Goodbye to None of That

It feels good. It really feels good.

Apologies to those I did not have a chance to see before I left, but I will be back — to visit.

Sinner Sandwich

Topless Robot, a pop culture website that specializes in very specific lists, yesterday posted a countdown of the ten most bizarre video games made by mainstream publishers. Such a post promises the kind of trivia that I cannot resist, so, of course, I clicked through. I do not regret this clicking-through. The list features titles I would have expected — Killer7 (which features the character Trevor Pearlharbor, though that’s the least of what makes it strange) and the equally horribly named Sega game Seaman — but also a few I hadn’t heard of before. Foremost among these: this year’s PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 oddity Deadly Premonition.

(Before I get into it, what the hell would a deadly premonition be? A psychic vision that kills its beholder? If so, what good could such a premonition actually do?)

Deadly Premonition actually takes the top spot in this list, and Topless Robot’s blurb on it notes that it incorporates a whole lot of Twin Peaksiness. Again, I couldn’t resists the urge to click. This is what I found:

So let’s see… An awkward, seemingly superstitious FBI agent in a small town, at a diner, all set to a soundtrack of incongruous jazz. It’s really too much. And a turkey, strawberry jam and cereal sandwich? The “sinner sandwich”? That almost one-ups “That gum you like is going to come back in style.”

The post offered one more clip.

This is the clip:

So the protagonist FBI dude has high standards about his coffee? Also very David Lynchy. The Zach that Mr. FBI mentions, by the way, is his own alternate personality but also, in effect, the game-player himself. Cute.

Baffled as to how one should play this game — is the object to drink coffee? to weird out people you share meals with? — I looked it up on Wikipedia and found that it’s actually Resident Evil-style survival horror. (Of… course?) According to Wikipedia, the announcement of the title back in 2007 prompted several gaming critics to note the similarities between it and Twin Peaks, ultimately forcing Access Games to push Deadly Premonition in a different direction and delay it for three years. Therefore, what you saw in those preceding two clips, strange as it is to say it, represents the final, un-Twin Peaksified version of the game. The initial go at it, which debuted with the working title Rainy Woods, owes even more to the cult David Lynch series.

Here’s what people in saw 2007 as a preview:

From what I’ve read about the title, the premise glimpsed here — protagonist arriving in a small Northwestern town to investigate the brutal murder of a young woman — survived into the final version. No clue about the two identical (twin?) dwarves chanting “red tree,” the Dorothy Valens-esque chanteuse crooning in what looks like Blue Velvet’s Slow Club, or the law enforcement agent who looks like the lovechild of Michael Ontkean and Michael Horse. But yeah, the fact that this title exists — for systems I don’t own, I should note — boggles me, to say nothing of the fact that it hit shelves so recently without me noticing. This totally blows the Legend of Zelda-Twin Peaks connection out of the water. Or, to use a more appropriate metaphor, it beats it to death, wraps it in plastic and tosses it in the river.

All that said, it makes me happy to learn that Twin Peaks’s legacy continues so far beyond its brief life, all Laura Palmer-like.

Lynch, previously:

• David Lynch made Zooey and Emily Deschanel weird
• David Lynch guests on The Cleveland Show... as a joke?
• Salto!

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The Top Chef Vocabulary Round-Up

In Sunday’s post, I mentioned that I like how shows such as Top Chef and Project Runway introduce vocabulary that novice foodies and the non-apparel-obsessed might not know. It seemed only reasonable, then, to post about food terms on this week’s Top Chef that I either had not heard before or recognized but hadn’t ever looked up.

The big one this week was dropped during the Quickfire Challenge. Angelo used the mystery box ingredients to make what he called a pot-au-feu. The term literally translates from French as “pot on the fire” and refers to a French style of beef stew that, according to Wikipedia, often includes cheap cuts of beef and along with carrots, turnips, leeks, celery and onions. Though Angelo’s take on the pot-au-feu didn’t feature sides, a traditional might offer coarse salt, strong mustard, and pickled gherkins and samphire. That last one is also a new one to me — it can refer to any number of edible plant species, but in this case would most likely be Crithmum maritimum. (The name samphire has no relation to sapphire, which is what I guessed, but is a corruption of the French Saint Pierre, patron of fishermen, because the plant grows near the sea.)

I’ve seen the term tataki on menus before but never knew what it meant. Tataki (literally translated as “pounded” or “hit into pieces”) is a Japanese style of cooking in which meat or fish is briefly seared in fire or in a hot pan, marinated in vinegar, sliced thinly and served with ginger paste. It’s that last bit, the ginger pulverized into goop, that gives the technique its name. (I think I may have previously confused tataki with rumaki. Contrary to what Betty Draper thinks, rumaki isn’t Japanese at all but apparently American, likely having originated at Trader Vic’s. Wikipedia calls this bacon-wrapped poultry concoction “mock Polynesian” and theorizes that the rumaki may come from the name of the Japanese spring roll harumaki.)

