Goleta, You're Not Alone

Hey, City of Goleta, you’re not the only Goleta in the world. There’s also a genus of spiders that shares your name. And it’s a genus of jumping spiders, no less. JUMPING SPIDERS!

Remember, everyone, when you hear the name “Goleta,” think of JUMPING SPIDERS!

Dwigt, Meet Tyson Homosexual

From Co-Worker Chris, a lesson in the dangers of auto-replace and a reminder that computers can only be a smart as the people using them. I can’t try to say it any better than Steve Benen, so here’s how he put it:

Auto-correct can be a very helpful feature of any word-processing program. But when conservatives use it, they run the risk of embarrassing themselves. Some far-right sites that subscribe to the Associated Press feed, for example, will use auto-correct to change “Democratic Party” to “Democrat Party.” This, of course, is because they have the temperament of children.

But the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow website takes the phenomenon one step further with its AP articles. The far-right fundamentalist group replaces the word “gay” in the articles with the word “homosexual.” I’m not entirely sure why, but it seems to make the AFA happy. The group is, after all, pretty far out there.

The problem, of course, is that “gay” does not always mean what the AFA wants it to mean. My friend Kyle reported this morning that sprinter Tyson Gay won the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials over the weekend. The AFA ran the story, but only after the auto-correct had “fixed” the article.

That means — you guessed it — the track star was renamed “Tyson Homosexual.” The headline on the piece read, “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials.” Readers learned:

Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday.

His wind-aided 9.85 seconds was a fairly cut-and-dry performance compared to what happened a day earlier. On Saturday, Homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat and had to scramble to finish fourth, then in his quarterfinal a couple of hours later, ran 9.77 to break the American record that had stood since 1999. […]

Homosexual didn’t get off to a particularly strong start in the first semifinal, but by the halfway mark he had established a comfortable lead. He slowed somewhat over the final 10 meters-nothing like the way-too-soon complete shutdown that almost cost him Saturday. Asked how he felt, Homosexual said: “A little fatigued.”

Now, the AFA has since changed the article back to the way it was originally written by the AP reporter, but don’t worry, Kyle got the screen-grab before the AFA edited the piece back.

There’s just something helpful about starting a Monday morning on a hilarious note.

Can’t help but wonder what else could be corrupted by this replace code. “Now we don our homosexual apparel”? Oprah Winfrey’s best friend Homosexualle King? Famed sherpa Tenzig Norhomosexual? And how might the AP story about this incident be filtered, if such an article were to be written? “… which erroneously and nonsensically changed the last name of would-be Olympian Tyson Homosexual to ‘Homosexual’ and referring to him solely as ‘Homosexual’ upon second reference throughout the remainder of the article. ‘I had to laugh about being called Tyson Homosexual,’ because that’s not my name,” said Homosexual, who also clarified that he is heterosexual.”

And since they’re already crazy, why not just replace “Hillary Clinton” with “Borg Queen”?

And how to the people who receive this news feel about it literally going through a filter that changes the meaning of words?

Australian University of Australia

Ben offered me this Monty Python sketch as a fair representative of Australian culture. Not being Australian in anyway, I'm happy to report that it is.

Reminds me of my Uncle Bruce.

Son of “But Seriously, Folks”

Best of June 2008, according to Back of the Cereal Box.

• Saturday Night Live sneaks in differences between TV and online versions! Says phrase "mouth whoopie"!
• Grumpy, insulting birthday for Drew!
• Drew gets tipsy and writes about love!
• Living in Isla Vista like being on an airplane! Kind of!
• Chuck Klosterman makes Drew think about opposites! And apples!
• Fun music suggestion game! And a response from me! New music for you!
• Pervy things snuck into video games!
• Likely false connections between a video game you've never heard of and Twin Peaks!
• Oversized Stridex pad!
• A possibly needed word: words that are text-dialed using the same number sequence!
• All about "bloofer!"
• Katy Perry, please go away!
• Mega Man to look old! Nerds like Drew are validated!
• Coldplay accused of music theft! Legend of Zelda there too, for some reason!
• Bugs!

