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.

Final Fantasy. Fleet Foxes. It’s at least alliterative. That’s always a good start. Again, as with the relationship between Creaky 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. It’s hard to use the term “soundscape” without sounding a little pretentious, but then again it’s hard not to sound pretentious while raving about how a childhood favorite has resurfaced in a cool new band. The songs 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.

The only Fleet Foxes track I could find attach to a YouTube video was “White Winter Hymnal,” which is also good. Enjoy!

EDIT: Since this went up and since Fleet Foxes sort of blew up in terms of popularity, YouTube clips for “Quiet Houses” and “Ragged Wood” have made it online. First, “Quiet Houses”:

And “Ragged Wood”:

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.

Doppeltexters

Should a term exist for words which, when being entered in a text message, require the same numbers to be entered? Surely, if you’ve texted before, you’ve experienced the embarrassment of sending a message with one word being accidentally substituted for its own number twin. With a few mere slips of the finger, “Call me ASAP, OK?” can be “Ball on bras, OK?” Awkward. Confusing. Potentially a source of ridicule. “Take care” can be “Take barf.” “Whose car are you using” becomes “Whore bar ape you Trini?”Like I said, confusing.

In the spirit of “aptronym” — the awesome coinage used to denote people whose names provide an accurate description of them, like a man named Baker who makes pastries for a living, or a the “popular” girl whose last name happens to be Mattressback — I feel a word should exist for these kinds of words, though something far less lame than “text twin” or “SMS sibling.” However, I feel like “numerotextogemini” won’t catch on.

Text-alike?

Digitwin?

Doppeltexter?

Synonumer — literally “same number”?

Or, like, nothing? Because this is a ridiculous concept that doesn’t necessitate a name, since so few people will ever need to refer to it?

Dancing Starfish

Maria introduces a new character to her repertoire: a psychopath who murders single women in their late 30s and their companion dogs.

Yes, I'm not happy about watching a Halloween episode in June either, but we take what we can get. (Well, I do. You're just along for the ride. Thanks for riding, by the way.) Also, please realize that I'm pre-writing these posts and will continue to do so until I run out of Maria Bamford Show episodes. Given that Super Deluxe may officially go kaput any time now, the linked video may ultimately be dead.

Oh, God. You could be looking at a dead link.

How eerie.

Isle of Forfeit

Trying to sleep in this weather is a joke, and a goddamned sick one at that. I know, I know. Poor Santa Barbara, who gets ideal weather for ten months of the year and then cries like a baby when the temperatures creep past 90 degrees. We’re spoiled, the lot of us, I’ll admit. However, know that my house lacks air conditioning or any effective source of moving air around. Attempting slumber in these conditions is basically a hopeless endeavor and only results in simultaneous reclining and sweating.

The worst part, by far: my realization today that use of my bed during this weather essentially makes whole of it — the sheet, the mattress pad, the pillows — one giant Stridex pad, soaking my endocrinal leavings for however long I touch it.

Nothing more dismal than knowing that your day will end with you climbing into a giant, sticky used Stridex pad.

Urkelgrew

Search terms that led to this blog and, also, led to people using said terms being fairly disappointed.

• ll cool j blowing kisses
• jack white treats meg white badly
• ladylamp
• sister roofies
• "ali larter" "southland tales"
• were mermaids promiscuous ¹
  
• special moment in ones life
• "face is my seat"
• Kiwi Bird font
• kun foow panda ²
  
• princess roselina biker suit pics
• super nintendo zelda where is sahasrahla ³
  
• colicchio vest
• projects for decorating cereal boxes with personal photos ⁴
  
• "Soy una nutria de la agua salada"
• fuck the fucking fucker, grammar
• funeral mario mushroom
• why is Roy g biv needed? stupid ⁵
  
• "leon yang is in the room"
• difference between roshell and greta ⁶
  
• back of the cereal box mae west
• dirty dansy
• HOW ARE SAMARA AND MOESKO ISLAND RELATED TO EACH OTHER? ⁷
  
• little wrinkle puppies
• They invent a likable facade to fool others?
• alcoholic drinks named panda

And some follow-ups from me:

1. Yes, until they converted. They're quite devout now.
2. Just. No.
3. He's forever in my heart.
4. Wouldn't it be easier just to throw your personal photos in the garbage?
5. Why you search in question form? Stupid.
6. Aside from their names, I'm guessing.
7. Samara grew up on Moesko Island. She made everything bad. She got tossed in the well, and everything got better.
   

The Queen of Sea Cows

Apologies, foremost. After a two week delay, the barely begun series on strange and therefore fun words is back on track. Blame Philadelphia. And then forgetfulness. In that order.

I think I’ve gotten a good one for this a week — the kind of word that you’ll soon be effortlessly slipping into friendly conversation, inter-office communiques, and letters to dear mother.

kakopygian (kak-o-PY-jee-an) — adjective: possessing an ugly set of buttocks

More often spelled “cacopygian,” I’m noticing, but Depraved and Insulting English spells it with the “k,” which I enjoy because it makes the word look all the more unpleasant. And the sound? Terrible. You start with the phlegm bubble that is “kak” and then it goes downhill from there, into something that sounds like the adjectival form of “pigeon.” The “butt” component of this week’s word comes from the Greek pyge, which is a good root to know and which is translated by verbanauts variously as “ass,” “rump,” “buttocks,” and “tail,” with each result relating directly to how proper he or she might be. That root gives us other fun words as well, including dasypygal (“having hairy buttocks”), steatopygous (“having fat buttocks”), callipygian (“having attractive buttocks”), and even a piscine genus Pygopristis, (meaning “saw-rumped”). A different edition of Depraved and Insulting English even offers unipygic, which, meaning “having only one ass cheek,” would seem to be the most useful of all.

If you’re not up to your ears in asses yet, there’s a speech credited to Leon Chesley posted here that focuses on the verbal possibilities the pyge root offers us. And if you’d like to hear more of my thoughts on the matter of butts, then read an old column I wrote for the Nexus so long ago on the subject of people using the word “ass” as a substitute for “self” — a linguistic trend that has some odd implications.

That’s all I have to say on the matter. I’m just glad I got through an entire post about fanny words without making a horrible pun.

The end.

…

Dammit.

Past words of the week:

• jehu
• itaiitai
• grandgore
• fissilingual
  

Not as Dead as Steven's Pool Party

I’d like to think that I’m better synchronized with the pop culture zeitgeist than the next aging hipster. I had reason to grasp onto this belief a little more tightly today when I read a Hollywood Reporter article about Robert Smigel’s attempt to reboot The Match Game only a weeks after I spent a day engrossed in all things Match Game after that Saturday Night Live parody of it. What makes this reinvented game show more interesting than, say, that new version of Hollywood Squares — which made all those people stab themselves in the brain, with garden trowels, through the mouth — is that Smigel has the good sense to get genuinely cool people to sit in as celebrity panelists: Norm MacDonald, Sarah Silverman, Rashida Jones, Scott Thompson, Niecy Nash, among others. Not completely out of rum-soaked has-been territory, but at least in a better sort of neighborhood.

