Tiny Money Land

DORK OF THE WEEK: The 18 year old high school kid who decided he wanted a piece of the Blaster magic and got arrested for his trouble. The AP description in the article tells you more than you'll ever need to know: "Parson, a 6-foot-4, 320-pound high school senior from Hopkins, spoke only in response to questions from the judge. He wore a T-shirt that read "Big Daddy" on the front and "Big and Bad" with a grizzly bear on the back. He sported metal stud under his lip and his hair was dyed blond on top and shaved close around the sides and back." That's always a great impression to make with the court. I'd ask if he couldn't have borrowed a proper suit from a relative, but I'm guessing none of them matched his proportions.

There are two other things in the article that make me think he's utterly and totally screwed. First, after he told the judge he had no income, no assets and only $3 in a savings account, he was assigned a public defender. If we read between the lines, and you know that I always try to, this tells us his quietly-weeping parents couldn't, wouldn't, or were asked NOT to help him. If it turns out the kid went for the third option, he's gonna get reamed. I don't know how to tell you this, but you're probably not going to get Sam Watterson if you go for court-appointed counsel; I don't care where you're from.

Second, and more importantly for our purposes of pointing and laughing, tell me if this picture reminds you of anyone on Eric's List of Unspeakable Internet Personalties. If you don't know the list, it's probably for the best. The quick summary: another GENIUS with a capital J, and nobody's going to confuse this guy for Kevin Mitnick anytime soon.  

QUICK, DISJOINTED COMMENTS ABOUT THE MTV VMAs: I will now say for posterity what I was saying in chat tonight...the MTV Video Music Awards have become almost as lame as certain legitimate awards. I only watch the VMAs these days to gauge how out of touch I am with kid kultcha, and HOO BOY, I'm hopeless at this point. A few low points:

---The technical end was utterly inept; the Duran Duran lifetime achievement award was ruined by a video with no sound (ooooo live TV, gotta love it), the stars were badly miked during the presentation segments, and the director kept giving us reaction shots of audience members who weren't reacting whatsoever. Go for that Emmy, guys! Woo-hoo!

---The non-music highlight, hands down, was what Eminem did to Special Ed the Crank Yankers puppet ("I'm on MTV and it's my birthday! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!!") But when Ed was doing another lame skit, screaming "BITCHES AND HOS, BITCHES AND HOS," MTV left "bitches" in but bleeped "hos." Can you say "mixed signals," kids? Of course you can't, you drooling morons.

---Johnny Cash got shut out by Justin Timberlake (quick fashion review: kid in his dad's clothes) AND Good Charlotte (quick music review: GOODGODGOUGEMYEARDRUMSOUTSOIDON'THAVETOSUFFER Charlotte, or Green Day With Less Green? You choose). Screw you, MTV. Screw you with a barbed wire dildo.

---Voice over of the night: "Coming up next, Metallica knock out the jams." KNOCK OUT THE JAMS. It's almost like the MC5 never existed.

---And who were these people we saw after the show? They couldn't be veejays, since MTV doesn't even SHOW videos anymore. Jon Norris and Kurt Loder were the only ones I recognized. Quick note to Loder: GNAW THROUGH YOUR RESTRAINTS AND MAKE A BREAK FOR IT. Sure, you've been with the network for a dog's age, but you're still an old school music journalist, for God's sake! Salvage whatever dignity you can.

---Oh yeah, you'll be hearing a lot about Madonna and Britney Spears kissing, so let me help you put that out of your mind...it was a peck on the lips. There's more sexual tension in the hug your grandma gives you at Christmas than what the Skank Trio did tonight.

However, that's my opinion...I could be wrong. OR I COULD BE THE RIGHTEST MAN YOU'LL EVER MEET IN THESE DARK AGES.  

HOW TO RUIN YOUR TEETH IN 10 DAYS OR LESS: If you've been in a Suncoast store in the past few months, you migh've noticed they started stocking the holy grail of J-snacks (POCKY~~~~~!!!!) and its weird cousin Yan-Yan. Apparently that went over so well, they decided to broaden the scope of this section, which means you can load up on this stuff for the first time in many parts of the country instead of going the mail order route. I'm going down the island and trying the stuff I'm not familiar with to see what develops.

