As You Walk Along With Your Ding-Ding-Dong

Just watch this this 1975 video of the song “Ding a Dong,” the winning entry of the 1975 Eurovision Song Contest, as performed by the inexplicably named disco band Teach-In.

Okay, so a few things.

Why does the audience look so miserable? Okay, sure, the song sucks, but why would they go to this show in the first place?

Wait, was this actually East Germany?

Was attendance to the disco party compulsory?

Were they shopped in after the fact using so-called “green screen” technology?

Is there a song where the word dong gets mentioned more often?

I think Dina put it best when she attempted to comprehend how this thing came about: “Someone had to have written this down at some point. And then showed it to someone else. And then they recorded it.”

Another point for Dina: “Is she saying ‘Maybe it’s a bigot’?”

Is the whole point of the song to be constantly singing so you never feel sad? That seems like a poor plan, seeing as how no one will want to be your friend if you’re dinging dongs all day. I mean, she’s there singing this song on a microphone and no one in the audience looks remotely happy. WHERE DID SINGING GET YOU, LADY FROM TEACH-IN?

At 2:03, she attempts to make contact with one of the robots in the audience and my heart just aches for her, this lonely ding-dong woman from West Germany.

This is all. Go forth and ding all the dongs.

OMG, you have to hear this, but not because it’s good, previously:

• “Happy Song,” by Boney M, as well as other disco-based school invasions
• “I’m on Fire,” by Maggie Mae
• “You Bring Out the Savage in Me,” by Frances Day
• “Banana,” by Jane Chiquita
• “At the Same Time, You Are Crazy Mind, Crazy Mind,” by Daydream
• “The Swim,” by Little Nell
• “Les sucettes (The Lollipops),” by France Gall
• “Neon City 1978,” by Mistral

The Bell Pepper With Something Extra

I’ll admit that cutting into a bell pepper reveals a whole alien world inside, that cluster of seeds clinging to the center like some kind of alien egg sack. But in preparing to open up this dinner ingredient, I certainly didn’t expect to find a small bell pepper penis.

I choose to call this a penis and not, for example, a tiny bell pepper parasitic twin because in examining the freakiness further, I found two smaller, rounder entities nestled in the corner. Obviously, these were bell pepper testicles.

In the end, I chopped up the whole thing and deposited it, pseudogenitals and all, into pan. Meal cooked. Meal consumed. Does this mean I’m pregnant with bell peppers now? Am I the host to a future race of super bell peppers?

Plants that want to be people, previously:

• The Ghost Tree of Malaysia
• The Watermelon Who Wanted to Become a Man
  
• The Face Lemons of Goleta
• The Vegetal What-Is-It of Pasado Road
• Orchids Look Like Ladyparts, Mushrooms Look Like Manparts
  
• The Bamboo Is Taking Over

Action County USA

So remember earlier in the month, when I blogged, if ever so tersely, about the fact that my city was on fire? Well, they put the fire out. Now we’re flooding. In fact, some of the same people who had to flee the Tea Fire and would have only recently returned to their homes are now evacuating again to escape mud and flood. In another post, I concluded with this thought: “It truly does seem that if it is not one thing then it must be another.” This would seem to be the case.

On a lighter note, area officials sent out a map of Santa Barbara this evening, with the mandatory evacuation area colored purple and, colored yellow, the areas that may yet be evacuated tonight. Unfortunately, the shape of the flood-endangered Sycamore Canyon lends the purple shape a certain penile protrusion into the Eastside. That little pointer, combined with the yellow fluid spilling out from the tip and all the way down to the 101, looks more than a little like male member pissing all over Santa Barbara.

Which would be appropriate.

see the flood penis in greater detail by clicking here.

A correction, I guess: If it’s not one thing then it must be another — and then again it might also be a penis.

