brought it up with Drew last night. (Technically, I had forgotten this conversation took place until I was reading an article on Andy Milonakis in the new Rolling Stone.) I'm not sure why, but at some point I got on the subject of Baby Doll, a character on the Batman animated cartoon show that I used to watch as a kid. She has the disease. She's also a former child actress, Mary Dahl, who played an adorable toddler moppet on a popular sitcom. Baby even had her own catchphrase: "I didn't mean to," spoken in a creepy cutesy child voice that makes you want to barf and shiver at the same time. The episode details that Mary Dahl quit her show to make it as a real actress — after all, she is twentysomething during her "child" stardom. But she fails. And she can't deal. Reverting back to the sitcom character and toting a doll that houses a semiautomatic, Baby Doll kidnaps her old TV family and forces them to relive the show or die.

The episode is one of the darkest I'd ever seen. In fact, I'm fairly certain they never aired it during the original "Batman" timeslots — weekday afternoons and Saturday mornings. Instead, I first saw Baby Doll's premiere on Sunday night, before the "Simpsons," when FOX ran some of the edgier "Batman" offerings. (Notably, "Batman" is the only television show to ever be created as a weekly afternoon children's show that eventually edged onto the regular prime time schedule.) In the episode's final moments, Batman frees Baby Doll's hostages only to have the pint-sized villain escape to an amusement park. They eventually — and predictably — stalk each other into a fun house hall of mirrors, where Baby Doll shatters one mirror after another in an effort to off Batman.

When there's only one mirror left, she turns to it. It's one of the kind that distort your body. In this last mirror, she's stretched out to adult proportions. Just like any actress would, she monologues. "Look! That's me in there. The real me." She touches the mirror. "There I am." Then she drops her Baby Doll voice and speaks like a middle-aged woman. "But it's not really real, is it? Just made up an pretend like my family and my life and everything else." Then she turns to Batman, smoldering rag doll in cocked. "Why couldn't you just let me make believe?"

But instead she shoots the mirror. Then repeatedly clicks her doll-gun, now out of bullets, at the spot where the adult-sized her used to be.

"I didn't mean to."

I can actually remember my mom being in the room for this and asking "This is a kid's show?" I guess it still was, even if the people who made it weren't necessarily considering a ten-year-old audience at the time. I believe they created Baby Doll specifically for the show, and this theory is bolstered by the character's appearance.


As you can see, she looks like a cross between Rhoda from "The Bad Seed" and Elmyra from "Tiny Toons," the latter of which the "Batman" team had worked on previously.

The part that really gets me is that the writers actually referenced a fairly obscure disease on a popular TV show. Even today, in the tenth year of the internet, I can't actually find that much information on systemic hypoplasia. It's real — I think — but you'd think it would be the fodder of made-for-TV movies and tabloid sob stories. Apparently no. (Maybe it's actually not real.)

The episode is creepy, for sure, but something about the disease is especially unnerving. Being stuck as a child all your life. Not a midget, a child. But a child that thinks and talks and feels like an adult. And no one would ever regard you as an adult. And eventually your skin would age and sag and you'd be this child body wearing a suit of aged skin. Yikes. If I had this idea, I think I'd be pissed too. And then I think about some hospital ward in some city somewhere where there's a special ward for systemic hypoplasia victims. And the room is littered with a combination of toddler shoes and cigarette boxes and stuff — see, because they live here, the kids-not kids — and one day they just get sick of everything and revolt. And they come marching down the hallway, this army of children with deep voices and thirty years of adult-sized angst.

And they're carrying bats.

Yikes.

Baby Doll should have gone on to direct instead.

NOTE (6.19.2010): For those interested, I've put up a new post on Baby Doll and where her creator may have drawn inspiration from.

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

The Mouth-Watering Taste of the Baja Desert

Damn.

I stopped at a mini mart on the drive up from Santa Barbara today and bought water, iced tea and a package of Starburst. I always thought the blue package was tropical fruit. This has apparently changed. The blue Starburst package now signifies Baja flavor.

Yes, Baja flavor.

The four flavors of Starburst in the Baja package are strawberry-watermelon, limon, Baja dragonfruit and Aztec punch. (I don't know what the fuck Aztec punch tastes like. For all I know, sand.) The colors are pink, red, green and light blue. (I'm fairly certain green is limon, but the rest are a toss-up.) The flavor name and color are ultimately irrelevant, however. Each one tastes like Kool-Aid. With extra sugar.

Why did the good people of Starburst do this? Who thought this was a good idea?

Damn.

Wednesday, June 8, 2005

The Conceits

Finally. Every time I've ever heard "Mr. Brightside" my mind always stumbles when processing the line "opens up my eager eye." I've known I know it from somewhere, and for the longest time I always thought it was a poem — like Poe or something Romantic.

So now, as I'm studying for a final on the Romantics and the Victorians, iTunes finally supplies the answer: Nena's "99 Red Balloons." Plain as day, she says "opens up one eager eye" toward the end of the second verse. She's no Romantic, nor is she one of the Romantics . But thank you, Nena, nonetheless.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Baby Swan

Given the word's meaning, I honestly believe that "cygnet" sounds far too technical.

