“I’m not gonna read that. You read that.”

The science of meta-marketing – the kind of knowingly ironic ad that sells by acknowledging its own absurdity – wasn’t anywhere close to being invented in 1948. Back then, your sponsors gave you copy, and you read it. As solemnly as possible, because no matter how pompous they might be they were still your financial backers…

…and then, as you might have guessed, there were Bob & Ray. Quick, amused, instinctively subversive – a bad combination for commercial pitchmen at the best of times.
Listening to the old Boston shows now, it’s amazing that they got away with what they did. Instead of coming in with a glowing plug for Mission Bell Wine in the middle of their jingle, for instance, Ray would insert a deadpan promo for his next news broadcast (‘…coming up at one-thirty. Thank you.’). Or he and Bob would get into a heated fight over who’d just missed the cue. Sometimes they’d just take over singing the jingle entirely. In tango tempo.

Surprisingly – at least, according to Bob Elliott in later years – nobody seemed to mind this kind of tomfoolery. Not even when they turned a ’simple phone call’ to get a trial TV set into a series of skits featuring spectacularly un-helpful ’special operators’. During a stint with a floorwax sponsor that asked them to urge customers to make a side-by-side test on their own floors, Bob once enquired mid-pitch, "Uh..if we’re so sure they’ll think [sponsor's wax] is better, why should they bother doing the test?"

Even the occasional objection was turned to account. When a railroad company tried writing ‘Do Not Ad-Lib’ on their copy, Bob dutifully pointed it out to Ray on-air. Ray was dutifully hurt. ‘Well, what the hey [sic]? There’s always the bus, you know what I mean?’

By the next episode, the commercial has been recorded beforehand. By another announcer.

In the autumn of ‘48, a new patsy signed on – the West Peabody Speedway. Stock car racing – Saturday afternoon, dollar admission – was ‘America’s newest thrill sensation!’ and the boys made great play with copy describing the ‘pulse-pounding action’. (‘I just wanna say, I was out there last night, and my pulse is awful sore.’) 

Then, one afternoon, inspiration struck on the grand – and slighly Frebergian – scale. The result is transcribed below, picking up just after the commercial proper. To get the full flavour, note that the lines are being ad-libbed on the fly, but the performance is totally deadpan.   

Do you remember…

Recently, on Facebook, I was offered the chance to friend people whose names were vaguely familiar, because ‘You both attended [high school].’

Ye-eah. No offense, helpful electronic data device, but somehow I doubt Brooke and Michelle et al are dying to know what became of the moon-faced kid huddled in the back with her nose buried in Uhura’s Song. (You young geeks generally, on the other hand, might want to spare just a moment for us nerdly pioneers, without whose struggle you might never have been graced with Chuck Norris or Katee Sackhoff. Show some respect! *whacks young’uns wiith plastic lightsaber*)

Anyway, I was thinking about how bizarre it all is, that you can just pluck people out of the chaotic mass of your former existence and award them relevance in the here and now. Bringing memories back to life like that is an awe-ful concept, when you think about it…

…which somehow leads me around to Oliver.

Or maybe you think I’m lucky/to have something to do

So yeah, updating. Sorry about that. Jasmine has since discovered the delights of sitting on human laps, albeit not the fine points. It’s kind of hard to type and keep her from tumbling off at the same time.

It’s not that I’ve been suffering for topics, either. For one thing, the kitten cuteness level around here has been off the charts. Work has been off the rails. And the geekiness has been right off the scale. It’s just that somehow I’ve gotten out of the habit of recording it on – uh – what do they call it if it’s not paper, anyway?
I remember how my first word processor — something like, oh gosh, Office 10,000 BC or so — had a ‘parchment’ background option. It could also do Comic Sans MS in teal. I was over the moon…

[short pause to rummage around in My Documents]

Ah, here we are. *chuckles gently to self* I remember now, what they call it.

Fun.

