Back of the Cereal Box

Moon Sammy

2009-12-14T07:16:00.000-08:00

It may be the yuletide, but there's fairly little Christmasy about the ways people have recently been finding my blog.

robotic techno music
"whore shanty" (Number one hit!)
cartoon mushroom pictures
similarities between nurse and waitress
the office googi googi
Trouble cougar (Number one hit!)
paranormal activity, what is the demon? (That would be the bad thing that causes all the awful things to happen.)
how to pronounce name sneed
presented by bamboo zerz
boob english derivative (Derivatives of the English word boob? Or just derivative English boobs?)
Krystal loincloth sale (Does not sound comfortable.)
nintendo characters inspired off real people like Mario Segali or John Kirby
Good name for vampire cereal (I caught you trying to use Google to do your work, General Mills marketing rep.)
sentence for shooting into an occupied dwelling in va (I caught you trying to use Google to do your work, assistant district attorney in Virginia.)
cornrow hair styles (I caught you trying to use Google to do your work, lady in Jamaica who does college girls' hair on spring break.)
song about child abuse with micah
best name to call a video game character (Financially speaking, I would guess Mario.)
list of video game protagonists with wings kid icarus, legacy of kain
what's the difference between the old simpsons intro and the new one?
meaning of colored dots on the back of yoplait (It means you got the one poison Yoplait.)
how do you pronounce tergiversate (Not very often.)
angering demons
bazooka tranny
how do you make a cereal box in microsoft publisher 2003
what do etymologies appear in? (Language.)
picture of small beige bugs in cereal box
"SUPER MARIO BROS 2" TURNIP PUMPKIN
vocabulary of nerds
sea cows, the queen of all (And, if she existed, that is how her name might appear in the phone book or an index of some sort.)
arby's commerical home invasion
how false teeth are made
princess rosalina dress up games
what is mean delicioso (I want to meet the person who Googled this. I want to have a conversation with him, record it, and reproduce it on this blog verbatim.)
muppets skit on the moon (Gets much better results than something that could be formed by changing one single letter in the original search term.)
Barbary Fig tree: what eats them?
Thank You Tell That I See What Was There Now We Have A Yellow Hangy And A Blue Hangy

Of note, roughly a third of search terms that led to this blog in the past week and a half involved Top Chef judge Gail Simmons — and often some part of her body and the desire to determine how big or attractive said part is. Some outliers:

did gail simmons get a boob job
who is gail simmons bitch (This one may be lacking a comma. It may also be an answer for a very rude version of Jeopardy!)
what does gail simmons' husband do (I would guess that Mr. Gail primarily watches Top Chef and makes comments about how Padma is not as attractive as she is purported to be.)

Something else I learned in this round up of search terms? Some people actually do use Bing. Who knew?

I Love Tina Tina Shanooz

2009-12-13T13:34:00.000-08:00

Saturday Night Live last night continued its trend of leaving the goofiest but most creative sketch for last. This week, it was “New Doorbell,” which, unless I’m mistaken, is the first sketch Jenny Slate has led since she said accidently said fuck during the season premiere. Happy to see her getting the screen to herself once again. Here’s the sketch:

Why I like this sketch:

For one, it’s good to know that Slate can lead a sketch without blurting profanities.
For another, this sketch reminds me of In Living Color, especially if a Fly Girl were to have hijacked the stage and tried out her own sketch. Or if some entrepreneuse Fly Girl hijacked the stage and tried pitching her new personalized doorbell company.
A simple concept well executed, with a character we have not seen before.
Girl’s name is Tina Tina Shanooz.
I feel as though I must have met women like Tina Tina, though I’m pretty sure I haven’t.
The sketch began with Nasim Pedrad as the woman answering her door and then jumped to Slate as Tina Tina, allowing me to differentiate one from the other, finally.
Slate’s character kind of reminds me of Amy Poehler’s impression of Rosie Perez, and that’s a good thing.

Last week’s episode also ended with the weirdest of the night’s sketches — and considerably weirder than Tina Tina Shanooz, though maybe not as funny. Though seeing Blake Lively lose her shit on the line “WAUGH! Potato chip thief!” stuck with me.

Points for “Potato Chip”:

It gave Lively more to do than most of this episode’s sketches did.
And it really reminded me of a sketch that I would have seen in a rerun of one of the SNLs from the first seven seasons of the show, though perhaps that’s just all the wood grain.
The line “This did not end the way I imagined it, in my undry dreams. So I shall collect my hemorrhoid donut and bid you adieu.”

“Potato Chip” wasn’t the highlight of the Blake Lively episode. No, that would be the sketch that referenced someone named DJ Deuce Groan. But I still liked it. Hey SNL, maybe more like this instead of sketches where Kristen Wiig in a sweater can’t handle surprises?

If Her Daddy’s Poor, Just Do What You Feel

2009-12-13T10:44:00.000-08:00

While every blog operating on the Gregorian calendar may be busily compiling end-of-year countdowns for the best, worst or otherwise most memorable things of the past decade, I have instead to offer you all something else as we rocket at breakneck speed toward a year that doesn’t look like it has eyes in its center. Yes, I’m choosing to inflict upon you all something that I’ve bouncing around my head for some time now: Drew Mackie’s three catchiest yet most annoying pop songs in the history of recorded music.

Mungo Jerry, “In the Summertime”

Melanie, “Brand New Key”

David Dundas, “Jeans On”

(Personally speaking, Dundas is probably the most notable of these three, as he later went on to do the score to Withnail and I, although I doubt that many people walk away from that movie talking about the score. In any case, the opening to “Jeans On” was sampled in “Sho Nuff,” a Fatboy Slim song that I encountered back when I thought it was cool to encounter Fatboy Slim.)

Simply put, once I hear one of these, I won’t be able to not hear it for days. They’re irritating, for sure, but I will stop short of calling them outright bad, as they each have a staying power that has to be respected. Whether it’s deceptively good songwriting or something accidental about the beats that bored into the brain wrinkles, these will not leave you soon. I’m interested to hear if any readers have a similar interactions with any of these lingering wonders.

Mega Man Reclaims His Masculinity

2009-12-12T16:35:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: No, I won’t be exclusively writing about old video games, new retro-style video games, or specifically Mega Man 10. However, it just occurred to me that I got something to say.