You all know my relationship with Pocky, the most addictive of Japanese snack foods. I'm a bit bummed out that they don't carry the Vanilla Mousse, my favorite of the non-standard flavors, but ya takes what you gets sometimes. Strawberry will do, though. Yan-Yan, on the other hand, is basically a Pock-alike biscuit dippable into frosting; as much as I hate to say it, it doesn't do anything for me. While I didn't find it as bad as the X-E guy did, I wasn't able to make it through the full package either. I do agree with them that any candy proudly stating it does not contain pigfat is a bit spooky (to my eyes, anyway).

The Kasugai gummy candies are excellent, thankfully not in cutesy shapes, and presumably made with real fruit, to boot. I sampled the kiwi version, and not only dug the taste, but was stupified that each individual gummy was individually wrapped. That's something you don't usually get from US off-the-rack gummies, where you're most likely to have to chisel your sweets out of a huge block of huddled and afraid bears, trying to fend off death by clinging to their futile numbers. The Kasugai gummies dodge this troubling scene by not only wrapping each gummy, but making a standard oval candy instead of pressing them into bears, worms, etc. That does kind of mitigate the fun factor (i.e. biting the heads off your screaming imaginary victim, or just eating something that's shaped like a worm) but you also get a higher quality product, too. Being a grownup is filled with tradeoffs like that.

That brings us to the latest sample, something called MILKY. Since I was raised on Milk Duds and the like, I was expecting a standard-issue brown sugar caramel, but what I got was a caramel that really tasted like sweetened milk. What a concept, a food name that's actually descriptive of the taste! If the Japanese ran the American food industry, would Apple Jacks really taste like apples? Or would they rename them "Cinnamon Jacks?" A warning to the uninitiated, though: this stuff will stick to your teeth hardcore, and some pieces have hard centers.

Among the unsampled goodies include Pucca, which are basically goldfish-shaped pretzels with chocolate or strawberry filling, a few soda bottle shaped candies, and something I didn't recognize in the wild but know now is Meiji Takenoko-no Sato (another chocolate snack from the Japanese company who do chocolate the best). There's also candy from the ubiquitous Hello Kitty cabal, still taking over the world one little girl at a time. Conspicuous by its absence is the unique Botan Rice Candy, which, you may know, is the only candy in an edible wrapper. The international market in our area is full to bursting with these, so it's not as big a loss as it could be.

Anyway, good on ya, Suncoast. Set our local branch up with some Meiji Karl and ramune soda and we'll be friends for life.  

REMARKABLE: MTV Magazine is coming. I am amazed *COUGHCOUGHthatMTVfanscanreadCOUGH*.  

ACCENT ON THE "FOOLY": I had an odd feeling when Cartoon Network ran "FLCL" (pronounced "fooly cooly" at this house) over the past two weeks that such a tripped-out freaky-vibe show would not go unchallenged by the hoi polloi. However, I thought the main rant would be over the freaky-deaky nature of the program, not something like this.

For those who refuse to follow my blind links, the crux of the whole thing is that this lady's husband was tipped off by some twentyish coworkers about this great animated series, so he and his wife sat down to watch it and freaked. Not because of FLCL's almost incomprehensible storyline, but because of the upfront sexuality and hyperviolence of the show. Nowhere in this opinion piece does it say that their teenage kids watched it; they were just floored that their teenage kids could watch it.

So an adult was told by another adult to watch a show that runs after 12 (ET) on a program block called ADULT SWIM, with a huge disclaimer at the beginning that strongly cautioned the program that follows is NOT suitable for all ages, and they freak out about the kids because it's a CARTOON, and even cartoons shown at midnight should be for kids. Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Apparently they have a V-chip in their TV, which is hardwired to PG-13, and they were stunned...STUNNED, I TELLS YA! Because of this little marvel of technology, they feel safe leaving their kids unsupervised. It makes me wonder if they've actually seen what goes ON in a PG-13 movie. She even mentions the up-front warning. "It doesn't do any good for The Cartoon Network to display a parental warning prior to its late-night programming because parental codes don't lock out a show based on that type of warning. What works is to rate a show correctly in the first place." Yes, it doesn't do them any good to warn about content in the most explicit and clear way possibe, because WE WANT A CONFUSING AND POORLY THOUGHT OUT RATING SYSTEM THAT ONLY A MACHINE WILL UNDERSTAND. Besides, she probably won't be up by then.

