Womannequin

I don’t want to be that guy, but it hasn’t to be said: Damn, that mannequin’s got some big ol’ jugs.

Like, really. I feel like every mannequin I’ve ever seen is fairly flat-chested, but this gal is showing off more that a lot of shirtless dummies would. I’m almost inclined to say that this photo captures something interesting, what with her in the center, this partial human form who’s anatomically different than most of her type. And then she’s flanked on either side by this disembodied mouths grinning meanly. And there’s the skeleton hanging in the background, reminding the shoppers — themselves partial human forms, as a result of the photo’s cropping — that no matter what they purchase at whatever discounted price, the item will likely persist long after they too die and become like the skeleton.

But naw — just them jugs. That’s the prevailing sentiment here. Jugs.

Betty Boop Laughs at Your Quaint Understanding of Reality

You know that weird kind of dream in which nothing outright scary happens but which nonetheless seems scary because the world presented operates on a screwy logic that you can just never understand? Yes? Well, that — that is how I can best explain this 1934 Betty Boop cartoon.

It begins with a live-action shot of an artist drawing Betty and continues on blending animated and non-animated, Roger Rabbit-style. And that’s unnerving enough, but it gets sinister when Koko, Betty’s fellow Max Fleischer doodle, emerges from the ink well and develops a toothache. Betty plays dentist and prepares to remove Koko’s tooth, turning on laughing gas to make the extraction process easier. Only Betty also gets gassed and forgets to turn it off. The gas cloud then escapes off the piece of paper — remember, this is all happening as a drawing on the artist’s desk — and flows into real-life New York, gassing various inanimate objects into hysterical laughter. It’s damn surreal, and that statement means a lot coming from someone who knows that Betty Boop was originally designed to be a dog. Check it out:

And then that’s it. But what more should anyone need other than the takeaway that everyone laughed to death?

“The Girl Likes Lozenges. Can You Blame Her?”

The lessons to be learned here: (1) One good ye-ye deserves another, and (2) Serge Gainsbourg had a pervy sense of humor.

Yesterday, I wrote about the French Adele, but in bouncing around online to research that post, I came across a story about another French pop song from the same era — “Les Sucettes,” an ode to lollipops sung in 1966 by France Gall. Yes, that’s her stage name, and yes, it’s just one letter off from France Gaul, which would be the name of the country she’s from and the ancient name for area that country now occupies. Such nationalism! She damn near rivals that airport guy.

And what a face, too. Seeing what she looks like, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that France Gall was once considered for a live-action musical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. It failed to materialize after Walt Disney died in 1966, but no worries, because Gall’s career was also stewarded along by Serge Gainsbourg. The same year as Disney’s death, Gainsbourg wrote the song “Les Sucettes” specifically for Gall. The following video resulted.

Let’s take a quick inventory: It’s about sucettes (“lollipops,” but literally “suck-ettes”), the French lollipops of the 60s were flagrantly phallic, cutaways show women who aren’t France Gall cramming lollipops into their mouths and, finally, people wear full-body lollipop costumes that allow them to waggle their long, pointed shafts back and forth. Gainsbourg had transformed Gall into a Lolita. Incredibly, though Gall was nineteen when “Les Sucettes” was released, she claims she was oblivious to all the sexual implications. And though you have to wonder what nunnery could have produced a girl naïve enough that she found nothing suspicious about the lyrics “When the candy stick / With anise flavor / Goes down Annie’s throat,” According to Wikipedia, Gall was so mortified when someone finally pointed out the obvious that she dissolved her successful partnership with Gainsbourg.

And that, friends, is the story of the sweet little French girl who accidentally sang a song about gobbling dongs.

Adele & Adele

With a small number of exceptions, most of us attempting to make a name for ourselves in this pineapple upside-down cake of a world also face a problem in that no matter how hard we work, some idiot with a sex tape or a novelty single or a poorly planned assassination plot could easily render us un-Googleable. Even worse: Even if you did actually become something halfway towards a thing in your day, some idiot with your same name could trot along decades later and wipe you from searchable existence. Hell, it could even be your own descendant, named in honor of how great you were. Oh, the irony.