Yeah, so about those sweet polite Canadians…

I dunno, maybe they all moved to Vancouver or something.

Short version for lazy clickers: The other night, former Ontario Attorney-General (and, as it happens MPP for my riding) Michael Bryant got into a crankiness with cyclist Darcy Sheppard at a major Toronto intersection, while driving an open-topped convertible. Sheppard – for what it’s worth, later revealed to have serious anger-management issues – dismounts, slams the car hood, grabs the driver-side door…

…and this Harvard-trained potential future Premier candidate just guns it and runs. Drags Sheppard about 100 yards before he fell off, fell under…

Mm-hm.

Couple things. First, CFRB 1010? Stop calling this the ‘Bryant Bicycle Tragedy’, like, right now. Words cannot express just how tacky it is that the live guy is repeatedly trumping the dead one – one would imagine a news/talk station would have the proper order on file somewhere – but here’s a hint: This is so tacky that your own host kept frantically trying to distance himself from it after every break. ("No, really, as I keep saying, it’s everybody’s tragedy…")

Next… well, yes, it does also kinda suck to be Michael Bryant right now, I imagine. I met him once, very briefly, when he came around our building canvassing for re-election. Given which he seemed unusually sensitive in dealing with a disheveled woman home sick that day who had only opened the door because she’d just woken up and had some vague idea he was the police. So I liked him OK.

I’ve also been thinking about blind panic, what happens when something – someone? – gets too close. Mind you, my field tests have been on nothing like this scale; but I have done some incredibly stupid and painful things to myself while in full-on getitoffgetitoffGETITOFF!!! frenzy. Trying to shake off the teeniest of spiders. Seriously, I almost dislocated a shoulder once. In those moments, it’s goodbye higher function, hello… I don’t know what, but I suspect the spider did.

I’m wondering if this sort of instinct goes so far as fellow sapiens. Hard to imagine it would – that common humanity wouldn’t've kicked in at least when it was clear the guy was stuck – but. Bryant was in the car with his wife; maybe it had been a freakishly bad day; maybe he’d read one too many screaming Sun headlines about gang violence. I don’t know. There are reports that he actually climbed the sidewalk, frantically brushing Sheppard off against mailboxes, banging him into light poles. It defines belief that any rational human would treat another like a bug – unless that’s exactly what Bryant’s instinct thought the cyclist was.

In the aftermath, here’s Darcy Allan Sheppard, who by all accounts was doing the best he could with the crummy hand life dealt him, dead. Michael Bryant, politician maybe not as sleazy as the rest, facing the ruin of his career at best and a life sentence for criminal negligence at worst.

Right, we can get back to sweet and boring any time now, universe, OK?

Let’s face it, Ozma’s kind of an idiot.

Really, she is. I know this, because I have lately been on a course of Oz sequels (in eBook form) and I have been experiencing that prickly sort of irritation that twigs only in the presence of a Purity Sue. It’s been building for a couple rereads now, but this time this Author on Board-sense is just off the charts. Also, this time I have a journal in which to rant about stuff like this.

Disclaimer: I love the Oz books. I really do. It is the one fairyland in which you are absolutely confident that anything can happen, and can never tell what might be around the corner – for the very good reason that the author couldn’t either. There is a sort of naiive charm about that. Having not hung himself up in a web of Rules for his World, Baum’s imagination was free to roam in a way that even Tolkien himself might… well, nod thoughtfully at.
It’s just that every time the Ruler of Oz shows up – and a smart few times when she’s offscreen – all this amused tolerance comes bang! to a screeching halt. You can’t get away from Ozma, not least because you’re implied to be a terrible person if you try. Baum goes on and on and on about how beautiful and sweet and dainty and beloved she is, to the point where it basically amounts to older man in love with ideal young creation.

