Damn you, urban dictionary

Introducing two words that I swear I came up with independently, only to discover that that accursed urban dictionary has already recorded their existence. Whatever, I present you here with my own definitions.

1) baloneous, adj. Having the quality or consistency of baloney, that is to say, malarkey, flim-flam, flapdoodle, etc. Acceptable extensions of the term, courtesy of a jazz musician, a friend, and the Central Square restaurant that inspired him, include: baloneous monk, and thence: baloneous monkish.

Example: His dissertation comparing Barth and Barthes just seemed unmistakably baloneous.

2) crayfish, n. and/or interjection. The next stage of the evolution that has proceeded this far as follows: crazy --> cray --> cray-cray --> crayfish.

Example: So-and-so will be there, and so-and-so, and so-and-so... Crayfish!!!

Cookies

So remember when everyone made fun of Cookie Monster for singing a song called "A Cookie is a Sometimes Food"? Here surely was a case of P.C. run amok. "Even the Cookie Monster can't have cookies anymore in this helicopter-parenting culture of ours! How depressing and humorless of them. "

Except that the title of the song is actually kind of a clever, learned reference to a Gershwin number from Porgy and Bess: "A Woman is a Sometime Thing." Which makes it all a much better joke.

The moral: never assume you are cleverer or have a better sense of humor than Sesame Street.

Bo Diddley beat

There is a thing called the Bo Diddley beat. You will recognize it as soon as you hear it. It is one of the fundamental sounds of rock and roll. Sort of a "Wilhelm Scream" of music, if you will.

But there is one example of its appearance in the world of music that is not currently recorded in its Wikipedia entry. It forms the basic rhythm of "The Naked Handstand Man," the song apparently written by a group of surfer bums, when they were teenagers, about the father of Sandra Tsing Loh -- who, among his other eccentricities, as she has often regaled us NPR listeners, does in fact perform naked handstands on the beaches of Southern California. Duh-duh-DUH-duh-duh -DUH-DUH/ He's the naked handstand maa-aaan. 

So that explains at last why, as a kid, when you first heard this radio story, the "Naked Handstand Man" song sounded so strangely familiar -- so unmistakably rock and roll -- even though it was the first time you were exposed to it.

Sugar Water

So, browsing through the 2004 edition of the Rolling Stone Album Guide, one reads about a group called Cibo Matto, made up of two Japanese ex-pats in New York who write songs about food (you know, like, "Apple," and "Birthday Cake," and "Know Your Chicken"), and one feels suddenly and strangely pulled to listen to every song they ever produced. One starts on YouTude with "Sugar Water," and you think -- oh, this song! Well, this song is famous. I've heard this loads of times. This band must be better known than I thought.

Then you realize -- oh, it's actually not that famous. I've just heard it a million times because it appears in that one scene that I've watched a million times from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in the episode "When She Was Bad" -- that part where she weirdly tempts Xander and then leaves the Bronze (which is host to many a forgettable mid-90s music act that never made it far beyond its appearance on this show) and Cordelia tells her to stop being so mean because she might lose "even the weirdo friends that you currently have," or something like that.

And strangely, you love this song, "Sugar Water," by Cibo Matto. Strangely, it sounds indescribably beautiful. The music of angels. The loveliest thing you've ever heard.

And one starts to credit a theory propounded in Aeon a little while back: that the main reason we enjoy any piece of music has not a lot to do with its intrinsic quality, if there is such a thing -- but with the fact that we've heard it before.

A koan for the 2016 elections

From a person who liked Bernie Sanders before everyone else did, but who swallowed hard and supported Clinton when it came down to it the way everyone else ought to have done.

Ahem, the koan:

The only good thing about Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 election is that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election.

A bald assertion for the start of the Holidays

I don't particularly want to bother substantiating this point, so, at the behest of a friend, I will just assert it. Besides, I trust it will not prove controversial to anyone:

Everyone who is worried about a "war on Christmas" has it perfectly backward, because Christmas wasn't that big of a deal, or such a central part of our domestic and cultural life, until it became essentially secularized and entered the mainstream of American culture as a part of our "civil religion," rather than as a part of Christianity.