Coming off the giddy high of learning that an evil sheep robot will feature prominently in the upcoming exercise in eight-bit nostalgia that is Mega Man 10, I have come across additional information that I like a little less. It’s being reported on various gaming blogs that another one of the game’s eight bosses will be a fairly uninspired robot named Commando Man. (Lamely military-themed. Does not derive power from shedding his underwear.) Also, unlike Mega Man 9, which broke decades-old gender barriers by pitting Mega Man against a mass of pixels that we players were told was supposed to be female on some level, Mega Man 10 will feature no female villains. “So what?” asks the practical gamer. “Pixels is pixels and it doesn’t make a lick of difference in the long run.” And Mr. Practical Gamer would be correct. However, thinking about this news in light of what I know about the production of Mega Man 9 makes for an interesting look into the brains of the people who make these games (dudes, mostly), the people who play them (again, mostly dudes), and the process of deciding what the former group thinks the latter will enjoy.

As I wrote about earlier on this blog, another Mega Man 9 boss, Hornet Man, was initially conceived of as also being a ladybot, Honey Woman, until the production team decided that two female Robot Masters would just be too big a departure for loyal Mega Man fans. The result of this was Honey Woman getting morphed into Hornet Man and Splash Woman — a mermaid-tailed robot whose attacks included singing — the sole do-badder who would have to squat instead of stand. (If robots urinated, that is. And since Splash Woman lives underwater, I’d imagine she’d just do it wherever she wanted, the slob.) I find this line of logic a little strange. Veteran gamers, who grew up controlling Mega Man and pew-pew-pewing through level after level, were delighted to have a new, old-style game to play through. The realization that two of the game’s bosses were gynoids instead of androids wouldn’t have exactly made them throw their controllers to the ground and stamp them into little pieces in disgust.

So there’s that. But there’s also the odd decision on the part of the Mega Man creative team to pigeonhole how these female robots would function and appear. Roughly half of the series’ bosses have names that imply some degree of badassness — Tornado Man, Shadow Man, Blizzard Man, Napalm Man, Knight Man. The rest range between slightly odd — Spring Man, Dust Man, Magnet Man, Time Man — to vaguely pornographic — Hard Man, Wood Man, Plug Man, Top Man — to fairly wussy-sounding — Plant Man, Crystal Man, Ring Man, Bubble Man.

Note that the two female Robot Masters, Splash Woman and the nixed Honey Woman, fall squarely into that last category, with honey being about as innocuous a substance as you could find and a splash being second only to dewdrops and fine mist in terms of dinkiness. I mean, in the universe of these games, robots can and are made to do anything, so there’s no reason the female-looking ones couldn’t be made to be as fierce as the male-looking ones. For example, the series has never had a Tsunami Man, so there’s no reason the designers couldn’t have made Splash Woman a little more imposing by avoiding Daryl Hannah references and calling her Tsunami Woman. Instead, the final product seeks to remind anyone looking at her that she’s not only a girl but the girl — at least so far, at least for the bad guys.

See?

splash woman says “tee hee”

It’s not surprising, given that the majority of the video games I grew up playing had female characters designed and named to seem sweet, small, pretty or otherwise benevolent. But it’s interesting to think about, especially in the sense that while current video games are getting more progressive, as far as sexual politics, this throwback Mega Man game still goes for some of the old stereotypes.

So, then, since this seems to be the pattern that the female Robot Masters should follow, here are my predictions for the villainesses that may appear in future retro-style Mega Man games:
Bunny Woman (fires carrots, procreates profusely)

Lipstick Woman (traps you in slicks of caked-on make-up)
Stove Woman (hefty, yells at you for treading into the kitchen, is made of pastries)
Waitress Woman (throws dishes, spills drinks on you, cries when you ask to see her manager)
Scented Candle Woman (weaker but pleasant-smelling version of previous fire-based bosses Heat Man, Flame Man, Burner Man, etc.)
Flower Woman (is not a robot but is actually human woman selling flowers; tragic case of mistaken identity)
Hysterical Woman (follows no discernable pattern, cannot be defeated)

Blue and Different Kind of Blue, for Fancy People

2009-12-12T08:22:00.000-08:00

Word of the week! Times two! Words of the week, if you’d rather! And both of them chromatically themed! And in the same one-sixth of the spectrum, no less!

Beyond the sixteen members of your typical Crayola starter set, there exists a more sophisticated set of colors and corresponding vocabulary. Unfortunately, most of these words are of use only to artists, interior decorators, people who want to sound smart and people who’d rather bystanders didn’t understand what they’re talking about. Appropriate though incarnadine, ponceau or minium may be to describe a given shade of red, these words overshoot the intersection of accuracy and pomposity and land square in Asshole Territory. However, in case the appropriate situation comes along, I’m offering you these two fancy terms, both of which refer to specific shades of blue. Consider this the third in a growing series of color-related words of the week, behind sinople and zinnober.

First:

perse (PURS) — adjective: dark blue or grayish purple.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the word comes from the Middle English pers, which in turn comes through Old French from the Medieval Latin Persicus, meaning “Persian.” The word came to me, however, after I read Cintra Wilson’s September 23 Critical Shopper article, in which Wilson reviewed Maxfield, a high-end vintage shop on Melrose that has ties to the Perse family. As she always does, Wilson finished the article with three squibs set off with verbally related kickers — in this case Perse, Purse and Perverse. Wilson meant the family Perse, but her use of the word nonetheless led me to learn that it would also be a color. (It actually led me to learn a lot of fancy color words, thanks to this list, which appeared on the resulting Google search.) I’d guess that the Perse family is more likely to have ties to what we now call Iran than the color, but I’d guess that the Perses know the chromatic sense of their name, given that they’ve trafficked in fashion retail for so long.

Second:

pavonated — (PAV-on-ay-tid) — adjective: 1. peacock blue. 2. like or colored like a peacock.

