The Breastsummer in Midwinter

The following word-of-the-week is easily the one so far with the most beautiful sound and the most comparatively plain meaning. Get ready for disappointment.

breastsummer (BREST-sum-uhr) — noun: a horizontal beam supporting a wall over a large opening, such as a shop window.

Though those words make sense, I felt a visual aid would better explain the term. The below photo, which comes from the Wikipedia page for timber framing, illustrates a certain kind of breastsummer: the jetty breastsummer. Unless I’m mistaken, it’s the beam at the base of the upper level that’s pushed out beyond the wall of the lower level.

Surely not as sexy as one might hope a Google image search for breastsummer might turn up, but educational, at least. To tell the truth, Google image search was less than helpful in finding an actual picture of a breastsummer.

Next to the above, the runner up was this:

It’s a meat platter that happens to contain turkey breast and summer sausage.

According to A.Word.A.Day, the term — which can also be spelled bressummer, though I say “Where’s the fun in that?” — comes from a combination of the architectural term breast, meaning “the part of the wall between a window and the floor,” and the Old French word somier, meaning “packhorse” or “beam” and coming from the Latin sagma, meaning “packsaddle.”

If you ever see a breastsummer out in the wild, be sure to point out its unusual sexiness.

• adulterine, ambeer
• barrack, bissextile
• cecaelia, cranberry morpheme, cummingtonite
• deasil
• epeolatry
• fissilingual
• grandgore
• itaiitai
• jehu
• kakopygian
• lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, mongo
• nobiliary particle
• ooglification, ordured, orf
• pareidolia, pismire, pong
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh
• roynish
• scrutator, shebang
• tiffin, tittery-whoppet, toby
• ucalegon
• veneficial
• witzelsucht
• xenodocheionology
• ypsiliform
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic

Ronald McDonald, as Designed by Stephen King

Something that terrified me as a child: the notion that Ronald McDonald himself was hiding in the bushes, waiting to wave terrifyingly at me at the drive-thru.

I was buying coffee, I swear.

Return to Caninopolis (However Brief)

Before I forget entirely about my adventure at the dog show, I should mention that there’s one photo I took at the dog show that features no four-legged ambassadors of puppy love. No dog show weirdos, either.

Just this:

It makes me laugh. Not being a dog show person, I don’t know what the hell it means, but I think it would be fun to tape to people’s backs.

Readers: Any idea what “best of opposite sex” means? Like, how does that even work? How can anything be the opposite sex?

Call Me Tanya... From The Simpsons

Quite a while ago, a book was purchased for me: The Simpsons Rainy Day Fun Book. It being exactly what it sounds like, I happily cut out the various exercises and tricks the book offers — in retrospect, in an effort to appease parents of children who had become enamored with such catchphrases as “Don’t have a cow, man” and “Eat my shorts.” Think paper airplanes, word puzzles, fun recipes kids can make(!) and the like.

A slightly less while ago, someone gave me a second version of this book: the aforementioned activity book combined with its dry weather version, The Simpsons Ultra-Jumbo Rain-or-Shine Fun Book, which included outdoor activities as well as the ones created to entertain the homebound and resentful.

It’s from this second, two-faced version of the book that I have scanned what you see below, which came from a paper-puppet activity which was titled “Put On Your Own TV Show” and which encouraged children to position paper cut-out versions of Simpsons characters in front of a backdrop of the Simpson family living room, with the expectation that this would be somehow fun. I suppose it might have been. I never partook. However, I did flip past these pages, which included various members of the Simpsons cast, all of which were immediately familiar, save for one: some bitch named Tanya.

Observe:

What the hell? Really, even nine-year-old me would have felt the need to ask, “Who on Ganesha’s green earth is Tanya?”

If you’ll note the page Tanya appears on — the second of three, I note, as I flip through the book today — she appears to be deserving of being located on the same page as such Springfield Elementary regulars as Principal Skinner, Mrs. Krabappel, Otto, Nelson, and Milhouse. (Barney, Apu and Moe appear on the same page, but, given Tanya’s height, I’d guess she’s not intended to be a bar patron or Kwik-E-Mart employee.)

