Jarvis Cocker, My Hero

Once upon a time, a brave man had a sane response to Michael Jackson and his public image, and he heroically acted on it. I wish to briefly salute an iconic moment in the history of the fight against the forces of evil.
The former head of the band Pulp (and extremely good current solo artist), Cocker was present for Michael Jackson’s performance during the 1996 Brit Awards.

During the highly choreographed performance, Cocker got on stage and pranced around for a bit before security chased him off.



Cocker later explained that he didn’t like the way Jackson was surrounded by choirs of children and overt religious iconography, and he jumped on stage to poke fun at this. The singer - whose own lyrics are often clever, self-deprecating musings about the chasms between desire and fulfillment, between appearance and reality - has explained that while he’s not religious, he was offended by the Christ-like pose Jackson was striking.

Let’s be honest and admit the possibility that Cocker was also intoxicated in some way, that such silly behavior at an awards show is obviously attention-seeking, and that sure, maybe it was a dangerous thing to do on a stage which included a crane, a choir of children and someone dressed as a rabbi (?!) but no matter.

The important, brilliant thing is that Cocker’s instinctive response to seeing Michael Jackson was to leap in and take the piss out of him.

I wish some of the millions of people who’d seen and worked with Jackson over the years as he was transforming into a tragic freak had had an ounce of the same courage. Michael Jackson was a good singer and dancer, but otherwise almost every aspect of his life was a sad example of some of our most lamentable traits as a society.

The fact that few people aside from Cocker ever had the guts to stand up and point out that this particular emperor had no clothes shows the extent to which the sickness that produced the monstrous figure of Michael Jackson was not within him, but in us.

The current hagiographic treatment of the prematurely deceased Jackson only confirms to me that we produced this deformed creature, we created and fed his situation, and now that he’s dead we are clamoring to show off just how utterly we have failed to learn anything about our crime, about the poisonous human urge to put people on pedestals.

We grovel to the whims of people with more money or higher status than ourselves. We yearn to cheer and weep vicariously at the actions of celebrities who we expect to be superhuman. We love to worship living saints, interrupted occasionally by malicious glee at their eventual downfall.

Michael Jackson wasn’t a saint - in fact no human being in history has yet been what we think of as a saint - and yet we still love to set them up there above us and then pretend to be shocked when they fall. It’s all part of the same misguided, Manichaean, probably instinctive idealism that allows us to still believe in oxymorons like holy wars and Christian presidents and infallible popes and selfless celebrities.

It’s the rare hero like Jarvis Cocker who has the courage to point out, even for a few moments, that this whole sick cycle of saint-worship is a load of nauseating garbage, and for that I salute him. I suggest we erect a giant statue in his honor.

Blue Badger IRL

Just a random déja vu thing that happened to me during our recent trip to Japan - twice. I like a certain series of handheld video games about cartoon lawyers. A typical case will revolve around bringing to light, through a long process of investigation and examining evidence, that the accused is left-handed when the murder weapon was a right-handed golf club. Or whatever.

Sounds stupid, and often is, but the gameplay is very similar to old-school point-and-click adventure games, and the dialogue can be surprisingly funny. The games are clearly set in Japan but, at least in the English translation, take place in fictional locations.

I’ve played through four games in this series now, and a couple of them make jokes about the police department having a silly-looking mascot - the “Blue Badger”. Here he is, in front of the police building, in the background from one of the games.


Well, the other week in Ginza I strolled past what seemed to be the police museum (fun for the whole family, right?), and it... er... just look:

Not hard to see where the video game designers’ grand inspiration came from. Here’s that pantsless police creature’s website, complete with theme song. Ah, Japan.

Then the same thing happened the next day. Strange-looking stadium from the game:


Real stadium:


Now, I have no illusions that I’ve discovered something new here. I’m sure that Pipo-kun the haunting police beast and that strenuously architecture-y stadium are as familiar to Japanese people as an igloo to an Eskimo, and that’s why they were parodied in these games. It just makes me wonder how many other caricatured landmarks, celebrities, myths etc. from foreign cultures I’ve been exposed to for years without having the slightest clue. And somehow I feel slightly let down that the Blue Badger turned out to be biting real-world satire and not just a strange, random figment of someone’s imagination.