Bonus credibility: Completely separate from the hipster comedy Match Game, that “It’s a Match” sketch became more relevant to me in the past week when I bought a DVD set of the first few episodes of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. The show is weird, in good ways and in bad ways, but that’s a discussion that deserves its own post. More to the point here is that MH2 stars Debralee Scott — Sarah Annette Boob herself. I honestly didn’t expect I’d ever have first-hand experience with this person so soon after learning she existed.

Ha ha. “Boob.” Unusual but appropriate surname.

Don't Delay! Act Now! Third Urgent Suggestion!

It has come to my attention that some of your regulars have not yet offered a suggestion for the abstract music suggestion game, especially the four of you who participated in the first go-around and did such a good job with it. (Meg H., Bri, Pedro, Dina — I'm looking at you.) I'm aiming to post responses on Monday. If you have any inclination to play, please do so now. Click the link back to the post and leave a comment.

Do it!

[ The post in question: "Dark Socks Beneath My Goody Two Shoes" ]

Antenna, by Tall Deb

A bit more abstract this time.

My interpretation: Antenna is an album by Swedish space rock quartet Tall Deb. Everyone thought the band's lead singer was, in fact, Tall Deb, mostly because the six-foot-four Scandinavian beauty towers over her male bandmates. However, her name is and always has been Jamilla, and the name "Tall Deb" references a minor villainous character in the 1974 cult classic Dune Buggy Massacre at Red Sands High. Antenna, the newest sonic venture by Tall Deb, features songs inspired by the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project.

Previous menu sign rearrangements:

• Bent, Yet Bland Anal
  
• Banyan Latte Blend
  
• Blatantly Nab Need
  
• Bentley Banana, Ltd.
• Le Bad Nanny Battle

Chet Desmond and the Beer at Jackie's Cafe

Consider this a sequel of sorts to the post about Flying Omelette's catalogue of video game oddities. In its list of alcohol-related content in games that should have been as dry as Utah, Flying Omelette does point out the strangeness of Jackie's Cafe, a location in the video game Earthbound. Upon close inspection, Earthbound's programmers clearly designed Jackie's Cafe to be a bar: the spot still features a collection of booze bottles on the back shelf as well as a character who looks a lot more like a bartender than a barista. I suppose I would have noticed this immediately had I played the game when I was older.

outside: C-A-F-E, plain as day

inside: boozy barflies... drinking coffee?

Aside from that small difference between the Japanese version of the game and its apparently teetotaling American counterpart, I noted something even more interesting about Jackie's, for it serves as gateway of sorts into Moonside, a backwards version of the world in which the rest of the game takes place. After entering and exiting the bar for the first time, the characters encounter Mr. Everdred, a character from earlier in the game. True to big city life, Everdred has been konked on the head and left lying in the street.


In classic last moment gasps, the seriously injured Everdred babbles about an evil statue and then implores the player's characters to head back into Jackie's and check the shelf — a request even a novice player would interpret as the method of best advancing the plot.

Upon checking the shelf out, the screen flashes white and the heroes find themselves in the weirdoland that is Moonside, where flashing neon outlines of buildings replace the structures themselves and where people speak in crazy backwards talk — "left" is "right," "yes" is "no," among a few other things. (Yes, I'm thinking of the Chuck Klosterman opposites discussion again.) Also, strange enemies like ambulatory gasoline pumps and floating Salvador Dali paintings populate the streets.



Like I said, major weird, though I suppose not all that much weirder than the rest of the game, which also has the heroes fighting a demonic circus tent or a pile of barf.

(A quick aside: Jackie's Cafe isn't the only instance of alcohol being replaced with something more family-friendly. At one point, an obvious drunkard says his condition results from having consumed too much cappucino. The proof:


I think the game's referencing itself, and making fun of its own awkward, poorly imposed censorship. You have to like that.)

What struck me as even more notable about Moonside, especially in the sense of pop culture intersections, was the manner in which these events parallel those in the opening segment of the Twin Peaks movie, Fire Walk With Me. Strip away Earthbound's purposefully 8-bit-esque graphics and occasional puerile sense of humor and you'd be left with a rather surreal plot about evil lurking in a contemporary American setting. In Fire Walk With Me, Agent Chet Desmond — the Agent Cooper stand-in played by Chris Isaak — investigate the murder of diner waitress Teresa Banks, a sort of proto-Laura Palmer. Teresa's body turns up noticeably missing a certain ring she was known to wear in her livelier days. At the very end of his segment of the film and before the film changes to focus specifically on Laura, Chet finally finds the ring beneath Teresa's trailer and reaches out to grab it. Just as he does, the screen flashes white — to a reality in which Agent Desmond has vanished, presumably away from the normal world and to Twin Peaks's flip side, where red velvet curtains serve as walls and creepy midgets speak backwards and malicious dopplegangers attempt to overtake their good-intentioned twins.

The kicker for all this is that Earthbound's Moonside trip had already risen to prominence, at least in my mind, to the point that it served as the inspiration for "The Freaky Tiki," my final project for Dr. Sorapure's Flash animation class. Essentially an abstract music video, the project detailed strange goings-on in a city — including glowing buildings — that ultimately prove to be the product of an evil statue. The tiki at the end of the video represents my best effort at re-creating the statue Everdread mentions in the game. The funny part is that I don't think I ever processed the similarity between the Moonside sequence and Fire Walk With Me, despite the fact that I actually use a quote from David Lynch in the video itself — "I want to dream when I go to a film." — and that the video used Funki Porcini's very Lynchy song "Sixteen Megatons."

The video in question is below. I just yesterday managed to upload it to YouTube, a processed that involved converting a .swf into a .avi — just as fun as it sounds, and less productive than you'd think, as the conversion eliminated the video's soundtrack. In other words, you'll have to imagine what "Sixteen Megatons" sounds like. (I'll fix this problem when I figure out how.)

My own experience with Moonside notwithstanding, I suppose it's worth it to guess whether the Earthbound creators had Fire Walk With Me in mind when creating Moonside. I say it's possible. Earthbound came out two years after Fire Walk With Me, but, more importantly, the game boasts a much higher level of pop culture awareness than the average game. For example, the game references The Beatles more the once — directly at least once, indirectly by including music that sounds like Beatles' songs, and finally in this manner:


The range of references includes things as varied as War of the Worlds...


... and the Apollo Theater.


So at least the game covers enough ground of the pop culture landscape that a Twin Peaks reference wouldn't be completely implausible.

All images from FlyingOmelette.com, save for the ones I got from this YouTube clip.

Teeny, Overcompensating John

I'm inclined to believe that the below video was created in earnest, as Texas state law forbids placement of tongue in cheek. (The penalty, of course, is death.)

Rough to work on Senator John Cornyn's political committee and be the one responsible for turning into a meme. Further menos puntos: The “Big John” song makes me instantly think of the Saturday Night Live commercial for Big Brawn feminine napkins.

And, also, I'd rather watch the SNL spot.

Spokespearsons

First, if you’re going to announce “official” spokespersons on any matter, much less one as divisive as gay marriage, it would probably be in your best interest to spell “spokespersons” correctly in the subject line of the email.