We all started caring about Christmas in exact proportion to the extent to which it stopped being about Jesus. "Christmas" in this country is really not about Jesus, and never has been. It's about the United States, and Charles Dickens, and a handful of modern liberal values that provide a surface-coating of moral coherence to this ever-fracturing society.

Santa Claus

When you are a teenager, it seems very knowing the first time you think back to that scene in Peter Pan where they all go "I do believe in Fairies, I do believe in Fairies, I do I do I do believe in Fairies," or to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and you say -- belief in God is just as ridiculous as all of those things!

News flash -- there's a reason all of those things are strangely reminiscent of debates around belief in God. Because all of those things were created by nineteenth and twentieth century writers and journalists who were transparently using them as code for belief in God. They are all drenched in the rhetoric of faith and doubt that derive from Victorian and Edwardian debates between skepticism and evangelicalism.

More people, and for more of recent history, have entertained serious doubts as to the existence of God that is dreamt of in the philosophy of the typical American teenager. The doubt about God came first. Belief in God became relegated to the ranks of the juvenile sometime in the reign of Queen Victoria. Santa Claus and the rest of them were a later addition. They entered our public consciousness as an in-joke among faithless adults. So there.

Now I get it

Oh! So a McIntosh is a kind of Canadian apple. Hence -- with slight respelling -- it became the name of a type of Apple personal computer.

All throughout my Mavis Beacon youth, I thought it had something to do with the Mackintosh coat. Like the banker who never wears a "Mack," in the pouring rain, very strange, in Penny Lane.

Tracking the results...

Of myself departing a job while a friend gains employment

Argumonster

An illustration of the plight of the divinity student, fittingly labeled by a friend and classmate, "The Argumonster."

Signifying

In that pretentious, readable, periodically enjoyable, dripping-with-talent-that-makes-you-cry-because-they-were-actually-slightly-younger-than-you-when-they-wrote-it, cringingly-obvious-it-was-written-in-1989-because-of-way-it-talks-about-race book by David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello, Signifying Rappers (and yes, David Foster Wallace wrote the book about rap by David Foster Wallace that the world never asked for) there is a passage in which they refer to a song by Schoolly D called "Signifying Rapper."

The narrative of the song is plainly based on an older folktale about the "signifying monkey" who is threatened by a lion, and who solves this problem by tricking the lion into a fight with an elephant. Costello offers the following suggestion by way of a hypothetical transmission history: "Schoolly D may have encountered in his dad's record collection [...] vocalist Oscar Brown Jr.'s early-'60s scat classic 'Signifying Monkey.'"

Which is pretty darn eagle-eyed, especially since this was before the days of the internet. But since we are in the business on this blog of out-Shandying even such digressive excavations as this, we must observe that Costello's chain of transmission is missing a key link: Rudy Ray Moore's 1971 spoken word piece "Signifying Monkey," written in the form of what our co-authors call the "straight rhyme" that would later come to be standard in rap.

A side-by-side comparison of Schoolly D's lyrics and Moore's reveals that the latter must have been D's main source for the tale. Placing these next to one another like the Synoptic Gospels yields the following: "jungle town" has become "ghetto town," both the monkey and the rapper "got wise and start using his wit," etc. Even the act of fellatio upon subterranean bug life that Costello and Wallace found particularly amusing in Schoolly's lyrics has its origin in Moore. In Moore's version, it is an earthworm and a flea. In Schoolly's, it is a "little maggot."

Purely for your edification. The missing link in the transmission history has been found. If you find this sort of comparison helpful, Schoolly D is to Moore as Luke is to Matthew. And Oscar Brown Jr., I guess, is Mark.