Finding much about perse was tough, but pavonated was even tougher. Pavonated, like pavonine, comes from the Latin pavo, meaning “peacock.” (Never would have expected that I would have reason to use pavonine more than once on this blog.) Pavonated apparently originated as a heraldic term referring to a peacock close — with close referring to a bird depicted with its wings at the sides of his body instead of distended, as if in flight. (The same website that defines a peacock close also notes, however, that close should only refer to birds that might be depicted in flight, such as an eagle or falcon, and not the ones that more often strut around on their legs, so peacock close is apparently bad usage.) At some point, the term apparently lost its associations with the bird itself and instead came to imply bird’s color. Oddly, it seems to only exist as an past tense participle adjective — that is, as something that looks like a verb but isn’t. The verb to pavonate doesn’t seem to be have been used enough to appear in any dictionaries known to Google. Not unheard of, given current English words like disgruntled.

So there you go: two obscure but potentially handy words to describe shades of blue you may encounter. Use them wisely.

Previous words of the week:

adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
barrack, bissextile, breastsummer
catholicon, cecaelia, couvade, cranberry morpheme, cummingtonite
deasil, decussate
eidolon, epeolatry, epopt, espalier
fabiform, fissilingual
gallinipper, grandgore
hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, honorificabilitudinitatibus
itaiitai, ignivomous
jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
kaffir, kakopygian, knipperdollin
leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
malacia, milt, mongo
nihilartikel, nobiliary particle
ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
pareidolia, petrichor, pismire, pong, puggle
quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc
ronion, roynish, rubirosa
salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, shebang, sinople, stevedore
tergiversate, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, toby, tyro
ucalegon, ultramontane
veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
williwaw, witzelsucht
xenodocheionology, xyster
yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang

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Feed Your Family Bugs for Christmas

2009-12-11T06:28:00.000-08:00

This Christmas, why give your loved ones presents they’ll just forget in a week? Why give your wife a diamond ring she’ll just end up throwing in the gutter? Why give your children toys they’ll just trade for drugs? No, make this Christmas one to remember by giving the important people in your life bugs — specifically those holiday time favorites, honeypot ants, those magical insects so gorged with food that their abdomens swell, rendering them crawling Tupperware containers filled to the brim with sweet, sweet candy.

Ah, yes — picture the looks on your family members’ faces as they partake in a tradition beloved by the Australian Aboriginal people: biting into the unnaturally enlarged midsection of these unfortunate creatures (which are used by other members of their species essentially as dessert carts) and savoring the sugary goo that flows out. Honeypot ants make for a memorable addition to any holiday gathering. Your children will say, “Christmas was never as good as when you fed us bugs.” Chocolate fudge what? Gingerbread men who? In the Australian outback, these ants would normally spend their days regurgitating their delectable stores for other members of their colony, but think of how much those in your human colony will appreciate stealing this precious, life-giving fluid and eating it as treats, when they’re already full of so much other food.

Remember: This Christmas, make your family eat bugs.

(Totally serious on this one. Proof below.)

Our Heroine, Alabaster Purelove

2009-12-10T14:20:00.000-08:00

I’m probably two weeks late with this, but since it’s been bouncing around in my head a bit and since the pop culture juggernaut that is Twilight isn’t going away anytime soon, I figured I might as well post it. A disclaimer: I have never read or watched or really experienced any aspect of Twilight aside from commercials for it and the SNL parody of it, “Firelight.” And I’m happy to leave my exposure there. However, being a person who stares at screens of various sorts, I do know a little about Twilight — about enough to know that the heroine’s name is Bella Swan.

This, in and of itself, is a warning sign enough that I should stay away. I hate that anyone — much less a grown woman — would name their heroine something that sounds so much like the kind of name invented by a ten-year-old girl who wears pink and strives for all things superficially pretty, or as it shall be spoken in this context, “pwetty.” It’s just so goddamn obvious. (“Bella means “beautiful” and swans are beautiful so her name means “beautiful swan” and that is both beautiful and pwetty.”) To me, someone who would like to think that both fictional and real-life things are named for sound but subtle reasons, calling this character Bella Swan is the equivalent of having her first spoken line of dialogue be “Hey you, the twelve-year-old reading this book, I’m supposed to be beautiful and appealing.” I can’t focus my rage on Stephenie Meyer alone, as I had similar problems with Mirabelle Buttersfield, the protagonist of Steve Martin’s book Shopgirl. Perhaps I am allergic to the word part bella, and perhaps if someone writes a book about a winsome lass named Bellabella Bellabelsten, I’d drop dead right there.

Upon thinking about this name a bit more, I considered that there may be an additional level of meaning to it. (Can’t confirm this, as I’ve not read Meyer’s writing and don’t know if she traffics in levels of meaning.) Swans are often thought to symbolize beauty, but in particular they are thought to have beautiful necks. A woman who might have an attractively slender neck might be called swan-like. (Her homelier necky counterpart, on the other hand, would be derided as giraffe-like.) Given that Twilight is about vampires, who often go for the neck, it could be that Meyer thought to name her character so as to underscore the fact that she is appealing to these bloodsuckers. However, even this is just a little too on-the-head for me, too direct, too obvious and too frustrating, though I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much, as no one has forced me at gunpoint to read or watch Twilight and I’m not technically obligated to think about it.

I may love the subtly significant more than the bits that beat you over your head with their meaning, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find humor in someone naming something in an obvious and therefore terrible manner. Here, then, is a list of names that Meyer may want to consider for theoretically appealing heroines in her future novels:

Melanie Ravenslock
Regina Regalston
Dulchezza “Dulcie” von Marzipan
Mariposa D’Ethereal
Stella McTwinkle
Ginger Spice
Loyalty the Dog-Faced Girl
Dyslexia S. Drawkcab
Virginia Tightclam
Popular Winsalot

The Frayed Color of Ice

2009-12-10T06:29:00.000-08:00

Notable links, brightening what is likely a meteorologically fierce Thursday.

The history of hello.

Polyamory is wrong — but purely on a linguistic level.

Crazy person names Winona Ryder and Depeche Mode frontman are named in a lawsuit filed against World of Warcraft.

Pregnancy bump-hiding tactics on How I Met Your Mother.

“Elmer in Drag”: See Ren & Stimpy creator John K’s attempt at concept art for the Tiny Toons character Elmyra. Freaky stuff.

The Telegraph: “Baby flamingos ‘scared of pink.’”

“Gaming archeologists” restore nudity censored from the American release of the Game Boy title Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, specifically to a hippo and a mermaid.

