Where the Sun Poured Down Like Rain

Although I managed to take a few good pictures during a visit to a certain superior gorge…

… I’m easly most impressed with this one:

It’s all in the framing.

The entire collection is posted online, for those of you who feel like viewing other people’s vacation photos isn’t a form of punishment.

Disneyfied Jabberwock, Times Two

In posting that little nothing about that one nightmare-inducing movie version of Alice in Wonderland, I prompted a someone else to write a post on the Jabberwock, that nonsensical but nonetheless terrifying Lewis Carroll boogeymonster. It seems that that most familiar of Alice adaptations — the 1951 cartoon version — at one point was going to include the Jabberwock. It didn’t make the final cute, so we are left to wonder how this beast might have been rendered by Disney.

Two pieces of concept art survive. The first comes from the “Disney archives” and shows how the battle between the Carroll poem’s young hero and the Jabberwock might have looked, while the second shows the Jabberwock as he appeared in a “Little Golden Book” titled Alice in Wonderland Meets the White Rabbit.


Neither is especially scary, but should we have expected a true monster from Disney? I say yes, actually — the Disney Alice came out before its take on Sleeping Beauty, and the Maleficent dragon in that latter movie is pretty damn intimidating. Of course, Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is a bit more mature of a film than Alice so maybe the eight years between the two films allowed the studio to summon the guts to create a truly evil villain — or at least to remember those guts, as Disney had in 1940 put out Fantasia, which pitted young viewers against the demonic Chernobog in that last segment, “A Night on Bald Mountain.”

Plants Are Up to Something

The suspicions that flash through your mind when you trip on an exposed root, suffer from especially bad hay fever or read the occasional news story about trees killing lumberjacks? They’re accurate.

From the Huntington.

A Locomotive Straight From a Futurist’s Nightmare

A few weeks ago, I had a bad dream involving a train. I’ve had strange dreams about trains before — and no, never with them going through tunnels — but this one was special in that the train itself was especially disturbing. You see, this particular Bad Dream Express had human facial features coming out of the the engine car as though this thing was actually some grotesque blend of man and machine. And in the surreal sense, not the cyborg sense. A blinking eye here, a grinning mouth there — part of people literally sticking out of the metal. I will say this much: It lingered.

More recently, I was reading about old video games I enjoyed when I was a kid and I spotted this very nightmare train. It was from the background of one the stages in the third Darkstalkers game. The stages name? “Iron Horse, Iron Terror,” which is just lovely. It took some searching, but I tracked down a large enough image of the Bad Dream Express so I can share it with you all.


So this, basically, but three-dimensional, more realistic, sporting a few more facial features and maybe crossed with the general aesthetic of Freddy Krueger’s boiler room. Full disclosure: I don’t remember my dream train having the whistle shaped like a screaming human head. That notwithstanding, the similarities are pretty striking.

Isn’t that nice? Wasn’t that considerate of my brain? Seriously, I spend hours cruising down colorful Mario Kart streets lined with smiling trees and bushes, but my brain says “Nope, you’re getting this tonight.” Though I should at least compliment my brain for its ability to store something in some unknown compartment for a decade and then retrieve it in such a flashy manner. Thanks, brain!

No Dignity in Death for Cici Cooper

Scream 2 was on TV recently and I watched a few minutes of it. It was specifically the scene with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character, sorority sister Cici Cooper, who learns that staying home to be the designated driver can still result in death. The killer ends up tossing her off the third floor of the Omega Beta Zeta house. See ya, Cici. Hope nobody needed a ride home.

Watching the scene through this time was the first since it was pointed out to me that there’s a pretty glaring blooper in it. Just as the killer tosses Cici off the balcony, a crewmember’s head pops up in the lower right corner, even though the scene is set at least three floors up.


Well, it’s either a blooper or a weird plot point — this guy literally hanging out underneath a sorority house balcony, doing little to save the poor girl who’s being murdered. But as far as bloopers go, this seems like a pretty huge one. Admittedly, I never noticed it until it was pointed out, but don’t movie studios pay people big bucks to spot these kind of things? Especially in a good movie produced by a major studio?

You may quibble with my classification of Scream 2 as “good,” but I’ll argue it out. From the little I saw, I surprised how the film — now thirteen years old — doesn’t look dated. And though it’s not as uniformly well-acted as the first movie, it actually has some nice performances and a awesomely oddball cast that includes a whole lot of people you’d never expect to have been in a movie together — Laurie Metcalf, Liev Schreiber, Joshua Jackson, Timothy Olyphant, Portia de Rossi, Tori Spelling, Rebecca Gayheart, Luke Wilson, David Warner and Heather Graham among them.

Bonus trivia: The girl who Cici is talking to on the phone when she starts getting calls from the killer is Selma Blair in an uncredited role, about two years before she starred with Gellar in Cruel Intentions and became famous. And the girl who provides the jump scene when she bumps into Cici on her way out of the house? It’s that inexplicably Hispanic Griswold daughter from National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation.

All of the Pink Without Any of the Crying!

If I accused iris breeders of not knowing how to name their creations — and I basically did — then I must congratulate whatever camellia aficionado decided on the name for a specimen I saw at the Hungtington.

Spanked Baby is one of the best names for anything ever. Sir or madam, I am in your debt.

Carol Channing Is a Scary Muppet

Last week’s post on the Jabberwock got a comment encouraging me to watch another scene from the 1985 Alice in Wonderland movie in which Alice interacts with the White Queen. The White Queen is played by Carol Channing, which should be motivation enough for you to watch in the same way that “Wanna see something gross?” will more than likely make you look at the something, even though you mostly didn’t want to and even though you know what the outcome would be anyway. If you’re still on the fence about whether to give a few minutes of your life to this clip, let me at least offer a glimpse at the strange, terrifying worlds that await you:


Yet more motivation: The clip consists of Channing’s unique take on acting, a musical number that begins so suddenly that it’s slightly startling, and finally a surreal ending that would not be out of place in a David Lynch movie. (Make Channing a midget and make the sheep Sheryl Lee and you’re there.)

And, finally, the clip itself:

I assume that Anne Hathaway only got the role of the White Queen in Tim Burton’s recent remake because Carol Channing was busy. Really, what other explanation could there be?