Wayne Enterprises

There is a real life thing called this. It is the name of the company that controls all authorized uses of the brand, image, and creative products of one John Wayne, i.e. The Duke. Sure, the full name is "John Wayne Enterprises," but they generally seem to shorthand themselves as the above. Hence Ray Madoff's book, Immortality and the Law, cites a legal case involving "Wayne Enterprises," and it has nothing at all to do with Batman.

How could this be the actual name of something? Does this mean that someone could create a newspaper called The Daily Planet and not have to pay anyone royalties?

Apple Strudel

A friend and I both remember apple strudel being a big deal as children in the '90s. It introduced a generation to the otherwise alien concept of this Viennese pastry. And somewhere along the way, it vanished from our lives.

Can anyone explain? Do others remember the Great Apple Strudel Craze? Where did it go? What was the brand that we were all so enjoying?

Overweight games of strategy

On Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me the other day -- that one and only NPR news quiz -- one of the panelists was searching his brain for an answer to one of the questions. Out came "Fats Waller," then "Chubby Checker." The correct answer, it turned out, was Fats Domino.

And I got to thinking -- oh... those are all different people?

And then I got to thinking -- why did I also think these were the same person? Why had I associated the three?

Fats Waller and Fats Domino is easily enough explained.

Waller came first. Domino is named after him in part. Hence the shared nickname.

But why in my head did I always associate Chubby Checker with Fats Domino, despite the lack of any shared letters?

Wait a minute -- because Chubby is a synonym for Fat.

Wait! And a Checker is a game piece, much like a Domino!

Before you get too excited, as I did, it turns out this was part of the original joke. Chubby Checker's name was a deliberate riff on Fats Domino.

But now, at least, we know.

Script mystery solved (probably)

So, a friend proposed a theory as to who our mysterious Q source might be. Suppose they were both getting the line from -- *gasp* -- Tolkien!

Which would make a depressingly large amount of sense, when you think about it, and thus take one more spark of mystery out of the universe. Doing a quick search within the books' text we discover a passage that was obviously the basis for the line in the LOTR movies. Meanwhile, the timing of The Ruling Class would put it well within the high-water mark of the books' popularity. The screenwriters could have read LOTR and simply internalized the distinctive and pleasing cadence of this line. And then Jackson, Boyens, & Walsh riffed on it for the movie.

Here is the original line from the books -- largely the same as what made it into the movie, apart from that clunky ending, which the screenwriters sagely replaced with something more alliterative.

It appears in the chapter "The King of the Golden Hall":

"I have not passed through fire and death to bandy crooked words with a serving-man till the lightning falls."

Case (regretfully) closed.

A LOTR script mystery

Okay, so everybody knows that Gandalf says: "I did not pass through fire and shadow to bandy crude words with a witless worm," or something like that. When he's talking to Grima Wormtongue.

Well, in that weird Peter O'Toole movie, The Ruling Class (1972), the 'Electric Messiah' says this:

"I've not travelled 20 million miles through galactic space to bandy words with a poxy moon loony who thinks he's me!"

Okay,

A couple possibilities suggest themselves. Philippa Boyens or Fran Walsh or Peter Jackson or whoever may have seen The Ruling Class at some point (seems likely, given their off-color taste), and internalized the unforgettable structure and cadence of this line. Perhaps unconsciously. Much as George Harrison internalized "He's So Fine" without realizing it.

Or: they were both drawing on the same unknown earlier source, much like the Gospel writers and Q.

If anybody knows the answer, please write to me in the comments section.

Jurassic Park's Screenplay Makes More Sense Than I Thought

All these years I heard Mr. DNA as saying: "thinking machines, supercomputers break down the strand in minutes." 

I always thought... huh... that seems a little redundant.


Then I realized, thanks to Paul Ceruzzi's History of Modern Computing, that Thinking Machines was a brand of supercomputers!
 Like, an actual, real-life brand.

So he's saying: "Thinking Machines supercomputers"


What's more, it was based in Cambridge.


Hence:
 "Call Nedry's people... in Cambridge."


Mind is blown.