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Dina Says I Don't Take Good Notes in Class

So do you agree with Dina?









In my defense, my grades are as good if not better than hers.

Thursday, May 12, 2005

Zombie Cucumbers

Then, for no reason at all, I suddenly feel sorry for pickles. These vegetables — and I mean vegetables in the sense that a body pumped with chemicals for a funeral is a person — would envy cucumbers, I'd think. Pickles look like cucumbers: same shape and color and all that, but they're not cucumbers. They're more dead than cucumbers. They're like zombie cucumbers. So while cucumbers are crisp and healthy, pickles are salty and mushy. And though pickles have seeds, they're not viable. And even if those seeds were viable, they wouldn't produce baby pickles — they'd make baby cucumbers. So even then, the parent and the baby wouldn't even speak the same language: The parent would speak pickle, while the baby would naturally speak cucumber.

Oh, and please note the slightly updated blog design. Lime green is in. Dark, cucumber green is out.

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Don't Cock This One Up

In an effort to resist studying for my midterm tomorrow morning — and taking a cue from Vitamin Q — I composed a short list of human body parts that double as verbs.
  • head
  • face
  • eye
  • mouth
  • teeth (as in, "Babies cry when they are teething.")
  • lash
  • ear ("to form ears," in the corn sense)
  • chin
  • tongue
  • gum
  • nose
  • neck (synonym for "make out")
  • cheek (British for "speak rudely to," like how we use it with "being cheeky")
  • brain (a good one: "to kill by smashing the skull")
  • arm
  • shoulder
  • palm
  • finger (as in, "I fingered your girlfriend," but also in the sense of identifying a culprit)
  • thumb
  • hand
  • nail
  • knuckle (though, more usually as "knuckle down")
  • elbow
  • breast (according to Webster, a synonym for "contend")
  • rib
  • back
  • knee
  • leg ("to walk," according to Webster)
  • foot
  • toe
  • heel
  • butt
  • stomach
  • blister (does this count?)
  • throat (as in, "to sing in a throaty voice")
  • skin
  • hip (a synonym for "tell" or "inform")
  • heart (according to me, as in the recently fashionable expression "I heart New York" to mean "I love New York" or the film "I (Heart) Huckabees")
So what did I miss?

Wednesday, May 4, 2005

Because "Martina" Was Taken?

I let my mind wander and I ended up in Super Mario World, more or less. I was thinking about the more obscure characters to populate Mario games and I recalled one of the first few female characters to show up: Valentina. Most wouldn’t know her, and for good reason — this lady bad guy appeared in one game and never schemed again, most because a company other than Nintendo owns the rights to not just Valentina but all the characters created specifically for a 1996 Super Nintendo game called Super Mario RPG.

One-timer or not, Valentina is notable because she was one of the first few lady bad guys ever too rain in Mario’s parade and, for someone that had reason to interact with kid-friendly notables like the Super Mario Bros., she’s also a little racy.

Check her out.


Aside from the rather prominent chest and the odd, football-shaped Betty Boop head, Valentina is constantly clutching what would appear to be a cocktail — a martini, to be exact. In Japan, she is called “Margarita,” which seems like a misnomer but, in my book, further underscores her predilection for booze. In fact, I’d bet that the translators switched her name so the association wasn’t so obvious. Also, If I remember correctly, the eventual showdown that Mario had with her in the game was made all the more notable by the fact that whenever Mario struck her, her whole body shuddered and set her breasts to a noticeable quivering motion.

Very odd.

I’m surprised Nintendo let this fly in a Mario game, much less one that kids in America got to play. They’re normally a bit more prudish than that. Perhaps it was okay that Valentina was such a bad girl because she was, in fact, a bad girl — a villain. In any case, she’s also an anti-Princess Peach who perhaps never got her fair shake at long-time do-baddery.

As to why she’s wearing a dead parrot on her head, your guess is as a good as mine.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

The Untold Coolness of Shirley the Loon

"Besides, in your next lives, you're all coming back as avocados. So there."

For reasons I could never explain, I can't stop thinking about Shirley the Loon today. You remember her, of course. She's the psychic waterfowl from "Tiny Toons." She has blonde hair and a pink shirt and she meditates and levitates and speaks like a valley girl.

Shirley is also the romantic interest for Plucky, the Daffy Duck analogue, which is strange because the metaphysically minded loon seems to have little in common with the petty Plucky. (Less often, I remember Shirley being pursued by Fowl Mouth, the Foghorn Leghorn analogue, who'd lace everything he'd say with bleeped profanities.)

Anyway, I can't imagine how the creators of "Tiny Toons" ever conceived of Shirley as a good character for a children's show. She was, it turns out, but the idea of her kind of baffles me. A psychic bird who likes to shop and talks like a ditz. When you really think about it, it's interesting social commentary that the character who cares most about materialistic matters and who peppers her speech with teeny-bopper jargon is the one who best understands the workings of the world. It's a mashing of extremes that's actually interesting from a literary standpoint — and all the more impressive because she's on a cartoon.

But Shirley is also an inside joke that most kids probably never got.

