Set on an Open Course for the Virgin Sea

I like Lara Flynn Boyle.

Regardless of what anybody says about her and her pointy, skeleton-like appearance, I think she has a certain appeal on screen. She's pretty, in a defined way, and she has this icy-sexy vibe that verges almost on creepy, but in a good way. Like if Morticia Adams dressed sensibly and went on a diet and had high-paying jobs. No, that's a terrible example. Nonetheless, I've enjoyed her work as troubled teenager Donna Hayward on "Twin Peaks" and as tough-as-nails prosecutor Helen Gamble on "The Practice" and as Wayne's obsessive ex-girlfriend in "Wayne's World." She's versatile — and she used to fuck Jack Nicholson, too.

So when "Las Vegas" came on at Todd and April's and I saw that Lara was a guest star, I was interested. I have never seen an episode of the show before, and though I don't recognize a single one of the regulars, I thought it might be worth a shot. The episode itself was nicely done. A comic book convention has taken over the central hotel — the Montecito hotel and casino, a fictional resort with a slant-rhymed name I can't stop repeating — and so the entire episode is framed in a comic book motif, with paneled, word-bubbled pen and ink drawings leading to and from the live-action shots every time the show went to or returned from a commercial. A nice touch.

The episode also had a underlying theme of things slipping away. Subtle, and far better done than I would have expected, it started with a drag queen singing STYX's "Sailing Away" at a funeral — one of the episodes many subplots. Yes, I realize a drag queen covering a STYX song at a funeral is not subtle, but following that, there's these nice little touches here and there that recall that idea. And that was nice, too.

I can't say I was as impressed with Lara. First off, something horrible happened to her lips. They're bigger, no doubt the result of some cosmetic science experiment. Lara may think they look good. I think they press together in the semblance of a duck bill. We're just going to have to disagree for now, but eventually I think she'll realize that she looks like she's had an allergic reaction to her plummeting body mass index. More importantly, Lara's role sucked. She's a domineering sexpot boss — and a boring one at that. When a role like that is poorly written, it just makes the character a villain and gives people a subconscious reason to hate women that make something of themselves. (A theory of mine.)

Lara's character appeared in the very first shot of the episode, and April immediately recognized the show as a rerun. I was stunned. Sure, I can identify any episode from the first twelve seasons of "The Simpsons" within ten seconds, give or take, but I didn't expect April would have honed so squarely on "Las Vegas." I'd be surprised if anyone has, really.

But then there was the episode's final scene. In it, Lara's character calls one of the regulars up to her office on the hotel's top floor for a tongue-lashing. (The bad kind.) She's standing up there on the windy balcony, yelling and berating and wearing this oddly multicolored nightgown that has a cape. Before you can turn to the person next to you and ask why the fuck she's wearing a cape, the wind whips her and her billowy clothes off the balcony and into the distance, like Spider-Man but without any of the superpower prerequisites that prevent him from falling into the pavement at terminal velocity.

Bam! Blend into comic book-style art. "To be continued..."

Clearly, the character is dead, in a wonderful mingling of the episodes two motifs. This, of course, explains why April could immediatelyt identify the episode as a rerun. Frankly, I'm impressed. It's one of the most out-of-nowhere deaths of a major character since Rosalind Shays stepped into an open elevator shaft in a episode of "L.A. Law" and fell out of the show forever. The death may be a jab at Lara's lack-of-weight problem, but I say that's exactly the kind of wild surprise television needs in its hour-long nighttime soaps.

I can't say that I'll watch the show again, especially since my principle draw is pavement goo, but for what it's worth, "Las Vegas" gave me one more reason to like Lara Flynn Boyle.

They Put Their Legs in the Air

I stopped by my brother's place tonight. He told me that he and his girlfriend are looking at places for a wedding reception, which everyone should find funny since the two are still not yet engaged. Curious to this whole wedding process, I asked him who will front the money for this event: him, our parents or April's. Traditionally, it should be the bride's parents, they explained. (And I think back to that Steve Martin movie, my prime reference for this sort of thing, and that seems right.) So I joked that if Todd and April are going to have a traditional wedding, then her parents should also pay us a dowry. Once we settled on livestock as the appropriate currency for this transaction, April suggested that her family's fainting goats would work best.

"Fainting goats?"

It sounds ridiculous, but apparently these animals actually exist. Also known as "Nervous goats," "Stiff-leg goats, "Wooden leg goats" and "Tennessee Scare goats," this particular breed are genetically predisposed to react to predators by becoming rigid and falling over. (Oh, how wonderful my childhood could have been.) The condition is called "myotonia."