Though I feel like I learned the word fricassee from Bugs Bunny cartoons (along with other naturally funny words such as succotash and hasenpfeffer), I never knew what it meant and had certainly never tried it. A fricassee involves poultry or other white meat stewed in gravy, usually along with vegetables. Know we know.

I knew what Kelly meant when she said she’d prepared her dish in a Yucatecan style, but I thought it was worth pointing out that I’d couldn’t recall ever hearing the demonym for the Mexican state of Yucatan.

All that verbal business out of the way, some other thoughts on tonight’s Top Chef:

• Whoever devises the Top Chef challenges has come up with some good ones that play nicely off the Washington D.C. setting. I enjoyed this week’s main event in particular — “disguising” traditional American dishes and then serving them to higher-up spooks at the CIA. However, this particular challenge gave me more reason to dislike contestant Amanda, who realized that her gussying-up of French onion soup would not fool anyone and who then verbalized this fact by saying that even Helen Keller would be able to spot the original dish. Not that I didn’t grow up with countless schoolyard Helen Keller jokes, but dude — Helen Keller was deaf and blind, she didn’t lack taste buds. Get your famous disabilities right.
• Of all the politicos to guest judge Top Chef challenges so far this season, CIA director Leon Panetta was the first to actually call out lousy dishes. Previously, people like Nancy “Jerri Blank” Pelosi and Rep. Aaron “Turquoise Belt” Schock hemmed and hawed about dishes they did not like, but Panetta — who was appointed to his current position, not elected — spoke with refreshing bluntness. I should also mention that it’s extremely weird to me that Panetta — the former representative for California’s seventeenth district, where I once lived — is now the CIA head and therefore guy who, as Top Chefer Kelly noted, knows where all the extraterrestrials are.
• Could Tiffany actually win this thing? I would not have guessed it at this season’s outset, but she certainly seems to be headed for a showdown with Angelo once he remembers how to cook. Tiffany’s culinary feats have not yet wowed me, but I will say she has one of the sunnier, more likeable personalities of any Top Chefer in recent memory. Plus she has the good taste to like La Femme Nikita, though I’m guessing she probably was referring to the Peta Wilson version.
• Kevin — the one contestant neither in the top nor the bottom of this week’s episode — looks like a grown-up version of Manny from Modern Family

Thoughts?

Special Victims

I’m not sure who I feel the worst for.

Of course, I feel bad for the baby elephant, who probably did not appreciate whatever process painted him pink. But I also actually feel bad for Jayne Mansfield. Even though it was probably her idea to paint the elephant pink, the end result of doing so with the same shade of pink as her dress leaves the viewer little choice other than to identify her with the large, awkward animal. And then there’s the baby, who I’m inclined to guess is Little Mariska Hargitay. All this fuss over her for a day she won’t even remember, plus the added horror of reaching toward what she thinks is her mom only to touch rough, dyed-pink pachyderm skin.

(Via.)

The Ghost of a Color

I watch Top Chef and Project Runway not because I want Padma to make mean faces at me or Heidi to tell me my design looks sad, but instead because I enjoy observing the processes of creative people. I like hearing the contestants explain how they arrived at their good ideas or, more often, listening as they talk themselves into pursuing a crap idea.

But another plus for me is the jargon — those weird words that the contestants spit out as if the American public will know what the hell they’re talking about. Sometimes we can tell by context. Sometimes we actually have no way of decoding a given sentence and figuring out what the strange French term means. (And, yes, whether it’s cooking or clothes, many of these words happen to be French, which is doubly difficult for me because I am terrible at guessing how French words might be spelled.) You’d better believe I get pissed when they don’t display the words on screen — when a Top Chefer, for example, boasts that they will “[unfamiliar French verb] some vegetables and meat to make a [unfamiliar noun — French? Arabic? Space language?]” and the chyron dumbs it down as “stew.”

Anyway, this week I had reason to learn a fashion term, though not from Project Runway, which most recently focused on party supplies and Betsey Johnson being a loopier real-life version of Janice from The Muppets. (I liked the episode anyway.) And this fashion term is happens to be the word of the week.

ombré (AHM-bray or ahm-BRAY) — 1. adjective: having colors or tones that shade into each other — used especially of fabrics in which the color is graduated from light to dark. 2. noun: the design resulting from this technique.

As I understand it, an ombré effect can result from either dip-dyeing a completed garment or weaving colored fabrics in a way that gradually blends and then switches out one color for another. Whatever the process, the result looks something like this:

(image source)

No, not like a model wearing a loaded high-fashion diaper, but the fade from white to cyan to gray. To put it in color terms I’m more familiar with, ombré looks like someone selected the space of the garment and filled it with a Photoshop color gradient. Neat, I suppose, in that it seems to strip down the tie-dye aesthetic and elevate it beyond the hippie ghetto. (And in fashion, the hippie ghetto is a bad place to be.) However, it seems like a technique that would only look good on women’s clothes. I at least can’t imagine owning or wearing anything with a color fade.

