Note From My Doctor

Dear Back of the Cereal Box readers,

Drew is unable to blog because he was bitten by a yeti. He will blog again when the yeti bite heals. It should not be long. If you see a yeti, run, because its bite may make you reluctant to blog.

Sincerely,
Dr. Norman P. Mufflepuff, M.D.

The Forgotten Jar Pixies

Anyone that actually played through the first Super Mario Bros. all the way to the end of level 8-4 should remember the game’s ending: a generic thank you from a pixelated mess that is supposed to be Princess Peach followed by Mario’s inexplicable reappearance back at the beginning of level 1-1. Only now the game’s levels were populated with the hard-to-kill beetle enemies. Beetle World, my brother and I called it.

Super Mario Bros. 2 offers something a little more cinematic.

When Mario — or, as the case may be, Luigi, Peach or Toad — does in the game’s final boss, Wart, by tossing a sufficient number of vegetables into his mouth, he dies, causing to materialize a door that leads to a plugged-up vase. Mario — or, again, whoever — pulls the plug and out spring eight strange-looking fairies whom the game hasn’t previously mentioned in any way. They don’t introduce themselves, but celebrate their liberation from their cruel amphibian captor and push his corpse crowd surfer-style into oblivion. (Yes, the game is strange.)


Then, of course, Mario wakes up, revealing the whole of Super Mario Bros. 2 to be a dream. As he snoozes away, the “cast” scrolls by — again, very cinematically, even more so than many games since. Included in the list of characters — in the list of enemy characters, no less — is the mysterious fairy. Its apparent name: Subcon — a fairly lame play on the word subconscious. Which is especially strange, since the name of the place in which Super Mario Bros. 2 takes place — per the game’s instruction manual and its intro screen as well — is also Subcon.

See for yourself:

images courtesy of the video game museum

The obvious conclusion would be that the little characters are, in fact, called “Subcon,” and the fact that they share their name with the place they live in is either a happy coincidence or some great symbolic association. (They are their country. Like America Ferrera or something.) As any keen-eyed person who has ever played Super Mario Bros. 2 through knows, however, the end credits are chock-full of typos. Birdo is “Ostro.” Clawgrip, the rock-throwing crab boss, is “Clawglip.” And so forth. So perhaps the Subcon fairies’ names are screw-ups as well. “Ostro” and “Clawglip” have been fixed down the line in various Super Mario Bros. 2 remakes, however, and the “Subcon” name has remained.

So who or what the hell are these things?

As far as I know, they’re just as mysterious in the game’s original version, Doki Doki Panic. (If they’re better explained and you know this and you’re reading this now, by all means please tell me.) And while a lot of that which populates Super Mario Bros. 2 was eventually pulled into the stable of regular Mario game elements, these little weirdos never showed up again.

I guess we’ll never know. Unless we’ve played through Doki Doki Panic and know the secret, in which case you probably do know and should tell me pronto.

EDIT: Just found the Doki Doki Panic ending on YouTube. Cleared up nothing.

Except that the Arabian family owns a pet monkey.

THANKS A MILLION. PUSH START TO REPLAY.

High Art, Local News — Part Two

A headline I just wrote:

Fence to Deter Pooping in Creek, City Hopes

Where was that grad school application, again?

Dogs and Gossip

While I’ve only seen two episodes of Gossip Girl and while I have only a superficial awareness of Tinsley Mortimer, I appreciate a good rip against a public figure when I hear one. Take, for example, Gawker’s treatment of the socialite, handbag designer and general target of ridicule. They drop the news that she will be making a guest appearance on Gossip Girl — which, by the way, features the talent of Kristen Bell and which for that reason alone has value. Given the character of the show as I understand it, Mortimer is a perfect fit. Then they promise an exclusive clip of the show featuring her.

This is what they show:

This delights me for several reasons. First: everything about it. I don’t know why anyone would have thought to make such a movie, but I’m eternally grateful that they did. Secondly, I can’t help but imagine Mortimer — who doubtlessly is aware of the blogs that mock her as the characters on Gossip Gir are of the online piddlings that drive the plot of the show — idly checking up on what the blogosphere has to say about her today. She’d see this, but not being the kind of person who gets jokes, and just sit in a state of total bewilderment. “Why do they say I’m dogs? Who are these dogs? Why do they say I’m dogs?!”

Amazing.

The clip, by the way, comes from something called The Dogway Melody, which we should doubtlessly all watch in its entirety at some point in our lives.

Amsterdam Breakfast

It’s nice to have relatives from out-of-the-country come and stay. It’s nicer when they say things adorably foreign. I nearly thought the Swiss Cousin Lorenzo would complete his entire stay without making any such slip-up, likely as a result of the fact that he’s been studying English in San Francisco all summer and now consequently speaks quite well, but this morning at IHOP he referred to the shredded, pan-friend potato bits on his plate as “hash brownies.” No no, Swiss Cousin Lorenzo, in the United States we don’t eat hash brownies for breakfast.