The Rooster Stampede of 1978

Courtesy of Dina, two things:

The below image, in which the cut-out design in a rail along a sidewalk in some unfortunate town cast a shadow that looks like so many penises.

courtesy eyje.com

And the ensuing discussion on Reddit, which, as Dina pointed out, discusses the value — or lack thereof — in the interrobang, only a day after I recalled my original post about this elusive and so-very-special punctuation mark.

Turtle Rock Ain't Got Nothing on This

I'd heard of it before, but played through the stage many times without ever seeing it. That changed today.

So Mario Kart Wii has bestowed my house with delightful, banana peel-strewn races for the last week now. But this post isn't reviewing the game so much as shedding light on what amounts to a Nintendo version of the Little Mermaid VHS box cover scandal. In addition to offering sixteen new courses to race on, Mario Kart Wii also offers retro stages from five of the series's earlier incarnations, including ones from the Gamecube title Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, which had previously occupied my houses more drunken late-night hours. One of these stages is Peach Beach, the sea-skirting Princess Peach-themed stage.

Only driving through it again, in its slightly altered, Wii-updated form, did I finally see the alleged penis in the rock archway the course runs under.

Here's the only image I could find. It's from Double Dash!!, but the rock basically looks the same in either version.


The fact that the rock is pink doesn't help, of course, but it's hard to deny that that that looks a hell of a lot like a pair of balls on the left with the shaft arching over the sandy raceway into a fairly prominent head on the right side. The above image isn't taken from the best of angles, but it's there. Here's another one I found of Penis Rock, viewed from afar.


And one more, equally bad, but equally showing the famed Penis Rock.


Strange, especially for something that came from a company as decidedly kid-friendly as Nintendo. Of course, all that on-the-surface wholesomeness has to create an opposite and equal reaction, right?

Gingerbread Endowment

Taken this morning at the Williams-Sonoma in La Cumbre Plaza.

I'm not sure whether the Mister or the Missus has more to smile about.

Trouser Mice

One more spam email before the close of the year, this one more disturbing than most in its use of mice running through your pants as a metaphor for penises. If I had mice in my trousers, I certainly wouldn't want them any larger than they already are. The fact that she's writing me from a Hersheys.com email address makes it all the more disturbing, though I suppose feeding mice chocolate would make them bigger.

Yesenia Doty, you're a painter of words.

The Roving Ambassador of Romance

Ahem.


During discussion of famously unhappy heiresses — namely Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton — I learned of the existence of one Porfirio Rubirosa, a notorious Dominican playboy who kept his name in tabloids during the first half of the twentieth century by romancing a succession of ladies that reads like a Who's Who of Bombshells. The list includes, but is not limited to, the following: Delores Del Rio, Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Soraya Esfansiary (wife of the Shah of Iran), Veronica Lake, Kim Novak, Eva Peron, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and of course Duke and Hutton. Beyond his ladies, Rubirosa was the subject of gossip also for the purported size of penis. The Wikipedia states that his member was described by Truman Capote (!) as "an 11-inch cafe au lait sinker as thick as a man's wrist." The Rubirosa wang was so famous, in fact, that today large restaurant-style pepper grinders are apparently known as "rubirosas."

This is perhaps one of the best legacies I've ever heard of anyone leaving, ever.

This is a fact that I find all the more hilarious in light of the following fact: At my birthday dinner, Hannah suffered the indignity of having the waitress's pepper grinder partly disassemble and drop its cap in her risotto.

His Phallic Nose

I stumbled across this old bit of promotional art for Pac-Man, back when his Japanese called him "Puck Man." The "puck" — which apparently stemmed from the onomatopoetic paku paku paku noise he makes as he gobbles dots — was rightfully switched out in favor of "pac" for the American release, as us rowdy types would have no doubt had a field day with the name.


Looking at this art, however, I think I'm more disturbed by the coincidence of the name "Puck Man" and the penis-like protrusion sticking off his face. I'm guessing the shortening of the Pac-Man's nose was in furtherance of the effort to de-pornify him.