I can remember that once or twice the characters on the show referred to Shirley not as "Shirley the Loon" but as "Shirley McLoon." This, of course, is a reference to Shirley MacLaine, who became a bit of a new age guru in the 80s. MacLaine led some self-actualization seminars and wrote a book in which she discussed her past lives. I actually only put this together after flipping through a "Far Side" collection years ago and becoming puzzled by a cartoon in which a lizard sitting on a rock in the desert says to another lizard something like, "There it is again, that weird feeling that somehow in a past life I was somebody named Shirley MacLaine." My mom had to fill me in on MacLaine's extracurriculars.

Making a reference to celebrities that children might not recognize certainly isn't unusual for Warner Bros. cartoons — "Looney Tunes" does it a lot and "Animaniacs" did too — but I still think it's odd that a fairly central character on "Tiny Toons" would be such a clear homage-parody to Shirley MacLaine.

On top of that, I like that her name is a pun on her "out there" status. She thinks she's psychic. She's a loon. She's Shirley the Loon.

I did a little research on Shirl and found out something else interesting. She was voiced by Gail Matthius. Matthius doesn't have an extensive filmography, but what's there is interesting. Apparently, when all the founding "Saturday Night Live" cast members left the show in 1980, Matthius took over co-hosting duties with Charles Rocket. That makes her the second female "Weekend Update" host and a kind of forerunner to Tina Fey, whose glasses I want to lick in a sexual fashion. (The other female "Weekend Update" hosts are Jane Curtain, Mary Gross, Christine Ebersole and, of course, Amy Poehler.)

Aside from "SNL," though, Matthius' work has consisted almost exclusively of doing cartoon voices — stuff like "The Tick" and "The Snorks." She's also the voice of Martha Generic, the valley girl sister on "Bobby's World," who, if you'll remember, talked exactly like Shirley the Loon. It's interesting, I guess. She can introduce herself at parties by saying "Hi. My name is Gail Matthius and though I used to be on 'Saturday Night Live,' I've made a career almost entirely out of my perfect valley girl accent."

I also found out that Shirley doesn't, as I have long suspected, suffer from "Skeeter Syndrome." You all might remember Skeeter as the other female character on "Muppet Babies." She's basically Scooter in drag and she doesn't really do anything besides balance out the nursery room gender ratio. (Honestly, you'd think Miss Piggy alone would have been woman enough. I will also point out that Mario Kart racer Toadette suffers from Skeeter Syndome and I hate her for it.) I had always suspected that Shirley had been born in a similar manner because she rounds out the corresponding group of girls — Babs, Fifi, Elmyra and herself — that matches up with the show's main male characters — Buster, Hampton, Montana Max and Plucky. The handy-dandy internet, however, teaches me that Shirley actually does have an analogue in the proper "Looney Toons" universe, albeit one of the most obscure ones: Melissa Duck.

No one has ever heard of Melissa Duck. She hardly even pops up on Google — and she's nowhere to be found on Google image search.

This makes sense, though. The She only appears in two episodes, "The Scarlet Pumpernickel" — an Errol Flynn parody — and "Muscle Tussle" — a short about the politics of dating on the beach. Both feature Melissa as Daffy's exasperated girlfriend. (And in that way, Melissa is kind of an avian Petunia Pig.) Like Shirley, Melissa is a blond waterfowl, which is really about as much most of the Tiny Toons have in common with their antecedents.

The Warner Bros. people recently saved Melissa from total obscurity by including here in "Baby Looney Tunes,"a downright abominable show that I watched part of while coasting through a hungover weekday morning. It's basically "Muppet Babies" with bland, large-pupiled versions of Bugs, Daffy and the rest. The toddler toons also wear diapers, even if most of them never wore clothes to begin with. And, as you can imagine, Melissa's only there to balance out the gender ratio.

So, there's that.

Finally, all the online rummaging I did today turned up this, the character breakdowns that the applying voice actors read when the various roles in "Tiny Toons" were being cast. (Annoyingly, you have to navigate by clicking "next" to scroll through the various profiles.) A highlight: a description of Elmyra as "sweetness to the point of dementia." This whole post might seem like ridiculous overanalysis of something completely insignificant — and it probably is — but if you actually read about these characters — these variations of "Looney Toons" characters, obscure or not, that some people decided to repackage and offer to children not old enough to remember the original animated antics — you'll realize people put a lot of effort into creating these characters. They drew on Bugs Bunny and that group, but they pulled on Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin. Even though the backgrounds didn't always manifest in the final versions of the characters, the people who thought them up took the time to explain why the characters should be funny.

Read Shirley's profile and it's all there. "A juxtaposition of extremes," the text reads. Even though it's only a children's show, there's a lot going on beneath the surface. There are motives and thought and a creative process that leads me to believe that these things I remember from when I was younger actually have a certain value. They're not just vehicles for jokes. They're not just stupid cartoons. There's more there and thinking about it isn't a waste of time.

Now I'm thinking about that.

Friday, April 8, 2005

Eudorigins

Though I was really rooting for her, Eudora Welty couldn't hold my attention. Sitting on the bench at Fiesta Laundry, Welty's musings on the history of the Natchez Trace lost out to a mosquito hawk that seem to be stalking an older black lady in a big hat. The lady never looked up from the pile of clean clothes she was folding, but I swear that mosquito hawk saw her as a big, juicy bloodsucker. That's how I saw it, anyway.