Also for hardcore Nintendo folks: Critical Gaming Network’s evaluation of New Super Mario Bros. Wii in comparison to previous two-dimensional side-scrolling titles according to various series staples. It’s quite in-depth. Here’s the list of entries so far.

Part one: basic mechanics
Part two: structural components of the levels themselves
Part three: game ideas
Part four: enemies
Part five: coins
Part six: power-ups
Part seven: locks and secrets
Part eight: the number of players able to enjoy the game at once

Because “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” apparently isn’t a universally understood proverb, those tasked with translating Kubrick’s The Shining had to find something else to put on Jack Torrance’s pages of crazy person typing. Horror blog Final Girl shows what the translators chose, thankfully translated into English.

Wikipedia’s list of speculated names for otherwise nameless characters appearing in the Bible.

A most disturbing dishwasher ad form 1966.

A neat history of Dr. X — an obscure Disney character along the lines of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit — which in turn led me to look up the surprisingly freaky 1933 Disney short “The Mad Doctor.”

And, finally, the original Jetsons version of “Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah (And That Means ‘I Love You’).” I have to say that I find the back-up singers immensely appealing, even it’s strange to hear the song being sung by a band other than The Violent Femmes.

If you want, follow my Google Reader shared clips here.

Refinance Your Home or Rot in the Street! Your Choice!

2009-12-09T18:29:00.000-08:00

I am baffled by the use of the mug shot-looking photo of Mr. Scary in this ad for home refinancing from LowerMyBills.com.

Is the ad implying that not taking this refinancing offer will render you homeless and therefore hairy-faced? Is it saying that you passing on this offer will literally make you lose your shirt?

Source: Weather.com

The Sheep Man Cometh

2009-12-09T17:53:00.000-08:00

In what I can only imagine is an effort by legendary video game company to make a nod to my New Zealand heritage — and mine alone — a new sequel to the Mega Man series was announced today, and it will feature among its line-up of evil robot bosses a contraption named Sheep Man.

In true Mega Man style, the weapon you win for defeating Sheep Man is also sheep-themed: something called Thunder Wool.

Those who have kept up with this blog for a while might remember my excitement in June of 2008 when Capcom announced Mega Man 9, a deliberately retro, straight-to-WiiWare installment of the old Nintendo Entertainment System series. The big news then was that the creators decided to make one of the eight Robot Masters female — or as close to female as a robot can get. The result stuck Splash Woman at the end of a list that began with Fire Man, Ice Man, and Elec Man and ran the gamut of every such-and-such-themed robot you could think of. Remarkable though this may have been at the time, today’s news is much bigger. Sheep trumps woman. New Zealand heritage and all.

The announcement — which appeared in Nintendo Power magazine, another fondly remembered part of my childhood that I’m pleased to hear is still around — was accompanied by purposefully off-model concept art. I assume the ram-horned monstrosity in the left corner is supposed to be another interpretation of Sheep Man.

Of course, nothing could be as disturbing as the other sheep-man-hybrid that has appeared on this blog. I’m happy to reintroduce the world to him.

Feel weird about it.

Sheep, previously:

Places Even Adult Swim Shouldn’t Venture

2009-12-09T02:14:00.000-08:00

Can you prescribe Nomolesterol to a TV show?

I watched last Sunday’s Venture Bros. and enjoyed it very much. I’ve been enjoying the show ever since the pilot, “The Terrible Secret of Turtle Bay.” However, upon watching this week’s, “The Better Man,” I had to think for a bit about what it was, exactly, that I liked so much. Then I realized: no pedophilia jokes.

Seriously, Venture Bros. has to take the prize for the most pedophilia jokes — specifically pederasty jokes — featured on any show in history ever. I, of course, have not seen every TV show ever made, but I have seen a lot of them. Even if I’m overstating my case here, anyone who regularly watches the show has to admit that it has packed more pedophilia jokes into its four short seasons that most shows could, would or should ever hope to. I mean, I’ve never watched Dallas, but I know it ran for fourteen seasons and I’ll bet it declined to find comedy in molestation more often than not. Dallas fans, please correct me if this is not the case.

You may be asking questions now. Perhaps it’s “Drew, what is this Adventure Bros.?” If that’s the question, I’d like you to close this tab and go back to editing the Facts of Life Wikipedia page. Perhaps, however, the question is “Drew, I watch the show pretty often and I’ve never noticed anything like what you’re talking about.” That’s not exactly a question, but I’ll answer it anyway. Simply put, the show references some sort of sexual activity between men and teen boys or teen-seeming men a lot more often than, well, any other show I can think of. And although I enjoy the show, I have to say that this peculiar theme is a little off-putting, especially this season with the promotion to lead character status of Sgt. Hatred — a reformed supervillain currently surviving as the title characters’ bodyguard as well as a recovering pedophile. I find myself asking, “What is up with the writing on this show?” While roundly very good, the writing — the vast majority of which is done by Doc Hammer and Christopher McCulloch, who also do voices for the show — seems to dwell on the theme of pedophilia unusually often.

sgt. hatred, courtesy of the venture bros. wiki

It’s not that such a theme is entirely out-of-place in the Venture Bros. universe. One of the show’s primary inspirations is the 1960s cartoon adventure show Jonny Quest, which itself featured quite a bit of homoeroticism — most of it inadvertent, I’m guessing, and most of it between Jonny’s dad, Dr. Quest, and the family bodyguard, Race Bannon. (Before Venture Bros. came along, this element was parodied in the pilot by another Adult Swim series, Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. In it, Harvey represents Dr. Quest in a custody battle with Bannon over Johnny and Hadji. Is funny.) Another big inspiration: comic book superheroes. And that element is there, too, as Fredric Wertham noted in Seduction of the Innocent. Batman does have a tendency, after all, to dress teenage boys in short-shorts and force them to hang out with him in an insolated cave.