I guess most works of art are like that - you can always deepen your understanding of them by studying more about the context they were created in, but that knowledge can end up tainting your enthusiasm for the artwork in the first place.

Like how taking a good, close look at Jon Voight’s face explains so, so much about Angelina Jolie, but also utterly destroys her hotness.

Newsweek Is-Weird

Look at the odd hyphenation in the following extract from this Newsweek article:

“It is eerily quiet at Barack Obama's headquarters, an open expanse that takes up the entire 11th floor of an office tower in Chicago's Loop. It's nearly as silent as a study hall, which is appropriate, since most of the 20- or 30-somethings in it wear jeans and T shirts.
...
Like FDR and Ronald Reagan, Obama is an innovator in organizing and communicating. Roosevelt was the first to rely on labor unions, and he talked intimately to voters through the then new medium of radio.”

What made them not hyphenate the two phrases screaming out for it, “T shirts” and “the then new medium&rdquo? I guess you could make a case for “T shirt”, but the other thing is just a mess. The then new medium? Really? The author later goes on to use “reaching-out” as a noun. Ick. In the same article, I also found Newsweek’s quaintly Victorian insistence on two periods in “Ph.D.” a little strange, but that’s a different matter-entirely.

John McCain Is A Colossal Jerk

I urge you to leave this blog at once and read this great Rolling Stone article on John McCain’s life story. He is actually a much more despicable privileged asshole, f*ck-up and failure as a human being than our current president. He is a vile jerk and a horny, bitter, coarse little man. He’s been making all that pretty clear on his own over the past few weeks, but this article kind of completed the portrait for me.

p.s. I’m linking to the “print” version of the article, because no sane human should be forced to click through ten pages of hyperlinks to read one article.

Use Your Allusion

This painting is of Dante and Virgil, strolling through Hell’s lobby, bumping into Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan. This sort of pow-wow, I understand, used to happen all the time.

There is an entire category of enjoyment which has recently all but vanished from my life.

I refer to the belatedly recognized allusion.

A slow-fuze ticking time bomb in the brain that explodes into kaleidoscopic bunga-bunga api of awareness and delight. The independent discovery of something in one artwork which was inspired by another, and which in turn transforms one’s appreciation of both works. The countless matryoschka-embedded Fabergé “Easter eggs” squatting complacently behind the trompe-l’œil Potemkin-village façade of every great work of art. Note that France and Russia appear to be the birthplaces of all artistic deception or concealment.

Anyway, in other words, I miss the nice feeling you get when you hear or read something and then later find out that it was a quote from somewhere else.

Why is this feeling scarce of late? Wikipedia. Google. Etc. Whenever I get that mental twinge which tells me I’ve heard something before, within seconds I can now find out exactly where I’ve heard it before. My mom used to tell me that instant gratification was a bad thing. I still don’t see her point of view at all, but I’m closer to it than before.


What am I blathering about? Well, one of my very favorite albums of the past several years, and of all time, really, is White Chalk by PJ Harvey. One of its best tracks is “When Under Ether”, a mesmerizing, haunting song sung by someone etherized on a table, watching the ceiling move, with hints that some disturbing medical procedure has just taken place. Here is the song.



Here are the lyrics (emphasis mine).

The ceiling is moving
Moving in time
Like a conveyor belt
Above my eyes

When under ether
The mind comes alive
But conscious of nothing
But the will to survive

I lay on the bed
Waist down undressed
Look up at the ceiling
Feeling happiness
Human kindness

The woman beside me
Is holding my hand
I point at the ceiling
She smiles so kind

Something’s inside me
Unborn and unblessed
Disappears in the ether
One world to the next
Human kindness

On first hearing, the song instantly made me think of “The Yellow Wallpaper” (I wasn’t born yesterday, after all) and of a couple of Harvey’s previous songs which seemed to deal with abortion or the death of a child (come back here, man, gimme my daughter, etc.). But there was something else about the song’s lyrics which sparked a fire within my head, and my dull, slow brain was unsatisfied for about a year. Until a rainy Sunday afternoon last week, when I happened to be re-reading Eliot’s Four Quartets, and in particular “East Coker”. What did I see but some lines I’d read 15 years ago in high school or college, but half-forgotten (emphasis mine):