And, because I worry that not enough of you may have seen its first posting, here again is "Mirror Image," which I endorse as one of the best SNL sketches I've seen in years.

Enjoy!

Stuck in an Elf Village

After I posted the bit about Coldplay, Creaky Boards and Legend of Zelda in which I marveled at the strangeness of a non-electronic rock band actually crediting video game music for having inspired a song, I realized that I had forgotten something I had read in Rolling Stone just a week ago: Harmony-happy rock band Fleet Foxes credited the game Final Fantasy alongside Simon & Garfunkel and Beach Boys bootlegs as having influences their sound. Said band frontman Robin Pecknold:

Those Japanese games had these dense and mysterious soundscapes... A song would just loop the whole time you were in an elf village or whatever. It was catchy and mysterious — that sounds like good music to me.

Again, as with the relationship between The Creaking Boards and Legend of Zelda, the influence isn’t as pronounced as you might expect, but, in the end, that’s a good thing.


In general, the songs don’t work in a way that you might end up humming them, but they’re lush and evocative of something grand and sweeping. They also could serve well as background music to something else — not unlike what you might hear in Final Fantasy. For those of you for whom Final Fantasy wasn’t part of your formative years, this all means nothing. You still might like Fleet Foxes anyway, provided similarities to the aforementioned bands and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young aren’t a turn-off. For those of you with even a basic knowledge of Black and White Mages, I urge you to check the band out, especially the tracks “Quiet Houses” and “Ragged Wood,” which reminded me most of those looping old melodies.

Humoresque of a Little Dog

Quite a few of you eventually offered to play the music suggestion game that I talked up in this post, and I will now deliver the goods. Can’t promise you’ll like the results, but what songs I’ve collected represent a cross-section of things that matched what you suggested and things I felt you might actually like to hear.

One exception to the rules, which now feel I should have clarified in the initial post. I’m not making the songs available for free, because I don’t readily have the means to do so. I felt a much better way of making the results immediately ready for the listening would be to post them in a Muxtape, which you’ll see below. (You can listen to the music as much as you want. If you’d like to buy them, you can do so fairly easily through the Amazon.com MP3 store. It’s cheaper than iTunes, generally, and the files downloaded are yours to do whatever you like with. That is, unlike iTunes, it won’t prevent you from burning them to multiple CDs. This seems like a reasonable compromise, no?) And below the Muxtape itself are my explanations for why I picked the songs I did.

MUXTAPE!

“Wishful Thinking,” by The Ditty Bops

At George’s suggestion of “flannel cakes,” I was a taken off guard, mostly because I’ve never had a flannel cake in my life. Still haven’t. Lucky me, however, because the word consists of two nouns for which I have very specific associations: “flannel,” which brings to mind a rustic outdoorsiness, and “cake,” which taste good. Thus, I’ve picked something upbeat, sweet, and fairly country.

“Run Joey Run,” by David Geddes

First off, I had to resist the urge to put something by Lesley Gore for the suggestion “a sweet sixteen birthday party gone bad.” The song I chose does not have anything to do with birthdays, specifically, but instead does a good job of taking the innocence of the American teen and turning it into something awful, if in a clichéd way. But I guess a sweet sixteen gone bad is itself a cliché, thanks to Lesley Gore. “Run Joey Run,” by the way, is one of my favorite bad songs ever.

“I Can Smell the Leaves,” by Olivia Tremor Control

This was as best as I could do with Erin’s extremely specific suggestion of “having a picnic on a sunny day in a warm, grassy field without bugs, on top of a superfuzzy mustard yellow blanket, on which you make out with someone very attractive (yet intellectual) all afternoon and you never, ever, ever get sunburnt.” For me, this Olivia Tremor Control song has also brought to mind thoughts of a sort of peaceful, quiet euphoria in the middle of a busy world. Erin’s suggestion seemed to hint more at a late springtime scene than an autumn one, though, and this song is definitely an autumn song. Still, I think it works.

