Long ago, I first ran across my future wife on a message board (gasps of horror) dedicated to comic books (more gasps of horror). There, in addition to grousing about comic books, we did fun little shared fiction games, where one person would post a chapter, the next person would pick it up and run with it.
One of us, Gail Simone, has run with it all the way to DC and Marvel Comics. She’s the new writer on Wonder Woman comics and the New York Times is all over the unfortunately radical idea of having a woman be the regular writer on the most prominent female superhero comic.
“I was a hairdresser until a couple of years ago,� Gail Simone said. “It took me a long time to admit that I was a professional writer.�
Ms. Simone was talking about her rise from hairstylist to online commentator to professional comic-book author. This month she added a new title. With the publication of issue No. 14 of Wonder Woman, which hit stores two weeks ago, Ms. Simone has become the regular writer of that amazing Amazon’s super-adventures, published by DC Comics. She is the first woman to serve as “ongoing writer� (to use the industry’s term) in the character’s 66-year history.
It’s an assignment that will only increase Ms. Simone’s profile. It’s also the latest move by DC Comics to push Wonder Woman, the company’s third-ranked hero, behind Superman and Batman, into the spotlight.
During a telephone interview from her home in Florence, Ore., Ms. Simone was effusive when discussing Wonder Woman. “She’s just the best kind of person,� she said. “She was a princess who didn’t need someone to rescue her. I grew up in an era — and a family — where women’s rights were very important, and the guys didn’t tend to stick around too long. She was an amazing role model.�
In 1999, during what she described as “a rough patch,� she was advised to try something creative. She went down a list: “I can’t draw. I can’t really sew. Well, I used to write.� This led her to create “Women in Refrigerators,� an online chronicle of the suffering experienced by female comic-book characters. The site (unheardtaunts.com/wir) garnered attention, which led to a modestly paid humor column on comicbookresources.com, a Web site that was read by many industry professionals. Still, she didn’t give up her day job.
So, here’s a mixed blessing: Hooray for all the exposure that WiR will get — cool logo by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey — and it’ll be nice having the late, great Rob Harris’ name out there, for the folks who read the credits at the bottom of the page, but oy, I expect Jonah will want to discuss the Web traffic with me at the end of this month. (For what it’s worth, Gail wanted the purple text on that page, since that was how she wrote on CBR. I wanted a monochromatic site, although Rob and Gail fortunately overruled me.)
Anyway, it’s a long way from Gail’s quips on a message board to the New York Times. Very cool stuff to see.
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
Raymond Chandler was, of course, describing Kermit the Frog.
Certainly, the current landlords of Sesame Street might disagree, according to an article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine:
Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street� are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.
Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School� is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.�
Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?� asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.
Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.
Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official� and “two billion in credit over the next five years� — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.
The old “Sesame Street� is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World� started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street� might hurt your feelings.
I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,� how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.� Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior� — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.�
Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street� that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,� she said.
Note that the evil liberal media elite writer thinks that maybe the producer may be overreacting a tad.
I do too, to put it mildly. I’m hoping my clone, James, will be able to be properly traumatized by old school Sesame Street, and have placed both DVD sets on his Amazon wish list, along with equally damaging classic Looney Tunes, Fraggle Rock and the Dini/Timm Batman, Superman and Justice League cartoons.
There’s a phrase for that in Malay, in fact: “pisan zapra.” Apparently this is an important measurement of time in Malaysia.
The World’s GeoQuiz recently had a piece on all sorts of words like this:
Kaelling – Danish: a woman who stands on her doorstep yelling obscenities at her kids.
Pesamenteiro – Portuguese: one who joins groups of mourners at the home of a dead person, apparently to offer condolences but in reality is just there for the refreshments.
Jayus – Indonesian: someone who tells a joke so unfunny you can’t help laughing.
Kamaki – Greek: the young local guys strolling up and down beaches hunting for female tourists, literally “harpoons”.
Giri-GIRI – Hawaiian pidgin: the place where two or three hairs stick up, no matter what.