I can remember the first I ever heard about Eudora Welty. It was that episode of "The Simpsons" that has Jay Sherman, the critic from "The Critic." It's also the episode Matt Groening had his name removed from, because he felt FOX shouldn't use his show as a tool to boost the popularity of "The Critic." ("Simpsons" fanboys, by the way, hate the episode. Most hold at as the second worst episode ever, the first being with the one with the racing horse and the jockey gnomes.) Anyway, Jay Sherman lets loose this wall-shuddering burp at the Simpsons' dinner table in an effort to further trump all of Homer's skills. "How many Pulitzer Prize winners can do that?" Lisa asks. Sherman responds, "Just me and Eudora Welty. (Later, I think, we hear the burp again and Krusty makes a remark about meeting Welty for a date.)

And with that memory, it strikes me as funny that I have to read her for a class. She's quite good, really, but my mind is other places.

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Moesko Island Lighthouse

NOTE: Since so many people are finding this post my searching for the phrase "Moesko Island" — nearly fifty a day, by the count of Freestats.com — I thought I'd drop links to two other "Ring"-related posts that you might not find otherwise: "Spreading It Like Sickness" and "Rewind, Rewound."

So I'm writing a review for the "Ring" sequel for Brenna to run in Artsweek this week. I didn't hate it as much as I thought I might. Sequels generally disappoint, and while I think I could have lived happily without seeing this film, it didn't bastardize the original. It seems like the people behind "The Ring Two" actually understood the original, even if they did break the rule of Samara only showing up by popping out of TV sets when some unlucky fucker's seven days are up.

Most anyone who knows me knows I really liked "The Ring," even if a lot of people didn't care for it much. It genuinely scared me and I find it hard to believe it only got a PG-13, even with its lack of gore or raunch. In the neverending fight against writer's block, I re-watched the original when I got home from work. Whether or not you thought the movie worked, I think it's beautiful. The look of it — this gray-blue haze, like some low-lying rainstorm. IMDb says Gore Verbinski looked to the paintings of Andrew Wyeth for visual inspiration, and you can really see it. There's something crisp and cold and vaguely lonely about these and I get that from the movie. (See Christina's World, Wind from the Sea and Fed, all by Wyeth.)

Anyway, watching it again, I realized that aside from being a neat little horror mystery, this movie has a theme of art and creativity and creation in it. All the main characters are make things that could be considered art, in one way or another. Rachel, the Naomi Watts character, is a newspaper reporter and a writer. It's her propensity for words that drives the film's central investigation. I know a news story isn't generally considered art, but it's definitely a creative process — and one that ultimately leads to her survival. Journalism versus Evil: Round One, as bygone Artsweek editor DJ Fatkid headlined my review for the original two years ago. Rachel's ex-husband, Noah, is a photographer. Before he finally believes Rachel's story about a cursed video tape, he uses his camera to conduct his own little investigation. The creepy son is a little artist too. In his first scene, he's drawing a morbid little picture with crayons. He keeps doing this throughout the movie, and one of his doodles eventually provides a pivotal clue for Rachel.

And then we have Samara. Oh Samara, the little dickens who re-affirmed my general fear of children, dead or not. In the movie, we learn that Samara had freaky psychic powers, even before she died. She could create images on negatives just by thinking about them. She burned a perfect image of a burning tree into the wall of her bedroom. And she, after all, is the one who put the images on that damned video tape together. (You could also say that Samara is a bit of a sculptor, too — whatever the fuck she does to people sure leaves their corpses in a memorably horrifying state.)

The most interesting artist figure, I guess, would have to be the film's director himself. Not Gore Verbinski himself — though "The Ring" sure springboarded him to bigger and better things — but the idea of a director — the director as an abstract figure. "The Ring" suggests that a film is so powerful that it actually can kill a person — make them feel an emotion so profoundly that it overrides every other bodily impulse and shuts the whole system down. When Samara emerges from the TV to kill one of her viewers, it's like the person has gotten so into the movie that the lines between art and life completely disappears. They let the art in, and when Samara reconfigures their corpse into some horrible death posture, they become art themselves.

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but it got to me, this movie. It did before. It does now.

By the way, here's the first picture I ever took with my digital. Last Christmas, I drove out to the edge of where I lived and snapped some shots of this creepy area where people's area stops and it turns into countryside. They always reminded me of "The Ring." Just a little bit.

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Nudge

I never do this, but can I please direct your attention southward to the wonderful line of dialogue that has developed out of the comments attached to the post "Deadly Youth." Maybe it's finals stress. Or maybe it's the best thing that ever happened. And for the lazy, I'll provide a transcript.

Anonymous:
I care nothing for the Marvel or Capcom universes. If they really wanted to make a game that would grab my attention, they'd propose what would happen if the universe of ABC daytime soaps fought the Muppet universe. Now that's worth spending quarter's on.
Me:
Uh, what if the world of My Little Pony took on the world of Tranformers?

What if Adult Swim took on The TGIF line-up from 1992?

What if Greek mythology took on your third grade class?

What if my floor freshman year took on the Twelve Tribes of Israel?