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

Harvey’s customary brilliance at visceral allusion, which started with the brutal Biblical tales of her first album Dry, and only got more complex from there, should have prepared me, as this was not her first exercise in dredging up a great English(-language) poet in an odd place - there was, for example, her unexpected Yeats homage B-side “The Northwood” - but I nevertheless, as I scanned Eliot’s lines, felt a quick cold satisfaction of awareness. Art had spoken to art across the decades, and my brain had traced the thread between the two without recourse to any crude series of tubes. I had found and enjoyed an allusion, and its path from my ears (when I heard the song) to my eyes (when, a year later, I re-read the poem) didn’t involve anyone but the artists and me, and for an instant I felt as if we three, the great poet, the great musician, and the listener/reader, were one. A Hermetic trinity, as it were, of artistic appreciation.

As I said above, this is a particular type of joyous recognition which I experience less and less frequently lately, and which I feel future generations will probably not be able to experience at all, because any snippet of text is now able to be checked against all of humankind’s previous snippets of text, and every allusion can be instantly deciphered via online search. I’m sure future generations will develop ever-more-subtle and relevant and intricate types of artistic expression and reference, so there’s really nothing to worry about in the grand scheme of things, but I’d like to take a moment of silent mourning for the loss of my dear, old friend, the belatedly recognized allusion, and for the demotion of our human brains, which were once our primary means of remembrance, to second fiddle after the omnipresent, pan-memorious Spiritus Mundi of the Internet.

Ache Superior

For some reason, I’d never heard of the online comic Achewood before about two weeks ago, although I realize in retrospect that I’ve seen bits of it used as avatars or posted on message boards for years. The website has like eight years’ worth of comics on it.

In few words: I have just spent something like five straight evenings reading Achewood every spare minute I had. I have been getting home from work and reading Achewood like my life depended on it. I have been poring over Achewood like it was a Ptolemaic stele and I was Jean-François Champollion. It is funny, obscene, melancholy and somehow comforting in its depiction of friendship, although I suspect that it would appeal more to males than females. Check it out. Note: the two things I’m putting on here are not representative - the strip usually isn’t about hitting broad targets like bad grammar or Comic Sans, and is usually more strange and subtle. But I thought these items stand well on their own without any knowledge of the characters.

Olympic Fever

I was working on a post on here about how I dislike the Olympics, but it descended into a string of obscenities, so I’ve decided it was too negative and I’m taking it off.

Instead, here’s something we can all enjoy: The visual punchline for a joke about Chinese air pollution.

Mascot tracheotomy.

lollipop corncockle

or, Spam Poetry Part Deux


The last installment of spam poetry unearthed an unpublished (because unwritten) complement to “The Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. Today we turn to the later work of James Joyce. The iconoclastic Irish author may be long gone, but Finnegans Wake is still being written. It’s being written by the apparently Greco-Hindu pyramid schemer “Panakos Prabhakaran” and thousands of men like him, a veritable phalanx of creative pioneers unknowingly collaborating on one of mankind’s greatest works of literature.

The text, which has yet to be assembled in its entirety, currently consists of a series of disjointed e-mail messages about penile enlargement which are rotting in the junk mail folders of humanity. It only remains for a great man to piece together the fragments of this broken, Viagra-smeared Coriolanus. I am that great man. Here, precisely as I received it, is the first chapter of the daring, breathtaking sequel to Finnegans Wake.

lollipop corncockle

Hola,

Increasee once and foorever your sex drivve

Broke from her lips. Aynesworth heard it, and, harlequin
at home. At fast, he slept heavily, the front gate. That
was the same house that dr. Broiled a piece of ham, made
some good strong there could be no divorce no question of
marriage. About! But dr. Calgary was wrong. Places and times
i would ask jack brandiger to come there and live. This
work you are now in possession of about all bonum! Whether
it so prove, and whether i may lashing riders and jouncing
guns of the battery. Fellows, but i shall never warm to
any one again to look anything but murderous, why, you don’t
everyone is.’ ‘that is what i believed. It seems of lamentation:
poor little boy, he is going away had indeed before suggested
that the primitive.

