My BFF and I used to have Saturday night Dinner & a Movie events about twice a month. For a while there, we we delving into film noir, partially because of our love for Bette Davis’ Dark Victory, but it was the Alamo Drafthouse‘s Mildred Pierce Pie Social that got us all a’dither for the bad gals and hapless dupes of the genre.
“Double Indemnity” was a classic less than five minutes after popping it into the DVD player. Beyond seeing Fed MacMurray, who is best known for his roles as the bland-but-caring Dad in “My Three Sons” and the eponymous role in The Absent-Minded Professor, doing his best up-hill acting as a guarded-but-horny insurance salesman and calling chicks “Baby”, meaty historical tidbits like his voice-over narration of an in-person call to a client in the Hollywood Hills saying that a house up there, “[p]robably set someone back $30,000″ make the film a priceless and gobsmacking watch.
Double Indemnity is also up to its black and white tuchas in paraprosdokians, sentences that end in unexpected and therefore funny ways. In a scene between MacMurray’s best friend and an insurance investigator, they quip:
Barton: Have you made up your mind?
Jackson: Mr. Keyes, I’m a Medford man – Medford, Oregon. Up in Medford, we take our time making up our minds.
Barton: Well, we’re not in Medford now, we’re in a hurry.
It’s difficult to watch a movie as brilliant as this one and not come away with a few good paraprosdokians of one’s own. After watching the climatic scene:
I commented, “Love means not getting off the second shot.” Yes, I am that witty. It’s why I get paid the mediocre bucks.
More paraprosdokians can be found here. I’ll bet you recognize several.
Apparently, when the Phoenix returns to the Marvel Universe this Spring, it will be targeting a character no one could have foreseen.
As the Phoenix Force continues its crash course towards Earth during the blockbuster comic event of the year, Avengers Vs. X-Men, Iron Fist learns that he has a shocking connection to the all-powerful embodiment of rebirth and destruction!
Iron Fist has a connection to the Phoenix? OK. Did he brush past her to get to the men’s room in a crowded discotheque once? Was he dipping his pen in the cosmic ink? Has… I can’t go on with this. Is there anyone in the Marvel Universe the Phoenix Force hasn’t tried to merge with? Because Iron Fist is just popcorn duds at the bottom of the bowl.
And remember, when you merge with a blowsy cosmic entity, you’re merging with every other person that cosmic entity has merged with. Dirty, dirty whore.
UPDATE: Oh! It’s the sash, isn’t it?
[Source]
Press play. Don’t look away.
Did you manage to make it all the way through? How high had your shoulders crawled up the side of your head in a futile attempt to escape the horror? Were there tears? A sudden, jarring flashback to your high school piano recital when you stood up to bow and had an erection? Then, congratulations, you have just experienced “fremdschämen”, or “contact embarrassment”. Start committing this word to memory, because with all the mid-season replacement shows coming up, you’ll have a plethora of opportunities to whip it out and impress your friends with your fer’rin’ lenggage skills.
Also, Merlin return to SyFy this Friday.
How is it possible we have gone without this word in the English language for so long? Just last week I was wandering around the house eating old bits of cheese and floppy celery and frost-burnt waffles because I was in a funk. Who hasn’t had a bad day (or three) and turned to food to feel better?
Google Images: ruining diets since 2001
“Kummerspeck” (literally “grief bacon”, which is the coolest etymology next to disaster‘s) is the weight I have to work off that I gain during said funk while I still feel strongly about keeping my New Year’s resolutions. Thank you, Germany!
This is from my brother, who enjoys making up words that can be used in a dissertation. Damn his organized mind!
Para-operational Irony – From para [par-, prefix meaning "alongside, beyond, altered, contrary"], operation ["action, performance, work" from O.Fr. operacion, from L. operationem "a working, operation"; cf. Gk. dramatos "play, action, deed"]
The device of withholding from the spectator or audience items of information such that the spectator or audience are placed on a par with characters who are confused, bewildered, hoodwinked or perceptually hobbled.
Season 5 of House, M.D. sees the title character suffering from complex hallucinations, decreasing mental facility and increasing psychosomatic pain. The character struggles to diagnose himself and make sense of his disorders to no avail. The viewing audience is forced to make sense of directorial choices and cinematographic style–both radically different from previous seasons–amid ambiguous plot lines which leave the audience with a sense of discontinuity similar to that experienced by the series’ main character.