As it stands, “spokespearsons” brings to mind either tubby, pear-shaped individuals representing ProtectMarriage.com and standing in stark contrast to their fitter counterparts and whatever organization is lobbying in favor of man-on-man marriage and woman-on-woman weddings. Well, either that or freakish Frankenstein-like human-pear hybrids.

Second, if you’re going to accidentally write “spokespearsons,” it’s in your best interest not to have done it in all capital letters, as doing so implies that the organization is screaming their typo to the world. Well, either that or screaming “We don’t know what we’re doing!”

Good luck on that ballot measure, guys.

Grand Theft Auto: Isla Vista

A quick one from a few weeks ago that I feel I should post before I forget about it.

Spencer took a class from Prof. Waid this quarter, and, in one of her characteristic lecture tangents, she mentioned how she saw an ad for the new(ish) Grand Theft Auto and mistakenly read the title as Grand Theft Auto I.V. Of course, it's actually Grand Theft Auto IV, but looking at the logo, I can see how someone accustomed to seeing the abbreviation for “Isla Vista” might do a double-take.


Waid’s misreading made me think, if just for a moment, about what Grand Theft Auto I.V. would be like. In short: terrible. The vast majority of such a game would involve trying to drive down Del Playa at 11 p.m. on a Friday, never accelerating past five miles per hour and only being able to honk your horn as a means of motivating pedestrians to move out of your way. When you get to where you’re going, you must chose between dinging your car in an attempt to parallel park or just having to leave your car on Camino Lindo.

Just terrible.

Sick, Sad World (of Video Games)

In the spirit of the "Legend of Cloudbush" post — which noted, among other things, the fact that the background clouds in the original Super Mario Bros are nothing but re-colored background bushes — I'm taking this opportunity to share with you the best of the video game oddities presented at the too-cool website Flying Omelette.

Despite Nintendo's strict policy against the depiction of sex or nudity in video games, a few things snuck past — some blatant, some not. For example, in the game Breath of Fire 2, there exists a big bad by the name of Deathevan. (Yes, I know. It sounds like the screen name that your high school friend Evan used during his goth phase.) Flying Omelette points out that the character sports a pan pipe of worm-like horrors emerging from his lower abdomen that evokes peens of an H.R. Giger aesthetic. Yikes. I dub thee "penis dentata," awful thing.


It's not all so grotesque, however. My beloved Kid Icarus boasts two instances of nudity, even in Nintendo's early days. First, the background of the game's final level features some Venus De Milo clones, as armless and full-busomed as the actual statue. More surprisingly, the game's manual depicts artwork for a minor harpy enemy — called "Syren" probably for the same reasons that the game's goddess damsel is called "Palutena" instead of "Parthena" — that has some very exposed breasts, nipples and all.


Another game that sucked away my valuable childhood hours, Secret of Mana, snuck in the nude female form through the presence of a minor enemy: a floating, spell-casting book saddled with the unusual name of "National Scar." The name makes a lot more sense knowing that the book occasionally flips to a two-pages spread featuring a said nudity. That's "National Scar" in the sense of the National Enquirer or some other such tabloid rag.


It's perhaps as much of a stretch as the Mario Kart penis rock, but the game Yoshi's Island has a stage with a background feature that looks suspiciously like a the torso of a bikini bottom-clad female torso. Funny, but pretty benign, and I'd imagine resulting from a programmer who didn't want his sense of mischief to get him fired. "What are you talking about? I don't see it. If you see it, then you're the pervert."


And, continuing the theme of risque elements in video games only as a result of her previous associations with less-than-normal sex, Flying Omelette's extensive Switched at Birth pages posit where Nintendo might have been inspired to create Birdo: the Snowths, the snout-mouthed whatchamacallit Muppets best known as the back-up singers in the "Mahna Mahna" sketch.


The newer Muppet Show redid the "Mahna Mahna" sketch, apparently, with Sandra Bullock. The below screenshot of said remake depicts the Snowths looking vaguely more Birdo-like. Who knew the Birdo-Snowth relationship was so profound?


This has been your foray into the sexual undercurrent of modern video games.

All images from the good people at FlyingOmelette.com, execpt for the one of dancing Sandra Bullock.

The Fear of Doing Something Awful

High points: Shitting on the Shroud of Turin and feeding a retarded person to his or her family. In other words, you may want to watch this out of earshot of coworkers, parents and any possible nuns or monks that may be hanging around your computer.

Happy Sunday!

Floodgates Open to the Sound of the Rainbow

Simple though it may be, this animation that graphically represents the music with colored dots and lines, compels me to keep watching.

Reason I looked the song up to begin with: I heard that this song, Bach's "Toccatta and Fugue," is the theme to Donkey Kong Jr. No matter how hard I try to mentally replace those organ notes with blips and bleeps, I don't quite hear it.

Bonus visualization: Debussy's "Clare de Lune."

Name That Egg-Spitter

At this point, it’s a trend: video games and names and the resulting confusion between these two elements. I guess if any chunk of online real estate were focus on such a matter, it would be here. Today, I’m focusing on Birdo, a regular target for my fixation on pop culture footnotes as a result of her ambiguous gender and general associations with unusual sex. Today, however, I’m focusing only on Birdo’s name, which is about as complicated as her love life.


First off, most countries that have reason to know Birdo don’t call her “Birdo.” (I’m willing to bet that not all Americans call her “Birdo,” either, mostly because her name sounds fairly nonsensical — given that she’s neither a bird not a male deserving a name ending in “o” — and that “that pink thing” works just as easily as a means of referring to her.) In Japan, she’s called “Catherine,” which strikes me as especially unusual in light of the fact that most female characters in Mario games don’t get the kind of name that women in the real world get. (Case in point: Princess Eclair.) However, the name is Catherine, at least over there. To complicate matters, however, she’s also called “Cassie” sometimes, perhaps because people in Japan don’t differentiate much between the “s” sound and the “th” sound and therefore think that “Cassie” is an acceptable nickname for “Catherine.”

Completely independent of that confusion, however, is Birdo’s introduction in the United States under multiple names. The American instruction manual introduces Birdo as being a boy who likes to think he’s a girl and likes being called “Birdetta.” (On some level, I suspect that this reference results from the character being known in Japan as “Catherine” and “Cassie” — and I wouldn’t doubt that the instruction manual accompanying her debut game, Doki Doki Panic, simply introduced her as a being named “Catherine” but preferring to go by “Cassie.”) Even aside from the Birdo/Birdetta disparity, however, a translation error on the part of the people who remade Doki Doki Panic as Super Mario Bros. 2, much like the one that listed the monster character Clawgrip as “Clawglip.” For whatever reason, the game’s ending credits — which list all the characters in the game — lists Birdo as “Ostro,” the name of a minor ostrich-like bad guy who appears only a few times in the game. Often, other monsters are riding on its back.