“Friday’s Child,” by Nancy Sinatra

Regina’s suggestion — “A woman who looks 20 years older than her actual age, smoking a cigar, swilling Lagavulin from the bottle as she tries to teach Latin phrases to her stubborn parrot” — probably made for the hardest out of the bunch. Really, I couldn’t decide whether the whole thing seemed funny or sad. I decided to go for what stood out most: a woman aged beyond her time, along with a general sense of smoky bluesiness. As for the Latin and the parrot, you’ll have to use your imagination. The song does repeat itself a lot, I guess, but in English and not Latin. Oh well.

“Kid,” by Green Apple Quick Step

A bit of background: I’ve had this song since early in high school, as I picked it up on the soundtrack to I Know What You Did Last Summer, which was actually a pretty good album, despite its association with a decidedly B-grade movie. As for this song in particular, I feel like I’ve listened it all the way through only four or five times, but I’ve always had a soft spot for it, even though it’s by no means a great song. I feel it matches Sara’s suggestion of “a song that reminds you of one of those days where it's too hot to really do anything, so you just throw on your grungiest shirt and flip-flops to go buy lime popsicles from 7-Eleven” well enough because it mentions of waking up late, throwing on old clothes, buying lottery tickets, and the sheer joy of wandering around your house aimlessly because you have nothing to do. That last one I associate with summer — or lime popsicle season, if you will — because that’s when the younger me had days to do just that.

“Over and Over,” by Hot Chip

A bit literal, I admit, but I can defend this match for Ellerby’s suggestion of “a really fun roll over car accident.” The song starts simple enough but builds, getting noisier and more cacophonic as it goes, and I’d like to think that represents a car rolling down a cliff, crunching a little more with every spin. Also, the song is called “Over and Over” and it uses that phrase, for lack of a better phrasing, over and over.

“The Sun Is Forever,” by Elf Power

For whatever reason, I had this song in mind immediately upon reading Plover’s suggestion of “an unripe persimmon.” Don’t know why. Perhaps because both song and suggestion reference orange round things — a persimmon and a setting sun — even if an unripe persimmon probably isn’t orange or even necessarily round. In any case, this is what you get: an abstract response to an abstract suggestion.

“Ice Cold Lemonade,” by Death by Chocolate

Whether the CHOCOLATE BABY’s suggestion — “you like CHOCOLATE BABY? then google CHOCOLATE BABY for best prices for CHOCOLATE BABY” — was meant to be included in this music game or not, I decided a natural fit would have to be a song from this rather group, whose underlying silliness doesn’t prevent them from being fun.

“One Million Miles Away,” by J. Ralph

A song that may be familiar to you all from a Volkswagen commercial from the late 90s, “One Million Miles” away fit the bill for Euphoria’s suggest of “an antique pewter and bronze colored song, one that you'd keep in a curio cabinet full of unusual things like animal bones, cones of hand spun wool yarn, Indian incense burners, feathers from exotic and/or extinct birds, occult books and other unusual things. You'd listen to it while having a tea party in full Rocco costume and the tea set you're using is hand made from Indonesia. Oh yes, and there's delicious finger foods to be had as well.” It’s fancy, but a bit strange. It’s even likable, if you can overcome the immediate associations with Volkswagen.

“The Philadelphia Grand Jury,” by The Fiery Furnaces

I damn near picked The Avalanches’ “Frontier Psychiatry” for this one, but changed my mind, mostly out of fear of putting it back-to-back with another song that was better known right at the start of my college experience. Don't want to date myself. This Fiery Furnaces song works for the anonymous suggestion of “something something like warioware,” because, like WarioWare, it’s weird as hell and changes from one thing to another at a moment’s notice.

“Murder in the Red Barn,” by Tom Waits

This song hold a special place for me as the first Tom Waits song I ever heard. It also reminds me a great deal of a short story we might have read in Prof. Waid’s Southern Lit class.