Oh yeah, I'd kind of like to know where she saw the nude-below-the-waist teenage girls she mentions in her letter, unless she was talking about the short-shorts that are standard gym class issue in Japan...that ain't naked, lady. I'd also like to know if she considers fighting robots exploding out of a kid's head to fight a huge hand reaching for a huge iron on the outskirts of town imitatable violence. Then again, I ask a lot of questions for which I never get answers.

Unfortunately, Cartoon Network is a bit schizo when it comes to their target demographic; Adult Swim notwithstanding, they still view themselves as a children's network, which means they'll probably give this situation much more thought than it's due. Entertainment Weekly got reamed by CN for mentioning Teen Titans and Stripperella in the same column space, and I was pissed...at the idea that somebody at CN thought kids would read Entertainment Weekly. Or that adults do, sometimes.

When I think of this gripefest, I'm reminded of what happened to the Disney Channel over the past few years, when they killed off their overnight boomer-nostalgia Vault Disney block and essentially started running their daytime schedule overnight, too. Their justification? Some kid might wake up at three in the morining and want to watch "Kim Possible." Seriously, that was their defense, to make the channel look exactly the same no matter what time of day you tune in, whether the target demographic of the kids' shows were even supposed to be awake at that hour. In other words, instead of sending an omen of the future, Ms. McBride-Wyatt might actually be behind the curve regarding corporate-think.

Ball's in your court now, Ska...  

GREAT AMERICANS: In the annals of incorrect music and outsider art, few were as popular among the uninitiated as Wesley Willis. And no wonder, because there was a sort of a damaged charm to his tunes about beating up superheroes, going to concerts, and (of course) doing unspeakable things to members of the animal kingdom.

Therefore, it's sad for me to hear tonight that mortality whipped his ass last night at age 40. Rock over London. Rock on, Chicago. Western Union: It's the best way to send money.

HEY ROCKY, WATCH ME PULL THIS DVD OUT OF MY HAT: Just picked up the Bullwinkle and Rocky Season One set, and holy cow but it's a great ride. We start with the 40(!) part "rocket fuel" serial, and over the course of this long story you can see the show's style clicking into place. The follow-up "boxtop counterfitter" story is choice as well, especially when you consider they were ragging out the industry that was paying the bills (General Mills was sponsoring the show). We also get the Fractured Fairy Tale, Mister Peabody, and Dudley Doright all given the digital cleanup, looking sharp and funny as ever. On top of that, we get original ads for the Bullwinkle shows, a few promos for US Savings Stamps and Bonds, and the infamous Bullwinkle hand puppet (although not the clips where he makes fun of Disney and asks the kids to remove the TV knobs so they're sure to be tuned in next week). While it's not technically an "as originally broadcast" collection (check Cartoon Research for the skinny), it's a must-have for cartoon lovers of all stripes.  

COMEDY CENTRAL LIVE: In case you didn't know, Lewis Black and Dave Attell are on tour this fall. Two great tastes that taste great together, and I know that Lewis is a UNC alumnus, so the Raleigh show ought to be fun. Hope I accumulate enough dough in time for October...or win the sweepstakes by then.  

TV ALERT: Tomorrow night on Court TV at 8pm Eastern is the debut of Smoking Gun TV, based on the famous website and hosted by ex-Daily Show personality Mo Rocca. If the 4 minute preview segment on the site is any indicator, we have nothing to worry about. The accent is definitely on humor, and Mo is in good form here. Definitely worth a look.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, today's Smoking Gun Doc of the Day details the first criminal case of a man stealing a Segway. The guy arrested said he bought the thing from a street vendor for $75 who said he "found it", sans keys. The guy thought it was a likely story, but he also thought it was a slick-looking thing. When he found out he had the ultra-swank urban toy of the moment, he decided to call the company and try to get some keys. Unfortunately, when he fed the technical rep the serial number, it matched up with a unit that was stolen from in front of a Queens Starbucks about two months ago. A meeting was arranged with the tech rep, and an arrest was arranged for the meeting. Since the Segway has a list price of $5,000, it's FELONY CITY, JERKY.

