Mr. Brain

The original posting of this simply read “There’s a whole lot of wrong going on here.” I can add nothing more.

Via Meiko.

The Premier Tramp of the New York Area

I’m cleaning and watching the series run of The Dana Carvey Show on Hulu. You know, like you do. It’s worth a try, if you like comedy, at least to see folks like Stephen Colbert and Steve Carrell and others before the The Daily Show made having that name seem popular. (Also a plus: Ace & Gary, pre-SNL.) But in glancing at my monitor as I walked by, I saw someone else who had appeared before making it big: Selma Blair.

She’s blonde, about 24 years old and nowhere near as hot as she looks now, but that’s her, in full-on goof mode, making a face that suggests she might be missing or lacking a chromosome, God love her. The sketch features her as one of the nixed possibles from an episode of Singled Out featuring Dana Carvey as Ted Kaczynski which OH MY GOD MOST NINETIES THING EVER I’M GRUNGE-PUKING ON MY COPY OF SO I MARRIED AN AXE MURDERER.

According to IMDb, it’s not Blair’s first role. That’s a 1995 episode of Adventures of Pete & Pete that I actually remember, even if I can’t picture her in it. In fact, it doesn’t even appear on IMDb, but I’m certain that’s her. Right?

Along similar Cruel Intensions-y lines: that time I spotted Christine Baranski in an episode of The Brady Bunch and the time I saw Swoosie Kurtz drunk at the airport.

A Total Dernface

I swear that this is the last of my posts about my parking lot. But this one merited a mention, I felt. Spotted on the walk to my car last night:

For most people, this would elicit a reaction of “Oh, hey, lady from Jurassic Park,” but for me it brought me to a specific facial expression that I have incorporated into the essence of my being:

I mean, this beautifully bizarre woman has twisted her face into a reasonable approximation of a tragedy mask. It’s unreal, even in a film as unreal as Blue Velvet. I want to frame it. I want to paint it. I want to Photoshop it into a background wallpaper. Actually, the last of these three I actually did:

This, sadly, beats out my Lara Flynn Boyle sighting to become the closest to David Lynch as I’ve gotten yet.

Fringe Event No. Two

A follow-up to the post about Anna Torv’s character on Fringe apparently having a parking space in my office lot: So does Joshua Jackson’s Fringe character:

For those of you who don’t watch Fringe, this is basically like coming side-by-side parking spots labeled Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

With a Name Like That, She’d Better Be Hot… or a Dude

Honestly, I don’t mean to distract myself, but you know how Wikipedia can be. There I was, at work, reading about Lisa Rinna — yes, at work and for work — and I ended up reading about Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., a little-known 1998 comic book adaptation starring David Hasselhoff. Already, I’ve said enough to explain why this film may have escaped your awareness, even if you care who Nick Fury is. (The short answer: He’s the eyepatch-sporting character Samuel L. Jackson played in the Iron Man movies and will return for next year’s Avengers movie.) In the 1998 film, Rinna played a character named La Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine. That only being the kind of name that a soap opera villainess, drag queen or kickass comic book character can have, I had to click through.

In Marvel comics, it turns out, the Contessa is one of those sexy but capable but sexy ladies who prefers catsuits to body armor and yet somehow still hasn’t died. She looks like this:

Given the Contessa’s banging, Bond girl body, it should be no surprise that in her forty-two-year run in Marvel comics, she has ended up in bed with Nick Fury more than once. Their first sexual encounter, however, is the most notable because the Contessa’s “one-page seduction” of Fury, as Wikipedia refers to it, had to be edited to conform with the Comics Code Authority. From Wikipedia:

In the third-to-last panel, de facto Marvel art director John Romita Sr. redrew a telephone that had been taken off the hook for privacy, placing the receiver back in the cradle; in the last panel, an image was removed and replaced with a closeup of an item from earlier in the page — a phallic long-barreled gun in a holster. [Romita explained,] “So one panel had the stereo in Fury's apartment to show there was music playing, cigarettes in the ash tray in one, there was a sequence of intercut shots where she moved closer to him, much more intimately, there was a kiss, there was a rose, and then there was one panel with the telephone off the hook, which the comic book code made him put back on. ... [T]he last panel on that page had Nick and his old lady kneeling, with their arms around each other, and that was entirely too much for the Code, so the panel was replaced with a picture of a gun its holster.”