Pelinti – Buli, Ghana: to move very hot food around inside one’s mouth.
Dii-KOYNA – Ndebele, South Africa: to destroy one’s property in anger.
Hanyauku – Rukwangali, Namibia: walking on tiptoes across warm sand.
Tartle – Scottish: to hesitate when you are introducing someone whose name you can’t quite remember.
Vovohe Tahtsenaotse – Cheyenne, US: to prepare the mouth before speaking by moving or licking one’s lips.
Prozvonit – Czech and Slovak: to call someone’s mobile from your own to leave your number in their memory without them picking it up.
Hira Hira – Japanese: the feeling you get when you walk into a dark and decrepit old house in the middle of the night.
Koi No Yokan – Japanese: a sense on first meeting someone that it is going to evolve into love.
Cafune – Brazilian Portuguese: the tender running of one’s fingers through the hair of one’s mate.
Shnourkovat Sya – Russian: when drivers change lanes frequently and unreasonably.
Gadrii Nombor Shulen Jongu – Tibetan: giving an answer that is unrelated to the question, literally “to give a green answer to a blue question”.
Biritululo – Kiriwani, Papua New Guinea: comparing yams to settle a dispute.
Poronkusema – Finnish: the distance equal to how far a reindeer can travel without a comfort break.
Pisan Zapra – Malay: the time needed to eat a banana.
Physiggoomai – Ancient Greek: excited by eating garlic.
Baffona – Italian: an attractive moustachioed woman.
Gattara – Italian: a woman, often old and lonely, who devotes herself to stray cats.
Creerse La Ultima Coca-COLA EN EL DESIERTO – Central American Spanish: to have a very high opinion of oneself, literally to “think one is the last Coca-Cola in the desert”.
Vrane Su Mu Popile Mozak – Croatian: crazy, literally “cows have drunk his brain”.
These are all from a book, Toujours Tingo: More Extraordinary Words To Change The Way We See The World, and Web site by dictionary collector Adam Jacot de Boinod.
I think almost everyone knows the Old Navy sweater commercial, but I just got the full song that goes with it via the Minnesota Public Radio Current Song of the Day podcast.
While Ingrid Michaelson’s singing is a nice mix of sexy and sweet, the full lyrics are the real surprise here:
If you were falling, then I would catch you.
You need a light, I’d find a match.
Cuz I love the way you say good morning.
And you take me the way I am.
If you are chilly, here take my sweater.
Your head is aching, I’ll make it better.
Cuz I love the way you call me baby.
And you take me the way I am.
I’d buy you Rogaine when you start losing all your hair.
Sew on patches to all you tear.
Cuz I love you more than I could ever promise.
And you take me the way I am.
You take me the way I am.
You take me the way I am.
It apparently did pretty well on radio, but since my radio is an iPod nowadays, I was completely unaware of this song outside of Old Navy and, now, the MPR podcast. If you don’t want to download the podcast (or get there too late, and that song is no longer in MPR’s rotation), you can get the song here.
I’m not a zombie fan, really, and I’m not sure what made me rent this film, but I’m glad I did. I suspect the hardcore zombie fans whom this is being marketed towards (including with all the trailers on the DVD) won’t necessarily be happy with this film.
Fido is a zombie movie, but it’s sort of Night of the Living Dead Invade Pleasantville, a social commentary and satire of post-9/11 life set in a post-World War Z world that resembles the sunny and optimistic 1950s, where any questioning of the compromises made for peace — or that the security measures in place are more feel-good than actually effective — leads to ostracism or worse.
Billy Connolly trades his loud and brash manner for a nearly silent role, and the comedian shows that he’s actually a pretty subtle actor. Carrie-Anne Moss turns in a very un-Matrix-like softer role and K’Sun Ray, on whose narrow shoulders much of this film rests, carries it with ease.
Take a chance of this particular flesh-eating monster. You’ll be glad that you did.
|
|
|
|