This is an inexplicably amusing story on a few levels, and maybe it has something to do with the fact that I haven't ever seen a Segway in the local area. When you live in a rural area, you drive or you're screwed. It doesn't help that my city doesn't really have a lot of sidewalks, so you'd be limited to a one mile stretch of midtown if you used it at all. Maybe some of the college kids would go for it...if they never left campus. And skimmed the five grand off of tuition.  

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME: Yep, today I got tagged by another year. If I haven't already told you how old I've become, maybe you don't need to know. I'll use the Dana Gould defense: I'm not old, i've just reached not young. More on this later, of course  

CRYPTIC TAUNT TO SKA: I believe Cornell U is in New York. Just sit down on the porch and whittle some.  

PUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURE!: Longtime online comrades might remember this ad image haunting my days and nights last summer. It's an 1899 issue of The Century magazine, and if you're too chicken to follow, it's an old Quaker Oats ad with a reflection of the Quaker man himself holding a box of the oats and a piece of paper with the word "PURE". There are a few things that set me off about this image; first, if they tried to make the Quaker look kindly, they failed miserably (at least from my vantage point). The eyes are dead, maybe even open a bit too wide for comfort, and the face is heavy on the shadows, giving it a malevolent look The whole design, in fact, is loaded with darker spaces than you usually see in a modern food ad, giving the illustration a claustrophobic feel. The other thing that bugs me is a bit more of an ad convention, but since it's all creepy to me anyway, it just helps seal the deal; to get everything to show up the right way as a reflection, the print on the oats can and the paper would have to be printed backwards.

I think I have a better explanation than that. The Quaker is trapped inside the mirror, wraithlike and waiting to leap out and attack those who would violate the PURITY.

That's where imagination takes over. I can picture a whole movie scenario based on the Quaker in the mirror. A group of teenagers are holding a party in an old abandoned Victorian-era house on the edge of town...one with LOTS of mirrors. One by one, or more often two by two, the spirit of the Quaker shows up to destroy those who break the purity of HIS house. He could be buried in the foundation or he could've been murdered by greedy land developers during the Civil War. Either one would work in this context.

Just like the Friday the 13th movies, several times the Quaker would wait until a couple were making the beast with two backs, then he makes his presence known, swirling out of his hellish phantom zone, screaming "PUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURE!", then falling on them with unspeakable brutality, a man driven insane by an era he never had a hand in. They are discovered strangled, raw oats crammed down their throats until they choke to death.

As is tradition, there is a "good girl" who survives most of the movie. She almost snuffs it when she fixes herself a steaming bowl of apple-cinnamon oatmeal, while the Quaker's preferred recipe is butter, salt, and maybe a bit of maple syrup (for your wild days). However, she recognizes the sadness in his soul. The company he was once the singular representative of has become a conglomerate without him, and the whole Quisp vs. Quake situation really ragged him out once he got word. A seance is the only solution, obviously.

What the result is I will leave up to the reader for now. Hopefully, though, you can see my point of view, and why those "Rugrats" kids are scared of the oatmeal guy.

 

CRYPTIC NOTE TO SCOTT CHRIST: The comedian I was having trouble remembering was Wendy Liebman, and she's still very active in the brick-wall-and-microphone scene. Hope you're not too disappointed.  

TV ALERT: This week, TV Land is running a number of Dick Van Dyke Shows featuring Rob Petrie's memorable boss, Alan Brady, 8-9pm E/P every night. The reason they're doing this is to lead up to the debut of a computer animated Alan Brady special. If the picture in that article is any indication of what we have in store, I'm ever-so-slightly creeped out already, but as a one-shot it might be fun. That's 9pm, August 17th (my birthday), and I'm telling you this since TV Land isn't really known for original programming (except for a few documentary shows and the dismally low-rent "TV Land Awards" from earlier in the year).  