“Imitation of the Sky,” by Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears

I’m not sure what an “astro-crag” is, but this song pretty well covers Tharpe-Tharpe’s suggestion of that thing “covered with pop-rocks, and honey and they are causing friction and creating sparks.” I’d like to think of “Imitation of the Sky” as a lost Elton John song, covered by a dream duo of Brendon Small and Jake Shears.

(This last song marks the end of the first Muxtape, which could only fit twelve in total. For the rest, see the additional Muxtape below.)

MUXTAPE, again!

“Diode,” by Andy Votel

An abstract one, again, but I feel it works since the song starts out very mellow and then quickens about 90 seconds in. That’s where — in accordance with Dina’s suggestion — that I think the realization that you’re not alone in the hot tub and there’s strange toe in your mouth happens.

“Cave of Time,” by Keiichi Suzuki

A weird one, I know. For Goofy’s suggestion of “falling thu the space-time vortex,” I bravely avoided both Angelo Badalamenti’s “Falling” and Funki Porcini’s “50,000 Ft. Freefall” and instead opted for this odd duck of a soundtrack chunk, which begins with what always struck me as a crude sample of the beginning of “All You Need Is Love” and gets stranger from there. Apologies if it’s offensively weird.

“Venus,” by Air

Yes, I realize that the lyrics initially specify the planet Venus and not the Roman goddess of love and sex. Despite that initial flaw, I feel like this song fits Pedro’s suggestion of a theme song for the mistress archetype, especially if you decide that the narrator is either being insincere or naïve when he talks about being together forever with the woman being addressed. Because, after all, mistresses don’t last. They either get dumped or become wife number two. Aside from the lyrics, I think this song makes for a nice accompaniment for the image of a beautiful girl walking through a room, in slow motion and soft focus. As for notions of her freedom, note that the lyrics give her all the power: The narrator is totally smitten with her, but for all we know, she could have other plans other than to hang around. Having someone hanging on your every word and action? That’s definitely a type of freedom.

“Japanese Boy,” by Aneka

Simply put, Sanam’s suggestion of “breast grime” is a private reference to a person that I think she and I both regard as one of the sorrier creatures to stalk the planet. I didn’t want to associate any songs that I actually like with this person, so I simply picked the one song that stands out as the worst song in my entire music library. Annoying, lingering, and ultimately offensive, “Japanese Boy” is truly a song that should not have been. Fitting.

And just because I didn’t want to end the playlist with that one, I tagged one song onto the end, only because it’s something I’ve been enjoying lately quite a bit. I feel like everyone else should give it a shot too.

So that’s it. How did I do?

A Nurse or a Cop or a Dragon

Maria applies to be a mentor.

Will she get it?

Will she?

Will?

W?

Lengthy Unicorns?

Just a quick post for this week's unusual word. In fact, the fun of this post is mostly derived from pictures of bugs. So it goes.

longicorn (LON-ji-korn) — noun: a biological family of beetles with especially long antennae

I thought this one was worth noting because, as Erin McKean states in Weird and Wonderful Words, the existence of "longicorn" proves that even if a word sounds entirely made up, it can still be real and have a perfectly valid etymology. (The etymology is quite simple: the Latin longus, "long," plus the cornu, "horn.") I looked up the Wikipedia page for the longicorn family and was horribly disappointed to learn that many of the members of this family actually have antennae that are quite short, which is really the stupidest thing ever.

Now here's a bunch of pictures of goofy bugs that all look like they're wearing those dinglebob headbands!

Meet the Rosalia longicorn!


And the Red Milkweed beetle!


And the Cactus longhorn beetle!


The Asian long-horned beetle!


And finally the Valley elderberry longhorn beetle!


The rest of the longicorn family I more or less found repugnant.

Previous words-o'-the-week:

• kakopygian
  
• jehu
• itaiitai
• grandgore
• fissilingual

Coldplay, Hotly Contested

As I proclaim in my sidebar mission statement, this blog began as a means to document the intersections of strange bits of pop culture — either with each other or with my life. Thus, when I heard Coldplay was meeting both a plagiarism accusation and Legend of Zelda head-on, I knew I had to jump on it and write about it here. In case you haven't already heard, Brooklyn rock band Creaky Boards is politely claiming that Coldplay's "Viva la Vida" bears a few too many similarities to one of their songs, which, appropriately enough, is titled "The Songs I Didn't Write." This video spells it out neatly enough.