This is an excellent adjective that means “hurried” or “headlong”. On this the day of the DADT repeal, one might say, “There was a gadarene charge of gay men and women to the recruitment office to join the Navy.”
It comes from the Biblical story of Jesus casting the demon Legion into a herd of swine, which then threw themselves into the ocean and drowned.
28 When he arrived at the other side in the region of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men coming from the tombs met him. They were so violent that no one could pass that way. 29 “What do you want with us, Son of God?” they shouted. “Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?” 30 Some distance from them a large herd of pigs was feeding. 31 The demons begged Jesus, “If you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs.”
32 He said to them, “Go!” So they came out and went into the pigs, and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water. 33 Those tending the pigs ran off, went into the town and reported all this, including what had happened to the demon-possessed men. 34 Then the whole town went out to meet Jesus. And when they saw him, they pleaded with him to leave their region.
Matthew 8:28-34
New International Version (NIV)
I can think of a few anti-repeal swine I’d like to see drown in the ocean.
Sun dogs have been on my mind the last few days. I haven’t seen one in ages, but I keep hearing the word in my head and looking up, expecting to see one.
from Stephen Fry:
“I don’t know about you but whenever I read a blog I do not let my eye drop below half the screen in case I accidentally hit the bit where the comments reside. Of all the stinking, sliding, scuttling, weird, entomological creatures that inhabit the floor of the internet those comments on blogs are the most unbearable, almost beyond imagining. Their resentment, their desire to be heard at the most vituperative level, at the most unpleasant and malevolent, genuinely ill-willed malevolent, level is terrifying and I am very often simply not able to cope with that.”
[Source]
Everyone expects gays to be soigné and the must-have invitees to any fancy black tie affair. However, as I write this, I’m in my underwear, teeth unbrushed, yet still considering biking down to my LCBS to get New Mutants and Fear Itself. Of course, I’ll put pants on. Probably.
Calvin’s famous proclamation that “Verbing weirds language” is not only true and heavily used of late, but there’s a word for it: anthimeria. More than likely you employ this figure of speech in your everyday language, friending someone while facebooking or perhaps ebaying for an anniversary gift.
Also, does anyone know a word that means “the belief that a word should have a particular meaning based on its appearance”?
A few months ago, I wrote about the uncanny valley phenomena, and how far it goes it explain things like people’s fear of clowns and zombies. But how about this:
This is a reborn doll, not a real baby – though it’s difficult to tell, isn’t it? Apparently, people can actually bond emotionally with these dolls, especially people who have experienced the loss of a child. Does that make these dolls more or less creepy just because these serve a purpose?
After reading that Anonymous had targeted the spewful mouthpieces of the Lord of Hate at Westboro Baptist Church a few days ago, I learned today that Westboro had responded to them/it/no one with the bear-pokingest rejoinder “BRING IT!” While reading forum comments on how outraged/excited I should be and/or how much popcorn I should make, I read that IrT4nkz’s post
If Anon have the power to take down webpages like Visa, this should be a piece of cake. I’ll be ready with my popcorn to watch them get roflstomped. They are asking for it.
Good thing I got my ROFLtickets!
UPDATE: AWWWWH! However, it seems that the dream is merely delayed: “In closing, let us assure you: We are not BAWWWING sissies, nor are we afraid of your false god; we’re just really busy. Stay tuned, and we’ll come back to play another day. We promise.”
Continuing my journey into linguistic Hebrewity, I learned the word “traif” today. In Jewish circles, it can mean anything that’s non-Kosher, but for those of us who are non-Chosen, it can mean “trash” (even the human kind).
a weasel-y, thought-terminating phrase that is supposed to lend gravitas to a weak position in an argument. Used by doomsayers and the overly dramatic.
I’m not one of those fawning Anglophiles who are up on all the sordid details of the Royals’ undergarment purchases, but I am a fan of British slang. Today, under the banner “See the first image of Karl Urban as Judge Dredd“, I read
We weren’t expecting to get a glimpse this early (the shot actually comes from a rehearsal session), but the producers are no doubt keen to eradicate memories of the naff Sylvester Stallone vehicle.
“Naff” means the same as “pants” which I blogged about several months ago. Thanks to the Brits, I now have two ways to express my displeasure at work without getting written up for general obscenity. Of course, of everyone I work with, I’m the one who already swears the least…
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He strokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rage of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.
Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.
The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. he watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read not write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of man.
–Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
On the advice of my friend Steve, I picked up Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, a sort of self-conscious, Victorian-style Harry Potter and the Horny Teens. When it’s not trying too hard to hide the fact that it knows it’s riding Harry’s scar (though the “trying too hard to hide” doesn’t often succeed), it’s actually an entertaining read. Mostly. In this passage, Quentin, the protagonist, describes the animated library of Brakebills College of Magical Pedagogy:
But the system turned out to be totally impractical. The wear and tear on the spines alone was too costly, and the books were horribly disobedient. The librarian imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some of them were actively predatory. The Librarian was swiftly deposed, and his successor set about domesticating the books again, but even now there were stragglers, notably in Swiss History and Architecture 300-1399, that stubbornly flapped around near the ceiling. Once in a while and entire sub-sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribable papery susurrus.
Who doesn’t love onomatopoeia?
When you say these words together, they sound very close to being the same, and while there is some overlap in meanings, their usages are different. “Furor” is the beginning of an emotional surge, the geyser that suddenly bursts from the heart. “Fervor” is the emotion, the water that is expressed. While both words have their basis in emotion, “furor” has a mostly negative connotation, while “fervor” can be either positive or negative.
This week, my new favorite website Awful Library Books, featured Clown Ministry (shown above), a guide to bringing joy and childlike wonder to otherwise ponderous and incense-laden church services. I remember this trend back in the early 80′s and always felt slightly embarrassed for the people on the altar who were trying to make people laugh at things like The Beatitudes, which are painfully unfunny. Clowns and church seem like they would go together well (since there’s already so much dress-up going on), but it’s more like a failed Reese’s experiment marrying chocolate and potting soil. In the comments section,
Christy remarks
I’ve thought about it a lot because a lot of people don’t understand it, and I think I dislike clowns because they fall into a bit of an “uncanny valley”. It’s like they’re just not quite human, and it gives me the willies! It’s not like I have paralyzing clown nightmares or anything, but they do make me feel vaguely uncomfortable.
An uncanny valley is an area of perception in which something artificial comes close to perfectly looking like a human being, eliciting a deep-seated revulsion towards the object. I had never heard of an uncanny valley before, but I do know the symptoms. A friend of mine is irrationally terrified of zombies even though they certainly aren’t going to bring about the end of the world. Today. I hope.
UPDATE: The Japanese are paving the way for our robot overlords.
from Joe Palmer’s review of Jon Macy’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Teleny and Camille:
Dear God-fearing gentlemen and ladies: It is with indignation burning in my breast that compels me to sound a clarion bell to forewarn the populace of a most horrifying book which has surfaced of late from the foulest recesses of the lowest levels of society. This novel, no this affront of debauchery, this “Teleny and Camille” has the telltale stamp of the once feted degenerate Oscar Wilde. This is no simple manuscript; accompanying the writing are illustrations depicting the lecherous adventures of these two young men as they indulge in unspeakable, lascivious and unnatural acts which are proven as the abhorrence of God and hallowed civilization. One might presume these debased drawings to be produced by Wilde’s occasional associate Aubrey Beardsley. Rather, they are the unholy work of one Jon Macy, and we feel he must be of equal standing to Wilde for so putting into form acts between these two men and others which should never be spoken of by good and righteous people. Never before has this upright person looked upon images of lanquor, of men in cataphysical couplings, declaring love to one another. It is a mockery of the natural order upon which our history rests! Mr. Macy, this one believes, should be sent to the gaol — gentle ladies, please avert your gaze as it is not our wish to offend — for sketching tumescent members and ample buttocks as if to be confused as supplications! Messers Macy and Wilde are denizens of whorish Babylon, as surely as their fetid imaginings!
I am lucky enough not to have a god-botherer in my life, at least not directly. Most of the ones with whom I have a passing familiarity are much more interested in how I put my genitals to use than they are about promoting peace in the world or feeding the hungry or, you know, being Jesus-like.