THE 1960s MOVIES (part 2): I drug my feet on this one, but now, to cover the second feature on the thick-of-the-60s double bill, What's New, Pussycat? A starring vehicle for Peter O'Toole, Pussycat also gave featured roles to Peter Sellers and Woody Allen, and not only was this Woody's first major film role, but also was the first one he had a hand in scripting.

As Michael James, O'Toole was in full-on charming mode (think Hugh Grant), which carries the film through the occasional shaky spots. The conceit behind the whole operation is another one of those leap-of-faith plot points, and since I can't say how well it went over back in the day (1965, pre-women's movement) , I'll have to assume it did go over. The initial flashback scenes in the psychiatrist's office are hilarious, and grease the tracks for what is to follow; basically, beautiful women have been drawn to Michael as long as he can remember, and he's just a guy who can't say no. Considering his lack of libido control, Michael's fiancée Carole (Romy Schneider) obviously has supernatural powers of forgiveness. The given here is that true love does that to some people, and whether you find that the horse chestnut or not, it's a pretty big part of the story.

Peter Sellers plays Dr. Fassbender as a mod analyst in a crushed velvet suit, pudding-bowl haircut, and (of course) thick, thick accent. Fassbender is one of a long line of movie/TV psychiatrists who just needs someone to talk to, and considering the establishing shots with his hyperjealous wife, he has very good reason. She has very good reason, too, since (as stated above) Fassbender is on the make for one of his female patients, who in turn is drawn to Michael. Woody Allen, as Michael's friend Victor, has an eye for one of Michael's cast-offs, hangs around 60s-type exotic dancers, and cheats wildly at chess.

There are a few other interesting interesting characters filling in the edges, although some get more time than others. The Paula Prentiss character's penchant for trying to kill herself with an overdose at the slightest bit of trouble doesn't feel like the surefire laugh getter now it would've been in days past, although the medal the doctor gives her for the most survived attempts is typical nightclub-era Woody. Ursula Andress, who gets feature billing in the opening credits, doesn't have very much to do (bad thing), but most of what she DOES do is in an advanced state of undress (good thing). The doctor's Wagner-obsessed wife pops up here and there, and the sight of her charging around the Chateau Chantelle in full valkyrie gear sets the tone of the film's endgame.

Oh yeah, that endgame... When we reach the Chateau Chantelle on a weekend where everybody is there, but nobody knows that everybody ELSE is there, we shift into door-slamming farce mode, and the shift, as they say, hits the fan when everybody gets acquainted in all kinds of haphazard ways.

It was said that Woody didn't like what they ended up doing to his script, and insisted on fuller control in future projects. I get the feeling the go-cart track scene wasn't his idea; I have second sight about things like that sometimes. Still, it's a fun film, and if I had to choose between the Pussycat and Royale, Pussycatworks better for me overall.

So there you are. Hope it was worth the wait.



 

THE BIG O: Before I move on to part two of my 1960s double feature, I'd like to give my thumbs-up to the new season of Big O, which began last night as part of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. The first episode was one of those "guess what's going on" shows that I enjoy from time to time, dropping lead character Roger Smith in a version of his world which, in the storyline, was supposed to have been destroyed. It also gets newbies like myself up to speed by presenting the backstory in a highly stylized way that works in context of this single episode. Basically, what's happened is that the world got collective amnesia as the result of some cataclysm some 40 years ago, which also wiped out all records of anything that came before. Roger Smith controls the giant robot of the title while unravelling all kinds of twisty-turny secrets. From some random episodes I've seen from the first season, I can also pick up that the people of Paradigm City, one of those domed cities that sci-fi folks dig, believe that they are the only ones left in the world, although that's not necessarily so. It'd probably pay with interest to see this series from the beginning.

Apparently, the first run of Big O went over so well that Cartoon Network is footing the bill (at least partially) for the new episodes, and I say if stuff like this keeps the anime industry without mucking up the editorial process, more power to 'em. Can't leave a good cliff hanging, I suppose.  