It's all very interesting, and I have to admit that the two songs sound very similar.

There's a second factor, however, in all this and, to me, a more interesting pop culture foot note than the alleged rip off: the random tie to Legend of Zelda. Without this element, I probably wouldn't have even written this post, as I generally could give a shit about what Coldplay does. (I side with Chuck Klosterman's and his summation of the British band: "a mediocre photocopy of Travis, who sound like a mediocre photocopy of Radiohead," and whose first big single "brilliantly informed us that the stars in the sky are, in fact, yellow." Klosterman also calls the Coldplay the single shittiest fucking band he's ever heard in his entire fucking life, but I feel that's taking it a step too far, given that Crazytown existed.) As I first learned in this post on The Girl Gamer and found to be echoed in other articles on the matter, Creaky Boards frontman Andrew Hoepfner admits that, in the first place, his his initial inspiration for the "Songs I Didn't Write" came from another song melody was the Great Fairy theme from the Legend of Zelda games. Perhaps that's why he's only politely complaining about Coldplay.

Here's that Zelda music:

The funny part here is that I'm not sure I hear the resemblance, at least not as strongly as I can hear a connection between "Viva la Vida" and "Songs I Didn't Write." But Hoepfner owned up to the Legend of Zelda connection, so I guess it must be the case. Still, I'm take aback that any serious musician would openly credit video game music as simple as this as inspiration. I mean, it's bound to happen, given how may video games people my age have played, and I should be the last one to be shocked. Nonetheless, I am.

Am I alone on this one? Or is this all as strange as I'm making it out to be?

The Robot Master Random Generator

In response to my news about Mega Man 9, the keeper of the blog Crummy has posted a nifty doodad he's calling Mega Man MMVIII. It supposes that the 2,008th sequel couldn't possibly feature any halfway decent Robot Master bosses and consequently creates new ones by affixing random nouns and adjectives onto "man" or, less often, "woman." Here's what I got.

For those of you who haven't previously played a Mega Man game, understand that each game begins with a stage selection screen like the one above, with Mega Man's face in the middle of a three-by-three grid of the game's bosses. I'm most amused by the less-than-terrifying Badinage Man and Humbleness Man, but I have to point out that I think we all know a Kerbside Woman.

Crummy, by the way, was the site responsible for the Eater of Meaning.

The Birdo Unitard

Technically, it's not supposed to be a Birdo unitard, I'm fairly positive, but I'm hard-pressed to say what else it could be.


Good to know I'm not the only one seeing Birdo in places she shouldn't be.

[ Source: Sailors Fighting in the Dancehall ]

Speaking of Robots

Something rather cool that arrived along with the new Futurama movie, The Beast With a Billion Backs: the below postcard.

Bender is great, but him made up like the robot from Metropolis makes him even greater. Happy me. I think I might have the original poster somewhere. (You can see a web version of it here.) And I think The Beast With a Billion Backs should be seen by anyone who'd like a story in which an alien has sex with the population of the entire universe.

Mega Surprise

I like video games, and I like being surprised. That's why today brought good news on both fronts with the revelation that a beloved childhood past time, the Mega Man series, will return to the consoles of Nintendo loyalists in the form of Mega Man 9 — a new sequel to the original series that began in 1987, in the earliest days of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Surprise number one: a new installment of a series that hasn't been officially updated since 1996.


Even more notable that merely continuing the series, however, publisher Capcom has chosen to do so in an unusual way: with the graphic style of those antiquated, first-generation NES games and not in the flashy way that newer systems are capable of. Thus, surprise number two: decidedly retro graphics. It's an odd move, but for a lifer like me, it's a welcome one in that it further supports my belief that game designers have wisely chosen to capitalize on the gaming nostalgia and mine the past twenty years of blips and bleeps.

