The other day, I told President Benjamin Harrison what I think of him. And now I’ll put it to you, readers — for what wild and zany reason would I be angry with a guy who was President almost 120 years ago and who’s been dead for at least a century? What did President Harrison do to piss me off? Let me know, because I’ve been wondering myself!
PBS
Insulted!
Back when I was active on USENET — heavens, that era, in itself, was over ten years ago — there was a character on rec.arts.books who went by the pseudonym “SubGenius”. I never figured out what, if any, connection he may have had with the fake religion “The Church of the SubGenius”, but he was a shockingly erudite character who had a highly amusing way with words. He also had a website for a while, hosted by a university in Texas (can’t remember which one), where he posted a lot of things he had, in turn, posted to online fora like rec.arts.books. One of my favorite things there was this very long insult that he had crafted. As I have not found this anywhere else online and think it deserves enshrinement, I do so here. Enjoy the insult!
(And a resounding NO, this is not even partially directed at any one of my readers!!!)
Given my spiflicated state (i.e., full sheets to the wind) and your persistent nanointellectual tendencies, I’d tend to think that this matter would be solved by a `Sir, your mother, under the pretense of maintaining a bawdy house, was the receiver of stolen goods,’ but, I fear, this sort of comment would send you a-scampering to the nearest dictionary for a look-up a) to see if you’ve been insulted and b) a quick wank in conjuntion with any of the naughty words you missed in your `curmudgeon’ research.
In short, sir, I must say that in general (no pun intended, but one indeed noted [ha]) you are lacking in wit, pathetic in practice and laughable in comprehension and therefore a typical representative of the common swut poster whose idea of clever rhetoric is the bit of verse s/h/it saw on the lavoratory wall the other night and, indeed, are the sort of chap whose idea of slander was passe when the dozens became a memory. In shorter, sir, you bore me with your lack of invention, raise my eyebrows in your attempts to simultaneously lower the standards and raise the gorges of whoever might be paying attention to your random flailing and flabbergast me (rhetorical device–I am overcome with ennui at your critical flatulence) with your patheticness and patheticeousity (pardon me whilst I pixilatedly coin new words for your damnedly mediocre mendacity) in shortest, sir, you are:
A turd herder, a shit shepard, a pustule-besmirched rapscallion, a fondler of other people’s wilted mothers, a knee-biter, a one-man plague, a titty-baby, the sort of lad who nods a hundred and nineteen times everytime he sees one of those `wouldn’t it be great’ Airhead Lite commercials, the sort of chap who one could clap about his head and shoulders and reasonably expect a handful of dead insects to spew forth from his mouth, a smidge, a forgetable simper of a coward, a clodhopper, a patsy, a fat-mouthed slob, a fop, a motor-tongue, a toothless boor, a loathsome scab, a babbler at meaningless banter, a cackler, a limp, wet fish, a conceited monkey, a tooth-chatterer, a dung-drover, a dweller in other people’s bottoms, a fanny fellow, a snaggle-toothed toady, a mincing milksop, a hopeless addlepate, a conousseur of caldswallop, a slabberdegullion rogue, a paltry panty-waste, a prating gobbleblorget, a lickorous glutton for cellulite women, a slapsause scaldiwag, a non-drunken unwoysterer, a drowsey loiterer in the halls of averageness and averagitude, a forlorn snippit, a drawlatch hoydon, a negligible coxcomb, a blockish grutnol, a foolish loggerhead, a turgy gut, a noddipeak simpleton, a codshead loobie, a woodcock slangam, a fondling fop, a base loon, a freckled bittor, a mangy prating gabler, a lubbardly lout, a sousening simp, a ninny lobcock, a gaping changeling, a ninny-hammer flycatcher, a noddy meacock, a grout-head gnatsnapper, a jobbernol goosecap, a clutch calf-lollie, a kib-dotterel, an idle lusk and above all, a pathetic wimper of a apology for a man.
And, having accosted you with such defamatory epithets of such profusion and so on on several counts, I say further not to address me any further until you can comment likewise with such length (appy polly loggies to hit a raw nerve, there) and so on that rather you should content yourself with provoking pederasts and others in your league and perhaps, to gain vengance with the world, victimise an earwig or something similarly your speed.
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Time for a couple more answers from Ask Me Anything! 2011.
Cal asks:
What other major cultural events (movies, books, TV shows) did you totally avoid? I know DUNE is one and I won’t discuss that further. Personally I never have seen ‘E.T’. I never wanted to see ‘Titanic’ but that one slipped through when I got caught up in the sinking of the ship. I only saw LOST the last year and caught up in a few months.
