The Office Desk Mystery

Two clues. I’ve not yet determined what the crime was, who the victim was, if there was a crime, if there was a victim, if I could have been the criminal or the victim, if suspicious deskmate was an accomplice, and (I repeat) if there was a crime.

But I’m pretty sure there totally was a crime.

The Adventures of Slut the Pig

How has there not yet been a children’s book written about Slut the Pig?

As illustrated in 1805 by John Landseer, father of the better known painter and sculptor Edwin Henry Landseer, Slut the Pig was a sort of real-life forerunner to Babe. Only instead of herding other animals, Slut helped her master kill other animals. And instead of winning a prize, she was slaughtered. Per the caption on the Flickr account that posted this image:

William Barker Daniel’s Rural Sports tells us that she was called Slut “in consequence of soiling herself in a Bog.” She lived wild but her “owner” taught her to act like a pointer dog and she accompanied him on his hunting expeditions and would point and retrieve as well as a dog. Slut was slaughtered when she was ten years old, which Daniel said was “animal murder.”

Slut’s story is recounted in William Barker Daniel’s Rural Sports, Vol. Three.

The word slut, by the way, has never really meant implied outright filthiness so much as slovenliness, more metaphorical then literal. These, I feel, are distinctions children should be learning through literature.

“Now That’s Interesting,” previously:

• Alice Brady and her ganked Academy Award
• Grant Wood and the American erotic
• The aptly named Meta Carpenter and her affair with William Faulkner
• Ambrose Burnside, the first name in sideburns
• Rock Hudson and the beefcake factory
• The crazy-weird story of Madame Butterfly, M. Butterfly, Shi Pei Pu and the Weezer album Pinkerton
• Victoria Vetri, who predicted her own downfall in Rosemary’s Baby
• Louis Mountbatten, who painted the British naval fleet a rosy pink color in a misguided attempt to be sneaky
• Gertrude Sanford Legendre, who is just so freaking boss 
• Gilles de Rais, one bad dude

Shards of Suspense

I admit I don’t know exactly what the show Breakout Kings is about, but I’d like to think it’s about contestants in some sort of acne competition. I have to wonder if the only one who keeps seeing the posters all over the city and thinking of Rebecca Gayheart’s bug-eyed overacting in the finale of a certain low-rated 90s slasher film.

I guess splintering glass makes for a convenient shorthand for the message “This is an exciting thing where a group of people are in danger!” I’m actually surprised we don’t see that design more often.

Also? Underwhelming though Urban Legend might be, isn’t that cast kind of crazy snapshot of the 90s? A post-Cybill Alicia Witt, Joshua Jackson presumably sporting his Cruel Intentions dye job, Tara Reid before she barfed all over her career, a pre-Lex Luthor Michael Rosenbaum, ol’ Crazy Eyes and a post-My So-Called Life Jared Leto. All that plus Loretta Devine as a rent-a-cop and Natalie Wood’s daughter as the girl who gets her head chopped off while she’s driving a car.

Now that’s what some people called movies, I guess.

With “It” Being the Blackest of Hearts

As DC universe superheroes and their associates go, Jean Loring never figured too largely into the the overarching plot. Jean was the Lois Lane to the Atom, a B-level Justice League member who, using a comic book interpretation of science — that is, magic, more or less — harnessed the power of white dwarf star to shrink down to teeny-tiny proportions. Jean, one of those lady lawyers, happily Lois Laned from her introduction in 1961 up until the 2004 series Identity Crisis, during which she attempted a reunion with the estranged Atom through a most unconventional means. In short, Jean had the bright idea to endanger the loved one of another superhero in an effort to drive all the masks and capes back to their Gotham City manors and Metropolis apartments and the distressed civilians who await them there. In long (and in horrific detail), Jean borrowed the Atom’s superpower, shrunk down and entered the brain of Sue Dibny — herself the Lois Lane to another DC universe B-lister, Elongated Man. Once inside Sue’s squishy gray mass, Jean triggered a stroke. When Sue died, Jean panicked and took a flamethrower to Sue’s body. Ultimately, her wrongdoing came to light, and Jean was carted away to Arkham Asylum, where she resided among the many brain-fried, criminally insane freaks who constitute Batman’s gallery of rogues… until she became possessed by the all-powerful supernatural entity Eclipso.

Oh, and it turned out that at the time of her murder, Sue Dibny was pregnant.