For comparison's sake:

Mega Man 3: an oldie but goodie

Mega Man 8: sporting a bit more detail

Mega Man 9: looks old, is new, makes drew happy

The retrotastic look, however, doesn't mean the game doesn't take the series forward, if only by a small step. For those who never played through a Mega Man game, the formula is simple: As the titular hero, you shoot and hop through eight levels, each of which end with a duel with a Robot Master end boss. Throughout each of the games, the Robot Master has a unique name and schtick to match. Despite the uniqueness of each, the Robot Masters share one common trait, which can be easily guessed by reading a list of them. Here is that list: Cut Man, Guts Man, Elec Man, Bomb Man, Ice Man, Fire Man, Metal Man, Air Man, Bubble Man, Quick Man, Flash Man, Crash Man, Heat Man, Wood Man, Needle Man, Gemini Man, Hard Man, Magnet Man, Top Man, Snake Man, Spark Man, Shadow Man, Bright Man, Toad Man, Drill Man, Pharaoh Man, Ring Man, Dust Man, Dive Man, Skull Man, Gravity Man, Wave Man, Stone Man, Gyro Man, Star Man, Charge Man, Napalm Man, Crystal Man, Blizzard Man, Centaur Man, Flame Man, Knight Man, Plant Man, Tomahawk Man, Wind Man, Yamato Man, Freeze Man, Junk Man, Burst Man, Cloud Man, Spring Man, Slash Man, Shade Man, Turbo Man, Tengu Man, Astro Man, Sword Man, Cloud Man, Search Man, Grenade Man, Frost Man, Aqua Man, Dynamo Man, Cold Man, Ground Man, Pirate Man, Burner Man, Magic Man, Oil Man, and Time Man. Quite a list, even if I’d be hard pressed to explain the difference between Fire Man, Heat Man and Flame Man. Did you spot the overriding similarity? If you did, know that it would appear to no longer be the case. According to what blogs are saying about Mega Man 9, the list of Robot Master includes one important difference. It reads as follows: Magma Man, Galaxy Man, Jewel Man, Concrete Man, Hornet Man, Plug Man, Tornado Man, and Splash Woman. Yes, a gynoid. A Fembot. A female Robot Master. Splash Woman might seem like a relatively unremarkable addition in the context of the seventy-some preceding her, but her presence is nonetheless a sign that the people who make video games have at least begun to acknowledge that they’ve been excluding an element for the past twenty years. Surprise number three: a move towards gender equality, even if it remains to be seen how intimidating some robot named Splash Woman could be.

I'll simply state surprise number four: Capcom will release Mega Man 9 for specifically for the Wii Virtual Console, meaning that I can obtain this pseudo-lost wonder the moment it becomes available.

Finally, I should note that news of the new "old" Mega Man comes not from the gaming blogs that usually tell me of such things nowadays, but from good ol' Nintendo Power, a magazine I read as a child but I figured had become irrelevant by now. (Well, to get technical about it, I heard it from the websites, which in turn heard it from Nintendo Power. But still.) Surprise number five: Nintendo Power not only exists but actually scoops the world of web media occasionally.

[ Source: Rockman Perfect Memories, the BBPS ]

¡Spanish Exclamation!

This is how I began my morning:

I've actually never played Sega's Samba de Amigo and do not know exactly how one plays the game, but, nonetheless, watching this trailer for the apparently upcoming new installment of the series made blood surge up through my neck and into a space behind my eyes, in a manner not unlike one that would result from riding a roller coaster or doing uppers. Not sure whether I'd consider this physical response good or bad.

[ Source: Like, everywhere in the gameblog world, including Joystiq, GayGamer and The Tanooki ]

Fresh Out of the Toaster

An open letter to pop tart Katy Perry:

Dear Katy, You’re from Santa Barbara, as I learned from Aly’s recent interview with you. How neat. Can I advise you to shut your mouth when taking your next publicity photo? It would help to end comparisons between you and a blow-up sex doll. Also, it would help me to believe that you’re a better human being than your songs “U R So Gay” and “I Kissed a Girl” would indicate.