Aside from further associated Birdo with birds — even though she’s clearly some kind of dinosaur — the mix-up resulted in some accidental foreshadowing on Nintendo’s part. In short, Birdo is a bipedal dinosaur who attacks foes with eggs, has indeterminate gender and was once associated with a beast of burden. For the Nintendo fans who read this blog — both of you — that should sound familiar. Yoshi, a more popular Mario character, is dinosaur who walks on two legs, attacks foes with eggs (though they don’t come from his mouth), has indeterminate gender (in that he’s a male character who lays eggs), and is a beast of burden (his debut game, Super Mario World had him giving Mario rides on his back, which he still does from time to time). However, Birdo’s debut occurred four years before the release of Super Mario World in 1991, so despite Yoshi’s popularity, it would seem that Birdo influences him — not the other way around. Regardless of who came first, Birdo exists in latter-day Mario games as Yoshi’s female counterpart and default partner for various sporting events. Funny how that works.

Whether as a result of the “Ostro” mistake or not, Birdo’s association with birds — ostriches in particular — lingered. As if her name weren’t already confused enough, the character is known in Italian translations of Mario games as “Strutzi,” which this page conjectures is derived from the Italian struzzo, meaning “ostrich.” Why this one false name of hers would persist is beyond me, but it has — and in, of all places, the one nation where named like “Mario” and “Luigi” would make the most sense.

An oddly complicated history for a thoroughly confusing character.

Previous linguo-gamer-geek indulgences:

• The Other Other Other Plumber
• Hello, My Name Is Ghost
• Clawglip
• Mrs. Carnivorous Plant
• The Girl With the Stars in Her Eyes
  

Dark Socks Beneath My Goody Two Shoes

Because I remember it most fondly among all the memery I've pulled on this blog, I'm bringing it back: the unusual music suggestions game. You remember this, of course. It initially went up on this blog about a year and a half ago, and Bri, Meg H., Dina and Pedro played by asking me to find a song that matched an unusual description.

For the record, here are the rules again.

1. You guys tell me what kind of music you want.

2. In a few days, I'll post one mp3 for each of you.

You can't request music by band name or genre. You have to describe, in terms of color, mood, texture, taste, or any other creative way you can think of, what you're looking for in a song, and I'll do the best I can with what I have. Yes, that means that I may end up posting a song that you wouldn't normally listen to. That's part of the fun.

I can't use more than one song by any given band. The point of this meme is to give you a taste of new stuff, not to pirate whole CDs. If you like what you hear, you'll still need to buy it yourself. If two of you come up with identical descriptions, I have to find two bands that both fit, or use one song for both of you.

I can't make the song permanently available. Unless the song in question is already available on the band's website (in which case, I'll provide a link to their site instead of posting an mp3), I'll be taking the songs down in a few days, or posting them on a temporary host so that they'll expire after a few days.

Read the old post if you still don't get it, read the results post if you'd like to see how I went about matching people's suggestions.

By all means, go nuts with this. I'm eager to see how many people I can get to reply.

Foxes Mate for Life

Blog find: Hi From Work, in which people say just that, from just there. And they don't so much say hi and just smile and hold up signs that say hi. Simple enough, right? Possibly everybody already knows about this, but it's new to me regardless. I enjoy it, especially because two people who I know are on it, saying hi from work.

Hi from Hillary.


Hi from Stephanie.


Personally, I feel like they're both saying hi to me specifically, but that's all a matter of perspective, I suppose. Also, there's a hi from a cat named Mr. Pants, which held special significance for me.

This may or may not be cooler than another associate's appearance on BedJump.com.

EDIT: Maybe I am the last to know about this. In the time it took to put up the above post, Betsy's work showed up too.


Hi Betsy!

ADDITIONAL EDIT: Mystery somewhat solved. The whole website is Hillary's baby. It started just a few days ago. Hi!

Inessential Oils

Can we make a motion to abandon a phrase that has been bothering me? Like, do we have that authority? That agency? Is there someone we can write?

The object of my ire today is the word pair “essential oil.” Not that those two words, when used in conjunction, somehow flaunt the rules of grammar to the point that they scrape across the ridges of my brain in a violent manner, but I feel they’re misleading to the point that most people who buy essential oils without understanding what they actually are. In American English, we use the word “essential” most often to mean “integral” or “of the utmost importance.” “To understand trigonometry, it’s essential that you have a thorough understanding of basic algebra.” “To survive the night, it’s important that your board your windows and drape yourself in garlic.” “To use the bathroom correctly, it’s essential that you remove your pants first.”

In this sense, the phrase “essential oil” could easily be interpreted as meaning something that, if lacking, would bring about one’s downfall. For example, Patty Jo Patchouli might think that if she doesn’t lube her face and arms in a certain herbal-scented goo, those years of unprotected sun exposure will show and her hippie face will fall off, John Lennon glasses and all. I can only imagine some unwary soul walking into an aromatherapy shop, seeing all the products labeled “essential” and buying out the store. I swear it’s true: People wouldn’t take the time to actually ponder “essential oils” on an etymological level and realize that the “essential” is actually the adjectival version of “essence.” “It’s amazing I made it this long without them,” this person would think. Because essential oils are just that: the essence of a thing. cloves, lemon, mint, cedar, ylang-ylang what have you. Unless one has some bizarre medical condition that can only be treated by topical application of cassia-infused liquid, their being will remain altogether intact without these oils that are misleadingly labeled “essential.”

Seriously, I think calling these products something else will ultimately work out for the better of mankind. At some point, some word-ignorant child of the earth will be pushed to the breaking point when deprived of his chamomile oil and will end up erroneously thinking that he’s in a life and death situation.

Can’t we save this guy the grief and eventual embarrassment?

Fathomless Chasm of Falling

Getty Images' Moodstream^TM: Genuinely inspiring emotion calibrator or virtual shit machine occupying valuable internet real estate? Randomly generated music video or horrendous TV display outside the dressing room at Macy's?

YOU DECIDE.

Butter Building

An open letter to Foulds Macaroni:

Dear Mr. F. Macaroni,

You confuse me. Why are you named "Foulds"? Why don't the people who make you realize that your name makes you sound like some kind of worthless pseudo-macaroni in the manner that fool's gold is the worthless version of actual gold? And why do the good people at Ralphs make you live on the aisle that includes such products as curry paste, grape leaves, baba ghanouj, and sesame seeds? (Essentially, it looks like someone without a real understanding of geography was tasked with assembling a Middle Eastern collection and just but all the food for non-Mexican brown people there.) What about you makes you foreign enough to merit not only distance from the familiar macaroni brands but also exile to the Foreigner Foods Island? And, please, what's with the spelling variant "elbo"? Is that also foreign? Or is it gimmicky advertising English in the style of "drive-thru" and "tonite"? ("Drive-thru elbo makaroni tonite!")

I would greatly appreciate your justifying your own existence.

Yours,
Drew

Blame Chuck Klosterman

On page 85 of Sex, Drugs and Coca Puffs, Klosterman writes on the inanity of the phrase “comparing apples and oranges,” noting that a person could pick a great many things less similar than these two fruits. He writes, “Their weight is extremely similar. They both contain acidic elements. They’re both roughly spherical. They serve the same social purpose. With the possible exception of a tangerine, I can’t think of anything more similar to an orange than an apple.” He brings up a good point. Perhaps proving that I shouldn’t read the work of people as pointlessly nitpicky as I am, Klosterman’s argument against this phrase launched me into a rumination the likes of which I haven’t had while sober in years: What, exactly, is the thing most dissimilar to an apple?