THE 1960s MOVIE(S) (part one): This afternoon, I managed to make it through most of Casino Royale (again) and all of What's New, Pussycat?, two films intensely of their time and place. Casino Royale, which we'll be covering tonight, is famous for being an expensive mess, with five directors each taking a piece of the script and doing what needed to be done without having a bit of coordination between each other, two stars (Peter Sellers and Orson Welles) being so sick of each other that the scenes they had together were only shot one actor at a time, and oh so much more. It's really hard to sort this stuff out (especially since I missed the earliest part of the movie), so here's an Internet Movie Database summary:

Sir James Bond is enjoying his retirement when four international agents press him into service again in hopes of smashing SMERSH and Topple LeChiffre at the baccarat tables. Bond is taken in by Agent Mimi (alias Lady Fiona McTarry) who immediately falls in love with him. Bond's illegitimate daughter, Mata Bond, whose mother was the late Mata Hari, is going to help out. The current agent using the Bond name, Cooper, has his hands full, despite his assistance by beautiful secretary, Moneypenny. 007's nephew Jimmy Bond is supposedly incompetent. Bond, hoping to clear his name from its current low repute, hires Evelyn Tremble to meet LeChiffre at the gambling tables at Casino Royale. The world's richest agent, Vesper Lynd, helps convince Tremble to masquerade as 007.

Sounds straightforward enough when it's boiled down to it's components, but "straighforward" is not an adjective to describe what made it to the screen. Parts of this flick are so disjointed, you wonder how much plot-related footage they had to lop out for the formless scenes that pad out the body. One of my favorite parts is when Mata Bond walks into a "dance academy" in West Berlin straight out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but the more I think about it, the more I realize it's completely superfluous to what should be the main story. It's a self-contained sidetrip that literally changes nothing and only exists to pad the running time.

Peter Sellers plays it startlingly low key as Evelyn Tremble, who in spite of the above summary is only one of the surrogate Bonds (and, interestingly enough, gets the part of the film that was really based on the Ian Fleming novel of the same name), with Woody Allen bringing his own period shtick to the proceedings. Orson Welles seems to be having a high time, and Niven is charming as always. It would've been nice to see all these stars in a more disciplined film, but sometime ya takes what ya gets.

Some people are hopelessly in love with the all-hands-on-deck slapstick melee that ends the film, feeling that it's a great example of the type of "camp" humor that often passed for mainstream satire in the mid 1960s. To me, it's a sign that the writers, or maybe the producers, didn't have a clue how to bring this shindig to a satisfactory end, so instead they made the finale overly-loud and overly-busy in the hope we didn't notice that nothing really got resolved. With all the looney visual non sequiturs tipped in, it feels like it was lifted whole out of a beach party movie.

In other words, if you were raised believing that irony is the height of humor, this might not be your new favorite film. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of funny business within, it's just the heh-to-huh? ratio leans too heavily in the "huh?" direction. It's might be a great movie for parties, but I probably won't be revisiting this one anytime soon. I might spring for the soundtrack album, though, since from it we get Dusty Springfield's gorgeous rendition of Burt Bacharach's "The Look of Love." And I still might spring for the DVD, since one of the extras is a live TV version of "Casino Royale" from the 1950s, with Peter Lorre as LeChiffre and a jarringly Middle American "Jimmy" Bond going through his paces. Sounds like fun.

A sidebar before I move on: some uninformed, unnamed twit who contributed a user review of Royale to the IMDB said "I would be willing to bet that the Blair Witch Project cost more to make then this low budget, crappy acting, and terrible story-line movie. " Let's put aside for a second the itch to diagram that sentence and beat the contributor over the head with it. You can accuse Casino Royale of a lot of things, but having a LOWER budget than Blair Witch? Your home movies from last Christmas probably had a higher budget than Blair Witch (and yes, I'm counting the cost of the presents here, since they're part of the production). The same reviewer also mentioned that there were "NO special effects," completely ignoring the dazzling freakout montage when Tremble is being manipulated in LeChiffre's clutches, among other psychedelic surface touches. I guess s/he was looking for laser beams and Terminators that melted. It's okay to be contrary, but don't be stupid, anonymous coward.
 