Think I’m being unkind to a classic of kidlit? There’s an entire book, The Road to Oz, that’s actually built around all the Ozites and every single character from Baum’s other books attending Ozma’s super-spectacular birthday party, the like of which the world has never seen. Dorothy is clearly too deep in the throes of a girlish crush to notice, but one might expect the Shaggy Man to be a trifle more bemused:

"You got me totally lost, saddled me with a couple of kids, which half the time one’s a damn fox – yeah, let’s give the dumb one the sharp teeth, that’s not a problem, noooooo. Plus one rainbow sprite – you ever tried collecting the perfect dewdrops at six am? And if it’s not perfect, she starts up that damn dancing again, and it’s like Oh, God, my stomach’s gonna add a brand-new colour to the spectrum right here. So here we are, completely lost…Oh, and the Scoodlers, did I mention them? ‘We love you in soup’, yeah yeah, most hilarious thing ever. Until they give me the donkey head. By then I thought that was a nice touch, actually.

"And so I have to swim in the Truth Pond – yeah, love that magical moss or whatever it was, bring it on – because I still have to keep the kids from picking up every random whatsis they find by the side of the road and we FINALLY get here and I’m staring at a little kid …and it’s her frelling birthday… hey, everybody, welcome to a Very Special Episode in Oz! Firearms are bad! Ha ha ha hahahahah…"

That said, this is not the nadir. It is close – especially the ending, where after spending a couple days in All Hail Ozma the Super-Specially Sparkly mode all the potentially interesting people just sort of float home in super-strong soap bubbles – but not yet.

No, the nadir is The Emerald City of Oz. In which Dorothy finally decides to bring her family to fairyland for good, at the same time as Evil finally decides that those ‘disgustingly goody-good’ Ozites need a thorough conquering. As a child, this is frankly terrifying. As an adult, especially a snarky-minded one, it’s… a bit less so. During the recent reread, I started mentally compiling a list of Ways This Kiddie Fantasy Novel Has Been Bugging the Crap Out of Me For Years Now, and since as noted I do have a journal this time…

…you might want to look out for the next entry. In the ‘Ooh, lovely!’ sense or the Wile-E-Coyote-with-tiny-little-umbrella sense, works fine either way.

Son of kitteh picspam III: Enter the dragon

…or, more accurately, enter our adult cat, Dolly, with whom kitteh has established a relationship not unlike the one in that Looney Tune with the big bulldog and the eager little mutt. Complete with happy bounces across the living room: "We’re pals, ain’t we, Dolly? Yup, you and me, right?"

Meanwhile of course, Dolly is throwing me pleading looks like "Do you really hate me this much?" I am not thinking there is much maternal instinct there. She finally snapped the other night and raised a threatening paw… which Jasmine promptly charged like it was the best toy she’d seen in weeks. Next thing you know they’re in a full-on game of Whack-a-Groupie. It was hilarious.

However. If there is one great leveller in the feline world, one language they all understand, it is: sleep. Big kittehs, bitty kittehs, get them dozy enough and it’s warm fuzzies all around – literally. I don’t wish to get into cliches here, but it does strike me that a bit of Sleep-Eze mixed into the water supply of, say, Syria would not hurt international tensions any.

Summer’s here, and the time is wrong

It is hot. H-O-T. The air is soup, the pavement glares, the bugs in the porchlights are the only living things moving fast.

It is so hot that I am reduced to going to work in those silk slacks I couldn’t resist at the thrift shop. The ones that are a little faded and increasingly crumply, so that it looks like I’m wearing the lining of some other pants.

I could iron them, I guess, but I am terrified of scorching the delicate fabric. Because then I would be reduced to going to work in those raggedy cutoffs that no longer fit. It is JUST THAT DAMN HOT.

Wondering where the lions are

Kitteh has finally collapsed on the bed behind me, having tried for a good  ten minutes to figure out how to work the keyboard. As near as I can make out, this is the message she wanted to send: mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmm [crash browser].

If I don’t update for a while, send help.

