Oh, crap. We can't even FIND the source that told us that the "Zond-5" spaceflight which purportedly carried a TURTLE (and some worms), predated Sputnik 2, which carried the famous Laika. "Zond-5" which went around the moon was apparently in 1968, years after countless dogs, monkeys, and assorted air force he-men had ascended to orbital heights.
Boy, was that stupid. We'd apologize, but it's TOO LATE for that. It's an outrage. A travesty of justice, a cancer on the Wombattery and ultimately another reason to see this whole Web thing as an extra-capacious variety of handbasket in which we are now plummetting Hellward at a rate of speed made possible by the hi-tech highway of good intentions paid for by your tax dollars and secretly plundered 401K accounts.
We cannot expect a disgusted public to withold its outrage, but we BEG you to refrain from doing any harm to yourselves or your computers, peripherals, or routers and such. No, the proper forum for your discontent should be indignant correspondence which lets us know, in no uncertain terms, every scintilla of disappointment we have, however inadverdently, put you through. Send typewritten screeds and dung-filled paper bags to:
Wombat File Public Reparations Project
Internationaljusticestrasse 11
The Hague
Postage costs will be refunded via certified check or candy voucher.
A very simple question this week:
The first vertebrate sent into space was not a dog. What kind of animal was it?
First correct answer posted to comments wins a plastic replica of same, or perhaps of some other kind of animal, or perhaps a piece of plastic in a shape that could be said to resemble an animal if you had a child's wonderful imagination, which, alas, you no longer do.
We've been wanting to give Boxjam's Doodle the attention it deserves for a long time. Clearly, a preliminary, thoughtful examination is in order, if only to lay the down a blueprint for the work of more exhaustive scholarship that is to follow. There are the obvious issues to grapple with: the artist's obsession with garbage (a metonym for the myth of Sisyphus) and the Schulzian focus on human powerlessness; the attempts to incorporate blog-like journaling, family-oriented humor (sometimes in a more mordant vein) and trippy self-referential dream-sequences. And it is important to note the function of the Doodle as a meditation on the anxiety of influence.
And yet more than these, the Doodle is irreducibly a dialogue, a combat, a face-off between authority and the romantic conception of the soul's yearning for freedom, cleverly hidden under a Lockhorns-ish veil of marital struggle. A straightforward feminist reading of the Doodle might raise an arch eyebrow at the portrait of Ms. Boxjam's position as the Household Enforcer, but this would be a superficial analysis. As the disorderly proliferation of Boxjamian characters has progressed, it has become entirely clear that we are observing not the the beleagured life of a married man, but the many-layered selves of the postmodern subject, flattened into two-dimensional form in an attempt by the artist to render their doodled selves into legibility. The archetypal Boxjam struggles in vain against his superego partner just as he does against the Id-ish kids -- who represent not his attractive and well-behaved actual dependents, but the anarchic terrorists at play within his soul.
We still, however, don't know why it's that weird blue color. And we don't have nearly enough time here to get into the significance of muu-muus.
Eds. note: we apologize for an error in an earlier edition, in which we bungled the name of a newsprint icon of ossified conjugal bitterness. We can only surmise that our misattribution of "Lockharts" for the proper "Lockhorns" has to do with our obsession with the work of Johnny B.C. Hart, a man whose weird little universe creeps us out not so much because of his forays into fundamentalist dogma but just because its vibe is really, well, creepy.
We were following up idly on a reference in the galleys of Christopher Kremmer’s forthcoming The Carpet Wars and wound up Googling the name of an ancient city. Most of the results are illustrative of the continuing deep connection between the ‘net and sci-fi fanculture. But one of the links proved considerably more diverting. A curious blend of heavyweight scholarship and excursions into fairyland make this a lovely example of the unexpected cross-pollinations the Web enables. Interdisciplinary fun, praise Enki!