Here is a photo of a myotonic goat.

I know it looks like a sleeping cat, but I have to believe that the International Fainting Goat Association would post a picture of a cat in place of a goat.

No wait. Here is a better picture. I'd delete the first one, but I find it too amusing it its cat-like qualities.


According to April, the function of the fainting goat is to use them as sacrificial bait for predators. If you stick a fainting goat in with a flock of sheep, for example, it will keel over when the wolves show up, allowing the sheep time to escape while the wolves strip his stiff, little body of goat-meat. I suppose you could say that you'd be using your fainting goat as a bit of scapegoat, though the etymology for the latter term doesn't support the theory, I'm shocked to find.

For more information on fainting goats and the people who raise them, visit the official club website for the International Fainting Goat Association. (And please, note the logo.)

Encyclopedia Drew and the Mystery of the Mixed-Up Currency

As my grandmother cleans out the house she's been living in for the past fifty years, she comes across things that she'd like to pass down to younger generations of the family. As a result, it's now not uncommon to receive Christmas presents from her that verge on heirloom status. Some family members complain, but I like the practice.

This last Christmas — a day that, as of this writing, is more than a month past — my grandmother gave my brother and me each half a collection of Japanese pesos. The only background information she could supply was that her cousin Dave had picked these up during his stint in southeast Asia in World War II. She didn't know how or why the Japanese government got to printing pesos, much less disseminating them through out the Pacific.

Having never been to southeast Asia, I can't identify the tall tower depicted on these bills. I can, however, clearly read the word "peso" — not "yen" or "dollar" or "giant stone coin of the Yap islander." What's especially odd to me about these bills is that the text reads "one peso" and "the Japanese government" in plain English text.

I eventually got around to researching these weird bills online and found that they are the result of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II. It seems obvious, in retrospect. The Philippines still use the peso as its currency today, and English is one of its official languages. It seems that when the Japanese took over the Philippines, they tried to force this currency on the Filipino people. Essentially IOUs from the Japanese, the bills were met with resistance from the Filipinos, who dubbed them "Mickey Mouse dollars" and correctly figured that they'd never be worth anything. Instead, the people persisted in using crude, homemade currencies.

I wish there was more info about the Japanese peso online. So far, all I've gotten that still works is the talk section for the Wikipedia page on the Filipino peso — good ol' Wikipedia, once again — and this eBay page detailing one guy's attempt to sell his pesos for, I'm guessing, actual money. I suppose there's this page to now, so good luck to you future researchers of the Japanese peso.

I like these bills, and not only for their status as a trivial footnote in recent world history. Just looking at them, I feel like they represent some crazy intersection of too many cultues sweeping through one area in too short a time. The Japanese government, English text, a Filipino monument, a currency that initially began in Spain and a graphic design that to me looks like it was inspired by that of the American dollar. In a way, these short-lived bills are nicely emblematic of the Philippines in general. This little nation has been unfortunately bitched around by bigger nations for such a long time that its currency looks like some kind of multicultural singles mixer.

That, plus the fact that when I read "THE JAPANESE GOVERNMENT" all in caps like that, I hear it in this ridiculously official megaphone voice. And that's funny.

[ "m" minus some serious hardcore. do you get it yet? ]

Trivia on the Superhuman Scale

Being back in Crawllister forces me to care about the little things. For instance: this article in the Hollister Free Lance noting how my sad, lonely little hometown was mentioned in an article of a spin-off X-Men miniseries.

In the comic, a mutant named Erg explains how his uncle was one of the Hell's Angels who rioted in Hollister in the 1940s. The incident, which was overblown by the media and which eventually inspired the Marlon Brando film "The Wild One," involved only a few actual berserkers. By and large, most of the motorcyclists in Hollister at the time were as much bystanders to carnage as the town's residents were. Those who later studied the event figured that approximately one percent of the motorcyclists present had engaged in the wild criminal behavior that news media had so widely publicized. As a result of that estimation, many Hell's Angels — the fictional Erg's fictional uncle included — wore a pin bearing the phrase "one percent."

Anyway, the printed article had a scan from the actual comic. It's very strange to see accurate historical information about my town being printed in word bubbles with that thick all-capped font you see in comic books. But I suppose you'll just have to imagine what it's like.

Well, go ahead.

The Punctuation Round-Up, Part Two

Last March, when I should have been preparing for my History 4A exam, I wrote a blog entry detailing the etymologies behind the long-lost letter “thorn,” the omnipresent-but-mysterious ampersand and the obscure interrobang. This is the follow-up to that entry, “Etymology Round-Up.”