What if the characters from every SNL spin-off movie took on the four food groups?

What if the "Creature from the San Andreas Fault" fought Mothra?

What if Death itself fought that one time in when you were slow dancing in junior high and you got a boner and had to keep dancing with the girl pressed up against you until the boner subsided?
Kristen:
amazing choices drew.

i want to play too:

what about if your recurring childhood nightmare took on your recurring teenage fantasy? i know you can picture exactly that. or my recurring teenage fantasy? or the precocious young hispanic kid's future recurring teenage fantasy?

what about if all the back to the futures rumbled? there'd be like 45 different michael j. foxes and lea thompsons to choose from.

or ... what if the periodic table of elements battled the periodic table of sex poster that they sell in bong stores?

or ... all the fancy little dogs in paris vs. our editing seminar last year? i picture them all pouring through the windows and door in their little t-shirts, devouring all the strange girls.

do more.

love, kristen
Me:
answers to kristen.

1) if that happened, i'd be having sex on a train with a mermaid and i'd be drowning and the train would be going out of control. i think. weird video game.

2) i could not picture your recurring teenage fantasy because you did not know me in high school and therefore your life must have been too boring to have real fantasies.

-OR-

it would involve a mermaid and me and some weird re-creation of the greenhouse scene from "sound of music." no wait -- that already happened.

-OR-

precocious hispanic child would team up with wolverine and they'd both be wearing wedding dresses and they'd have to fight me and a mermaid, both wearing suits. not the best game for children, but it has potential.

3) the mind boggles trying to think about how many michael j. foxes and lea thompsons would be selectable. i think the character selection screen would be confusing and repetitive. however, we could call it "back to the future: mcfly melee," and that makes me happy.

4) what? stay out of bong stores.

5) i think this is your best bet. i think the yappy dogs, led by linda ronsdstadt II and alphonso van floof, would be fairly evenly matched against the girls from our writing class, led by that airhead girl who wore earmuffs and that sassy girl who i liked but who i suspect did not like me.

tourney, of course, would be the boss and his weapon would be the red pen of permanent omission.

and what? the dogs had t-shirts?

how about this: all the STDs in your body grow to the size of elephants and you have to fight them with mops, brooms and three castmembers from "kids incorporated"?
Anonymous (I think Nate):
what if the staypuft marshmallow man fought new york?

no.
Kristen:
1) mermaids are super hot.

2) they probably were mostly wearing little sweaters and the occasional dogberet but i just really love little dogs in little t-shirts.

3) i gotta dig deep for the next round.

k
Bri:
This is the greatest thing I've ever read...

What if that one person you really REALLY wished you hadn't hooked up with took on a flock of your friends who have inexplicably turned into kindergarteners?... Under-water?

What if David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust took on David Bowie as Jareth, the Goblin King in Labyrinth?

What if my weirdest sex dream (this is Bri, by the by) took on Drew in a suit and the precocious young Hispanic kid in a wedding dress? (I know now that the background would consist of bleachers with Wolverine in a wedding dress--knitting--sitting with a suit-wearing mermaid filing her nails on one side and the Mad Hatter sipping tea with Brandon the wonder dog who is smoking a phallic cigar on the other side.)
Anonymous (Sanam? Nate again?):
What if a giant asteroid was going to crash into earth and a ragtag band had to fly to it and blow it up?

No.
Kristen:
ok, so Mr. Belvedere, Dr. Ruth, Chef Boyardee, and lovable tough guy Lt. Dan from Forrest Gump round out a killer tag team equipped with Nerf sports gear where every Nerf ball is soaked in people-disintegrating chemical compounds and studded with pitbull teeth.

vs.

all the skeletons in your parents' closets have emerged, donned St. Pepper's-reminiscent psychedelic marching band gear and initiated a parade of shame and doom, shaming and dooming all in their path!

speaking of Chef Boyardee, how about the stale smell of Spaghetti-Os that permeated my pre-school goes head to head with the person i become when i black out drinking?

or

your underwear has to beat a snakecharmer at tetherball.

and up-down-left-right-select gives you the ability to fart the top 20 Cingular Wireless ringtones.

k
Lauren:
what if the extra half an hour i am gonna have to spend staying late at work, because i've been reading this blog, to come up with kiss ass tag lines to write in a letter i should have written this morning inciting a certain pissed off donor to still love project angel food...fought all of the creative intelligence in this blog dialogue...

if they tied blogalogue and my undercompensated guilt trip would each be worth $6.50.
Lauren:
i will suggest one more...

"I know you are but what am I."

vs.

"I'm rubber and you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you"And a capper: what if the video game was that all the female characters from "Tiny Toons" had to fight a monster made out of all your elementary school art projects?

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

The Punctuation Round-Up

I hate History 4A. I hate studying. I hate finals.

As a result of these three hatreds converging on one night — my last before I'm done with this shitbag quarter — I have spent the last hour procrastinating. Instead of the boring stuff I hate, I read all about boring stuff I like. For your edification, I've collected this knowledge here. Now learn something.