Mathematically speaking, I suppose that an anti-apple would be exactly that: the absence of an apple. Just as the opposite of the number 22 would be exactly that many ticks away from zero on the number line to the left — or, put more plainly, the number –22 — the obvious answer would seem to be “not an apple” or “the lack of an apple.” However, that makes for a shitty chunk of syntax. “Oh, Herman. You just can’t use the same logic for ice hockey and you do for ultimate Frisbee. You’re comparing apples to the absence of apples.” Also, while the addition of 22 to -22 equals zero, one apple plus the absence of an apple doesn’t equal nothing. It still equals one apple, or possibly one apple and an empty spot next to the apple. “Was I supposed to have another apple?” you’d ask.

No, there has to be a better answer.

The notion of an opposite is tricky. Aside from numbers, the only things I can think of that have demonstrable opposites are directions — left and right, backwards and forwards, probably others — and colors — though I’m told that a shade of brown containing perfectly equal parts of the three primary colors as well as equal amounts of black and white would have no complement. When in comes to more complex subjects, I find that people often claim one thing to be another’s opposite when they actually mean that the two things actually are quite similar, with only one or two important differences. For example, if you ask even a novice comic book nerd to name the opposite of Superman, they’d probably tell you it’s the Bizarro Superman. However, Bizarro is a lot like Superman. Similar builds, for example, excluding the gray skin that marks most denizens of Bizarro World. Similar outfits. Both live in large cities, Metropolis or Bizarro Metropolis. And both have superpowers. Should not the opposite of Superman be a weakling? And female? Decidedly Un-Superwoman?

There’s a Seinfeld episode, “The Bizarro Jerry,” in which Elaine attempts to refute the notion that Bizarro is, in fact, Superman’s opposite. Jerry explains Bizarro’s characteristically contrary speech patterns, noting that Bizarro would say “hello” when leaving and “goodbye” when arriving. Elaine’s response: “Shouldn’t he say ‘badbye’? ... Does he live underwater? … Is he black?” Bizarro doesn’t really qualify as Superman’s opposite, when you think about it, yet the logic appears elsewhere. The Flash, for example, has a nemesis who functions as his opposite — the infuriatingly stupidly named supervillain Reverse-Flash — but has more in common with Flash than does, say, Marcia Brady. Taking a step outside the DC comics universe, I’ll point out two more: Darkwing Duck has an archenemy named NegaDuck, and Mario has Wario, and yet both work more as differently colored versions of the hero, with key personality aspects twisted toward evil.

More often, I feel like a thing’s perceived opposite could serve just as easily as its double, depending on your perpective. Take Twin Peaks, for example. As hinted at in its very name, doubles populate this show. In nearly every episode, characters must confront others who work simultaneously as both opposite and double. Most obviously, there’s the introduction of the Cooper doppelganger in the series finale, who looks and acts like Cooper but commits acts of evil and insanity when Cooper would act heroically and logically. On a more subtle level, Twin Peaks offers us Audrey and Donna, the former a spoiled rich girl and the latter a sweet-natured girl next door. However, in the pilot that introduces them, they look enough alike that new viewers often have trouble telling them apart at first. As the show progresses, you begin to notice that beneath her bratty exterior, Audrey is motivated by good intentions, whereas Donna exhibits more and more of a dark side. Notably, at the end of the series, the two learn that they probably share the same father, which, in the context of this discussion, couldn’t a more appropriate revelation.

But I’m off subject. I’d intended for this essay to focus on apples and whatever their opposites might be.

If one were to find a better candidate for the position of “anti-apple,” I suppose, one would have to avoid the logic that has created the Bizarro effect. I think this could be accomplished by making a list of a given thing’s most important attributes, then making a list of qualities that could constitute opposites, and then thinking of something that has all of the qualities on this second list.

So what, then, are the qualities of an apple?

• It’s edible.
• You can hold one in your hand.
• It’s a product of a living thing, even if it’s usually not living when you’re eating it. (Unless you’re a squirrel living in an apple tree, in which case I look forward to the comments you may leave on this post.)
• It’s spherical.
• It promotes health of its consumer.
• And it’s generally a thing that people have positive associations with.

(Note that I’m leaving off color for now. Apples are probably most often depicted as red, but I feel like I see roughly as many green apples as red ones. I’d wager that most asked to mentally picture an apple would dream up a red one, but I feel I’d actually have a green one in mind, because I’m partial to Granny Smiths. Also, green and red are opposite colors anyway. Thus, I feel this is too complicated a factor for the moment.)

So, then, following my logic, these would be the following the characteristics of the anti-apple:

• It’s inedible.
• It would not be able to be held in your hand, either by virtue of too harmful, too large to pick up or simply intangible.
• It’s inorganic.
• It has sides, I guess. Or it’s covered in spikes. It’s just not smooth?
  
• It’s not particularly healthy.
• People generally don’t like it.

A stream-of-consciousness list of initial responses, rejected for obvious reasons: Sea urchins? No, that’s stupid. Porcupines? Stupider. A football? No, can be held in hand. A computer tower? Nope, I’m just looking at things in the room. Those early-age computers that took up entire rooms? No, people liked those. A sword? No, you can hold that. A leprechaun? No, they’re imaginary, and I didn’t come up with “real” as one of the most essential qualities of an apple. Wax lips? No, I think you actually can eat those. (This went on for some time, with some of what popped into my head being quite embarrassing. I’ll save you the worst of it and skip to my final three conclusions.)

The three finalists:

A grease fire.

Because you wouldn’t classify one as organic, per se, though they can thrive on such elements. You certainly can’t eat it. You can’t hold it, in the sense that it would horrifically burn your hand to do so. It lacks any definite shape, which I feel would make it more an opposite of a near-sphere than anything else. And grease fires are both unloved and unhealthy, likely the former as a result of the latter. Possible disqualifications: I’d bet you’d be more likely to find a grease fire in your kitchen than in any other room of the house. And, if pressed to imagine what room you’d most likely find an apple in, I feel like post people would say “kitchen” as well.

An army tank.

Although some military nuts might light up at the sight of an army tank, I feel like the vast majority of humans wouldn’t. Army tanks make an awful lot of noise and, worse, can blast you into smithereens in an instant. It’s has a varied, irregular shape. You can’t pick it up, as a result of its size, and you can’t eat it, as a result of its components. And, you can’t neglect the verbal zing of the sentence “You’re comparing apples and army tanks.” Possible disqualification: You could debate how unlikable they are, especially if the United States were engaged in a more popular war.

A mine, but specifically the kind that floats in the sea.

This might seem like more of stretch than the others, but I think it’s my candidate of choice. Marine mines do have a basic round shape, I’ll admit, but I feel like they more often are covered in spikes or at least protuberances, at least. They have variable size, probably, but you can’t hold them in your hand, because they would blow it off. It’s probably the one of these three that you’d least likely encounter, especially in a familiar setting. (Like, I’ve seen army tanks before but I’ve never seen a marine mine outside of a movie of that one episode of Baywatch.) Finally, they’re highly unpleasant. Possible disqualifications: Something I’m missing because I actually know very little about marine mines.