[ “S” Goes to Jail ]

Like many people, I have used the dollar sign ($) without ever understanding precisely why an “S” with lines going through it represents the basic unit of American currency. I had heard initially that the sign comes from the expression “pieces of eight,” which is piratespeak for money. In that sense, the dollar sign was literally that — the “S” was actually the remaining chunks of the number 8, after having been divided by vertically cutting lines. But oh, if only it were that simple.

There are quite a few other origin stories that don’t pan out either. One, proffered by the United States Mint, claims that the modern-day dollar sign evolved from a logo that combined the “U” and “S” in the institution’s name, though apparently not the “M.” Ayn Rand apparently endorses this explanation of the sign in Atlas Shrugged. According to the website of researcher Roy Davies, the tenth chapter of Rand's book is titled "The Sign of the Dollar," and in it Rand claims that "the dollar sign was the symbol not only of the currency, but also the nation, a free economy, and a free mind." Though this one would appear to make the most sense, most researchers have seemingly abandoned it as a possible explanation because the dollar sign predates the founding of the United States. (Suck on that, Ayn.) The U.S. Mint website doesn't even list it — or any — explanation in their FAQ section.

Another different history, offered by the U.S. Bureau of Printing and Engraving, claims that the symbol was born as a result of a union of the letters “P” and “S” — as in “peso” or “piastre” or “pieces of silver” or, again, “pieces of eight.” The "S" was apparently written in superscript next to the "P" in "old manuscripts," though these ancient documents aren't cited and God knows where they could be. (This website for the bureau mentions this origin on its FAQ page — scroll down to the bottom third of the page.) This explanation accounts for the fact that the dollar sign was in use to denote other forms of currency long before the United States officially adopted it in 1785, and as a result seems to be the most favored possibility. However, the one vertical bar of the "P" doesn't account for the two vertical bars of the sign itself. (Though I should note that the iMac keyboard I'm typing on now only shows the sign with one vertical bar.)

The Wikipedia site for the dollar sign has a neat little graphic depicting how either the P-S or U-S explanations might have come to be.

Other, less popular theories abound. One purports that the dollar sign derives from an abbreviation for "shilling" — a form a British currency popular around the same time the Britons were drawing slashes through things to indicate that an abbreviation was being used. The still-used symbol for the British pound — £ — also has a slash, albeit a horizontal one.

Another unpopular explanation links the sign to slavery — and the Spanish words esclavo and clavo, meaning "slave" and "nail," respectively. Davies writes that "the shackles worn by slaves could be locked by a nail which was passed through the rings or loops at the ends of the shackle and bent while it was still hot and malleable." In short, the bent loops of the shackle looked like an "S." Once locked, they looked like an "S" with a line through it.

"S" + clavo ("nail") = S-clavo, or esclavo, meaning "slave"

To me, this seems at best another folk etymology, though one that works nicely when you consider what a large part of worldwide economy slaves once composed.

There's even a proposed connection to the Portuguese cifrão, a remarkably similar-looking character that Brazilians use to mark the transition from dollars to cents, much as we use a decimal point. (Well, not dollars and cents, but escudos and centavos. But you get the idea.)

What the Wikipedia entry concludes with, however, is an even stranger origin story for this little guy — and in my opinion, the one that most smacks of the truth. Some theorists link the dollar sign to the Pillars of Hercules, the twinned outcroppings that mark the Strait of Gibraltar — the nautical gateway to the new world. The logo of the two pillars superimposed over images of earth's two hemispheres — Eurasia and this new America thing — appeared on popular Spanish coins after Columbus' expedition and remained there until well after the United States declared its independence from Britain. The two circles representing the then-known world devolved into an "S" and the pillars became twin vertical strikes.

This explanation accounts for the double strike as well as the signs worldwide popularity. After all, the United States isn't the only nation to employ the dollar sign. Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile and Cuba also use it. Finally, it makes for sense than the shilling theory, because it seems unlikely that the United States would employ an out-dated currency symbol once held by the then-hated Britain.

Somewhere in these, there's the truth, but I feel like someone with more time than I have will be the one to sort it out.