[ Ye Olde Missing Letter ]


Among many other things, a subject that came up during a talk I had with New Megan was the letter Thorn. The way Megan told it, Thorn is the name of a symbol for the th sound — either way you can pronounce it, whether voiced like in "the" or voiceless like in "thick." Though we still use the sounds — lispers more than others — we don't have the symbol, which in its day looks kind of like this: Þ

It's a vertical line with a loop coming out of the right side, just lower than it would on a P. Neat, huh? The interesting part about all this is that a certain influential printer named William Caxton decided to substitute Y for Þ, for reasons I will surely never understand. Because of that, it was standard practice to use Y to make the th noises for a while. This has all but disappeared except on quaint, folky-like store signs, like "Ye Olde Whorehouse" and stuff like that. People mistakenly pronounce "Ye" like yee when it's actually just a fucked-up way to spell "the."

Neat, huh?
[ And, Per Se ]

As near as anyone can tell, the ampersand was born around 63 B.C. when a scribe named Marcus Tullius Tiro created the first system shorthand we can find record of. As a speaker of Latin, Marcus' word for "and" was "et." Whether he joined the two letters together or whether that was already standard practice among writers at the time, we're not sure, but the oldest form of the ampersand is a fancy way of writing "et."

If you look in this picture below, you can easily make out the individual E and T in the classical ampersand on the right. The more modern, more familiar one on the left, however, has changed quite a bit.


The name of the letter comes from a recitation of the phrase "et, per se and," a mishmash of Latin and English that basically translates to "et, which by itself means and." For a while, the ampersand was treated like a quasi-letter and stuck onto the end of alphabets. People slurred "et, per se and" into "ampersand." (And there's a phony etymology for the name of the symbol which traces it back to the phrase "emperor's hand," but don't believe it. Believe me instead.)

And I know inventing shorthand is technically a big accomplishment, but I'm way more impressed that Marcus Tullius Tiro has gone down in history as the inventor of the ampersand.
[ The Tragically Short Life of the Interrobang ]
Apparently having decided that English punctuation didn't pack enough punch, New York ad exec Martin Specktor introduced a new end punctuation — the interrobang — to the printed word in 1962.



This mark, which looks like a malformed P with a dot under it, is actually an exclamation point and question mark combined — hence the name. "Interrobang," by the way beat out other suggestions for the name like "rhet," "exclarotive," and my favorite, "exclamoquest."

Specktor even concocted a name for the upside-down interrobang that would rightly precede a Spanish sentence expressing both surprise and interrogation: the gnaborretni, which is "interrobang" backwards.

The interrobang fared better than you might think. Supposedly, it showed up in some magazine articles and print advertisements. Remington brand typewriters even included an interrobang key for a few years. As you probably could guess, however, the mark ultimately faded into obscurity. Today, the standard practice for punctuated a surprised question is to use ?! or !?. There's no rule saying which order you have to use, but it's generally not considered a trait of formal writing.

And I'm totally not shitting you. This has to be the only instance of fad punctuation I've ever heard of.

I just like that the first sentence I can think of that would actually make good use of the the interrobang is "What the fuck?!" And that is exactly what people should have said when someone tried to explain the interrobang.

Monday, March 14, 2005

Deadly Youth

"Hey mister, how come you always pick her?"

I wash my clothes at Fiesta Laundry now. Like I've said before, I enjoy being there because I never see any other college students. Young marrieds, sometimes, and some weird aging hipsters and Hispanic mothers who yell at their kids — but never any people who look like the typical UCSB student.

What really draws me to Fiesta Laundry — which, honestly, isn't as much of a party as the name might imply — in the arcade nook. It almost looks like an afterthought — this row of four arcade machines shoved in the back in the corner, presumably because Mr. and Mrs. Fiesta didn't order enough dryer units. However they got there, they're there and I feed them my spare quarters — likely at the expense of future laundry loads, I know, but that's the future and not the now and-it's-my-money-so-drop-it. I used to play video games a lot when I was younger. I still do — just not as often, mostly for the sake of getting my work done and not seeming like less of a dork. Video games, it turns out, are still a lot of fun.

So I play this one in particular: Marvel vs. Capcom 2, the one-on-one fighting game that proposes an answer to the question "What if all the characters from the Marvel universe — that being the one with the X-Men, Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, etc. — took on the characters from the Capcom universe — that being the one that gives us Street Fighter, Mega Man, Resident Evil, etc. Granted, nobody probably ever asked that question before this game suggested an answer, but it exists nonetheless.

The game offers sixty selectable characters — I'll kindly explain to the uninitiated that that's a lot, especially considering the original Street Fighter only had eight. My favorite character is B.B. Hood, a little girl in a red dress with a picnic basket. Little B.B. hails from the Darkstalker series, a sort of re-envisioning of the Street Fighter with all the characters in movie monster drag. (Ryu's the vampire, Zangief is Frankenstein's monster and I could swear that Ken is cross-dressing as the succubus.)

B.B. Hood, of course, is a the Japanese fighting game designer's take on Little Red Riding Hood. Instead of running from the Big Bad Wolf, she wants to murder him. Instead of skipping to Granmda's, Grandma is dead. And instead of cookies in her basket, she keeps a stash of firearms, knives and grenades. (I love you, Japan.) She also has this little puppy with a red bow that follows her around and yaps. Though I have yet to make Puppy Goo Goo do anything cool, I'm sure a certain sequence of buttons will make him tear out the opponent's genitals or something.