So there you have it. I’ve taken the matter this far. Now, please tell me: Which of these three do you feel best deserves the title of “opposite of an apple”? Or am I completely off-base on this one and some other thing better deserves the honor?

Cielo Vista

A final thought on air travel before I return to writing about more earthbound matters.

Airplane society — by which I mean the society contained on a given airplane and not the class of people who travel on airplanes — reminds me of Isla Vista. For those of you who don’t know and for those for whom the world of grown-ups has made Isla Vista a distant memory, I speak of the “town” that the majority of UCSB students live in. An unincorporated chunk of Santa Barbara County shunned by Goleta when it attained cityhood a few years back, Isla Vista is basically a terrible, discarded keg cup of a community where young people frequently accept a standard of living below what their parents raised them to strive for. That’s not so unusual, as it’s a college community and most such locations often amount to student ghettos, but it’s part of my experience, so I’m choosing to compare air travel to it and not some generic, more universal university-adjacent place.

Like I said, Isla Vista is mostly unpleasant, now that I look back on it. Aside from college students, a list of its occupants include bad hip hop, the lowest grade alcohol imaginable, awkward hook-ups, girls shouting “Woo!” for no apparent reason, broken side mirrors, blind corners and random single flip-flops found in the middle of the street. However, despite its status as a hole, I am still pleasantly surprised that Isla Vista doesn’t devolve into bloody, eye-gouging anarchy. Sure, they burned the bank down so long ago and a few people have died in incidents that turned out to be quite preventable, but it keeps itself together, like a drunk girl who manages to surprise everyone and teeter home from the bar without falling down or breaking her cell phone.

In a similar manner, I think of air travel as, in general, a thoroughly unpleasant experience that so often turns out better than you might expect. It’s not just passengers who ride on planes, you see, but such horrors as uncomfortable seats, overused community bathrooms, infuriatingly stupid movies, bad lighting, stale air, high tempers, low tipping points, and lousy food — all suspended in a metal cylinder thousands of feet in the air and oppressed by the notion that acting out could result in the plane landing somewhere worse than wherever you departed from and you, an apparent terrorist, being arrested on the spot.

Parallels exist. That awful man who falls asleep a half hour after take-off, trapping you in your window seat until you shake him awake? He’s a lot like Joe Couch Surfer, who somehow gets permission to crash in your living room and monopolizes the space until you get fed up and order him to hit the road. The jerk who shoves an impossibly gigantic suitcase into the overhead compartment above your seat, forcing you to stow your laptop case at the back of the plane, next to the extra pillows? That’s the same person who parks an Excursion in your spot, forcing you to put wedge your compact somewhere on Camino Majorca, which your forgot existed. The idiots behind your seat, blathering on about what a cute movie Fool’s Gold was? They’re the sorority girls smoking in your driveway at 3 a.m., blathering on about what a cute movie Fool’s Gold was.

But despite all that badness, shit and fan keep their polite distance, save for the occasional automobile-bicycle run-in or the statistically insignificant engine failure and resulting crash. Just as a smoldering cigarette butt has managed to not set a dumpster aflame and rip through block after block of student slums, the plane stays aloft and the people on it take a deep breath and endure the pain. In Isla Vista, you somehow don’t get robbed everyday, even though your window locks don’t work and someone left the back door open last night. In the airplane, passengers don’t snap and vent their air rage on you, who are too tightly buckled in to do anything but feebly block the barrage of fists raining down upon you. Students and air passengers alike realize that the ordeal — Isla Vista or flight on a commercial airline — is not only a means to an end, but often the most sensible means to an end, potential for disaster notwithstanding.

Oh, and they both cost more than they should.

Provided the worst case scenario doesn’t become reality, you emerge having done what you needed to do, and possibly with a few good stories to tell your friends waiting for you on the other side.

Either way, I’m equally glad I have no reason to set foot either in Isla Vista or on a plane again in the near future.

Death by Pancake

Oh, Google homepage, how your feeds of CNN's top stories never fail to grab my attention, especially when they link pancakes with death.


I mean, you'd click this, right? Especially if you just finished a day of air travel?

The full story, however, is quite sad and packaged under the considerably less breakfasty headline "Ohio plane crash kills 6."

Goal Number One: Master and Defeat Death

And so the second season of the Maria Bamford Show begins. I'm pre-writing these, so God knows if you'll actually be able to see them, given Super Deluxe's recent collapse.

Spoiler: Maria fails to accomplish goal number one.

Horace Highwater

Oh, how the blog deceives them with its misleading search results. Ha, I say.

• what is a mentos moment? ¹
  
• secrets about mermaids
• internal porno
• frasier gay subtext ²
  
• my accidental polygamy
• what happens to ismene ³
  
• unread myspace emails
• "The whole point of Super Mario"
• are may 31st geminis weird? ⁴
  
• giant women stomping
• the devil wears prada jewish themes
• funny shaped letters of the alphabet (number one hit!)
  
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1. Having some beach stud toss you a pack of Mentos and then it hitting your abdomen and spontaneously aborting your unwanted pregnancy.
2. You mean, like, all of Frasier?
3. She, unlike Antigone, goes on to marry and live out her life happily. Lesson learned, Greek audience?
4. Me being a June 4 Gemini, I can safely answer "yes."
5. That matter is itself widely disputed.
   

Baubo Sirens Need Groceries Too

The saga of the split-tailed mermaids continues — first with Starbucks' old logo and then with Starbucks' new logo, which happens to be the same as the old logo. Now the whorish fishwomen seem to have invaded the pseudo-old timey cartoons of the Trader Joe's Fearless Flyer.

Spencer gets credit for the flyer and the highlighting, but Dina gets credit for updating me as to the Starbuck's matter, which, as is to be expected, has drawn the ire of Christian conservatives in San Diego. Personally, I'm glad. Because if Christianity is clearly against anything, it's surely mermaid breasts.

Squawking and Cooing, Also

Okay. After hearing repeated assurance that Twitter actually deserves to exist, I'm giving the service a second shot. It's been almost a year since I updated my Twitter account, thought I have to say that it's sort of neat to read my old twitterings and remember the day that I found out I didn't have domoic acid poisoning. Aside from the prospect of a instantaneous personal archive, I still don't really see what use I could find in Twitter, but then again I never thought I'd use text messaging either. So there you go.

We'll see how this turns out. You can also read my Twitterings in my left sidebar.

Love Is Several Different Colors

Maybe it’s the U.S. Airways Bloody Mary talking, but all apprehensions I had hopping on a plane this morning have vanished as quickly as does the food and beverage refuse that I’m depositing on the tray of the unoccupied seat next to me. Sure, I’ve already consumed 83 percent of my daily recommended allotment of sodium — and that’s not counting the terrible egg scramble I choked down at the Santa Barbara airport this morning — but I’m nonetheless quite happy up in the sky. I’m flying to Philadelphia for work, but I can’t help feeling as though I’m playing hooky. Here I am, at 3 p.m., with no more pressing obligations than keeping my seat belt buckled, enjoying the string of hits that my iPod is piping into my head, and slowly disconnecting the dots that bind me during the usual office hours. I enjoy this tomato-like product, which includes 71 percent juice. Why don’t I ever drink tomato juice separate from the ingredients that turn it into Bloody Mary?