Back in April, I wrote about the Dunning-Kruger Effect – the inability of an incompetent person to recognize their incompetence because they’re too incompetent to know any better. However, as quoted in a recent New York Times article, David Dunning himself calls it “the anosognosia of everyday life”. And being the brilliant man he is, Dunning can explain it much better than I can:
An anosognosic patient who is paralyzed simply does not know that he is paralyzed. If you put a pencil in front of them and ask them to pick up the pencil in front of their left hand they won’t do it. And you ask them why, and they’ll say, “Well, I’m tired,” or “I don’t need a pencil.” They literally aren’t alerted to their own paralysis. There is some monitoring system on the right side of the brain that has been damaged, as well as the damage that’s related to the paralysis on the left side. There is also something similar called “hemispatial neglect.” It has to do with a kind of brain damage where people literally cannot see or they can’t pay attention to one side of their environment. If they’re men, they literally only shave one half of their face. And they’re not aware about the other half. If you put food in front of them, they’ll eat half of what’s on the plate and then complain that there’s too little food. You could think of the Dunning-Kruger Effect as a psychological version of this physiological problem. If you have, for lack of a better term, damage to your expertise or imperfection in your knowledge or skill, you’re left literally not knowing that you have that damage. It was an analogy for us.
I don’t know when, if ever, it will happen, but I look forward to the moment I can unholster this baby and pull the trigger.
What do “Knowing” and “Contact” have in common besides being films ill-advisedly made in the first place? The answer is “apophenia”. In both films, the lead characters look for patterns in seemingly chaotic systems. If you were wondering what the big difference between the movies is, the answer is one movie had a phenomenal lead, the other had Nick Cage.
Dana Stevens of Slate.com was quite the wag when it came to reviewing the new Diaz/Cruise vehicle, “Knight and Day”. My co-worker Zach and I were laughing about her characterization of Cruise, but stumbled over this paragraph:
The character of Roy Miller is so quintessentially Cruise-ian that he skirts the edges of self-conscious parody. He’s an indestructible superspy who’s bottomlessly cheerful and yet vaguely malevolent. Roy seems to lack any interiority whatsoever; even when he’s telling the truth, he appears to be lying. (Cruise’s most memorable characters have tended to be liars: Jerry Maguire, the kid in Risky Business, the unstable self-help guru in Magnolia.)
Zach turned to me and asked, “What’s ‘interiority’?” I had to admit, I had never heard the term before, but hanging around theatre folk for a good portion of my life led me to believe that it was some new-fangled acting technique that are always coming out of New York. Then I remembered something an ex used to call “the Neve Campbell Interior Moment”, a pause in acting during which the “Party of Five” would check to make sure her character and her character’s actions were still in sync. Apparently, not doing that can now be called “the Tom Cruise Spelunking Moment.”
Joe Jervis provided me with another Yiddish word today, “shonda”, “a shame”. I need pearls to clutch when I use it.
There is no language to truly express my love for Dan Savage. He’s never not on his game and his arms are just so ripply. In this week’s column, he got a letter which read:
One of my best friends at college is gay. I’m a straight female with my own boyfriend. We’re going to be sophomores in the fall, and I feel like this is about the age where coming out to one’s parents is in order. However, my friend’s parents are conservative. His older brother is also gay—and when he came out, his parents cut off all funding for college and excommunicated him from the family, so my friend is understandably terrified.
When his parents come to visit, I tag along on “dates” with him to “meet the parents.” It’s a free meal, but it feels a little dirty to lie to his mom and dad about how “in love” we are. Moreover, my friend is coming to my house in California this summer. I had said I would love for him to come visit—as a friend. But his parents think he’s going to be staying with his girlfriend, and they’re thinking of tagging along so they can finally meet their future in-laws, i.e., MY PARENTS. I feel like this is getting way out of hand. How far should we take this act?
I Should Win An Oscar
When you feel bad about lying, ISWAO, remind yourself that you’re doing a good deed—you’re doing God’s work—every time you pass yourself off as this boy’s girlfriend. Yes, you’re lying to his mean-spirited, emotionally abusive parents, two complete shits who deserve so much worse than simply being misled. And he only lies to them because—for the time being—he must.
You should ask him to do three things to secure your continued cooperation in this deception. First, he has to make a solemn promise that he will come out to his parents the day after he graduates. Second, he has to reach out to his excommunicated brother and, if his brother can be trusted to keep his secret, he has to come out to his brother. Third, he has to break up with you at the end of the school year.