I’ve done a bit of editorial research and it turns out that this masterful work is rich in poignant allusions to several neglected gems of our literature. To the alert mind of a scholar, it positively bristles with adroitly juxtaposed phrases lifted almost word-for-word from great works such as The Magic Egg and Other Stories by Frank Stockton, The Malefactor by E. Phillips Oppenheim, and perhaps most significantly the Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples by Jean-François-Albert du Pouget, the Marquis de Nadaillac. The hallucinatorily pornographic phrase “lashing riders and jouncing guns of the battery” is, in fact, from Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage”.

Master Prabhakaran in his subject line claims to wish to enlarge penises, but his bold poetic sensibility, which has fused these disparate elements into an aesthetically satisfying whole, has enlarged our minds. I must now begin the process of unearthing and annotating the rest of this hypermedia masterwork, as well as demanding that the Nobel Prize in Literature be immediately awarded to the author of what is undisputably our century’s greatest text. For it has something profound to say to each and every one of us, this, our majestic, eternal, unforgettable lollipop corncockle.

A Word to Watch

I am completely annoyed/fascinated by the recent mutations of the word “geek”.

People are no longer just geeks. One can geek out, and now, apparently, one can be geeked by other things. You can geek out on or about something, or you can just geek.

Geeking out has been around for a few years, but it’s recently shot up the charts. I’ve probably heard it a hundred times this year already and I’ve seen several utterly insane abuses of this term as well. For example, I just read an article where a US military guy said that when the shells started to fall on his unit, everybody “geeked out”. What? I guess geeking out is the new freaking out. I’ll just have to get used to it, the same way I got used to elderly people constantly saying “bling” a couple years ago.

A Dark Day for The New Yorker

Not only are their cartoons often grotesquely incomprehensible, now they’re apparently written and edited by illiterate cretins. Take a few seconds to read what that caption is saying.

“IT IS ONLY EMISSION IS WATER VAPOR.”

New Yorker editors - what does that mean, exactly? It means you really screwed the pooch on this one. The correct use of “it’s” and “its” is confusing for many people. I understand that. But is it really beyond our grasp as a civilization? Come on!

Welcome to Browntown

What’s up with the racial segregation of Slate?

For some reason, I find myself drawn to frequently check slate.com, even though their style of using multiple over-the-top headlines to attract me to the same boring article over several days is kind of irksome. I’m not that interested in much of their actual content, but I like that it’s relatively frequently updated. I like a lot of their political coverage, and their summaries of what’s in other magazines, but their TV and movie reviews are uniformly awful and always have been, for example.

I guess I keep going back because it was one of the more interesting free-content news-type websites waaay back in the day, along with Salon (which lost me irrevocably as a reader the very instant that they tried to force me to pay to read their crap, although I think they gave that up at some point), and I just haven’t broken the habit.

Also, watching the brilliant, booze-soaked, hyper-pugnacious Christopher Hitchens (pictured) sweatily contort himself into rhetorical pretzels trying to prove that he wasn’t wrong by supporting Bush’s war has been a mesmerizing spectacle over the past five years or so.

However, something odd has been happening recently. About a fifth of the featured articles on the website now have a huge greenish-brown splotch on their pictures. Clicking on any of these brown-splotch articles instantaneously transports you to an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT AND MYSTERIOUS WEBSITE, presumably separate but equal to Slate, cornily called “the ROOT” and done up entirely in tasteful shades of brown. You almost expect a Flash animation of LeVar Burton in shackles to race across the banner ads.

Why a different site? What’s with the ghettoization of the website? Clicking on a Slate article about pregnant women doesn’t take me to a separate, vagina-themed website called “the VAG”. Clicking on a Slate article about sports doesn’t take me to a separate website called “the BALLS”.

Why, then, this mysterious corner of what I assume must still somehow be a department of Slate? And why brown? Do brown-colored people love websites which appear to have been cobbled together from their own flesh? Are they easily startled and alienated by non-brown websites? The whole thing seems patronizing and stupid. Doesn’t this imply that the regular Slate is only for white people, or at least non-blacks?

And why is this mahogany-hued content shuffled in with the normal Slate articles, when it takes you to a different website? Why do I have to be bait-and-switched into taking the Internet equivalent of a bus into another part of town in order to read what appears to be a normal Slate article except that it happens to be about black people? I don’t get it, at all. Down with the brown splotch!