I suppose someone could argue that Venture Bros. explores all manner of relationships between male characters and more than a few of them would get sexual. In a way, it deals with relationships between men in a way that’s similar to what Buffy the Vampire Slayer did with relationships between women — and at the end of Buffy, it had addressed just about every way one woman can interact with another, including the sexual ways. However, a sexual relationship between two consenting adults is different from one between an adult and a teenager, and it’s the portrayal or insinuation of the latter that sets Venture Bros. apart from other shows and certainly other cartoons. Aside from Jonny Quest and superhero riffs, the first instance I can remember occurs in the episode “Past Tense,” which introduces Colonel Gentleman, a Sean Connery-sounding, Allan Quatermain-acting member of the Team Venture from two generations previous. He resides in Tangiers, with an eager-to-please boyservant named Kiki, who is in turn modeled after a similarly named, real-life lover of William S. Burroughs. As the series progressed, the audience learns that Col. Gentlemen is quite the libertine and, at least during his younger days, would have sex with anything that walked. Not sure if the historical basis or the later development of Gentleman as sexually omnivorous helps the matter any, but, really, he’s a minor character in the grand scheme of the show.

Aside from a touchy-feely Caligula in “Escape to the House of Mummies, Part II” — to which, notably, there is no part one — the next major instance of a character whose eyes seem set on abnormal sex would be Sgt. Hatred, who debuts in the second season, appears as a villain in the third and as a kida-sorta hero in the fourth. Especially once he enters the Venture household as a replacement for family bodyguard Brock Samson, Sgt. Hatred’s struggles with his urges become regular plot and joke fodder — his alleged deprogramming, his failed relationship with a woman named Princess Tinyfeet, and most recently his temptation toward Master Billy Quizboy, a now-37-year-old former boy genius whose body has retained the basic shape and appearance of a prepubescent.

Turning a pathetic sexual deviant into somewhat of a relatable character is maybe the most daring feat Venture Bros. has attempted. You feel bad for Sgt. Hatred because he means well, but he’s overall a miserable person with fairly monstrous tendencies. I mean, on one hand, pedophilia is a thing that happens and that ruins people’s lives, so I guess someone could argue that it’s noble of the show’s writers to introduce this concept to an over-to-top universe. On the other hand, Hatred’s placement alongside so many other comic book-style evil-doers — whose nefarious plans rarely end up causing much harm to the show’s main cast, often killing off only red shirts and other background types — makes his pedophilia seem less awful than it would actually be in real life.

Light-hearted though treatment of his affliction might be, making audiences feel sympathy for such a social outsider might have been the writers’ intent. According to the character’s Wikipedia page, Venture Bros. creators Hammer and Jackson Publick note in the DVD commentary for the episode “The Buddy System” that they once observed “a man with a crew cut at Starbucks, who appeared to be looking at foot-specific pornography on his laptop without regard for the comfort of those sitting around him. The man’s intense demeanor, coupled with his blatant disregard for sexual mores, inspired Jackson and Hammer to create Hatred. They view him as a sympathetic character and state that despite his urges, Hatred realizes that his attraction to minors is wrong and is attempting to keep them in check — an aspect of his personality that they view as redeeming and sympathetic.” Even someone opposed to any kind of amnesty towards people who prey on the underaged would have to admit that it would require a good deal of skill to write a character who has this trait but who also manages to be dramatically interesting. And if that’s honestly what the writers were going for, then they’re welcome to do that. I mean, it’s their show and all.

However, even in the midst of this newest season that has focused so much on Hatred’s pedophilia, the show still went for a completely unrelated pedophilia-themed episode that used the same themes just for laughs. In “Handsome Ransom,” Hank Venture ends up becoming the new sidekick to the superhero Captain Sunshine, who like Superman is powered by the sun but who like Batman keeps company with youthful heroes-in-training. Hank’s superhero sidekick name is even Wonderboy, which seems like a pretty clear reference to Batman’s sidekick, Robin the Boy Wonder. Throughout the episode, an oblivious Captain Sunshine behaves in a way that makes everyone, Hank included, think that he has sex or wants to have sex with his sidekicks in addition to housing them and training them in the arts of superheroism. However, throughout the course of the episode, whenever Captain Sunshine seems like he’s making a move toward Hank, the following action is always something much more innocent. Thus, it’s a setup for a joke, the punchline being “Ha! You thought this was about pedophilia! But it’s not!” Which is kind of mean-spirited, given the show’s theoretically noble attempt to address Hatred’s plight and its history of man-on-man subtext.

In the end, I really don’t know what to make of this strange tendency to a show I otherwise find to be thoroughly clever and entertaining. I go back to my initial reaction: “What is up with the writing on this show?” Does someone find this subject especially compelling? Is there a humor in all this that I’m too uptight to get? And, finally, one that I debated whether I should even say but feel is justified: Is someone trying to work out some personal issue out in all this?

For what it’s worth, I feel I should note that the show doesn’t portray all gay men to be pedophiles. There’s quite a few gay guys on the show whose sexuality isn’t used to set-up pedophilia jokes. Among them: The Alchemist (a sassy magician), Holy Diver and Mile High (former OSI agents, now a couple with a tendency to bible-beat), and King Gorilla (an incarcerated, sentient ape who seems to be a parody of DC comics ape-villain Monsieur Mallah, who’s also gay).

I don’t expect that I’ll ever get a satisfying answer about why the show’s writers chose to dwell on this particular theme, but I still think it’s worth putting out there, even if only for the chance that doing so will make someone else stop and say “Hey, that is weird. Now I also wonder why they do that.” Not that anyone would actually say it in those words, but still. Venture Bros. is an outstanding show in so many ways. I only wish I understood why the powers that be chose to make it additionally outstanding in this way. If anyone reading this has any insights one way or the other, I’d love to hear them.

Reservations and questions notwithstanding, Go Team Venture.

My Mirror’s Laughing at Me

2009-12-05T23:01:00.000-08:00

Has anyone besides me noted that the song “Waterfall” by James sounds almost exactly like the song “Gypsum Oil Field Fire” by Olivia Tremor Control? Couldn’t find a handy YouTube of the latter, but you can get a good taste of it here, in the Amazon.com MP3 shop.

6AY4EVR — Or, What Is This License Plate Trying to Say?

2009-12-04T16:53:00.000-08:00

Via my brother, I received this snapshot my sister-in-law took of a curious license plate. So what, exactly, is this acting of vanity trying to tell us?