Less like this, okay?


Thanks.

Sincerely,
The world

Looking Quite Bloofer Today

Back when I was a kid and I fanatically read The Far Side, my piano teacher had one of the retrospectives in which Gary Larson explains some of the nutso logic that led him to draw the comics he did. One Far Side, which I can’t find anywhere online, featured a meeting between two destined lovers, Elephant Man and Buffalo Gal, with the former referencing the famed deformocelebrity and the latter the woman from the folk song “Buffalo Gal, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?” Anyway, Larson just explained that the two names suggested that the characters would be compatible, in that weird Far Side way, thus the meeting of the two.

Okay, okay, I know. It was the 90s. This is what we thought was funny back then.

But I had reason to think of this comic last week at work, when various factors led me to verify a statement made by one of our columnists by looking up the Wikipedia page for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That, of course, resulted in me looking up several other related pages, as that’s what Wikipedia was designed for. I ended up on the page for Lucy Westenra, the character whose encounter with Dracula ends rather badly. When I read Dracula in high school, I noted its odd use of the term “bloofer lady,” which children characters use to describe what is eventually revealed to be the vampire of Lucy, who stalks the countryside after her death and preys upon villagers. In the context of the story, I just assumed that “bloofer lady” was some regional British term for “boogeyman” to the point where that assumption sat, unattended and mostly useless in the back of my mind, as a sort of female counterpart for “boogeyman.” “Bloofer Lady, meet Boogeyman. You’ll hit it off, I think.” A nice matching pair, I think, not unlike Elephant Man and Buffalo Gal.

Not the case, necessarily. People disagree on the subject, but the prevailing interpretation of the phrase is that “bloofer lady” is garbled childspeak for “beautiful lady.” Some annotated versions of the book postulate that, in any case.

Votes in favor of “bloofer” meaning “beautiful”:

• English Forums.com
• The Valve, which posits that it came from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, which uses the word “boofer lady” to apparently mean “beautiful lady”
• EduQnA.com, which also offers the less plausible interpretation of it being a garbled version of “bloodsucker”
• And this site, which features fan art of Bloodsucker Lucy

None of these being anything close to official sources, of course. None of the dictionaries I checked had anything to say about “bloofer,” one way or the other. And while most people who have anything to say on the subject side with the “beautiful” definition, they do so cautiously, often saying that people ultimately don’t know for sure. And seeing as how Stoker published Dracula in 1897, I feel like we won’t get any surer about “bloofer” in the years to come.

Phantom of the Stupid Hat

Best Week Ever posted a countdown of the ten best silly hats from Ladies' Day at Royal Ascot. The following photo took the number two spot, though it's easily my favorite.


Unspeakably terrifying, but also hilarious, in that the Crazy British Lisa Kudrow's facial impression would seem to indicate that she has no idea what her hat actually looks like. How Best Week Ever puts it: It looks like she’s being chased by the Ringwraiths from Lord of the Rings. And this poor woman… look how happy she is!!! She has no idea the four whoresmen of the apocalypse are hot on her tail! Look how happy she is to see you… she’s all “Hi Bahsil! What? Behind me you say? Ghosts? Oh Bahsil, you ol’ –” THUD. El morte.

Ms. Lefevre

I recently stumbled on this clip again, after having first seen it on George's blog some time ago. I have to say: Even keeping in mind that any rock star will shed a few personas during the course of their career, it weirds me out to see Neko Case looking young and happy. Because that's not how I like to think of her.

The band is Maow. The year is 1996. The song is "Ms. Lefevre." And the sense of deja vu your feeling probably stems from the fact that you've watched an episode of Smack the Pony.

Mirror Image

Easily one of the better SNL sketches from this past year, and one that somehow slipped past me when the Amy Adams-hosted episode aired earlier this year. It's a simple but brilliant concept: Twin girls attempt to do have the work in life by pretending to be one person, but then one of them gets fat.

Ha ha. Hagley.

Death, Cars and the Power of Names

A thought upon seeing Death Proof for the third time.