Easily, however, the best part about playing as this character and spraying the likes of Chun-Li and Captain America with machine gun fire is that no matter how well I can do against the computer, there's always a little hispanic kid who comes in, plunks in a single quarter and makes short work of poor B.B.

"Um, you know what you could have done there? If you wanted to do better?" He then demonstates a series of button taps and joystick wags that I can't follow. "And that will do her combo reverse and you wouldn't have died so fast."

Thanks, kid. Thanks a fucking lot.

"And then, another thing you could do, you could pick somebody else."

I hate you, kid.

"Because she's not very good. She's one of the not very good characters."

Death and pain, child. Death and pain. I must walk away now, I figure.

"Hey mister, how come you always pick her?"

Because she's pretty. Because I'm twenty-two and if I want to play as a certain video game character on the basis of her being pretty, I can. Because I've been playing video games longer than you've been alive, I'd guess. Because I went to a geography bee in the seventh grade solely because Street Fighter gave taught me the location of world superpowers by showing a little plane that flies to each country and then announcing the name of said country.

And then I say happily, "Gotta go check my laundry!" And then I walk past my laundry because I know it's not done and sit on a bench and read the Independent. I figure I could start doing my laundry during school hours.

Video games, it turns out, are still a lot of fun.

Saturday, March 12, 2005

Ten Thousand Balls of Yarn

My parents called me Wednesday night, but I was at the dress rehearsal for "Cabaret," watching a pigtailed Palmy Palmerston twirl her legs in an entertaining fasion. When I got the message — "Just calling to say hi!" — I naturaly assumed something bad had happened, like my bank account taking a turn for the worse.

The next night I finally called my parents back and they told me the cat had died. I immediately thought back to a conversation with my parents I had during my last few days in London. They told me that they had bad news and I assumed then that the cat had finally kicked the bucket. She was fifteen then — and that was a year and a half ago. Instead, my mom and dad informed me that the departed loved one was my grandmother's sister, who had been like a second grandma for me and my brother.

I dno't feel especially sad. I guess having once mistaken my dead relative for a dead cat kind of shut me off to the idea of missing the cat. If I think about the cat, I end up thinking about how much more I miss Gigi. When I go home on Thursday, I might feel sad when I realize the cat won't be there, waiting to greet me with an indifferent stare — a look, I honestly believe, is cat language for "bring me food or fuck off" — but I can't say for sure until then.



This is the only picture I have of her. She was a good cat, I guess, though if you look at the list of her accomplishments over her nearly seventeen years, it doesn't amount to all that much. Then again, the net result is never all that important.

Wednesday, March 9, 2005

But the Grass Still Looks So Beautiful

See the forest for the trees. See the dead rat for the perfectly green grass beneath it.

Tuesday, March 8, 2005

Conrad the Feeble

And while I write an eight-page paper on The Castle of Otranto, the roommate is out having a good time, eating dinner, proposing to his girlfriend.

Friday, March 4, 2005

Meet the Muddlefoots

As I do every day around 5:30, I was thinking about "Darkwing Duck." On the show, Darkwing's meek alterego, Drake Mallard, lives next to an annoying family. The father is Herb Muddlefoot. The wife is Beaky Muddlefoot. The two sons, if I remember correctly, are Tank and Honker Muddlefoot. Now, judging from the enthusiastic response my last grammar-related post drew, I feel I can benefit from much feedback to this question:

When speaking about Drake Mallard's neighbors as a group, should I call them the Muddlefoots or the Muddlefeet?

I mean, the plural of "foot" is "feet," but should this rule extend to proper names? Input, please, you grammaticians and associated pickers of nits.

Monday, February 28, 2005

Sunday, February 27, 2005

Directions for Using an Emery Board

I am looking at a package of emery boards and the how-to-use instructions are ridiculously lengthy. I quote:
Nails should always be filed when dry to insure [sic] smooth edges. Place the emery board under the nail edge at a slant and file in one direction only. Back-and-forth filing will result in cracking and splitting. For best results, nails should be filed into an oval shape following the fingertip contour. Filing into a point weakens nail. The emery board has two distinct surfaces: a coarser side for shaping and a finer-textured surface for smoothing.
This is why I don't use such things. Too complicated. The last part is what really gets me:
Keep out of reach of children.
I know this is good advice for most things, but how much damage could a little kid do with Dr. Roger-brand emery boards?

Saturday, February 19, 2005

Water

The Mystery of Life, Vol. 841, Chapter 26: "All life begins with Nu and ends with Nu... This is the truth! This is my belief! ... at least for now." Sometimes I just never know what happens next. I can't wait to turn the next page. Honestly, I have no idea.