All that said, I feel it’s worth pointing out that this poor woman — this damsel-turned embodiment of evil — looks like a certain someone.

Also, it’s worth noting that if she thought she’d stand to benefit from doing so, Kris Jenner would totally take a flamethrower to a corpse.

Who Wore It Better?, previously:

• Michael Cera / Edith Crawley
• Lana Del Rey / Camilla Rhodes
• Tabatha Coffey / An angry, white cat
• Grace Jones / A cassowary
• Coco / The Venus of Willendorf

Rhythm-Based School Invasions of 1980s Europe

Awkward. Improbable. Dated. Carbon-dated. These are terms that a thinking individual could put toward the music video for “Happy Song,” the 1984 “hit” by the West German eurodisco-reggae group Boney M. I, for one, can’t take my eyes off it, what with its earnest efforts to sell something that no one wants, needs or even know existed until they watched this video. And I think I can do it the most justice with a summary of what I believe to be its plot. And here goes:

A demonic force travels through an elementary school, lingering for a moment on an apparent portrait of Adolf Hitler (it’s at the 0:26 mark) and inspiring the children to rebel against their teachers. The demonic force assumes the form of two black men who dance into the classroom and, with promises of afterschool dancing and ice cream parties, steal the children, Pied Piper-style. At the same time, a separate presence — some sort of cackling blond devil infant to whom the camera occasionally cuts away — seems to have possessed the one female student, causing her to speak in a baby voice. It’s unclear whether these presences are working together or against each other, but regardless the children end up taking a bus to an ice cream party that’s inexplicably attended by the very teachers they fled. The teachers remove their academic robes and begin dancing. The female student continues to talk in a baby voice.

Yeah, I feel pretty comfortable with that. Honestly, that may be the second-best summary I’ve ever provided, the first being this one. Please, now, watch the video for yourself:

Now, with all that in mind, think about this: Its lack of any reggae sounds makes “Happy Song” an outlier in the Boney M discography, and that’s probably because “Happy Song” is a cover — and, believe it or not, an improvement — of a song released in 1983 by the Italian group Baby’s Gang, which also had this song “Challenger.” I’m posting it below twice, because YouTube has two difference versions — a full version in black and white and then a colorized version that cuts away to what looks like Power Point effects of text scrolling across the screen in ways that are never impressive. It’s… weird.

But I make a point of writing about all this because the “Challenger” video is remarkably similar to the “Happy Song” one: Singing, dancing people manage to steal an entire school’s worth of youths. It even features a woman speaking in an inexplicable baby voice. Isn’t that kind of weird, as far as a narrative for related music videos to have: School invasions in which the children all get kidnapped by singing, dancing people and also there’s a woman who talks in a baby’s voice? Is that baby-talking girl the titular Baby who owns the gang? Was this an 80s trend that I just didn’t know about until now? Was I lucky to be spared this by having been educated in the U.S.? And finally, what do you think they did with kids once they took them away? Do you think they went all Pied Piper on them?

And finally, there’s the question that I’m most reluctant to ask: How embarrassed should I feel if I’m kind of into these songs, their flaming lameness notwithstanding? Is it the expert synthesizer at work? Yeah, it’s that. It must be that.

Drew overthinks bad music:

• Let’s Get Awkwardly Physical
• The Robots Are Coming  
• The Inside of Lisa Turtle’s Brain 

As Infinitesimal as a Barn

I’d guess that most who read this blog don’t often encounter barns, unless maybe it’s Dress Barn, in which case you deserve better than that because no one deserves Dress Barn. Furthermore, who thought that anyone would want to buy clothes from a barn? Are humans so removed agricultural life that they don’t realize that cows and other unflatteringly large stock animals live in barns? Is Dress Barn, like, the lady version of a big-and-tall shop? Is the decor barn-themed? Is there hay on the floor? Do salesgirls pass out salt licks and cud?

I’m stopping. This is not a post about Dress Barn, but it is about the word barn in an unusual context — a context that just happens to be my word of the week.

barn (bärn) — noun: 1. a large farm building used for storing farm products and sheltering livestock. 2. a large shed for the housing of vehicles, such as railroad cars. 3. a unit of area equal to 10^-24 square centimeters, used to measure cross sections in nuclear physics.

Guess which of these American Heritage Dictionary definitions I think is the most interesting?

