The Beeper King and His Impostor

I have a mental problem that’s clearly rooted in some manner of childhood-rooted trauma. I confuse actors. Not all of them, no, but specific sets of two. I acknowledge that they are separate people and that they don’t even look that much alike, but I consistently mistake one for the other. I hear something about one and catch myself picturing the other. I do it with Adam Scott and Seth Gabel, whom I posted about late last year, but I also do it with, for example, Embeth Davidtz and Annabeth Gish (for no reason I can understand) and also Senta Moses and Marisa Jaret Winokur. And here’s another one.

On the left we have Dean Winters, best known as Liz Lemon’s terminally recurrent boyfriend, Dennis Duffy, on 30 Rock. And on the right we have Jeffrey Donovan, best known as the lead role on Burn Notice, which SNL correctly identifies as a show which I have never seen and know nothing about. I don’t think they look like, exactly, yet I can’t keep them straight. I constantly mix up which one used to be on Law & Order (Winters) and which one was in Changeling (Donovan), which one was on Oz (Winters, even though I could swear it was Donovan) and which one was in that weird Blair Witch sequel (Donovan, even though he seems to old to have been in that movie).

Honestly, I don’t get it. Looking at them side by side now — and, honestly, for the first time — I feel like Donovan looks more like Mac from It’s Always Sunny than anyone else, yet when I found out that Burn Notice was a thing, I remember thinking, “Oh, I hope this doesn’t prevent him from being on 30 Rock.” I can’t imagine what mental block prevents me from separating these two actors and their respective filmographies. ButAnd I’m curious to know: Does anybody else?

Buttercups in High Definition

Now I offer four strange things I saw but did not purchase at the sale at H.D. Buttercup. (And yes, non-Angelenos, that really is a store, and no, it’s nowhere as twee as it sounds.)

Lamps that suggested Marcia, Jan and Cindy Brady had they been scalped during the family trip to the Grand Canyon.

Rampant sexism!

A doll that I imagine was not designed to have a broken leg but whose facial expression made a hell of a lot more sense with the leg being broken.

And finally a small statue in the form of that extraterrestrial that either abducted me or is just a creep and has been hanging around my bedroom window.

Not pictured and not purchased: an affordable coffee table.

I Am Living on Channel Z

Today, some overdue attention for the ass end of the alphabet. If you love the Queen of England, you call it zed. And if you love TV instead, you call it zee. Why the hell is that, anyway? Especially when every other letter has the same name regardless of which country you’re reciting the alphabet in? Before I attempt an answer, I’ll confuse the matter further.

Words of the week!

izzard (IZ-urd) — noun: a Scottish name for the letter “Z.” 

izod (EYE-zod) — noun: an obsolete name for the letter “Z.”

I picked this pair for the weekly weird word post because of the many old or obscure names for “Z,”, these would be the most familiar to English-speakers — izzard as a result of the comedian Eddie Izzard and izod as a result of the clothing brand. (The latter takes its name from British tailor Jack Izod, who sold an American businessman the rights to his brand in 1938. Funny how Messers. Izzard and Izod have the same last name, in a sense.) According to a handy post on Separated by a Common Language, which examines the difference between American and British English, Americans have zee and Britons have zed as a result of Noah Webster — who specified in his dictionary that Americans should use zee and not zed — and the spread of “The Alphabet Song,” an American-penned ditty whose end rhymes don’t work as well if you use zed. However, zee isn’t an American creation and was documented as having been used in certain regions of England before the American Revolution.

You could argue in favor of either zee or zed, I guess. The former rhymes with a majority of the other letters, while zed better reflects its origins: the Greek zeta. But rather than looking so closely as these two winners in the race to the back of the alphabet, I’m more curious as to why the letter “Z” has had so many different names. The Separated post alone lists zad, zard, ezed, ezod and uzzard in addition to izzard and izod. They’re not all that different, of course, and in fact, Canadian word blogger Bill Cassell says those last two could be the same, more or less. Izzard may have come from the French et zed, (“and ‘z,’” like you’d say upon reaching the end of the alphabet), or just “s” hard (which is what a “z” sounds like) or maybe even just izod with an “r” jammed into to it, as the British are sometimes wont to do.

Now I’m wondering why the other names for other English letters aren’t so complicated. If this page is any indication, “Z” is the only one with such a severe identity crisis.

Hey, but speaking of Izod, how disturbing is this mannequin?