Friday, February 18, 2005

I'm a Cuckoo

I use Axe body deodorant unabashedly. I don't care if it's the poor man's cologne — or, more correctly, frat guy stink. I like it and will continue using it until I begin to feel too old to do so. While lost in the hygiene aisle today, however, I noticed a trend among the names of Axe's various scents.
  • Orion.
  • Voodoo.
  • Kilo.
  • Tsunami.
  • Essence.
  • Phoenix.
All vaguely natural-sounding, vaguely spiritual, vaguely elemental, vaguely manly. Makes sense, really, considering that they're marketing to guys who want to smell good without paying much or seeming feminine. (Although I think I'd buy at least one novelty can of the scent called Fagtastic.) But I have a quibble with Tsunami. Recent events on the other side of the world lead be to believe that it's not an appropriate name for a scent, especially because I'd imagine the actual scent of a tsunami would be somewhere between sea water and decomposing Indonesian people. And who really wants to smell like that? Thus, please allow me to propose ten possible re-names for the Tsunami scent.
  • Squall. Still wet and powerful and exotic seeming, but not as widely associated with dead.
  • Lynx. Powerful and quick — and coincidentally the name Axe goes by in England.
  • Genesis. Not particularly masculine, but a word a lot of guys would have a positive association with nonetheless.
  • Super Nintendo. Like Lynx and Genesis, it's a defunct video game system. Why not?
  • Hot Asphalt. About as manly as you could get.
  • Peeing on Hot Asphalt. Okay, this is about as manly as you can get.
  • Cobalt. Or Quartz. Or Slate. Most rocks have a sturdy, manly sound to them.
  • Megaton. For that "kaboom" effect. Now that I mention it, Kaboom wouldn't be too bad either.
  • Pickle. Because I like it.
  • Boner. Ultimately, this is what every cologne wants to suggest.
They might as well be up front about it. I'm honestly surprised there isn't a cologne named Boner already. And it wouldn't have to smell like a boner, either. It could smell like anything. The name is just a concept, you see.Thoughts?

Monday, February 7, 2005

Musica Geodesica

A CD that I just burned.
  1. Goldfrapp - "Train"
  2. Chromeo - "Rage!"
  3. E.G. Daily - "Mind Over Matter"
  4. 5.6.7.8's - "I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield"
  5. Electric Light Orchestra - "Mr. Blue Sky"
  6. Luscious Jackson - "Ladyfingers"
  7. Mohammed Rafi - "Jaan Pehechan Ho"
  8. Julee Cruie - "Artificial World"
  9. Broadcast - "The Book Lovers"
  10. Captain Beefheart - "Her Eyes Are Blue a Million Miles"
  11. Icicle Works - "Birds Fly"
  12. Funki Porcini - "Sixteen Megatons"
  13. Pristeens - "Beat You Up"
  14. Grand Funk Railroad - "The Locomotion"
  15. Brothers Johnson - "Strawberry Letter 22"
  16. Electric Six - "Improper Dancing"
  17. Castaways - "Liar Liar"
  18. Clinic - "Welcome"
  19. Aneka - "Japanese Boy"
  20. Myrtle Hilo - "Lover's Prayer"
And I've mentioned Myrtle Hilo, Hawaii's singing cab driver, before in this journal. I haven't listened to her song since summer until today and I still think it's weirdly moving. The lyrics are simple but I think it might be the my favorite long song. So here again are those lyrics.
I do believe the lord above
Created you for me to love
He picked me out from all the rest
Because he knew I'd love you best
I once had a heart that was true
But now it's gone from me to you
Take care of it as I have done
For you have two and I have none
[something indecipherable about heaven]
I'll put your name on a golden spell
If you're not there by judgment day
I'll kow you went the other way
I'll give the angels back their wings
Their golden harps and all those things
And just to prove my love is true
I'll go hell to be with you
I dunno. Something about being willing to go to hell — that's to hell, not through hell — just for love is beautiful. Or horrible. I can't tell and I like that. And I like how casually she throws it into the song. It's nothing. Hell's nothing.

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

The Socio-Cultural Relevance of Stephanie Tanner in Today's Media

I had a revelation.

Does anybody remember that episode of "Full House" where Stephanie dances? She's taking a dance class and has to perform this number to "Motown Philly" and she's way psyched about it.

Do you remember it?

But then the whole Tanner clan starts building up the event and Danny starts recalling his days as a pole vaulter in high school and Stephanie begins to freak out. And then there's this whole dream sequence where everybody in the family is dancing and singing about how great Stephanie is and how great it is that she's performing and Danny sings the lyrics "I'm placing all my childhood ambitions on you"?

Do you remember it?

Well, when it comes time to actually dance, Stephanie freaks out and instead of the choreographed number, which she new cold, she just starts doing this jig. And then she runs away and they stop the music.

Do you remember it?

Okay.

Well, think about that and the remarkable similarity to the Ashlee Simpson debacle on "SNL" earlier this year.

It's totally the same thing. Girl freaks out and at a loss for anything better to do, she jigs.

A jig!

I can think of no other instance in pop culture where a female performer has jigged to cover up her inability to perform correctly on stage.

Tuesday, January 4, 2005

Here's to You, Canada Sue

Boss lady Heather calls me yesterday to tell me that the Flores article with my name on it was the third most read article on National Geographic's news site all year. Yay and all, but the real credit must go to an intrepid little intern whom I call Canada Sue. Of course, I'm still in the byline, so hey.
[ link: Hobbits in the Philippines ]
I'm alive and living in Santa Barbara, by the way. More when all the plugs are plugged and the boxes are un-boxed.