I’m not sure where April took the picture, but let’s presume that it was a place where Spanish would be widely spoken and understood. A Spanish-speaking might read this as por un corazon, which would translate as “for a heart” but for all I know would be understood as something like “for my sweetheart.”

But I’m an English-speaker, so I initially read the plate like it was trying to say something in my language. My first guess: a strangely represented version of poor unloved, which would be the worst vanity plate ever.

Then it hits me: It’s actually obvious. This vanity plate says porn love, just with the first word given a folksy semisyllable — as in the last word in “It’s Shake and Bake, an’ I hayulpt.”

Right? That’s it, right?

Less Famous Last Words

2009-12-02T13:18:00.000-08:00

“It’s totally safe. Watch me.”

“I hope that isn’t poison gas.”

“Hey, aren’t you that guy they keep showing on the news?”

“But you did check the guidebook to see what kind of mushrooms these are, right?”

“Look out for what?”

Invasion of the Tartars

2009-11-28T21:10:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving morning, my mom sent me to the grocery story. She had been tasked with making lemon pie but realized that she lacked cream of tartar, an ingredient that makes the difference between good, fluffy lemon pie and sucky, flat lemon pie. So I went and picked it up from that swarming zoo of a supermarket, all the while wondering why this particular item was called cream, since it’s a powder, and why it’s called tartar, since it has apparently nothing to do with the seafood sauce or raw beef

The internet, as always, has explained it all. Drop dead, Clarissa.

According to Merriam-Webster, cream of tartar is a salt, so why it gets to be known as a cream is a complete mystery to me. (Full disclosure: I took Physics AP to pass out of high school chemistry, so there’s much about chemical classifications that I don’t understand. Most of these are cooking-related, like why baking soda gets to be a soda.) This particular sense of the word tartar comes from a term that the Online Etymology Dictionary traces back to the Greek word tartaron, meaning “a substance encrusting the sides of wine casks.” According to Merriam-Webster, there’s essentially no difference between this byproduct of fermenting grape juice, sometimes known as bitartae of potash, and the product now sold as cream of tartar. And it makes sense that cream of tartar is a wine byproduct that helps pastries rise, since yeast, which is also used to turn baking one-stories into high-rises, is an integral part of winemaking.

Also, if you think about it, the notion of crud accumulating where it’s not supposed to also works for dental tartar. It should be no surprise, then, that the two words share the same etymology.

So what’s the deal with tartar sauce? The soundalike has no relation, in either the verbal or culinary senses. The sauce — defined by Urban Dictionary as “the gay version of mayonnaise” — seems to come from the Tartars, who inhabited Tartary, the region that once spanned the region between the Caspian Sea, the Ural Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. (These people, now known as the Tatars, survive today. Charles Bronson was apparently one, so good for him.) According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the term Tartar originated in the fourteenth century in reference to the hordes of Ghengis Khan — which included some people now known as Tatars, but lots of others as well. The Mongols themselves allegedly called themselves the Tata, though the resulting term Tartar may have been influenced by the Latin Tartarus, “hell,” presumably by the way they conducted themselves. By the seventeenth century, the term could just refer to a “savage, rough, irascible person.” Regardless, the pickles-and-mayonnaise recipe seems to be historically tied to Turkic people and not Mongolians.

Sometimes spelled tartare sauce, the phrase is first recorded in French, which also gives us tartare in the sense of steak tartare, “highly seasoned ground beef eaten raw.” Curious, then, that the legacy of the Tatar people would be seafood sauce and raw steak, but it’s more than a lot of people can claim. Also good to know: the sauce and the steak have no connection with dental crud.

Food and words, previously:

I Think You’ve Got the Knack

2009-11-25T08:52:00.000-08:00

Okay, so Inland Empire was borderline unwatchable. A good movie, yes, but a borderline unwatchable one. Regardless, it had its moments, and I was recently reminded of one of them when I found the following clip of it on YouTube. Watch it while you can — but maybe do so in a place other than your office, as it contains nudity.

Nonsensical, awkwardly sexy, and overall kind of creepy. In short, appropriately Lynchy. I have a theory that many of Laura Dern’s facial expressions in Inland Empire are meant to mimic those of an utterly confounded audience. Thoughts?

“The Loco-Motion,” previously on this blog:

Encyclopedia Drew and the Mysterious Feline Byproduct

2009-11-24T17:39:00.000-08:00

I live in a cat neighborhood now. I live among cat people. This is mostly a plus, as the cats themselves are friendly. And I have learned to find comfort in the fact that every time I step out my front door I have at least one set of feline eyes tracking my every movement. Today, however, I was greeted not by glinting eyes but several mounds of cat waste product, none of it readily identifiable as having come from one end of the cat or the other. Really, it looked like polenta to the point that I don’t think I will be able to eat polenta again.

Even more troubling was the sheer amount of mess. Had that much been purged from a wildebeest or other such large, grazing thing, I would have been worried about that animal’s health. Because wildebeests are rare in my neighborhood, however, the source was almost certainly a cat — a sick cat — even if the mathematical nature of volume would seem to indicate that this particular feline lacked bones and internal organs. This leads me to imagine three possible explanations about how this horrible thing happened. For one, it may be that a boneless, organless cat was lurking around my house, oozing about and flowing to whatever part of the property happened to have the lowest elevation. I guess I can’t be angry with Jellycat, because it has clearly led a troubled life and therefore should be permitted to void wherever and whenever it wants. But this possibility is most likely not the case, as Jellycat would probably have been unable to make it up my porch steps.

This brings me to the second possibility, which is less appealing than the Jellycat scenario: One cat may have made several trips to my porch during the night, depositing its waste in increments. I hope this is not the case, because it would seem to indicate that one of the local cats is less friendly than it seems. Not only does it apparently have a grudge against me, but it also has the wherewithal to plan out a revenge that I would find especially unpleasant. This is a cat to be wary of.

But say cats can’t plan that far ahead — and, looking at their little tennis ball-sized heads, I’m inclined to think they can’t. Well, there’s still the third possibility, which is the worst one of the bunch. If it’s not one cat making repeated trips, then it must mean that the neighborhood felines have decided as a group to make my porch their deposit spot. I was not consulted. I wish I had been. I guess I’ll have to object at the next neighborhood cat meeting.

Whatever the case, I do hope I don’t have to hose down the porch tomorrow.