And I’m writing about this because I’m struck not only by how much of a rather vanilla sex scene had to be edited in a comic where people spend most of their time shooting guns at each other but also the specific signifiers of sex that had to be omitted. Maybe I’ve been living in houses without landlines for too long, but it seems so strange to me that leaving a phone off the hook would signify sex and that redrawing the panel to show the phone hung-up, ready to take incoming calls, dispelled the sexiness enough to get an approval. Then, to take a panel showing a man and woman embracing and replace it with a gun in its holster? That seems even worse, honestly. An embrace is an embrace; there’s not much symbolism to it, but the gun slid into its pocket — surely a flesh-colored sheath, designed for it, specifically for it, keeping it warm, the way it likes — actually suggests more to me than than a straightforward depiction of clothed, physical affection ever could.

It’s baffling to me, but then again this is coming from a guy who has authored the Penis Vagina Twins series of superhero-detective comics (contract pending.)

Hellmouth Much?

In certain ways, in most ways, I had a sheltered childhood during which I learned about the world mostly through popular culture. If I didn’t see a given movie or read a given book, I wouldn’t know something, unless the thing in question somehow related to sheep, apricots, New Zealand or one of the few other things I learned about through actual experience.

So when I first heard the phrase “X much?” I didn’t know what the hell I was being asked. You know what I’m talking about — “Excited much?” to someone who is clearly overenthusiastic, “Hair gel much?” asked to someone with statement hair, “Have bark much?” asked to a tree. Eventually I figured it out. Asking “X much?” is an ironic way to point out either that a person is, does or has too much X or, in some cases, doesn’t do X enough, as with “Walk much?” being asked to someone who just tripped. (I realize I sound like an academically minded 90s-era drug-dealer with all this talk of having and doing X. Just go with it.) Late last year, I saw a Language Log post that detailed the origin of the phrase. As far as anyone can tell right now, the first documented use of “X much?” seems to a 1978 Saturday Night Live “Nerds” sketch in which Todd (Bill Murray) asks Lisa Loopner (Gilda Radner) “Underdeveloped much?” to imply that she’s flat-chested.

That notwithstanding, the OED cites other pop culture references in its entry for this use of much, all of them equally close to my heart (thought none of them being things I’d be exposed to until at least mid-high school. According to the OED, the phrase first appears in 1988’s Heathers — “God, Veronica, drool much?” and later as “Jealous much?” — but was popularized by the 1992 Buffy movie — “Excuse much! Not rude or anything.” The post also notes that it’s used in the TV show’s 1997 pilot, “Welcome to the Hellmouth,” in a line spoken by Cordelia — “Morbid much! I didn’t ask!” — in response to Buffy wondering if a recently deceased person had vampire marks on his body.

I know Buffy played with language a lot, but it makes me particularly happy that it, SNL and Heathers have a place in the OED. I’ll eagerly await the next edition to see if chatter in the cafe, fuck me gently with a chainsaw or schwing eventually get their due.

Pop culture and words, previously:

• the word for the blocks in Tetris
• my Top Chef vocabulary round-up
• four kinds of dollies
• what we mean when we talk about Beetlejuice
• when acme is no longer the highest point

Respectfully I Say to Thee

The grocery store was truly cranking out the hits tonight, and the disco hit parade included a song I’d never heard before. Not only was it notable for being new, but it also included lyrics I would never have expected to hear in a pop song: “Respectfully I say to thee / I’m aware that you are cheating.” Which is rather a polite way to call someone out for being a lying bastard, no?

Please note the many kinds of crazy going on in the above video.

Turns out the song is “Upside Down,” by Diana Ross, which I find strange because I was under the impression that Ross was a great singer, yet there’s nothing vocally spectacular about this song. Still, the choice of words — especially the thee, given what’s been on my mind lately — seemed remarkable. Overall, the weirdness of the song reminds me of a far less important pop cultural footnote, but it’s also one that I’m happy to post as often as possible: that time Padma Lakshmi sang.

Here’s to all the awkward songs.