Her appearance alongside instantly recognizable Simpsons characters is puzzling. I mean, even I — a diehard Simpsons fan — don’t readily recognize her. I might assume her presence results from a desire on the parts of the book’s creators to appeal to any potential female rain-plagued activity seekers. After all, by virtue of being massively unpopular, Lisa Simpson lacks any female friends worth exhibiting. Bart too. Even the villainous twincicles Sherri and Terri appear on the subsequent page, curiously alongside such antagonists as Mr. Burns and Sideshow Bob. In fact, the closest that Lisa has to a good friend would be Janey Powell, the dark brown-haired and pink-dressed friend who originally appeared in “Bart the General” and who infrequently pops in again whenever it’s convenient that Lisa has a friend. Otherwise, Lisa is friendless. (Kind of like Family Guy’s Meg Griffin, come to think of it.) Janey does not get to be a cut-out. Anyway, I really do think that the presence of the mysterious Tanya results only from the fact that she has both earrings and a necklace and someone involved in the creation of this Simpsons-themed book assumed these qualities would appeal to girls.

But, it turns out, Tanya does actually have a place in Simpsons history, however small. It took a while, but as a result of the fact that I couldn’t shake the feeling that Tanya didn’t look wholly strange, I eventually thought of where I might have seen her before: The second-ever episode of The Simpsons, “Bart the Genius,” in which Bart tricks the world into thinking he’s special-in-the-good-way and consequently ends up in smart kid school.

Among his fellow students is none other than Tanya.

See?

I can only imagine that the makers of the Simpsons Rainy Day Fun Book decided that the show lacked any appealing young female characters and consequently named and showcased Tanya, in hopes that she’d eventually make her way back onto the show. After all, the original book hit shelves in 1991, when either the second season was ending or the third one was beginning. Many characters had not yet grown into the roles they have now. However, we’re currently at the twentieth season now, when even seeming one-timers like Princess Kashmir and Ms. Albright and Lurleen Lumpkin have made repeat appearances. Tanya has not appeared again, so it would be a pretty safe bet to say that we won’t.

Mystery solved, I guess, but what a strange bit to trip us up upon, so many years down the road. And what ever happened to Tanya? Did she — unlike the rest of the Simpsons cast — continue to age realistically since she was Bart’s classmate in 1990? Is she really 29 now? Did she opt to not be featured again on The Simspons? Is she relieved? Resentful?

Those questions, I suppose, would demand another post.

The Simpsons, previously:

• So Hungry I Could Eat at Arby’s
• How The Simpsons Introduced Me to George W. Bush
• Mad Men on The Simpsons

Some Blue December

A deserted patch of country land feels even emptier, somehow, when it exists beneath clear, dry cold. I took pictures — less so of the cold, but I hope some notion of temperature is conveyed in the below photos.

And, finally, a shot of a brick branded with the name “IONE.” Such bricks exist in great numbers in San Benito County — and possibly other places too. As a kid, I had always read the name as “1ONE,” — or “one one.” I read it correctly for the first time only this past Christmas.

In Praise of Pixels and in Search of Super Mario Bros. 5

As I was tossing out old magazines to make way for the 2009 stack, I came across an issue of Retro Gamer, a British publication which focuses specifically on the chunky gloriousness that is old video games. An apparently regular feature is “Pixel Perfect,” in which a certain game’s sprites are showcased — not just for being good enough considering the technical restraints of the time but instead for being aesthetically pleasing in their own right. The issue I picked up happened to honor Super Mario World and its enemy sprites in particular. Yes, their every colored block component is visible, even at a distance, but Retro Gamer encourages us to see this as a positive.

The scans:

It might be odd for some people my age to see a game that debuted in 1991 be held up as iconic, even though pretty much anyone who regularly held a video game controller that year would know that Super Mario World is held in high regard. Looking at the character sprites laid out in a grid, however, with whatever Mario game they debuted in noted beneath, I can’t help but to notice how many of these characters never appeared again after Super Mario World and which, consequently, didn’t become such weirdly large parts of my childhood.

Who is it, I have to wonder, that gets to decide which ones get to become series staples and which ones fall by the side? Who decided that the Porcu-Puffer or the Dino-Torch were so inherently flawed that they didn’t need to appear in any subsequent Mario games? What made them so inferior to the rest of the minions pictured in the second scan? And who thought it necessary to bring Pokey back from the obscurity of Super Mario Bros. 2, resulting in the segmented, ambulatory cactus’s appearance in nearly every subsequent Mario game? (Damn activists and their pro-cactus agenda.)

