Beautiful Arms Showing From Your Summer Dress

She's a real-life gymnast, who competed in the 2005 World Rhythmic Gymnastics Championships. She's also the star of the below video, which is technically titled "Mariko Takahashi's Fitness Video For Being Appraised as an 'Ex-fat Girl,'" but is more popularly known in the world of memery as "Poodle Fitness." Needless to say, it's way weird.

From Wikipedia: "[Director] Nagi Noda, in her artist's statement, explained that she arrived at the poodle concept after noticing that the dogs' hair cuts resembled muscles. She believed that this concept would help her video appeal to people of all ages." Of course!

[ Source: PCL LinkDump ]

Yule Prevails

Normally, I don't bother posting here what work I do for the news department, but today is different.


Today, I posted a very simple article about an overly medicated woman who drove her Lincoln in to the State Street Christmas tree. She was not seriously hurt, from what I've heard, and I think that makes it okay to look at the humor in a situation where the poor woman had to, at some point, figure out how a tree had grown out of the middle of a normally tree-less road. Well, that and the fact that the tree survived the collision with nary a twinkle light out of place.

An Empty Sarcophagus

In an effort to answer a question about the nature of Santa Barbara, the soap opera, that arose in a meeting today, I looked at the show's Wikipedia page, on which I found the following utterly delightful paragraph:

The series began on an uneven foot, but creators and executive producers Jerome Dobson and Bridget Dobson proceeded to kill off most of the show's actors via natural disaster and a serial killer storyline. When a major earthquake hit Santa Barbara, core character Danny Andrade slept through the entire thing. Minx Lockridge (Dame Judith Anderson) was unfazed, saying that the 1984 Santa Barbara earthquake was nothing like 1925. She was later locked into an empty sarcophagus. Luckily, her grandchildren were around to let her out and she escaped with merely a bruised ego.

I don't know what's better: the fact that such an apparently terrible show starred one Dame Judith Anderson, that her character's name was Minx Lockridge, or that she's emerged unscathed from imprisonment in an empty sarcophagus, which, of course, we have in abundance here in Santa Barbara.

Where's Maddy?

After having shown the video for "Collection of Stamps" — which is apparently the name of the song and not the name of the band, which is I'm From Barcelona, strangely — to anyone with a spare three minutes, I've noticed that one girl — the one I've named Nosering Girl — looks a lot like a hipsterfied Maddy Ferguson. I swear, it's not just me coming off the Twin Peaks kick.

Nosering girl

Maddy Ferguson

Had I been able to find any big enough images of Maddy wearing her Sally Jesse Raphael glasses, the resemblance would be even more striking, believe me.

EDIT: I found a good image of the bespectacled Maddy, on a German Twin Peaks wiki site, of all places.

Damn Fine Coffee

Apparently, December is David Lynch month here at the Back of the Cereal Box, because the dude seems to be everywhere lately. (Must be all the transcendental meditation.) Less than a day after I mentioned re-watching Twin Peaks through to the end, Sanam sends me a link to this: an Onion article (but not a fake one) about how he started his own Signature Line coffee brand a year ago. (The article actually went up one day short of a year ago, strangely enough. But what does "strange" mean when writing about Lynch?) The article also shows a clip from an old Japanese commercial Lynch did for Georgia coffee, mid-Twin Peaks fame there, I'm pretty sure. The clip features Coop, Lucy, Hawk, Andy and the Log Lady — then some Japanese guy and a Japanese lady that's supposed to be Annie, I think. It's not the same brand of coffee and the one Lynch launched (ha), but just another connection between the director and his favorite beverage.

Funny how Lynch complained about ABC tinkering with Twin Peaks but apparently was okay with lending the show's characters and setting out to an international coffee company for a few ad spots.

EDIT: Apparently the above clip is just one part in a series. Here are two others:

LampSex: A Story Told in Nine Photographs

The night before I left for my study-abroad program in London, I tried out my new camera. I rarely use it now, but for the last non-digital camera I ever had, it did pretty good. Curious at how it worked, I took some test photos in my room. After a few, I decided that the obvious way to learn it would be to photograph a tableau melodrama about two oversexed lamps, whose trust is interrupted by the sudden arrival of one of their spouses.

I just scanned them today. See if you can guess when they're having sex!

I like the way the low light gives the photos a pulpy, yellow light.

This Is the Girl

While at work, I had to look up somebody's filmography on IMDb. One thing led to another and I stumbled onto the cast listing for that awful Lindsay Lohan movie, I Know Who Killed Me. Scrolling down the names — more out of mean-spirited curiosity for who else had their fingerprints on this train wreck than anything else — I saw one named that struck me as familiar: Bonnie Aarons. I couldn't place why, but I was sure I remembered seeing something that Bonnie Aarons appeared in. When I clicked on her profile, I saw her face. It was this face:


Again, she looked vaguely familiar, though something about her face disturbed me on a fundamental level. In fact, when the image loaded and popped onto the screen, I felt a little startled to see her. I couldn't put my finger on it, however, until I scrolled down a bit and saw what had made her known to me.

What was it?

Well, she's been in a good handful of movies most people would know of: both Princess Diaries films, for example, as well as Exit to Eden and Wristcutters: A Love Story, which just came out. But one role stands out. And I'm wagering that readers of this blog would recognize her most easily from this one role. For maximum effect, I'm making the image of her in this role open in its own page. When you click this link to her image, I'm hoping, you'll have a similar reaction to the one I did when I first saw her.

I'm including an explanation in the first comment of this post for those of you left scratching your head.