Love is Tomato Red.

Adults may be right: My iPod may in fact be isolating me from the rest of society. On the flight from Santa Barbara to San Francisco, the lesser-known works of The Apples in Stereo somehow prevented me from seeing the medical emergency that I caught only as it was ending. The stewardess stood the aisle, holding the feet of a woman wearing salmon-colored platform sandals, not unlike how stirrups hold the legs of women becoming mamas or receiving pap smears. (Neither was the case with Salmon Sandals, I’m pretty sure.) Given what angle those tan feet were protruding, I have to assume that the head anatomically linked to them was cradled in the lap of the woman sitting in the window seat. I’m not sure if they knew each other. They didn’t look to be either sisters or lovers, and the age difference was such that they couldn’t possibly have been mother and daughter. (Then again, plastic surgery has made time travel possible.) I’d assume Window Seat’s generosity was motivated by friendship at best, but even then, when the paramedic came to take the apparently ailing woman off the plane when we landed, Window Seat stayed. Shouldn’t the loved ones and traveling companions of unwell air travelers reap the benefits of early aircraft exiting? Window Seat, you’re a kinder soul than most.

Love is Salmon Pink.

You have to wonder about male flight attendants, those waiters in the sky who so dutifully fill your styrofoam cups and accept your plastic meal packaging like you’re giving them a present. They shuffle endlessly up and down the aisle in their navy blue vests, providing you the means to make a mess and then cleaning up the mess, only to start the cycle over again. I’m not suggesting that the job weighs more heavily on men than it does women, but the male flight attendants must realize that even the most broad-minded passengers suppose they might be gay. Like jerks, those of a narrower train of thought just assume it, I assume. Maybe the male flight attendants don’t care, but I’d be willing to guess that some do, as many straight guys would rather not perceived as being gay. That simple fact makes their job unenviable to a lot of guys, who would much more willingly wait tables on the ground than perform what is essentially a similar but more difficult service up in the air. How is it, male flight attendants, that you’ve come to perform this job? Is it a means to an end? An opportunity to travel? Did you want to be a pilot but accidentally enroll in the wrong class? Do you laugh off the stereotypes? Embrace them? Embody them? Or are you banging your female coworkers in the galley at the back of the plane in an desperate attempt to prove something?

Love is Navy Blue.

I’m wearing by birthday sweater, which sports two colors of stripes: navy blue and a second kind of blue that can only accurately be described as “electric blue.” I love birthday sweater.

Love is Electric Blue.

Much like Window Seat, I also have a window seat. I won’t, however, refer to myself as “Window Seat” because that would be confusing. Also, you should know my name by now. It’s a good view, as airplane seats go. I can see some wing and some of the Below — the best combination, in my opinion. I feel cheated if my view contains too much wing, but if I somehow get a seat that just sees Below, I get nervous, because I like to be reminded that I am, in fact, on a plane and not somehow just floating in the sky on my lonesome. Had I not received a seat with a partial wing view, I’d worry that I’ll fall asleep and then wake up and see tiny mountains and two-point line highways and have a panic attack from the shock of it all. At the moment, however, I feel the plane has ascended to the best possible position, as we’re cruising through the clods and all windows now show only pure white light. It streams in from every window, making the cabin seem impossibly bright, like the set of a 50s movie where happy households glow impossibly from the inside-out. If I can’t see the Below, I can forget how high up we really are.

Love is Pure White.

Soy Cansado, Pero No Estoy Cansado

“Today is my birthday.” Really, it is, but I’m putting the sentence in quotation marks in order to call attention to the magic powers this chunk on syntax endows the person who speaks it. On so many other people’s birthdays, I’ve heard this sentence excuse some otherwise unforgivable behavior. Insistence on spending time at a terrible bar, for example. Or the purchasing of extravagant self-gifts. Or not coming to work regardless of the onus it places on non-birthdaypeople coworkers. (Ha ha. “Onus.”)

Today, June 4, the day on which I and Horatio Sanz get to be special, however, I’m only asking for allowance to do one thing, which I imagine should not inconvenience the other 1/365th of the world too much: I’d like to respond to the people who feel the need to tell me I look tired.

As a rule, I look like I haven’t slept. Even when I have slept, I have eye bags — twin, crescent-shaped slight puffs of the skin that exhibit slightly more coloration than the rest of my face. They don’t go away. I credit my mother’s DNA. because she has had them as well. No amount of sun or sleep or mental peace seems to change that I just happen to naturally have a facial feature that most people associate with not having slept well. If I wear my glasses, I’m wearing my glasses atop eye bags. If I don my classiest duds, I’m sporting them and eye bags. They’re a fact of life for me, and, more or less, I’ve made my peace with them.

The rest of the world hasn’t.

Regularly, people I encounter — people I like, people I don’t, neighbors, friends, bosses, coworkers, interns, the cashier at the drug store, the guy I’m interviewing for a story, old roommates I haven’t seen in years, just to name a few — feel the need to tell me that they think I look tired. I do not consider such statements to be acts of benevolence. If I were tired, I would already know and therefore don’t appreciate being reminded that it’s obvious. (Sometimes, this is the case, as I do have trouble sleeping. I also spend most work days in front of a computer and beneath fluorescent lights, and that doesn’t exactly leave me looking especially enlivened, even though I like my job.) If I’m not tired, it’s all the worse. I tend to interpret “You look tired” as “You look like shit,” and that dampens my mood fairly quickly. It also puts me in the awkward situation of either lying (“Well, yes, I have in fact not slept in three days. Must be the meth.”) or correcting them and consequently seeming defensive about the matter. Except for two possible scenarios, no good can come from telling me I look tired. (Situation one: You happen to have a bed I can crawl into and it’s somehow socially acceptable for me to nod off for a few hours. Situation two: I’m about to do something for which alertness is a must, such as driving to Oregon or appearing on live television. If it’s the latter, fire that goddamned make-up girl.) No, I honestly believe that whether people do it consciously or not, the proclamation that another person appears tired constitutes a passive attempt for the proclaimer to seem somehow better able, better prepared or just generally better. (“You look tired. But I don’t. Isn’t that wild? Why do you suppose that is?”) In fact, there’s only one person in the world who I allow to tell me I look tired with impunity: my mother. She likes to keep tabs on my health. Her inquiries about my appearance — weight loss or gain, muscle tone or lack thereof, paleness, tanness, skin clarity, hair vigor, redness of the eyes — comes from a genuine place of concern.

The rest of you, however, are not my mother and I am suspicious of your motives.

I have, however, attempted to solve the matter. Long ago, I began a word file in which I list the responses to “You look tired” that I think but do not speak. Because I’m nice. I honestly don’t remember to whom most of these were originally directed, but I clearly meant what I wrote at the time.