Weirdest and most satisfying is the extent to which academic-style argument finds a home among the servants of the gods and goddesses of a pre-scientific culture: We wait eagerly for the second installment of this righteously footnoted denunciation of spurious "wizards" who have been duped by the belief in that urban legend of the Satanist set, the Necronomicon.
We simultaneously wince at the coattail-riding and tie-ins these meaningless industry accolades generate in the weeks preceding the ceremonies, and appreciate the opportunity they offer us to wax wordy on yet another subject. In particular, the Academy Awards are a natural generator for the quizmaster. We've appropriately eschewed straightforward who-won-what queries and twisted today's question into a suitably WombatFile-style pretzel.
The setting of the very first winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, Wings, is World War I. Another award-winner the same year was The Last Command, for which Emil Jannings won Best Actor, playing a General who flees from his military resposibilities. What earth-shaking conflict was Janning's General ducking out on?
Post guesses, tentative answers, and slam-dunks to comments. First one in correctly gets a collection of old movie stubs cunningly pasted together to form a portrait of Ron Howard sleeping on a gigantic pile of shredded hundred-dollar bills.
We have just time enough today to encourage the reading of this article on the social psychology of slavery in the modern world from Scientific American. (Courtesy-- yet again-- the always-useful Arts & Letters Daily.)
Interesting piece from James Surowiecki on the history of standards and of screws. Mr. S., as in his New Yorker weeklies, continues to believe that Mr. Smith's Helpin' Invisible Hand is the friend who'll never let you down. But he's diverting nevertheless. (Tip o' the 'bat to Arts & Letters Daily.)
Two more versions of the hero with a thousand faces.
Today’s Category: The Glorious and Noble Pageant of American History, as Excitingly Rendered in Eighth-Grade Textbooks
Sixty-nine years before the Robert E. Lee fought the Battle of Gettysburg, Lee’s father was involved in a military action in the same state, commanding a force of 13,000 men to put down a “rebellion.” With what precious commodity was the dispute between federal troops and local residents concerned?
Hey, don’t tread on us: just post your answer to comments. First correct post wins a “These Colors Don’t Run” bumper sticker, or equivalent memento of our nation’s upright character.
Okay, now, the first thing you have to know about this is that as I was walking home last night, knowing what movie we were about to watch, I made up this little tune, sort of a faux-bad-house-disco thing that went “[deep voice]Sexy Sexy…[high voice]Beast Beast!” To do it right, the second part sort of has a “whoo-oop – whoo-oop” quality which is really difficult to transcribe. I note this here because it is the sort of thing I have to deal with day in and day out: once I thought of this irritating song, I couldn’t get it out of my head. I am the kind of person who, in the absence of all media, would make up annoying jingles to torment myself.
But on to the film itself. This was just released on video, and after much regret that we’d missed it in theaters, Theresa and I snapped it up the moment it arrived in the store. Ben Kingsley as a psychopathic criminal in a small, cool-indie-ish heist drama: sign me up.
For starters, let me be clear that the much-lauded performance of Mr. Kingsley is indeed a fun little exercise in actorly charisma, a tightly wrapped dumpling of post-Mamet-Pinter tuffness. Ray Winstone, playing an ex-thief whom sun and lassitude have left the color and shape of a roast suckling pig, plays weakling to Kingsley’s force-of-nature brute. We wait nervously until Kingsley arrives on screen (his character, Don, is coming from England to Winstone’s Spanish hideaway to demand that Winstone return with him to England for a Big Job). Once he’s there, he blusters, bullies, stares down, rages, threatens, kicks, and punches until…well, until.
Through this whole sequence we come to understand the depth and nature of Winstone’s predicament: he’s a lucky man who has emerged from a vaguely sketched background of thieving – an escapee from a life he wasn’t strong enough to sustain any longer, which was going to break him rather than toughen him. His retirement is like that of a dope-addled drummer from a hedonistic 70’s band: the guy who would have O.D.’d or been killed in a bus crash if fate hadn’t washed him up on the beach, with enough money to dream away the rest of life.
