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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.