MORE CREEPY CARTOON TALK: Started the day by catching My Life as a Teenage Robot , a repeat of last night's debut. Yes, I'm on cartoons waaaaay outside of my target demographic again. On top of that, it's one of those Nicktoon things, and posting this review just a few lines up from a South Park callback. Smell the transmission for me, because I think I shifted gears too fast.

The title's also nine-tenths of the setup. Jenny is one of those world-saving androids that's somehow developed the mind of a teenager, and as a result just wants to live instead of that dull death-defying-adventure stuff. After a couple of neighbor kids accidentally discover the secret of her existence, they share amazing adventures and sometimes just hang out, trying to avoid the wrath of Jenny's creator, Mrs. Wakeman. Simple setup, no steep learning curve, but how does it PLAY?

I always approach a new Nicktoon with extreme caution, since the ones that aren't in the wall-to-wall entertainment/product tie-in mode tend to be about junior high kids learning valuable life lessons in stories that run slow as molasses, it's a 50/50 prospect as far as which type you'll be getting. Thankfully, Teenage Robot is the baby of Rob Renzetti, who wrote and directed for Dexter's Laboratory and the Powerpuff Girls, and had a hand in Samurai Jack and some of the Family Guy episodes. Nowhere is the Cartoon Network pedigree more apparent than in the second episode, where Jenny's body is taken over by hyperintelligent lab mice that look like the type of vermin you'd find in a silent movie cartoon and whose leader speaks with a thick Eastern European accent. Since Nickelodeon probably won't be allowing out-and-out violence, at least against organic lifeforms, you should adjust your expectations accordingly.

Producer Fred Seibert also helms The Fairly Oddparents and Chalkzone, so there's a solid Nick pedigree behind this series.

Teenage Robot is a bit talkier than the shows on that other cartoon channel (most Nicktoons tend to be), but works pretty well in terms of the Nicktoon lineup. Kids'll dig it, and grownups probably won't be driven to distraction by it, which is above average for what passes for family entertainment these days.  

NOTE TO CHAZ: I never said you didn't have an outside life; I just said if your outside life is anything like your net life, your neighbors' pets must be afraid of you by now. Apples and oranges, pally.

ONE MORE NOTE BEFORE BED: Sadly, it would appear that the Iratepanda page has vanished off the face of the earth, therefore the link to that page will disappear, too. If you recall from other places, that was I Rate Panda, and not Irate Panda, which I thought would've been more fun, especially after hearing about the journalist in China who had his testicles ripped off by an angry panda. Anyway, Janey never explained on what criteria she was RATING the pandas, or even RATED any pandas so we could decide that issue for ourselves, and that makes ME a saaaaaaaad panda. Who lives underneath a willow tree? Sexual Harassment Panda! etc. etc.  

FAIR WARNING: This is going to be one of those long, talky updates about old books. If that type of thing bores you to tears, there will be other stuff later in the weekend.

THE CASE FOR THE ARTIST: "By an 'artist' I mean Shakespeare and Me and Bach and Myself and Velasquez and Phidias, and even You if you have ever written four lines on the sunset in somebody's album, or modelled a Noah's Ark for your little boy in plasticine. Perhaps we have not quite reached the heights where Shakespeare stands, but we are on his track. Shakespeare can be representative of all of us, or Velasquez if you prefer him. One of them shall be President of our United Artists' Federation. Let us, then, consider what place in the scheme of things our federation can claim." This is the start of one of those great hidden gems in the Project Gutenberg collection of out-of-copyright (or freely released) texts, from a guy you've probably heard of (A.A. Milne) in a book you probably haven't heard of (If I May). It's not setup-punchline type of writing (God curse the day that all humorists start writing like stand-up comedians), but a thoughtful kind of humor; also, in the lead-off piece I quoted above, Milne does make a case for the arts, a uniquely human endeavor. It's definitely worth a look, and since these are all magazine essays a few pages long each, you can pick through them at your leisure. Anyway, it's free, so all you're paying with is your time.