A few years ago, I came across this amazing song by a singer named Adele. I listened to it again and again, because it resonated with me in a deep way that few songs do. Months later, I learned that Adele was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live and was therefore thrilled. Not only did this indicate that talented performers could get mainstream recognition, but it also meant that Adele was contemporary when everything about her sound made me think she had recorded back in the 60s. Then she took the stage and sang. In English. This was not my Adele. This was the British Adele, whom everyone knows now and who now gets to be an icon for either womanhood or plus-sized womanhood, depending on who’s talking. I actually don’t have a problem with this. Adele has genuine talent, and I wish all pop music could be as good as hers, so if she usurps the title of “that pop singer who’s just named Adele (no last name),” I’m fine with it and won’t make a cruel joke about there genuinely only being room for one Adele in this world.

However, as a result of Adele’s ubiquity, my Adele — the original, French Adele — is far more difficult to research. ‘’ I know her real name was Christine Allegrini and that the song I like — the song that may actually be her only hit — came out in 1966. Like I said, she sings in French, so I don’t actually know what the song is about other than that the title, “J’ai Peur Parfois,” means “Sometimes I Have Fear.” That’s enough, really. The song moves me, comprehensible or not.

(Please note: She actually kind of looks like Now Adele. Could Now Adele possibly be a polyglot time-traveler? Sure, why not?)

Anyway, I thought I’d do what I can for my Adele. What with Francoise Hardy’s “Le temps de l'amour” getting play in the trailer for Moonrise Kingdom and Megan Draper getting radio play with Gillian Hills’s “Zou Bisou Bisou,” there might be an interest in the ye-ye sound — guitar, French songspeak, timid sexuality, a hot chick. I hope there’s also an interest in my Adele too.

Farewell, Saint Hot Dog

And eventually there came a day when I said goodbye to my eclectic twentysomething years and hello to a third decade full of collared shirts, white appliances and eye rolls inspired by the newly adult.

As I was leaving my old apartment for the last time, I dropped off a box of unneededs at Goodwill, and it included (but was not limited to) the George Foreman I received my junior year of college, the food processor I received my super senior year of college, speakers I bought got my sophomore year of college and the above pictured “trophy,” Saint Hot Dog. For reasons I can no longer explicitly recollect, my friend Kami gave me Saint Hot Dog when she left Santa Barbara. I think she thought I’d think it was worth preserving, and though I did, I realized that I couldn’t move it a third time. I just couldn’t. So funny, sunny specialness notwithstanding, Saint Hot Dog ended up getting placed in the “to go” box with the same care I’d offered it throughout the two previous moves that managed not to destroy its stapled-on, paper wings.

The drop-off process, however, didn’t go as planned. I thought there’d be a charity dumpster I could just throw my donations into as a sped by. No such luck. They had the “free shit” equivalent of a doorman there to sort through the contents and shame me in case I tried to give foiled-covered rocks or Acme-brand booby traps or whatever. Everything in my box passed with approval until he got to Saint Hot Dog.

“What the hell is this?” he asked.

I legitimately didn’t know what answer would appease him. So I didn’t even try. “It’s Saint Hot Dog,” I responded.

Him: “Is this a joke?”

Again, how can that question ever be answered? My best attempt at a response was a shruggy “Sort of?”

He just looked at me.

Me: “It’s… quirky,” as if that explained my very wrong belief that poor people would want Saint Hot Dog.

Eventually, the “free shit” doorman relented. “I’ve been hearing that word a lot,” he said, effectively concluding our interaction.

Most of me thinks that Saint Hot Dog got tossed in the garbage moments after I pulled out of the parking lot and headed east, leaving the Santa Monica fog in my rearview mirror for the foreseeable future. A small part of me, however, believes that Saint Hot Dog is now sitting on some thrift store shelf, forcing a little kid to ask “Mommy, why? What is it?”

Water, Water, Oil, Oil, Room Service, Room Service

I know what you’re thinking: What is Princess Vespa without the unmistakable spark that Daphne Zuniga brought to the role?

But the takeaway here isn’t the proof that someone at some point adapted Spaceballs as a novel. No, it’s that one person in particular did: Jovial Bob Stine. He also made book-like-things out of Ghostbusters II and Big Top Pee-wee, but you probably know of him for different reasons. The same author wrote a great many more books under the name R.L. Stine, including the whole of the Goosebumps series (yes, yes, “mah fravrit berks”) as well as the Fear Street series, which I never read but which I will always remember for their bumpy-textured covers depicting ambiguously unhappy teens at night.

