Three Message With Varying Levels of Clarity

I had thought that these might be in the order of ascending levels of clarity, but then it occurred to me that the opposite might be true. Consider the matter for yourself.

Credits: A dressing room, a poster in Miami, the inside of my mind. Bonus trivia: The “confetti” is actually torn-up bits of spraypaint can lids.

Encyclopedia Drew and the Abandoned Theater

Yesterday I visited the set of a TV show that was filming at the Los Angeles Theatre, an improbably beautiful, 1930s-era venue that is now essentially closed except as a rentable event or shooting space. That's a shame, really, because the theater is more beautiful-in-that-great-old-way than I'd expect to see anywhere in California, much less downtown Los Angeles. However, there it stands, grand but neglected. I took a single iPhone photo of the carved demons and angels that frame the balcony seats.

The results are about as good as you'd expect from an iPhone working in dim light. For a more professional take on the same wood detail, check out this photo at the official Los Angeles Theatre website. But I’m at least glad I have a memento of being there.

Igboo

Tonight my iPhone suggested that I may have been trying to type igboo, which made me want to have a conversation with whoever programmed the default Apple dictionary. But not being able to resist my own nerdish tendencies, I looked up igboo. Turns out it’s a Nigerian word for “marijuana.” There was even an example sentence: “The guy dey smoke igboo.”

This is all I can offer you tonight.

“That’s My Sister, Mister!”

Video games two days in a row. Who would have guessed?

Stumbling around online, I found a collection of backgrounds from the old Simpsons arcade game. I’m sure I’m not the only one who snuck away from family pizza outings to put a few quarters into this machine, and I vividly remember one grade school birthday party on which we decided to play the game through. (I was stuck playing as Marge. Hrm.) Anyway, these made for instant nostalgia — for pizza parties, for arcades, for those golden says of Simpsons-mania.

Some rather narrow selections:

And here are some of the stages in fuller form. Click, open and enjoy: Springfield Amusement Park, Springfield Cemetery, some sort of dream land that I actually don’t remember, and Channel 6 Studios.

And don’t forget Princess Kashmir, a chestier configuration of pixels than you remember seeing in a children’s game.

I can practically smell the combined aroma of pizza grease and quarters.

Name That Gargoyle!

Today I’m picking up a subject I’ve left alone for a while: words and video games. My goal is to use the power of the internet to answer a little linguistic mystery that has puzzled me for a while.

A short video game history lesson: Back in the day, Capcom (the people who made Street Fighter) released a side-scrolling arcade game, Ghosts ’n Goblins, which featured a knight hopping through what essentially amounts to a tacky Halloween haunted house landscape. Being a coin-operated game, the head-bashingly difficult Ghosts ’n Goblins aimed to overwhelm the player with countless undead monsters, assuredly killing the knight and forcing the the player to dump quarter after after quarter into the machine in order to progress. Despite that, the game caught on and spawned a lot of sequels and spin-offs, including some that starred the original game’s first-level boss, a nasty red gargoyle. In the spin-offs, you could even play as the gargoyle, jumping around, doing typical gargoyle stuff. As it stands now, the gargoyle may have appeared as a playable character more often that the original knight protagonist has.

He used to look like this:

But advancing video game technology has allowed him to look like this:

Now the wordy part: In the American release of the first gargoyle-centric game, the character was called Firebrand. (Good gargoyle name!) But the character’s original, Japanese name was something that gets rendered in English as Red Arremer. (Confusing!) Now, both Japanese and American games use the latter name. (Feel ways about it!)

And, finally, the confusing part: For the life of me, I can’t figure out what this name means. I could mean nothing, sure, and it could be a Japanese word that just translates like something that looks like an English word. But given that it has the word red in it and the character itself is red, I’m willing to bet that the name is English, translated into Japanese and then reproduced back in English in a way that makes it unrecognizable. Is it some variation on ream? (Parallel thoughts: “Don’t get ruined by the word ream, childhood memories!” but also “Ha ha, ream.”) But the character doesn’t bore any holes or, you know, engage in buttplay, so I think the answer lies elsewhere. I know that translating between English and Japanese can mean the insertion of vowels in between the consonants and that whole fluidity with the letters “L” and “R,” but I can’t switch the letters around in any way that makes more sense in English. Reamle? Lemul? Lemur? Could it be Armor? Nothing. What the hell is Arremer supposed to mean?

So then, internet — language-keen and video game-savvy people who frequent this blog, I’m looking at you — can you make anything from this? There is a theory that the a possible way to find obscure information online is to simply post somewhere what you don’t know and let the answer come to you, and I’m willing to try put this tactic to gargoyle-related use.

In closing, three more word-related thoughts on this game series:

• After Ghosts ’n Goblins came a sequel, Ghouls ’n Ghosts, but the alliteration stopped there, unforch, but I guess forcing the pattern would have resulted in games like Geists ’n Ghastly Things We Didn’t Put in the Last Game, so maybe it’s for the best.
• The series’s Japanese name is Makaimura, which translates to “Demon World Village,” the last word of which sounds not only redundant but also oddly cute to me. Like, “Ooh! Scary place where demons come from! … But look! They’re churning butter!”
• Yeah, the apostrophe looks wrong to me too. It should be Ghosts ’n’ Goblins, since both the “a” and “d” in and got contracted into oblivion.
• Of course, the heroic knight from the original games is chasing after a damsel. Tragically, this game’s leading lady got stuck with the name Princess Prin-Prin, which is just embarrassing.

Nicole Kidman: Striving for the Middle

When I saw Batman Forever back in theaters, I left feeling a little annoyed — not as much as when I saw Batman & Robin, about which everything critical has already been written, but bothered still because the film invented a new love interest. The first movie had Vicki Vale, the second Selina Kyle, but the third had a Batlove who hadn’t previously existed in the comics: the Nicole Kidman character, Dr. Chase Meridian. I didn’t like that, and even as a kid I was bothered by her name. Seriously? Chase Meridian? She sounded like a bank or a watchmaking company or maybe a codename from a James Bond movie.

Well, her name still sucks and all, but today I found out it can be read as a pun. As Wikipedia explains it, Kidman’s character falls in love with both Bruce Wayne and Batman, and rather than settling for one or the other she tries to integrate the two halves of Batsy’s self into one. So, in a sense, she’s chasing the “meridian” of Bruce Wayne’s personality. Dr. Chase Meridian. A little on-the-nose, sure, but not so obvious that I got it right away. I mean, I saw the movie on opening day back in June of 1995 and it took me fifteen-and-a-half years to get it — and I had still had to have it pointed out to me.

So there’s that.

Oh and Rachel Dawes, by the way, means “I liked her better once they blew her up” in… some language… Oh, finish the joke yourself.

The Family That Didn’t Know the Meaning of the Word “Cancelled”

I knew about the various Brady Bunch spin-offs, but I’d never seen the opening titles from The Brady Brides until today. And I wish I hadn’t.

It would be self-parody if it displayed the merest hint of self-awareness. There are no words. Only the image of me sitting here and pondering the sentence “This happened.” It actually makes the opening credits to the next spin-off in the series — the Thirtysomething-esque The Bradys — look better by comparison.

Though you have to question the logic in crediting not-the-Marcia, Leah “Bloodsport” Ayres before the five, non-fraudulent Brady children. Not to talk up The Bradys all that much. “Men with mustaches don’t run for office.” The hell?