The word comes from the past participle of the French ombrer, “to shade,” which goes back to the Latin umbra, “shade.” (Umbra also gives English the word umbrella. Translated literally from Italian, umbrella means “little shade,” which is exactly what the instrument provides even though English speakers call a sun-blocking umbrella a parasol, literally “sun-shield.”) The noun form of the French word, ombre, means “shade” or “darkness” but also “ghost.” This usage parallels English’s treatment of the word shade. And I like this too, because ombré reminds me of pentimento, the instance of a previously painted-over image becoming visible beneath a finished work, whether as a result of an x-ray or time thinning the top level of paint. The extra image appears ghostly — and truly would be spooky, if you noticed a transparent figure appearing in a painting where none stood before. I’m not sure if I prefer the idea of ombré being the lighter color gradually shining through the darker one or the darker one slowly swallowing up the lighter one.

Of course, ombré also happens to sound a lot like the Spanish word hombre, which is funny because ombré is this soft, feminine thing and an hombre is a gun-slinging dude walking into a saloon in a spaghetti western. In fact, there’s a relative in the name of the card game called ombre — it’s what Belinda plays in Rape of the Lock — and if you try to read about ombré on Wikipedia you just get directed to the article that starts with this image:

And that’s even worse than a high-fashion diaper.

Previous strange and wonderful words:

• adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
• barrack, bissextile, bloofer, breastsummer
• catholicon, cecaelia, couvade, cranberry morpheme, crwth, cummingtonite
• deasil, decussate, deuteragonist, dingle
• eidolon, epeolatry, epopt, espalier, etui
• fabiform, fissilingual, Föhnkrankheit, folderol, froward
• gallinipper, grandgore, grue, gyaru
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, honorificabilitudinitatibus
• itaiitai, ignivomous
• jabroni, jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
• kaffir, kakopygian, knipperdollin
• leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, malison, milt, mongo, morepork
• nef, nihilartikel, nobiliary particle, nosism
• ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
• pace, pareidolia, pavonated, petrichor, pismire, pong, puggle, purse
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa
• salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, shebang, sinople, stevedore, suovetaurilia
• tergiversate, thagomizer, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, tmesis, toby, tyro
• ucalegon, ultramontane
• veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
• williwaw, witzelsucht, wooper looper
• xenodocheionology, xyster
• yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang

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For You’ve Not Attained Marriage Age

First, a song you likely have not heard before:

It’s “Single Girl,” by 60s pop star Dusty Rose Muddy Tulip Rocky Chrysanthemum Sandy Posey. And it’s great, if you have ever felt like your experience of bygone pop music was lacking an American Petula Clark. But that’s not the point. Here, below, watch the same song performed in Cantonese by former child star Fung Bo Bo, a.k.a. Bobo Fung, Feng Bao Bao, Fung Po Po, Petrina Fung and the Hong Kong Shirley Temple. Or at least it’s the same melody played in a more upbeat manner and paired with Cantonese words that, of course, have been translated hilariously into ka-chunk ka-chunk robot English.

The lyrics:

Active youth
Promising and sentimental
The active young ones
Full of gaiety and laughters
Dance gaily but not too much
And be sensible
For you’ve not attained marriage age
Enjoy the songs of the birds
The beautiful flowers on meadows
The fascinating country scenery

(Note: When the hell did we go to the country?)

Active young ones
Compete energetically
Play but not too much
And be sensible
For you’ve not attained marriage age

(Another note: The song may have continued, but the video cuts out, so we’ll never know. Never.)

For what it’s worth, Fung Bo Bo is giving it all she’s got. But I brief flashes of worry on her face make me wonder if she had a choice about the matter. In conclusion, does anyone else find it disturbing that the Wikipedia list of former child actors from China features only two people, one of whom is famously dead? How likely do we think it might be that some disaster befell a Chinese national child actors convention?

A Juice Box and a Snack

Another report for the streets: Today a car passed by blasting that Khia song “My Neck, My Back.” You know which one I’m talking about — the filthy one. Walking right next to me were some kids with their mom, and they totally heard the chorus. Weirdly, I reacted to the situation with this alien and vaguely parental sense of anger at those kids having been exposed to something inappropriate. Later, in more Drew-like fashion, I tried to think of what a more child-friendly version of that song might be, and the most I could come up with was a revised chorus: “My jump rope, my jacks, a juice box and a snack.” Can anyone with access to a children’s choir flesh out the rest of the song and get this performed publicly? Because YouTube awaits.

That is all.

No, wait. That is not all: The car playing the song was full of guys. Weird, right? Or at least sending a message that was open to interpretation?