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, froward
• gallinipper, gnaborretni, grandgore, grue, guilloche, gyaru
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, hobson-jobson, hogo, honorificabilitudinitatibus, hoyden
• ignivomous, iracund, isabelline, itaiitai
• 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
• pace, padiddle, 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, 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

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Let’s Get Awkwardly Physical

Do you love Olivia Newton-John but feel that her greatest achievements could be improved upon? Then you might have a bit in common with Vanessa, the Dutch-born singer who recorded the song “Upside-Down” in 1982, about a year after Newton-John released “Let’s Get Physical.”

It’s not so much that the song itself draws on “Let’s Get Physical” but just that Vanessa — who looks like Vanna White as styled by Dolly Parton — decided to steal the original video’s whole workout motif. Not that Olivia should have owned for eternity, exactly, but she at least deserved to keep it for a year or so. I’d imagine that Vanessa and friends didn’t realize that the early 80s vibe and the decidedly low-budge aesthetic, when combined with the gym setting, either skews porny or specifically gay porny. (You know, in the way that happened with that awful thing that Bruce Jenner did. No, the other one. No, the other one.) Either way, if you do not feel weird about touching surfaces after watching this video, you are weird.

Overall, the result is enthusiastically baffling. Bonus points for the part at 1:49, when the ridiculousness of doing the whole situation overcomes the dude with the mustache and he starts laughing. I have to hand it to him: He lasted longer than I would have gone without laughing or barfing.

With “It” Being a Particularly Feline Expression of Disgust

First the image…

And then the addendum that I do actually believe that Bravo fury Tabatha Coffey was actually born into this world as a white-haired cat that bore a constant expression of condescension for having to tolerate other living beings' existence. She willed her feline body to grow human parts specifically so she could yell at people and make them quake with fear.

Decisive Battle (of Musical Trivia)

Fellow nerds, help me out.

So I like Pink Lady, the Japanese duo who scored big in the late 70s and early 80s and, as I noted in a now-years-old post, ultimately wound up on a variety show on NBC despite the fact that neither member spoke English. (It’s quite the story, actually. Do click through to the original post, if you value from truly bizarre east-meets-west pop culture fusion.) And I recently happened upon a cache of Pink Lady videos on YouTube and caught the follwing rendition of “Southpaw.”

The music at the beginning — from 0:07 onward especially — reminded me of a Final Fantasy battle theme, but I can’t remember which. I can hear it in my head, but I just can’t place the game it came from. I poked around some more on YouTube and ended up with what seems to be a remade, hyped-up version of one of the original NES Final Fantasy tracks.

And this is pretty close, I guess, but the thing is I never played this glossy version of the original Final Fantasy. So is this it? Or is it a different battle theme I’m thinking of? If it is, in fact, this Final Fantasy 1 song, I’m guessing that the game music was a tribute to Pink Lady, since “Southpaw” came out in 1978, nine years before Final Fantasy taught the world about Red Mages and Bahamut. I eagerly await your thoughtful responses on this most urgent matter.

In testament to the greatness of Pink Lady, I’ll point out that they’re one of only two Japanese artists to ever appear on the American Billboard Top 40, the other being Kyu Sakamoto, whose 1961 globe-spanning hit found considerable success in the U.S. as “Sukiyaki.” (The song’s path from a tearful Japanese song to an American hit about a stewed beef dish made for another previous post on this blog, by the way.) Here’s that one American-approved Pink Lady song, “Kiss in the Dark”:

Clearly, it did well with the disco crowd. It’s all the more impressive to me because the Pink Lady singers were singing the translated, English lyrics phonetically. Truthfully, they hadn’t a clue what they were saying, not that their performance reflects this.

But yes — nerds? What say you?

Video games and pop music, previously:

• The Pixies do the theme from NARC
• Final Fantasy (the artist, not the game) and the star maze song from Super Mario Land 2
• Janet Jackson sampled Legend of Mana
• The ice music from Donkey Kong Country 2 seemed to have “been inspired by” a Vangelis track
• The Great Giana Sisters sounds not unlike electroclash
• Scissor Sisters and Mega Man
• Video game-y lyrics in Magic Wands’ “Black Magic”
• The Super Mario Bros. theme and Van Halen’s “Jump,” allegedly 

Son of Dad?

Why yes, I do enjoy my beers making obscure Seinfeld references.

 (An explanation of Denogginizer, if you need one, courtesy of The Seinfeld Dictionary.)