Below, I have listed what I consider some of the pithier responses to “You look tired.” I am not identifying any potential targets. That would be rude. And I’m also not saying that everybody I know does this. Some of you are classy as all hell and either don’t make such judgments or have the sense to keep it to yourselves.

Read at your own risk.

• You look like some kind of weasel.
• You look tired of life.
• You look like you just ate something that’s not sitting well.
• You look like you’re hiding a secret, and, based on what you freely tell people who don’t even know you that well, I shudder to think at what you keep to yourself.
• You look like you used to play rugby, with guys bigger than you, and also you weren’t very good.
• You look like you just got bad news that wasn’t exactly unexpected.
• You look racially ambiguous, and I was secretly disappointed when I found out you were just white.
• You look like a photo in your own parent’s yearbook.
• You look like you want attention.
• You look like you want attention and you don’t care what kind of attention it is.
• You look like you couldn’t possibly be the offspring of your parents, which is pretty puzzling because you said you didn’t know anybody who was adopted the one time I tried to bring it up.
• You look like you’re made of butterscotch pudding.
• You look worried. Should you be?
• You look like Bert from Sesame Street.
• You look like you’re going to punch someone in the back of the head today.
• You look like your own purse, weirdly.
• You look like a weird male version of your sister, and that makes me feel weird every time I think about it.
• You look like you started to swallow something, got bored, and then let it sit in your throat for the rest of your life.
• You look slightly irritated every time I ask you to do something, and that’s why I never ask you to do anything that I think you’d be interested in.
• You look like your wife dresses you, and also your wife wants to you to be gay.
• You look like you sweat when you eat.
• You look like a pile of leaves.
• You look like an extra from a movie that takes place in the 70s.
• You look like you don’t take vitamins.
• You look like you’re secretly trying to stay a teenager.
• You look like you didn’t get your money’s worth with that nose job.
• You look like you had a drink before you came into work this morning.
• You look like you didn’t evenly distribute the gel you used in your hair, and, consequently, your hair looks to be bi-colored.
• You look like you have extra skin.
• You look like those breakfast plates that have fried eggs as eyes and bacon as a smile.
• You look triangular, in so many different ways.
• You look like you don’t like your job very much.
• You look like a potato.

Don’t worry. The 26-year-old me has no plans to start responding to “You look tired” with anything like the above statements. (And yes, the opportunity will surely arise.) So this year is safe. But who’s to say what 27-year-old Drew will be capable of?

Sorry if this seems like an excessively mean-spirited post to slap online on my birthday, but please understand that I’ve needed to get this off my chest for some time now, and the first day of a new year of existence on this planet seemed as good a time as any. By the time you read this, I’ll likely be on a plane to Philadelphia, where I’m spending my birthday this year because I’m attending a conference there. If the plane crashes, let me apologize up front that this will be your lingering memory of me. Sorry. At the same time, I want to encourage you to enjoy the 26th year of my life as much as I plan to. Perhaps a good way of beginning this celebration would be to avoid telling me that I look tired the next time you see me. After all, at the soonest, that would be immediately after I get off the plane back to Santa Barbara. What the hell am I supposed to do about jetlag?

And if you see Horatio Sanz today, be sure to wish him a happy birthday as well.

Perfectly Cromulent

From a comment left by Bradshaw of the Future blogger Goofy on this post, I've ended up on HeiDeas, a blog that celebrates St. Patrick's Day with an annual feature examining wordplay and linguistic jokes on the past year of The Simpsons. There's sizable entries for this year, as well as for 2007, 2006 and 2005.

Puns are funnier in yellow, don't you know.

Policia Montada

A postcard that Spencer found in the UCSB library, in a copy of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I'm guessing it's from a Portuguese-speaking country somewhere south, where police don't actually ride anything that looks like gnus but will fake it for the purposes of self-mocking postcards that white people buy.

click for readable version

Curiously, whoever filled this postcard out doesn't seem to have ever attached a stamp, which raises questions about how it ended up in Santa Barbara. Either way, the date would suggest that no one may have seen this thing since 2002.

Mouth Whoopie

Stayed in last night, did work and watched the beginning of Saturday Night Live, even though it’s the Shia LeBeouf-hosted one that just aired a few weeks ago. One of the first sketches was the one below, in which the host of a 70s game show called It’s a Match is found murdered and the C-list celebrity panelists respond to the detective’s question like they’re still on the show. It’s funny.

I liked this the first time I saw it, enough that I actually found it on Hulu and rewatched it, mostly to see Kristen Wiig’s facial expressions and try and figure out who Amy Poehler is supposed to be making fun of. But having watched it online so many times made me notice something about last night’s rebroadcast of it: It was different in at least two places. For one, Casey Wilson’s character’s response to the detective’s question about what she was doing last night at 2 p.m. has completely changed. In the online version (and possibly the version I first saw on TV), she says “I was eating pound cake, and crying on my waterbed.” In last night’s, she responds “Mouth whoopie.” In last night’s version, the sketch ends with the entire cast responding in unison “How dead is he?” to Shia LeBeouf’s character. Online, only Fred Armisen’s character gets that line.

I know enough about SNL to understand that each episode gets filmed twice: once for the version we see on TV and once for a longer rehearsal version that’s also performed for a studio audience. And I know that occasionally, sketches from the dress rehearsal version replace those from the original live broadcast or even subsequent reruns. That’s no mystery. What makes me feel weird about this difference is how it makes the live broadcast a little less special. It’s something that’s always appealed to me about SNL — the notion that everybody in at least one time zone all seeing the same live performance at the same time. But once little bits and pieces of that original broadcast get trimmed down or replaced altogether from with bits from another taping, it loses a bit of its pop. (The previous time I noticed something like this, it regarding the two different versions of the Drew Barrymore “Body Fusion” sketch — one with the end referencing The Ring, one not, but both seeming to be official NBC-sanctioned versions. But being a digital short, it didn’t bother me as much.)

Of course, the discrepancies in the “It’s a Match” sketch also leave me wondering whether it’s funnier to have a washed up actress eating pound cake and crying on a waterbed or referring to oral sex as “mouth whoopie.” Even though “pound cake” got less of a response from the studio audience, I think I’m more inclined to pick it. You know, because we’ve all been there.

EDIT: Okay, Correspondent Prancer informs me of who the It's a Match characters are parodying. Pam Sumpter is Brett Somers (who looked like this and who died in 2007). Steven Nielsen Perry seems like a Paul Lynde/Charles Nelson Reilly composite. (Lynde looked like this and died in 1982; Reilly looked like this and died in 2007.) Sarah Annette Boob is most likely Debralee Scott (who looked like this and died in 2005). Nancy Nan George is fairly obviously Marcia Wallace (who looks like this and who voices Mrs. Krabappel on The Simpsons.) Chipsey Boday is Nipsey Russel (who looked like this and died in 2005.) And Dirk Densten is Doug Henning (who looked like this and died in 2000.) Keep on keepin' on, Marcia Wallace!

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

Maria and her many personalities conclude the show's first season with a musical number about how internal terror is consuming us all. Best line is sung early on: "Don't be afraid of the dark / Reach out your hand, you'll hit someone like you." Because jabbing people in an unlit room is funny.

Next week: season two!