Yes, barn has a scientific use: describing an extremely small amount of surface area. In fact, 10^-24 square centimeters is roughly the area of the cross section of a uranium nucleus. How did this scientific barn come to be, and why is it grouped with the “farmhouse” definitions as opposed to being listed as a separate barn, since it couldn’t possibly share an etymology with regular definition of the word?

The terms are, in fact, related, and in a lighthearted way I wouldn’t associate with men who split atoms. According to the physics journal Symmetry, the name arose in 1942, when Purdue University physicists Marshall Halloway and Charles Baker took a moment away from the Manhattan Project to eat dinner and bat around potential names for the cross section measuring 10^-24 square centimeters. On the subatomic level, this expanse is actually quite large, or “as big as a barn,” so barn and whimsy won out as the term and the mood, respectively. The name stuck, and today this common word barn — which, by the way, comes from a the Old English bereærn, literally “barley house” — gets paired with all the metric system prefixes denoting various sizes, from megabarn (10^-18 square centimeters) down to the far more interesting micromeasurements of attobarn (10^-46 square centimeters), zeptobarn (10^-49 square centimeters) and yoctobarn (10^-52 square centimeters). But here’s the especially quaint footnote to all this atypically folksy barn business: Though rarely used, a special term exists for the yoctobarn measurement. It’s shed, and no, I’m not kidding. And in case you’re ever describing an area of 10^-34 square centimeters and you don’t feel like using the standard terminology, microbarn, you can always go with the synonym outhouse. No, really.

vintage barn (weiser, idaho), via

Yay, barns!

Previous words of the week after the jump.

• acné excoriée des jeunes filles, adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
• barrack, beeturia, bissextile, bloofer, breastsummer, brinicle
• catholicon, cecaelia, cephalophore, cherpumple, chilver, chyron, cockernonnie, collywobbles, coprolalia, couvade, cranberry morpheme, crwth, culaccino, cummingtonite
• darkle, deasil, decussate, deuteragonist, dingbat, dingle
• eidolon, epeolatry, epopt, espalier, etui, exoterica
• fabiform, Feghoot, fissilingual, Föhnkrankheit, folderol, freekeh, froward
• gallinipper, gnaborretni, grandgore, grue, guilloche, gyaru
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, hobson-jobson, hogo, honorificabilitudinitatibus, hoyden
• ignivomous, iracund, isabelline, itaiitai, izod, izzard
• jabroni, jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
• kaffir, kakopygian, kayfabe, knipperdollin
• lagniappe, leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, malison, maroon, milt, mongo, mooncalf, morepork, muzjiks
• narrenfreiheit, nef, nihilartikel, nobiliary particle, nosism
• ochanee, ogonek, ombré, ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf, osculate
• pace, padiddle, paraprosdokian, pareidolia, pavonated, perendiate, perigee, petrichor, pettifogger, pettitoes, phlegmagogue, pismire, pixilated, pogonip, pong, pruniferous, puggle, pulveratricious, purse
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc, quiff
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa, rumpsprung, runcible
• salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, sharrow, shebang, sinople, slampadato, slubberdegullion, stan, stevedore, suovetaurilia
• tappen, tatterdemalion, teratogenesis, tergiversate, tetromino, thagomizer, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, tmesis, toby, tutoyer, tyro
• ucalegon, ultramontane, umiaq, umquhile
• veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
• weeaboo, widdiful, williwaw, witzelsucht, wooper looper
• xenodocheionology, xyster
• yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang

Dogs That Don’t Like Reggae (They Love It)

Hello. Have you met the Komondor? It’s a Hungarian dog that looks like a mop.

You may remember the Komondor from such pop culture appearances as the cover of Beck’s album Odelay and that’s it. In fact, this Komondor seems to be leaping over a hurdle the exact manner of they Odelay dog. Maybe that’s all they do? Leap over hurdles? So as to maximize dreadlock movement?

Anyway, now that’s you’ve seen one Komondor, have a look at two of them.

You know what’s especially cool about the Komondor when it appears in multiples? If you’re among the people who either want to respect the dog’s rich Hungarian ancestry or who have a tendency toward pedantic displays of technical correctness (the best kind of correctness), then the plural for Komondor is Komondorok and not something as stupid and common as Komondors.

See, now you’ve seen a Komondor and Komondorok all in one day. Oh, and a lot of natural dreadlocks.

By the way, the breed name has no connection with the word commander, no matter how much authority this dog’s hairstyle might command. It means “dog of the Cumans,” who were a Turkic nomadic people who tragically never capitalized on their inherent brand synergy with cumin.