*****************************************************

Meanwhile. Bob & Ray biography – or at least, expansion of my article to include deeper motivations, and broader perspectives. Definitely beats markdown credits on the Points to Ponder scale. Not least because more plausible; as noted previously many of the Goulding family at least are on Facebook, and belong to a Bob & Ray fan group.

I am something hesitant about going on and finding out about the Elliott family, because it’s all a bit scarily plausible, to be honest. They seem like nice people, and I have a policy about pestering nice people. This policy has been under serious refinement over the last few weeks checking in on my own Facebook account, in which I have rec’d no less than three Friend requests from ‘lonely’ African men (plus one woman) and one from a Ponzi scheme. I do have a legitimate article to back me up, at least, but not much more.

Besides…given the research I did end up doing, I’m not completely sure whether I even should. As I’ve mentioned before, their genius has a weirdly impenetrable intimacy, rather like those twins who develop a private language. With very rare exceptions, when cornered by the media their modus operandi was to talk to each other, instead.

If the interviewer went along with it (as did Roger Ebert, interestingly) he was treated to a private, if wholly impersonal, performance; if he persisted in trying to actually interview them… they would simply continue the routine. Only more so. One poor sap from the Los Angeles Times, having sat through twenty minutes of such responses as "Gee, I wonder how they get those windows clean [on the highrise opposite]?" was driven to inform them that they were the absolute dullest celebrities he’d ever encountered. "Yeah, a lot of people tell us that," Ray responded calmly. "Can’t imagine why."

Somehow, I am not totally shocked and amazed that for many years after Ray’s death in 1990, Bob Elliott refused all interviews.

So I’m driven to the same conclusion I was before Facebook: much as I’d love to, trying to pry into this setup just feels wrong – like I’m not only intruding but spoiling the performance somehow. They were the exact same Average Americans they were spoofing, save for the self-awareness, and as a survival mechanism they turned it into part of the gag…

…either that, or to them, it was really just as simple as making each other laugh.

Frustrating as either option is, they compel respect.

Sometimes, Alanis, it really is ironic.

I love this Pearls comic first because, as is so often the case with comic strips one loves, I can relate. So much.

 

Seriously. I have been kicked off two fan forums, chatted on ESPN during the Chicago-Green Bay game, participated in fan fights on TWoP and spent several months cruising the comics blogosphere (remind me to tell you about the ‘Spider-Man doesn’t enrich my mind, thus is a miserable waste of ink!’ crowd someday).  I want somebody to manufacture this thing and sell it on late-night informercials for $19.99. I am assuming it will come with a special FREE! extra-soft banky for edit wars on Wikipedia.

Which leads me to the second reason I love this strip: Because some people actually pored over the second panel and came up with a Magic-Eye style ‘F—’ . (Just to save you time, it’s in the lower right-hand corner – that’s actually a ‘# rock‘ after panel compression.) Then — this is the part I love more than anything else — they called their papers and made a stink about it. And the papers dutifully wafted it over the masses. Leaving an utterly baffled cartoonist in their wake.

Self-fulfilling self-references are wonderful things.

I don’t even *want* to know who Gordon Tullock is. Really.

I was going to throw out the results as a bad job, but then I started looking more closely, and… I do think an interest has developed. Or something.

Based on the lj interests lists of those who share my more unusual interests, the interests suggestion meme thinks I might be interested in:

1. humor score: 2
2. george smith patton jr. score: 1
3. dick cavett score: 1
4. plato score: 1
5. game theory score: 1
6. anarchocapitalism score: 1
7. spongebob squarepants score: 1
8. michael mann score: 1
9. moby dick score: 1
10. george gershwin score: 1
11. oman-kuu score: 1
12. sneaking up behind you score: 1
13. armenian score: 1
14. jean shepherd score: 1
15. paws score: 1
16. foetus score: 1
17. losing track of time score: 1
18. tsuchiya koitsu score: 1
19. martin van buren score: 1
20. gordon tullock score: 1

Type your username here to find out what interests it suggests for you.

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