Previous Encyclopedia Drew mysteries:

On the Similarities Between Artists and Drug Addicts

2009-11-23T12:22:00.000-08:00

A bit of advice: If you happen to live near a certain dilapidated building that you think may be a halfway house, it’s better not to publicly voice this opinion, as the woman who uses this particular piece of property as an art studio may be in earshot and may take offense. “But,” you begin, “the collection of people amassed out in front — all of them pale, smoking, and dressed in black clothes spattered with something-or-other — led me to believe otherwise.” And then when you attempt to relate that, when one really considers artists and drug addicts, the two groups have a lot in common and likely a considerable amount of overlap, you’ll realize that you should have stopped talking several sentences ago. So, yeah, it’s better just not to bring up the subject in the first place.

The Blossoms of a Million Pink Trees

2009-11-23T07:47:00.000-08:00

Be thankful for the following list of links of note. Happy Monday.

From Wired: ten gaping plot holes in geeky movies. Most of these aren’t quite my cup of tea, but the article does point out a significant problem with the plot of Gremlins: “If you can’t feed them after midnight, at what point during the day does it cease to be after midnight so you can feed them again? For that matter, how does the mogwai know what time zone it’s in?”

Steampunk Duck Hunt, essentially.

From Kottke: the coolest flag ever. It’s below. And it belonged to the bygone Benin Empire.

From Neology: the “Buffalo buffalo buffalo”-style humor inherent in the fact that the taxonomic name for the Western Lowland Gorilla is Gorilla gorilla gorilla. (Also: what I’m talking about with the buffalos.)

From Topless Robot: five genuinely worthwhile female versions of male superheroes.

From Slate: the strangeness of excluding off-color words from the dictionary.

From Tokyo Times: Japanese scarecrows, the sinister nature of which is fairly debatable, or so says me.

From National Geographic: The Spanish ribbed newt defends itself by slashing through its skin with its own sharp ribs, which then function like defense spines.

From Kotaku: why Capcom decided to put a Korean fighter in the upgrade to Street Fighter IV after years of never having one. (Why they decided to make this fighter an evil dragon lady stereotype, however, remains unanswered.)

Form IGN: Shigeru Miyamoto explains that Peach isn’t playable in New Super Mario Bros. Wii because she wears a skirt and skirts are hard.

From Dealbreaker: the differences between that super cute, quirky girl from that movie and her real-life counterpart.

From Eye on Springfield: “Oh no, my brains.”

From Bradshaw of the Future: the etymological connection between onion and union.

From Geeks of Doom: Why the universally despised Batman & Robin may be the most important comic book movie adaptation of all time.

From languagehat: the increasing prevalence of is is and was is, as in “The thing is is that…” and other such constructions.

From The Retroist: a clip from The Brady Bunch Variety Hour in which Greg, Marcia and Not the Jan sing “Southern Nights” on a creepy, monster movie swamp set. Because I think you need to see it.

And, finally, from fourfour: a clip from the Bollywood remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Yes, you read that correctly.

If you want, follow my Google Reader shared clips here.

Before Pug-Beagles Walked the Earth

2009-11-22T10:58:00.000-08:00

A quick update to my long-delayed word-of-the-week series. Lovers of designer dogs should know that I won’t be writing about the kind of animal that usually comes to mind when one hears the word puggle. No, the subject of this post is a little harder to love.

image courtesy of ugly overload

See? That little scrunched up whatchamacallit ball is a baby echidna — cute in its own way but probably less-than-appealing to the trophy pooch crowd. And this baby echidna and his fellow echidnitas would probably be pretty pissed to know that that there’s another species trotting around and being called puggles.

puggle (PUH-guhl) — 1. a baby monotreme. 2. a mixed breed of dog created by mating a pug and a beagle.

That’s right. Long before the term became associated with pug-beagles, it referred to baby monotremes — that bizarro order of egg-laying mammals that includes platypi, echidnas. I first encountered the word in this June 8 New York Times article on the wonder that is the echidna. Here is the sentence: “They lay leathery eggs, as reptiles do, but then feed the so-called puggles that hatch with milk — though drizzled out of glands in the chest rather than expressed through nippled teats, and sometimes so enriched with iron that it looks pink.” Lovely, no? (I have a previous entry on the monotreme habit of milk-sweating, in case you’re interested.)

If you’re Googling the term puggle, expect a hell of a lot of canine-related articles and not too much on the history of original definition of the term. The Wiktionary page, however, claims that the original puggle comes from the Australian verb puggle, meaning “to clean drains.” According to Wiktionary, “English settlers in Australia would puggle to get rabbits out of holes and sometimes find an echidna,” with the source of this possible etymology coming from a November 11, 2000, broadcast of the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Radio National Science Show. And I guess if you pulled out a baby echidna from a pipe and didn’t know what it was, I guess puggle is as good a name as anything else. Obligatory Simpsons reference: That’s an odd name. I’d have called them chazzwazzers.”

Incidentally, I checked Wiktionary’s list of baby animal names to see if some unfortunate species’ young was coincidentally called pekapoos or goldendoodles. Thankfully no. However, I did learn a few new ones: cria (a baby llama, vicuna or alpaca), leveret (a baby hare), and parr (a baby salmon).

Previous words of the week:

adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
barrack, bissextile, breastsummer
catholicon, cecaelia, couvade, cranberry morpheme, cummingtonite
deasil, decussate
eidolon, epeolatry, epopt, espalier
fabiform, fissilingual
gallinipper, grandgore
hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, honorificabilitudinitatibus
itaiitai, ignivomous
jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
kaffir, kakopygian, knipperdollin
leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
malacia, milt, mongo
nihilartikel, nobiliary particle
ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
pareidolia, petrichor, pismire, pong
quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc
ronion, roynish, rubirosa
salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, shebang, sinople, stevedore
tergiversate, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, toby, tyro
ucalegon, ultramontane
veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
williwaw, witzelsucht
xenodocheionology, xyster
yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang

Word nerd? Subscribe to Back of the Cereal Box’s word-related posts by clicking here.