Interesting query! Cal continues to be incensed that I haven’t read Dune yet, but it’s on my 2011 reading list, and will probably be near the top of my batting order once I get in the mood for SF again. (I tried Dune once, ten years ago, and I got through about fifty pages or so before I finally got frustrated with having to look something up in the glossary every third sentence. It made the reading really choppy.)
But for big pop cultural touchstones that have eluded me completely? This does happen, actually — happens quite a lot. When I went to college in 1989, I delved into my classical music studies pretty hard core, with the result that most of the pop culture from those years completely went under — or over — my radar. I kept up with some of the popular movies of the time, but music? Books? Forget it. There’s a wonderful Internet quiz site, Sporcle.com (Warning: that site is second only to Cracked.com as a timewaster) that a couple of friends of mine at work like to play on when we’re on lunch. When we do a music quiz — such as, say, “#1 Song from Each Year in the USA” — I invariably cannot supply any answers past 1990. The vast majority of pop music of the last twenty years has passed me by.
Mostly it comes down to “Do I want to see/read/hear this? Or don’t I?” And often times, if the answer is “Yes”, it then comes down to “DO I want to see/read/hear it now, or can I wait a while?” Lots of times I’ll simply elect to wait a while and take a “I’ll get to that when I get to it” approach. The Harry Potter series was into its third book by the time I got in on the act; I only just saw The Godfather all the way through for the first time less than two years ago. I rarely decide that something is sufficiently important for me to experience it at the moment of its popularity. Sometimes this leaves me a bit at odds with the warp and weft of pop culture and the references to it that fill discussion (for instance, until just a couple of weeks ago, I had no context for the line “The Dude abides”).
Ultimately, it’s not so much a reaction against what’s popular as just a general personal commitment to going my own way.
“Joe” asks:
If its cold in a room and a woman is not there to tell him, will a man still know?
Oh, he’ll figure it out eventually…such as when the glass on his beer bottle frosts over…or when all the pets are clustered around him…or when he shifts position just a little bit, and all the warm air that’s clustered around him disperses!
More to come! (And if anyone still wants to ask something, go right ahead…I’m even allowing anonymous commenting on a temporary basis.)
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Sentential Links #238
Linkage, linkage, linkage for all!
:: How does it feel being fisted by the Invisible Hand, America?
:: “Ghetto people don’t own boats!”
More next week!
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A Special President’s Day Message
Journeys among the fantastic
Some thoughts on some recently seen movies at Casa Jaquandor!
:: When we were moving from Hillsboro, OR to Allegany, NY in the summer of 1981, there was one day on the trip when my mother handed me a book and ordered me to read it. The book was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and I read it in its entirety that day. We started out that day somewhere in Nebraska and ended up somewhere in Indiana. I was riding the Ryder truck with my father; my mother and sister were in the pickup truck which was towing the camper. When we finally stopped at a Holiday Inn in Indiana, my father complained to my mother that he hadn’t been able to talk to me all day, so absorbed was I in the book.
Unfortunately, I never found the subsequent books in the series remotely as captivating, and to this day, Lion, Witch and Wardrobe is the only one of the Narnia books that I’ve actually read. So except for the first movie (previously written about), I bring no assumptions or impressions with me into the films. I actually enjoyed Prince Caspian more than I did Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe; and I actually enjoyed The Voyage of the Dawn Treader more than Prince Caspian.
Mainly, I liked it because, aside from a few moments at the very end, Dawn Treader didn’t seem to take itself as seriously as the previous two films did. This one just felt like more of a fairy tale adventure than Big Important Fantasy Battle Between Good and Evil.
I don’t really have much more to say about it than that, maybe because I don’t count the Narnia books among my favorite things, so I’m not terribly beholden to its message or the faithfulness with which it delivers that message. I’m not invested in whether or not the movie gets its CS Lewis right, or if by extension it gets the Jesus right. I’m trying to think up more to say about the movie, but I just don’t have anything. Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a genial, nice-looking, mostly entertaining fantasy adventure movie. That’s fine with me.
(I could tell that the film was shot with 3D in mind, which made some of the cinematography a bit unpleasant at times. We saw it in 2D, because I think 3D is stupid.)
:: How to Train Your Dragon is a really, really fun movie. It’s just a lot of fun, and it’s got a lot of heart, and best of all, it does things, story-wise, that are actually surprising. I don’t want to say too much about this animated tale about a young boy in a Viking village who befriends an injured dragon, but it’s just a fine, fine movie. It’s a pleasant piece of mainstream computer animation, but it’s also a movie that doesn’t fill its cast with cardboard stereotypes, opting instead for conflicts that are actually fairly complex. The story is your basic “War based on a misunderstanding” tale, but it finds some new things to saw within that framework, and the dragons themselves are a lot of fun to watch. (The main one seems to be more cat than lizard, if that makes sense.)