[ all for you, lauren deny custard ]

What a Tacky Sunset, What a Vulgar Moon

Going back through the mnemonic device I was taught to remember the names of the planets in our solar system — yes, the one about the very eccentric mother — I was suddenly struck with the comparative crappiness of the name of the planet I'm writing this on. Earth — as in, a synonym for "dirt." Literally, our planet shares its name with some of the smallest particles that make up its outer layers. Our nearest neighbors, as pop culture self-help books remind us, share names with this great figures from Roman mythology — Mars, the uber-manly symbol of wrathful warfare, and Venus, the embodiment of all things sexy to the point that her name gives us the itchy, scratchy term "venereal." But here we sit in the middle, with no clear mythological figure to look up to. Even the two celestial bodies most important to Earth — the moon and the sun — get the shaft, as far as names go. Rather than calling them by their Roman names, we stick them with the generic terms for such things. Just a plain old sun, and a boring moon. We could have easily called the sun "Sol," I suppose, and the moon "Luna." Or something like that. But no. Other planet's moons — bodies which, I understand, have fairly little impact upon the daily lives of Earthlings — get fantastic names, like Europa and Ganymede and the like. We, however, insist upon referring the ones important to us as if they were the most humdrum, run-of-the-mill sun and moon we could possibly come across.

What I propose: If we're to rename the Sun, Moon and Earth, I vote that we either call them by their Roman names so as to fall in line with the rest of the solar system and call the three Sol, Luna and Terra, respectively. But if we really go through with this, I say we shoot the moon, so to speak. My suggestions for the new names for the Sun, Moon and Earth are — again, respectively — Superman, Moonie the Best Moon Ever, and the Wonderful Planet of Funk.

The Math of the Surreally Yellow

I must admit I’m a little pissed. I received the seventh-season DVD box set of “The Simpsons” for Christmas — the one that includes the episode “Twenty-Two Short Films About Springfield,” which I’ve considered one of the best in the series. It plays exactly as the name indicates it should: a bunch of loosely interconnected vignettes about the various residents of Springfield, somewhat in the style of “Pulp Fiction” or this art house flick called “Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.”

My major issue with the episode, however, is that it doesn’t contain twenty-two clear-cut segments. Those in the episode go as follows:

1. Bart and Milhouse spit at cars from an overpass
2. Apu in “The Jolly Bengali” segment, complete with title card and theme song
3. Lisa gets gum in her hair
4. Smithers gets stung by a bee
5. Dr. Nick has his medical license reviewed, then prevents Grandpa Simpson from dying of “skin failure”
6. Moe’s Tavern gets robbed
7. The “Skinner and the Superintendent” segment, complete with title card and theme song
8. Homer gets Maggie stuck in a newspaper vending machine
9. Chief Wiggum and his deputies discuss McDonald’s
10. Bumblebee Man’s house implodes
11. Chief Wiggum runs down Snake
    
12. Rev. Lovejoy’s dog shits on Flanders’ lawn
13. “Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel” segment, complete with title card and theme song
14. Milhouse and his Dad free Wiggum and Snake from the antique store
15. Nelson Mocks an extremely tall man
16. “The Tomfoolery of Professor John Frink” segment, complete with title card and theme song

The Lisa segment gets two sequels, so to speak, one involving the entire town trying to help her de-gum her hair and another involving a barber giving her a haircut — “I finally look like a real person! Thanks!” — and Bart gets another segment involving spitting that kind of bookends the entire show. At best, however, this makes nineteen.

Back when the episode first aired and I was just beginning to use the internet as an extra fix for my TV addiction, I looked the episode up and found that it was initially going to include two other segments: “Ralphplane,” involving the younger Wiggum and Krusty, and “Marge the Hostage.” (In retrospect, Ralph, Krusty and Marge seem like glaring omissions from the line-up of characters listed above. Well, them and Patty and Selma and Dr. Hibbert.) In fact, I can remember seeing a shot of Ralph and Krusty seated next to each other in an airplane in the original advertisements in the week before “Twenty-Two Short Films” first aired. Since the footage actually existed at some point — It had to! I saw it! — I eagerly awaited catching these two missing segments in the deleted scenes that the DVD box sets are so careful to include.

But no.

The only deleted scene provided for “Twenty-Two Short Films About Springfield” is an extended version of the “Jolly Bengali” title card and nothing more. As a last resort, I actually listened through the commentary to the episode to see if the people who made it might have any insight. They do indeed mention these two segments — noting that “Marge the Hostage” is some sort of fantasy sequence that ended in Marge being in a foul mood, hence her indifference to whether Lisa recycles later in the episode — and they claim that the segments should be included in the deleted scenes. (The writers also explain that the episode’s title is a reference to the Glenn Gould film and that they made the episode without bothering to count the vignettes.) They lie, however, as the missing segements just aren't there.

“Ralphplane and “Marge the Hostage,” I suppose, will be gone forever, which sucks for so many reasons, the least of them I can best explain in the following manner: “Come on! It’s Ralph. And Krusty. Together. On a plane! How could that not be the best thing ever?!”

So damn — has my imagination deluded me once again or have I just purchased a defective version of this particular DVD?