I actually know very little about R.L. Stine. The Goosebumps books only became a thing right when I was growing out of them, and I felt the older-skewing titles threatened my adolescent masculinity, what with their relatable heroines and approachable-seeming male love interests with their tucked-in shirts. But looking at this guy’s collected work, I realize he’s a freaking Stephen King for the puberty set, exorcising this bit of nascent existential angst and that bit of hormonal confusion with near-horror, semi-suspense and the mild macabre. It’s actually almost impressive that he actually exists — you know, as opposed to Franklin W. Dixon or Carolyn Keene — and this one guy actually thought up so many technically different nightmare scenarios for young people.

Then again, in complete contradiction to the that last statement, there are the synopses to R.L. Stine’s Babysitter tetralogy to suggest that such a body of work could be amassed by any idiot with a rainy afternoon and a pair of dice with stock plot devices taped to them.

More or less straight from Wikipedia:

The Babysitter: Sixteen-year-old Jenny Jefferes receives threatening calls while she is babysitting, and the person making the threats turns out to be Mr. Hagen, the father of the boy she’s watching. He hates babysitters because an inattentive one accidentally killed his daughter. Mr. Hagen initially offers to take Jenny home but instead takes her to a rock quarry where he tries to kill her but then fails to killer so badly that he himself dies.

The Babysitter II: Suffering from nightmares about a zombified Mr. Hagen rising from his grave, Jenny has begun to see a psychiatrist. While babysitting a malevolent boy genius, her psychiatrist’s receptionist attempts to kill her.

The Babysitter III: Jenny goes on a babysitting outing with her cousin, Debra, when threatening calls begin again. Then Debra finds out the calls are coming from Jenny, whose mind has been overtaken by a “Mr. Hagen” personality.

The Babysitter IV: Jenny attempts to put her dark babysitting-related history behind her by accepting another babysitting job. She is terrorized by murderous ghost children.

Had the series continued into Jenny Jeffers’s seventeenth year of life, I can only imagine what horrors she would have faced on yet more ill-advised babysitting jobs, , and I can only imagine that the synopses get shorter yet. Something in the ballpark of “Jenny babysits kids who turn into dinosaurs, also Jenny is two robot twins.”

Five More Words With Surprising Etymologies

People seemed to enjoy “Five Words With Surprising Etymologies,” so here’s a sequel. Happy Monday.

phosphorus: It was previously an adjective meaning “light-bringing” and a proper name for the morning star before it got attached to the chemical element. But what’s interesting about phosphorus is that it’s essentially the Greek form of a Latin name with a very negative association. That phoros, “bearing,” is the same root you see in Christopher, which means “Christ-bearing.” Phos, meanwhile, means “light,” so phosphorus means “light-bearing.” That’s exactly what Lucifer means.

bellwether: It might be used today to refer to some on-the-cutting-edge person whom trendwatchers have their eyes on, but the etymology goes back to a far more provincial place. It’s literally the sheep that wears a bell around its neck and leads the flock. A wether is a castrated ram.

a trendsetter, via

galaxy: I actually buried this one in an old word-of-the-week post, and I feel like it’s worth mentioning again. So you know how we live in the Milky Way galaxy? Well, astronomers had known for a while that clustered stars had a milk-like appearance. In fact, the word galaxy comes from the Greek galaxias kyklos, “milky circle,” and that first syllable in lactation goes back to the same Proto-Indo-European root as galaxy.

germane: It doesn’t have anything to do with Germany, though it comes from an old word german that in the mid-fourteenth century meant “having the same parents.” The modern usage is first documented in Hamlet, where germane used the old meaning in a figurative sense. Germane goes back to the Latin noun germen, “sprout,” which also gives English germination.

bulimia: It literally means “ox hunger,” though that first syllable — from the Greek bous, “ox,” — is used here as an intensifier, so “hunger of an ox” and not “hunger for an ox,” I’m thinking. But the weird part is covert bovineness notwithstanding, that first syllable doesn’t have any relation to bull, which comes from some mysterious Germanic place.