:: I’ve never been one to believe in the concept of “guilty pleasures”, but damned if I don’t think I have an honest-to-goodness guilty pleasure: the movie Armageddon. It’s utterly ridiculous; it screens like a 150-minute rock video, with its endlessly moving camera; its story makes very little sense. All the movie really has going for it is some entertaining banter amongst the characters, and Bruce Willis in his full-on Bruce Willis mode. Oh God, Armageddon is a bad, bad, bad movie.
And yet…I watched the damn thing, yet again. Voluntarily. And I didn’t feel that guilty at all. Except, maybe, in that feeling I get after I have my second slice of cake on my birthday. Of the two “giant rock hitting Earth” movies that came out roughly the same time, Deep Impact is the better movie. But Armageddon is the one I prefer to watch. Even with its horrible script, its cardboard characters, its abysmal scientific accuracy, and its relentless score that pounds away at you with all the subtlety of a brick thrown through a plate-glass window.
:: Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf is a movie I wanted to like a lot more than I did. The film actually has a very good script, by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, and it has an excellent cast. But the film is very nearly undone by its visuals.
The Beowulf story is a familiar one, and the film depicts its world with all of the bawdiness, raunchy behavior, and brutality that one might expect from a PG-13 film. Hrothgar’s hall is being attacked by a horrible beast called Grendel whom no one can kill; enter the great warrior Beowulf, who kills Grendel but then discovers that Grendel isn’t actually the real beast. The story is pretty straightforward.
Zemeckis’s visuals, though, are too often distracting to the point that they ejected me right out of the story. The film is made in the “motion capture” animation style that The Polar Express had formerly exhibited. A lot of people hated the look of Polar Express, particularly the eyes of the characters; I wasn’t one of them, but the visuals of Beowulf really gave me a hard time. Part of it was that there really wasn’t that much of a reason for the stylized look of the film; Polar Express had a “Is it a dream?” quality to it, and the visuals there were influenced by the design of the famous childrens book that inspired it.
There really doesn’t seem to be any reason for Beowulf to be shot in this way, however, and the visual design of the film does a disservice to the earthy tone of the script. Hrothgar’s hall should be a dirty, filthy place, and yet, the film makes it look almost shiny and spotless. Bright fires fill the movie with brilliant yellow light that seems out of place most of the time.
And that’s just the general appearance of the film; Zemeckis also goes for specific shots or effects that draw so much attention to themselves that it detracts from the story. Here’s a perfect example:
Of what use was the spear, sticking that far forward? Or the camera pivot to show that the spear tip is an inch from Beowulf’s eye? The shot is just goofy. And then there’s the supremely silly bit where we see, in flashback, Beowulf’s swimming contest against another warrior. Now, this bit is unbelievably over the top, which may be because the film implies that Beowulf is embellishing this story (he’s telling the tale to someone else as we watch the flashback). He’s swimming at sea, neck-and-neck with the other guy, when he is attacked by a series of sea monsters, each one of whom he vanquishes by stabbing in the eye. Except for the last one, which rears its head from the sea, shudders a bit, and then dies as Beowulf literally explodes from inside the creature’s eye. The whole sequence is just so gonzo, so fake, that even the story’s implication that Beowulf is spinning a web of bullshit doesn’t help. At this point I was actually laughing at the movie.
And there are many other scenes in the film that just look wrong, or that look as though Robert Zemeckis fell in love with things he could do with his camera without ever stopping to consider if those things were a good idea in the first place. It’s a shame, really. Beowulf has a good script. If only Zemeckis had directed it.
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Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Here’s a gallery of some of the worst superhero costumes to ever grace film and teevee. Granted, some of this has the air of “picking the low-hanging fruit” — making fun of the costumes in low-budget productions, including in one case a pilot episode of a show that never went to series — but still, some of ’em are hilarious.
:: Do you want to abide, just like The Dude? Here’s how. (Note to self: write a post about The Big Lebowski.)
:: Living in a home with cats, we’re long acquainted with the attraction of the laser pointer:
So it hurts me — it physically hurts me — that I didn’t think of this:
Laser cat bowling! I gotta do this. (via)
More next week!
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Saturday Centus
OK, we’ve got a more conducive prompt this week, thank God! Apparently Jenny Matlock selected a snippet from a song lyric. I didn’t bother listening to the song for inspiration, though — that’s what coffee is for! It’s inspiration in a cup.
But anyway, here’s my tale, which may well establish me as the science fiction geek of the Saturday Centus crowd. But I’m pretty much already a science fiction geek, so it’s fine by me!
Here’s my tale, with the prompt in bold.