Fair enough: we know, going in, that somehow Kingsley is going to get Winstone “back into the game,” and set up a high-pressure situation where some conflict of wills or final test will happen. And something like that – sort of – happens. I won’t include any spoilers here, but I’ll just note the following points:
Sorry about the long stay at the Wombat Test address.
As Rory sez, Last Plane to Jakarta is capable of making you seriously rethink a certain band's much-discussed (and much dissed) recent product.
It also makes any attempts that we might make in this space to supply thoughtful re-evaluations of recordings seem, well, doomed to be underwhelming. Now, having admitted this and hopefully, through what we admit is a kind of a cheap gesture, foreclosed on your ability to wave off our pathetic music-musings as...well, pathetic, we launch right ahead.
Raised as we were by parents generous in many things material and otherwise but oddly parsimonious when it came to recordings ("save your money" was the withering response to any plans we floated to purchase, say, the much-desired copy of In the Court of the Crimson King or any such valuable item), we developed a profound feeling of shame and uncertainty when buying records, as if we were in danger of going broke and landing on the street as the result of LP-overindulgence. Consequently, we never had a very good record collection. Living as we did with and near people who were able to follow their instincts without our complex sense of purchase-guilt, we let them do the buying and listened without fear of penury: when we moved out , we amassed shoeboxes full of Maxell 90-minute tapes, each one a memento of a time and place, as well as a small violation of intellectual property law.
One of those tapes contained XTC's 1980 album Black Sea; as part of a long-term project to get right with the law and prove that we're not slaves to neurosis, we got the CD a couple of days ago and took it to work.
It's no masterpiece (that would, for this band, be Skylarking, despite the bitterness that went into its making), but a few things stood out on a careful couple of relistens: The fun of the tom-toms in "A Rocket From A Bottle." The joy of a time when that vague ska influence didn't signal dumbass fratboy party music (at least, not in this country).* The bizarre rightness of the coda to "Towers of London" -- to cap a song about the exploitation of Irish labor in the construction of Victorian London, apparently it is necessary to rip off the Beach Boys. The electric kazoo of "Sgt. Rock."
Of course, the record is full of bad ideas: Partridge's unwitty antinuke jibes ("Living Through Another Cuba"), a watery discussion of romantic impulses that sounds like it came from Thomas Dolby's discard pile ("Love at First Sight"), and the closing must-skip epic "Travels in Nihilon."
But on the whole it does what it needs to, even now as a recognizable child of its musically schizzy time: despite its title there's in all of Black Sea that sense of youth and brightness, of appealingly loopy energy (which always, with Andy Partridge, threatens to collapse into annoyingly loopy energy) which makes a damp March morning burn at the edges with Optimism's Flame.
*Though we note that the first time we heard "No Thugs In Our House" it was at a frat-ish house party where studly types in surfer shorts reigned, and we thought at the time (not listening clearly to the lyrics) that it was some kind of weird anti-punk anthem.
See previous quizzes for the rules.
Today's burning question: At the 1893 World's Fair, Josephine Cochran unveiled the first working version of this indispensible device. Reportedly, she had announced a few years earlier, ""If nobody else is going to invent a -------, I'll do it myself."
What did she invent?
First correct post to comments, as always, is the winner. Googling for the answer is beneath you, really it is.
This isn't the first rant we've been on about the programming inanity going on at NPR. But that was really about the selection by WNYC of lousy shows over better ones.
Today our topic is truly poor editorial choice, and the culprit is Morning Edition. David Frum's bloviations, which used to intrude upon the dawn, are now confined to the State of the Union address, which at least only comes along annually. But yesterday's broadcast included a really irritating spiel by one of our fellow Brooklynites about how it's so cool to be unemployed.
Apparently, it's GREAT to be unemployed for all twentysomethings -- twentysomethings being in her world relatively privileged urban types. "We're former magazine editors, marketing executives, commodities traders, and assistants." What a surprise -- these people are all..."still very confident" they'll get another job soon. In the meantime, they're discovering the joys of hanging out in coffee shops. How cool for them!