The difference between hash brownies and hash browns was explained.

Do You Not Hear the Thunder?

Men at Work’s 1981 hit “Down Under,” translated into a prose narrative.

Traveling in an old van on a trail frequented by unwashed youths, I had a hangover. I encountered a strange woman who made me nervous, but I nonetheless went with her back to her home. Though I’d rather gloss over the subject, we had sexual intercourse. The next morning, while eating, she finally realized I was Australian and asked me about it.

“Are you from Australia, where the women are always pregnant and men are habitual thieves? Do you not hear thunder?” she asked. “You’d better run, better take cover.” She presumably was referring to the thunder when she suggested that I take cover.

Then, another time, I was buying bread from a man in Brussels. He was in rather good shape. I asked him if he spoke the Australian dialect of English in which words like “combie” and “chunder” are understood. Then he gave me a sandwich smeared with yeast paste. Then he began speaking.

“I’m from Australia, where people drink a lot of beer and male inhabitants vomit, presumably as a result of plentiful beer,” he said. “Do you not hear thunder? You’d better run, better take cover.” Again, presumably he was referring to the thunder, which has apparently followed me to Belgium.

Another time, I was in Mumbai, visiting an opium den. As a result of heavy intoxication, I was prostrate and slack-jawed. I asked the man, possibly the opium den manager, “Are you trying to tempt me because I come from a nation that seems rich and plentiful in comparison to yours?”

Then the man said to me the following: “Oh! Do you come from Australia Where the woman are always pregnant and the men are habitual thieves? Do you not hear thunder? You’d better run, better take cover.” You see, because the thunder had at this point followed me from Belgium to India.

Loses a bit, doesn’t it? And, also, who knew that the song was called just “Down Under” and not “Land Down Under”?

Apparently this will have to suffice for the second song of the week, the first of which was this better song. Back on track next week.

The Roynish Clone

Wish I could remember where I found this one, but I can’t. It simply appeared mysteriously on my unsorted list of candidates for word of the week. I chose it for this post simply because we’re now at “R” and it was the first on the list to begin with this letter. It’s also the first word of the week to have strong Shakespearean association, as many definitions of it cite a line spoken to Duke Frederick in As You Like It: “My lord, the roynish clown, at whom so oft Your Grace was wont to laugh, is also missing.”

roynish (ROIN-ish) — adjective: mangy; scabby; mean; paltry; troublesome.

This tragically out-of-use word, which is sometimes also spelled roinish, probably doesn’t mean all of those things at once but can instead mean any of them in a given social situation. You have to admit, however, that one word that could potentially pack in all five slams against one’s hygiene or demeanor is pretty great, especially because it doesn’t sound like a bad word. If put in the proper context, it could sound downright regal.

The Wiktionary claims that roynish comes from the French rogneux, which in turn came from the French word rogne, meaning “scab,” “mange,” or “itch.” Through Answers.com, I found another etymology. (And, yes, I realize that comparing Wiktionary information against Answers.com information could possibly be as worthwhile a venture as comparing bus stop restroom graffiti with tenement elevator graffiti. “This one says ‘Mexico sucks balls’ while the other says ‘U.S.A. sucks cock.’ What to make of this disparity?”) According to an Answers.com affiliate called simply “Obscure Words” — which itself is rather obscure, as it’s not linked to in any way from Answers.com — roynish traces back to the French roin, “scurf”or “scab” to the Vulgar Latin ronea. My non-Vulgar Latin dictionary doesn’t have an entry for ronea and efforts to find an online Vulgar Latin dictionary resulted only in online dictionary definitions of the term “Vulgar Latin,” so I guess that path ends there.

The “Obscure Words” definition also offers the spelling roinous, which Microsoft Word AutoCorrect insists on changing to ruinous. While I’m on the subject of technical failures, a Google search for the spelling roinish offers the correction “Did you mean finish?” No, Google, I didn’t. I’m not yet that stupid.

Regardless of precisely where the term came from, I enjoy it as a wonderfully awful alternative to the overused stable of pejorative adjectives we English-speakers have to use against unpleasant people. As this blog demonstrates in the post “Thou roynish, eye-offending hedge-pig,” roynish appears as one of the mix-and-match terms in the Elizabethan Curse Generator, which surely will delight us all.

Previous words of the week:

• quacksalver
  
• qualtagh
  
• pismire
• orf
  
• nobiliary particle
  
• mongo
  
• lemniscate
  
• longicorn
  
• kakopygian
  
• jehu
• itaiitai
• grandgore
• fissilingual