Leonard Hatred

2009-11-20T06:19:00.000-08:00

A pre-Thanksgiving update of ways people have been finding this blog.

googi googi
marabou frills
mae west childrens?
(She had none, though it was the childrens who finally killed her.)
video of guy being called by his last name only
spatula-mancy
(Is a thing, surprisingly.)
my name is rydia, what nationality is this name, and what is the meaning of this name
goonies are good enough doesn't mention goonies in song
interesting facts about names "double initials"
(Number one hit!)!
how much does busy philipps weigh
what are Padme Lakshmi's cooking credentials
stereotypical indian sitcom character
Drawings of princess peach, daisy and rosetta
(For once, a search term relating to images of the Mario princesses but not ending in the word "naked.")
"the music you hear when skeletons are dancing"
I hope you’re reading this in a ‘back of the cereal box’ kind of way and not in a textbook kind of way because even though I’m trying to make it seem like something someone wil
(Notable in that a friend's blog, I'm Not One to Blog But..., shows up in the search results before this blog does.)
how much is a twin mattress and box spring

Proof of Matrimonial Love

2009-11-19T06:50:00.000-08:00

Both the women featured in this special Facebook edition of “Ha Ha — This Person’s Name” must have truly loved their husbands, for the collisions of their first names with the husbands’ last names have marked them both for life.

A good point to bring up: Keeping your maiden name isn’t necessarily a political move.

Thanks to obsessive Facebook prowlers G. and S. for these. Your “Ha Ha — This Person’s Name” t-shirts are in the mail.

Money Causes Mental Illness

2009-11-18T16:20:00.000-08:00

From Spencer, proof of the post title gleaned from various Wikipedia pages. First, from the Wikipedia article on James Gordon Bennett, Jr. :

In 1877, [James Gordon Bennett, Jr., newspaper publishing heir] left New York for Europe after an incident that ended his engagement to socialite Caroline May. According to various accounts, he arrived late and drunk to a party at the May family mansion, then urinated into a fireplace (some say grand piano) in full view of his hosts.

And then, on a possibly unrelated note, this:

Attached please find two pictures of mining heiress Virginia Fair, whose father was one of San Francisco’s Big Four. One of them is a portrait by Boldini. The other is a snapshot of her bathing at Baileys Beach in Newport, Rhode Island. I'll leave you to guess which is which, and which more accurately depicts the lady.

And, finally, another crazy rich person painted by Boldini: La Marchesa Luisa Casati, who apparently requested extra crazy.

Bonus points for the inclusion of the greyhound, but menos puntos for wearing the dress that that one goth girl you know would have cut herself to wear to prom. Of course, we can only hope that we too will one day be wealthy enough to be so crazy.

Thank God for Larry David

2009-11-18T07:57:00.000-08:00

Things I learned while watching the most recent Curb Your Enthusiam, checking on Wikipedia to see why the Cheryl and David on the show got a divorce, and ultimately learning something unexpected:

In 2003, Juan Catalan, a resident of Los Angeles, was cleared of premeditated murder charges against a material witness (a crime eligible for capital punishment) after outtake footage shot for the “Carpool Lane” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm showed him and his daughter attending the Los Angeles Dodgers vs. Atlanta Braves baseball game some 20 miles from the crime-scene at the time of the murder, resulting in a $320,000 settlement against the City of Los Angeles. On hearing of the incident, Larry David commented that “Now I’ve done at least one good thing in my life, albeit inadvertently.”

This is something I did not know. This is something I did not expect to learn.

Incidentally, Cheryl left David because he hung up on her while she was calling from a plane experiencing turbulence because he was with the TiVo guy and “couldn't hear” her.

Thank god for Wikipedia, too.

Drew Goes to the Post Office (A Short Play Based on Real-Life Events)

2009-11-17T18:26:00.000-08:00

Woman at counter: Next?

(Drew, envelope in hand, steps up to the counter after having stood in line for about twenty minutes.)

Drew: Hi. Something weird happened. I moved recently and sent in my change of address notice. And I’m getting my mail fine, but I’m also getting mail for some lady named Vanessa who lives in New Jersey.

Woman: Does she live with you?

Drew: No, I live here in Santa Barbara. She lives in New Jersey.

Woman: And you don’t know her?

Drew: Right. No clue who this lady is.

Woman: Where did you move from? Did you just move here from New Jersey?

Drew: No, just from one side of town to the other.

Woman: Do you think this woman might have lived at the address you moved into?

Drew: I… don’t think so. Because she lives in New Jersey. (Points to address on the envelope.) See? The original address on this says it was supposed to go to New Jersey.

Woman: Do you think it’s possible that whoever sent this just got her address wrong?

Drew: I guess that could be, but that would be really weird because she lives in New Jersey. Also, her address is literally nothing like mine. Like, no part of it. Also, the address on the envelope is correct. It’s you guys at the post office who put a sticker on this saying that should be redirected to where I live.

Woman: Oh, well that wouldn’t have been us. It would have been at a different processing center.

Drew: Well, whoever did that is sending me Vanessa’s mail. It’s happened twice now. I would have brought the other envelope but I can’t find it.

Woman: You know, you could just peel off the sticker that directed this towards your house and put it back in the mail. It should get to New Jersey fine.

Drew: I can do that for the other envelope, when I find it, but I don’t want this to keep happening. Like, why should this lady’s mail have to go to California every time it needs to get to New Jersey? (Drew picks holds the envelope up.) Also, this looks like a phone bill. I mean, Vanessa probably wants to pay it. And the one I have at home looks like a personal letter. I could have just thrown this mail away, but I didn’t want to do that because I feel bad for Vanessa and I thought it was the right thing to do to bring this to your guys’ attention.

Woman: Oh, you shouldn’t throw away the mail.

Drew: And I won’t. But I’d rather this got fixed.

Woman: You know, I’m not sure what to do. Sometimes mail gets stuck together. I can ask my manager.

(The woman toddles off to speak with another woman. After a few moments, both come to the counter. The boss woman has a slip of paper in hand.)

Boss woman: So you’re moving and you need a change of address form?

(Drew, now dejected, exits.)

. . . . . . . . .

I left the phone bill at the counter. I hope this will sort itself out and that Vanessa in New Jersey will one day get her mail. Meanwhile, it seems like it might have been easier just to find Vanessa and ask her to come live with me in Santa Barbara.