AND SPEAKING OF READING: If you haven't been completely ignoring my sidebar stats lately, you might've noticed that I've been reading a book called Tristram Shandy for an godawful amount of time. I still haven't finished (the curse of not being a Constant Reader, and the curse of choosing another extra-long one), but I'm finally within shouting distance of the end, so it's good enough time for a status report. The short version: HOLY SCHLAMOLEY.

And now, for those of you who are thick enough to ask for the long version: Like Don Quixote, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy was written at the dawn of noveldom, so the rules about what could or couldn't--or rather SHOULD or SHOULDN'T--be done in long-form fiction hadn't been hardened yet. Lawrence Sterne, a vicar who wasn't above an occasional ribald joke or two, decided to have a bit of fun with the form, just like Tarantino decided to toy with movie storytelling conventions in the 1990s. Although Sterne didn't have people dropping F-bombs of language and unleashing bloodbaths of violence on the world, he did share the idea with Quentin that a writer didn't have to tell a story in a straight line. Therefore, you get a book which isn't afraid to double back several decades at the drop of its three-cornered hat. He jumps the tracks frequently to tip in things that may or may not be related to the main stream of the story, which is nominally about the title character, his family (landed middle class, unless I missed something important), and the people that surrounded them. At one point, a sentence is cut off for a digression and not picked back up until the next volume. While it's not stream-of-consciousness by any means, you could say all this jumping and shuffling was an attempt to reflect the way the mind tends to work (a major influence was Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, so this might be pretty close to truth).

Sterne was obviously in love with the process of writing and the mechanics of the novel, and toys with the format in other ways. At one point, he writes a glowing, flowery old-school dedication (in the middle of one of the volumes, mind you), then turns around and offers to sell it to the highest bidder in phraseology best suited to used-car dealers. After thinking about the eventual death of a character, a page all in black pops up. He writes chapters, writes about his plans to write about chapters, and writes about why he never wrote some of them. Other "chapters" are nothing more than blank pages with headings. He talks directly to the reader, and occasionally puts words in their (our?) mouths. Then there's the ten "missing" pages that were "torn out" for delicacy's sake; in the original printing it was actually nine, so the odd and even numbered pages were on the "wrong" side for the rest of that volume. People have called this book an ancestor of the postmodern approach; another way of putting it is that metahumor runs amok throughout.

Oh yes, that phrase "nominally about"...I could really get myself into trouble if I told you the story was about anything in particular, especially about the title character. As odd as it might sound, Tristram Shandy, the guy whose name is in the title, is so minor a character in his own story that he hardly appears in it at all, except for narrating the whole thing. He doesn't even manage to get born until the fourth volume.

In spite of all the shenanigans, we do still get some vivid human types: Walter Shandy, Tristram's dad, who could best be termed as a terminal OVERthinker with a "whim of iron"; Uncle Toby, the original man who wouldn't hurt a fly, whose mania over military tactics led him to tear up his yard to build a scale model of a battle; Parson Yorick, a jester like his Hamlet namesake, and who found no end of trouble as a result; and various other servants and family members who dash in and out of the story. Since this is a book that refuses to attack anything head on, we pick up the details as we would our own relatives, through anecdotes, sideways glances at incidents, and the like. Even at a distance of 250 years, we're given many instantly recognizeable moments of human nature; the bedroom "debate" between Mr. and Mrs. Shandy about whether it's time to put Tristram in pants, Yorick's misadventure with a piping hot chestnut and an open button fly, and Uncle Toby's courtship of Widow Wadman are among the highlights.

To boil it down, this can be mega-dense in places, the actual layout (and this time I'm talking about things like quotation marks and paragraph breaks) might take some getting used to, and if you're the type of person who wonders when somebody's going to get to the point already, you'll have no end of frustration here; like the man says, remove the digressions, and you might as well remove the whole book. In other words, by no means a summer beach book; more like a summer project. However, there's some gorgeous language to fill your head with, and an overall unique reading experience. Oh yeah, and a lot of 18th-century sex humor, too (clue: when Sterne says "nose," that's not always what he means).

If you go for it, I recommend the Penguin Classics version; it has the most thorough footnotes (100+ pages) to help you through the more obscure spots and point out a few "appropriations" (not to mention some of the multilingual dirty jokes). There's also a great introductory essay.