James and William crouched on opposite sides of the open door to the control room of Mars’s mightiest battle cruiser. Alarms were still blaring; smoke choked the corridors. Martian troopers were searching for the intruders, to no avail. Two men, seconds away from winning the war for Earth.
“Before we do this,” James said, “I gotta say you’ve been a hell of a partner, man. I’d catch a grenade for ya.”
“OK,” William said as he tossed James a live grenade and ran away.
“Martian double-agent,” James said, stunned. “Son-of-a–”
Boom.
And Mars conquered Earth.
By the way, I’ve just figured out that Google Docs’s word count function somehow counts HTML tags as words! I always write them into my text, as is my habit for writing online, but I experimented a bit: I wrote the tale, checked the word count, then I went back and deleted the HTML tags (italics and bold, actually), and checked the word count again — which had gone down. Interesting.
Anyway, enjoy!
(And as always, or at least until I finish answering questions, Centus participants are invited to Ask Me Anything!)
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Answers, the second!
Continuing the replies from Ask Me Anything! 2011 (still open to queries! Get ’em in, no question turned away! No question, turned away!), this time from Roger:
1. Do you watch a TV show/movie because one of your ROWR is in it? In particular – did you watch CSI NY before Sela Ward was on it, and do you watch it now? Also, have you noticed that she had “work done” and how do yo feel about this?
I have, occasionally. Note that I don’t choose ROWR’s (even now, when I choose them very sporadically — although I’m giving thought to revising that practice, since my traffic spikes every time an episode of The Big Bang Theory airs in which Melissa Rauch appears) on the basis of just how beautiful they are, but because I saw them in something, or saw them perform something, that I really, really liked, so what attracts me to them at first (in the very mild sense of “attract”) is the talent they bring to whatever they do. There are plenty of really beautiful women on shows that I hate, so I don’t post about them, because I hate their shows, and that kind of “taints” them a little. (But I do make the distinction between hating the person and hating the show. That’s got to be clear.)
So, the ROWR honoree has to be in something that I’m interested in watching. If Sela Ward, Melissa Rauch and Jacqueline Obradors were all cast in a new David E. Kelley legal drama, I wouldn’t watch, because I can’t stand David E. Kelley’s shows. (I’m just picking on him because I’ve got him on the brain, as he prepares to destroy Wonder Woman for the new generation.)
On Sela Ward specifically: I have only watched one episode of CSI: NY since she’s been on it, and I watched that one just to see what she was like on the show. But since the best opinion I’ve ever been able to muster for that show was “tepid” and that has cooled significantly over the last couple of years, I haven’t watched any more. She was OK, but fact is, the CSI shows are basically designed to plug in any actors at all. The most character driven of them is CSI: Miami, and that’s just because David Caruso has turned Horatio Caine into the most deliciously weird teevee cop of all time (excepting those on Barney Miller).
Ward has had some plastic surgery done, which does, in my view, make her less beautiful than on Once and Again, wherein she wasn’t in a single scene where she wasn’t radiant. But even so, Once was ten years ago, and in general, I think that the whole plastic surgery thing can be OK when it’s done relatively tastefully, and I thought hers was. I certainly didn’t agree at all with this Ken Levine post in which he says that now she looks like Jack Lord (I found that post in general fairly mean-spirited, actually). Plenty of women have had surgeries that make them look ghastly — Joan Rivers is a good example, although I’ve always found her ghastly, so she might not be a good example).
2. If you were at dinner with George Lucas, what would you talk about, assuming that Star Wars is off limits? How would you feel if he brought up your sequel fixers?
No Star Wars? Aieee! But really, George Lucas seems to be a man with a lot of interests and who knows stuff about a lot of things, so even setting Star Wars aside, I suspect that the conversation would be fascinating.
Now, if he were to bring up Fixing the Prequels, I hope he’d be gracious about it, especially since I’m always trying to make clear that I don’t write those out of a desire to bash the Prequels, but to defend them by drawing attention if I can to what’s good about them. (And there’s a lot.) What I suspect, though, is that he would be gracious about it. Lucas has shown quite a lot of humor over the years about his life’s work; he has, to my knowledge, never really gone after any of the parodies that circulate online, nor has he gone after the various people who have done “fan edits”. When Carrie Fisher took to the stage at Lucas’s AFI Lifetime Achievement award and told the story where he apparently had indicated during filming of A New Hope that “there is no underwear in space”, he laughed uproariously, and there is a photo out there of Lucas on the set of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull wearing a t-shirt that says “Han shot first”. I have a feeling Lucas would be fine with it…but man, would that be weird. It would probably take me fifteen minutes just to pull my heart out of my stomach just to discuss the subject with him!
More answers to come! And don’t forget, I’m not closing off the submissions yet, so if you want to ask something, go ahead!