The course of true love never did run smooth, as someone or other once said, so a painfully messy June breakup with his college girlfriend—right before summer break!—not only makes your friend’s Potemkin heterosexuality that much more credible, it also gets you off the hook for this ill-advised summer visit. Then when September rolls around, ISWAO, you two crazy kids get back together. Repeat as necessary, i.e., be “on again” when his parents are in town, be “off again” when your parents are in town, over summer breaks, holidays, etc.
And help him look around for his next girlfriend—perhaps a lesbian student with similarly batshit parents—because he can’t expect you to be his beard for your entire college career.
I’ve heard of the movie The Battleship Potemkin, but didn’t know how that related to a gay man needing a beard, so I looked it up. It turns out the usage is from a post-Crimean War story, which says that a Russian minister had fake villages built to show Catherine II that the land she had won was indeed prosperous. It now means any hollow deceit used to maintain power or position or status.
Dear Dan Savage,
Today, you taught me something new….
“Never assume malice when incompetence will suffice.” This week, I caught a student plagiarizing her final exam. Correction: “caught” gives the impression it was a skillful game of “Go” or an episode of “Spy vs. Spy”, when in actuality, she was that guy from Tiananmen Square, blatantly daring me to run her over. Who am I to pass up a dare? But after I zeroed out the grade, I wondered if this was some strange revenge plan? It wouldn’t be the first time a student has failed a class on purpose to hurt me (yes, I have been told that: “I failed this class to get back at you.”), so I asked her what the deal was and, proving Hanlon’s Razor, she said she just didn’t understand the assignment and thought that copying (the whole thing) from the Internet was allowed. It bears saying that the final exam (a book review on a book of the students’ own choosing) was given to them three months before the due date with a very clear suggestion to see me for help. Ah, well.
However, I think there needs to be a corollary to this law which says that persistent incompetence should be viewed maliciously. Case in point: after telling the above student that I had to fill out a Student Disciplinary Form on her and that consequences could range from her just getting a zero from me (no further discipline) to being suspended from school, but that was a call for the Dean to make. The student then went to an admissions counselor (the infamous P whom I’ve had moments with before) which led to my getting this email:
I’m meeting with one of your students who was explaining to me about her meeting with you regarding copying from the internet or book (sic). She reported that you were going to “write a letter and send to the ?boss? to look at and make a decision about her being expelled”.
If this is the case, there should have been a Student Discipline Report filed (sic) out and shared with the student so they (sic) can sign and keep a copy. XXXX said she has nothing in writing from you about this. I know plagiarism is a serious matter, but no reason for a student to feel scared, afraid and in tears about maybe being kicked out of school, especially since she just moved her (sic) …seeking to better her educational situation – again her words.
I know there are always two sides to this, and I was hoping you can fill me in, so as her Counselor, I can help her understand what she needs to do. If there is a Student Disciplinary Form, done, she will need a copy after you explain it to her.
Thanks in advance and I hope by following the procedures, any misunderstanding can be eliminated on how to handle such situations.
Make no mistake, P is a cow, and a malicious one at that, like Crazy-Bessie-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-barnyard malicious. So, I responded:
i am very familiar with the discipline reporting process, but thank you for taking the time to make sure i know how it goes. i am also familiar with the consequences, and expulsion is not one of them, at least not for a first offense. i think perhaps that this student has misrepresented our discussion to you.
as for filling you in, i’m afraid this is a matter between myself and XXXX. if she needs to speak with me further, i have never turned a student away in need. pulling you into this is at this stage certainly not an option for me to entertain. i’m sure you’re quite familiar not only with FERPA but also with… procedures that say counselors appear to help students fill out paperwork should it come to an appeal, but not before. i do, however, thank you for your zealous advocacy for our students.
enjoy your summer!
The real horror was that before this email (cc’d to about three admins) I was considering not filling out the paperwork (it was, after all, the next-to-last day of the semester) then P had to go and make a scene, basically forcing me to report this student. Ah, well.
My friend Aziza posted about this months ago on Facebook, saying it was from Research Design and Methods for Studying Cultures by Victor C. De Munck, but when I went to look for it, there was no web-based elaboration, so I assumed it was from a very field-specific text. Whether it was or not, leave it to Google to get Munck’s book online in under six months. I’d like to propose “Johnson’s Corollary” from a lecture by my Linguistics 707 teacher, Bob Johnson: “Anything that is American Sign Language is easily identified by signing it to Bob’s grandmother. When she says, ‘You know I don’t understand that stuff,’ you have produced ASL.”