As I said in my first blogged essay on the film, the first set of girls — Syndey Poitier, Jordan Ladd and Vanessa Ferlito’s characters, plus Rose McGowan, depending on how you look at it — function in a significantly different way than do the second set — Tracie Thoms, Rosario Dawson, and Zoe Bell, plus Mary Elizabeth Winstead, depending on how you look at it, and I’m not just talking about how the fact that the second group survives the film. In essence, the first group are the film’s Marion Cranes — the flighty ladies ultimately doomed by their inability to act as adults. The second group act more sensibly and manage to defeat the film’s big bad, so I’ll call them the Lila Cranes.

left to right: Marion Crane, Marion Crane and Marion Crane

Seeing the film for a third time has helped me notice a strange trend in the first half, with the Marions. There’s some strange goings-on with these characters’ names. Maybe it’s unintentional on Quentin Tarantino’s part, but the fact his other films have included some names that indicate that he does, in fact, name his characters for a reason make me think he could have planned this out. Fun with names in Tarantino films abounds, by the way. In Kill Bill alone, there’s a staggering amount of “letter play” going on, with this name and that name referencing individual letters: Beatrix (B), Bill (B), their daughter BB, Bill’s brother Budd (another B), O-ren (O), Jeanie Bell (G), Elle Driver (L), Karen Kim (a double K), Gogo Yubari (a double G), and two axed characters, Yuki Yubari (a double Y) and L.F. O’Boyle (L, F, and O, duh). Aside from that, a lot of the characters have more than one name. Uma Thurman’s character alone goes variously by The Bride, Beatrix Kiddo, Black Mamba and Arlene Machiavelli and is damn near buried under a gravestone marked Paula Schulz.

But back to Death Proof.

Back when I took classes, I can remember literature professors speaking more than once of an old superstition about wariness about telling strangers your name. Knowing a person’s name, in various senses, gives others a certain power over that person. You can call them out, curse them out, Google them ad nauseam, file a lawsuit against them, stalk them on MySpace or, at the very least, tell everybody you know that So-and-So isn’t the superstar he or she claims to be.

I’ve talked up the point too much by now, but I feel like it’s worth pointing out that the three main Marions — who, again, meet bad ends — each encounter some odd business with men and their names. (I’m only picking the three, because they’re the only real main characters in the first part. Lana Franks, who dies in the big crash scene midway through the scene, basically has three lines and only serves to drive the Marions into certain death. Pam (McGowan), who gets more than three lines, is clearly excluded from the main group.) Julia (Poitier), for example, is almost universally known as Jungle Julia, the name she uses as a DJ. The only person who ever uses her full name is Pam, who’s known Julia since childhood and freely divulges that Julia wasn’t always the statuesque beauty she is today. (Or was, given that she’s dead now.) There’s a big difference between Jungle Julia and Julia Lucai, and there’s a big difference between knock-out and a gangly junior high schooler. With Arlene (Ferlito), a fake name manages to simultaneously protect her and put her in danger. Julia, as part of her radio show, announces that her friend will be visiting from out of town and encourages men to approach her, buy her a drink and recite a passage from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Only Julia tells her listeners that this friend is named “Butterfly,” which manages to protect her identity a little bit. And finally there’s Shanna (Ladd), who takes offense to a bar dude accidentally calling her “Shauna.” She’s protective of her name, a rightly so. “Now there is one thing every girl in the whole world whose name is ‘Shanna’ has in common with each other: We all hate the name ‘Shauna.’ And we really hate when people call us ‘Shawna.’ Remember it’s Shanna Banana, not Shauna Banahnah.”

It’s all a moot point, this name protectiveness, I guess, because, as I said, they all die. The women in the second half of Death Proof don’t, and no one seems to talk about their names all that much. Maybe that’s intentional and maybe it’s not, but there’s a lot that Tarantino wrote to parallel between the film’s two halves — bad things happening on birthdays, lousy Hollywood boyfriends, nasty business with legs — and other elements that don’t, in an apparent effort to contrast the second group against the first group.