Maybe more importantly, I note two facts in the infobox on the right side of the first scan: in order, “[Super Mario World] is known as Super Mario Bros. 4 in Japan” and “Super Mario World’s direct sequel was Super Mario’s Wacky Worlds and was supposed to be released on the CD-i.” I’ve read about Wacky Worlds a bit online and recognize that it is the Mario game that never came to be. And I realize that Super Mario World was released in Japan with the subtitle “Super Mario Bros. 4.”

See? And it makes sense, especially given that an earlier incarnation of Super Mario World featured Mario sporting the raccoon tail that allowed him to fly in Super Mario Bros. 3. (Like in real life!) But if this Super Nintendo launch title is Super Mario Bros. 4, then what is Super Mario Bros. 5, especially if the horrifically titled Wacky Worlds — that is, the “direct sequel” to the subject at hand — never came to be?

In 1995, Nintendo released a sequel to Super Mario World: Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, which starred Mario in infantile form, clinging tenaciously onto Yoshi and screaming like a banshee when the two were separated.

It would seem logical that an actually published sequel to Super Mario World would get to take the title of Super Mario Bros. 5, but I’m not sure that this game actually should. Essentially, this game departed enough from the standard Mario hop-and-bop gameplay that it birthed Nintendo’s Yoshi games as a series in their own right, what with their egg-tossing and constant eating. (They’re like a primer for bad motherhood.)

So if it’s not Yoshi’s Island, maybe it’s Super Mario 64 — the first 3-D Mario game and the second title to continue the trend of one-title-per-system that began with Super Mario World. (If the Wii gets a follow-up to Super Mario Galaxy before a new age of Nintendo systems dons on it, it would be the first in years to break this trend.) Of course, you could also say that Super Mario 64 was the start of the al the games where Mario could run around in any one of 360 degrees from where he’s standing — yes, that is different than up, down, backward and forward — like in Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy. So, essentially, this one may not be the true sequel either, if you look at it instead as the first in a new series.

Really, if any game deserves to inherit the subtitle Super Mario Bros. 5, it would be a game that most people probably didn’t play and which has never been ported to any latter-day Nintendo system: Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins. It was the game that introduced that Freudian nightmare Wario as well as the second Mario outing for the Game Boy. The game did its best to re-create the basic Super Mario World graphics and atmosphere and gameplay with the magic of creamed spinach color. But even if it was the title that deserved to be the true follow-up to Super Mario World, it should get nixed for the same reason that the previous two games should: It spun off into a radically non-Mario direction. Its sequel, Super Mario Land 3 starred not Mario but Wario, who later went on to bop-and-hop through five more games, each with a more Wario-specific style of gameplay. Beyond that, Six Golden Coins is already a sequel to another game: the Super Mario Land, which owes more to the original Super Mario Bros. than anything else.

The conclusion: None. There is no Super Mario Bros. 5, and, thus, it’s stupid to imagine what could deserve that honor.

Realization: Anything that had a chance at having the honor immediately lost it by spinning off into its own thing. Boo.

Additional realization: I think I hate Pokey.

Third realization: What the hell ever happened to the Koopa Kids, foremost among them Morton Koopa Jr. — the only video game character to be named after trash TV titan Morton Downey Jr.?

Other noteworthy Super Mario-related posts:

• The strange origin of Mario characters’ names
• Obscurio: The most famously un-famous Mario characters
• Super Mario, King of Japan
• The surprising intersection of Super Mario Land 2 and indie pop
• Questions reasonable people should have upon playing Super Mario Bros. for the first time
• The best song from Super Mario RPG and its TV soundalike
• Mario’s lack of balls
• Nature re-creates Super Mario Bros. 3... completely by accident
• Toad had a bad dream
• Who Put the “P” in the P-Wing?
• How the worlds in Super Mario Land got their names

Dog Star

I wouldn’t want yesterday’s post to overshadow my own dog, who has not and will not appear in a dog show but who my family considers a grand champion in his own right. A neurotic, troubled champion.