What are the issues for those "twentysomethings" who don't come from enough money to make unemployment the equivalent of a little vacation? Who have kids? Or need health benefits? Well, it's a matter of semantics -- these people must not be "twentysomethings" at all. And thus have no bearing on the world of dog-walkin', self-re-inventin' and coffee-shop hangin' with which this reporter is concerned. Gosh, this recession isn't so hard to get through after all, especially if you don't think about the people it actually affects.
If this weren't (1) an old story, (2) a fatuously "reported" piece of vague meditation on the lives of one media type and her pals, and (3) unbearably smug, we might have simply observed that it must hard to find enough hard news to fill up the show these days (which would be a silly thing to say, but we try to be generous). But as it's all those things, we must breeze right past blaming the "essayist," who simply indulges in the kind of ain't-my-life-interesting myopia which is, of course, the stuff of weblogging. But the editor/producer who assigned, approved and aired this piece of drivel is, in our view, a fine candidate for a little time hanging in the coffee shop, chatting up former magazine editors about the joys of unemployment.
For some reason, this takes us back in memory to Gulf Shores Choral Camp in 1980, a one-week post-school affair in which a crowd of junior-high-school music lovers with breaking voices and breaking-out faces gathered at a community college in Gulfport, Mississippi, for a six-day session of warbling and juvenile flirtation. We were roommates with (among several others) a budding ladies-man named Jason whose constant topic was his always-imminent acquistion of carnal knowledge beyond the ken of us lesser seventh-graders. His gelled hair, his carefully upturned Izod shirt collar, and most of all his constant application of Chaps by Ralph Lauren (which the rest of us concurred smelled like "pig sweat") testified to the seriousness with which he took the task of sexual conquest.
On the last night of camp, after the performance for parents and a predictably horrible dance, two of the most beautiful girls in the camp arrived at our door. Jason was out on the prowl; they requested leave to ruin his bedding with shampoo and shaving cream, which they had amassed in quantity. Jason returned to the ambiguous message of a soaking mattress; something between a rejection and an acknowledgement that he was worthy of attention. His pride was hurt, and he spent an uncomfortable night on the floor, but such are the sacrifices attendant upon the claim of manhood.
A matter of public notice: after many meetings with some interested parties, we've decided to branch out and re-dedicate part of the staff to the task of income generation. That is to say, Igottajob.
You can visit me any time at the office; drop by and hang out. I think there's a coffee bar around the place somewhere. You won't be able to see what I'm doing for a couple of months, but at some point you might notice some new things going on with the bestseller lists -- that's my department.
We have absolutely nothing witty or snarky or passive-aggressive to say about this. We are unabashedly, straightforwardly, irritatingly upbeat about the whole thing. If you call us about it, you will get an earful.
For the rest of the week, we will try to do all of those things with this space that we won't have time for once the fun starts.
I. The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs (part 1), Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, February 1, 2002
An uptown stasis:
Wordy hipsters cultivate
Lovely banjo lines
II. The Upright Citizens Brigade, Asscat 3000, UCB Theater, February 3, 2002
In a sex-joke swamp
Amy P.'s thought darts like a
Precise hummingbird
Complete and utter fluff here this week: those expecting to learn something had best immediately click off to the Library of Congress or Arts and Letters Daily.
As per usual policy, stay away from Google and IMDB before guessing, please.
Dennis Dugan was the star of a short-lived 1978 Rockford Files spinoff called Richie Brockelman, Private Eye. In what Disney movie (the ads for which stick maddeningly in the memory of your faithful scribe) did he play an astronaut who journeys back to Camelot, a la the Connecticut Yankee?
(A hint: the title is a play on a well-known acronym).
First correct post to comments wins, as usual, a prize of worth precisely calculated to match the value of the knowledge expressed.