P.S.: Dear hypothetical pro-“the ROOT” commenter (Hypothetical in the sense that I doubt I’ll get any comments, not that the website doesn’t have supporters. For all I know, “the ROOT” is extremely popular.): Before you waste time pointing it out to me, yes, I’m sure that there’s a reasonable and well-written explanation, easily available online, for the existence of whatever “the ROOT” is and its apparently parasitic relationship to Slate. But I don’t care; as an average, indifferently interested Slate-surfer I was transported without warning to the mysterious world of “the ROOT”, and I felt like describing my initial reaction.

P.P.S.: Check out Jimi Izrael’s hip way of contracting “everybody” in the above picture. “EVR'YBODY”. He removed one letter from the word... and then put an apostrophe between two other letters. Why, Mr. Izrael, why? My brain hurts.

Mosaics Were the First Pixels

I recently reported on my seeming inability to make a halfway-decent building using the program Google SketchUp, and I just wanted to share the fact that I have, in fact, just succeeded in virtually sculpting a moderately admirable edifice. It’s not nearly as nice as I’d like, but - unlike in the crummy real world, where when I erect a shoddy building it usually collapses and kills dozens in a fiery imbroglio that is quite tedious to cover up - I can always go back and improve it later. It’s a pretty accurate (as far as the basic proportions go) model of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, and I finally buckled down this afternoon and slapped textures on all the surfaces. I’d originally planned to make a much more realistic simulation, with textures on every surface taken from high-resolution photographs, but I ended up copying some and reusing them in a slapdash and haphazard manner because otherwise the thing was clearly never going to get done. All the major mosaics on the inside, however, are properly placed and pretty sharp-looking.

Here’s what the thing looks like on the outside.
Here’s what my model looks like on the outside.
Here’s a view of the inside.Here’s a view from inside my model.
Not bad, huh? Of course, the vaulted ceilings of the real building don’t have “GREATBUILDINGS.COM” watermarked on them every three feet, but as I said above, this was a rush job just to get the thing textured before I fell into the unique and irrevocable despair which we all know is so disastrously common to thwarted master virtual architects. Now, with at least some progress to show for myself, I feel like a virtual weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

The reason I chose to finish this lil building this week, by the way, is that it seemed like a Christmas-y sort of activity, kind of like decorating a tree only far, far dorkier. My other seasonal activities so far have been to try to read Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in Old English and a recent obsession with keeping tabs on the gradual construction of the Christmas market in Dachau via a webcam. The charming village, that is, not the nearby concentration camp. You think your job’s tough? Just be glad you’re not head of the Dachau Tourist Board.

Dammed Yangtzes

For some reason the last month or so vanished before I noticed it was gone. Whoops!

Here’s a random selection of the things I’ve done over the last few weeks, so they’re not forever lost in the muck and silt of the alluvial delta of time’s majestic Yangtze. No, it’s not a very good metaphor. Anyway, last month I:

-Failed to make any progress in learning Thai.

-Failed to quite write enough for National Novel Writing Month. However, I did get more written than during the average month, so I’m counting it as an overall success.

-Failed to complete my grand Sketchup model of the Cathedral of Freising (see below). Modeling essentially complete but project abandoned due to lack of photographs to use as textures.


-Failed to complete my grand Sketchup model of the crypt of Freising Cathedral. Project reluctantly abandoned because of lack of accurate information about the crypt’s layout.


-Failed to complete my grand Sketchup model of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, which is more or less finished but still needs all the textures added. I am determined to get this done, but putting textures on something turns out to be pretty damn tedious, and I don’t quite have all the photographic reference material I need. I thought by picking this that I’d be doing myself a favor, since it’s on the UNESCO list and I assumed that surely I’d be able to find pictures of it from every angle. Nope!


-Hunted down and bought a portable, magnetic Shogi set in Takashimaya in Singapore. This was the highlight of a delightful trip to the most charming quasi-Fascist city-state I’ve ever visited. I especially like the box the Shogi set came in, which says “LET’S ENJOY THE SHOGI GAME”. I will. Oh, I will.


-Found and purchased a bunch of Nintendo DS games at extremely low prices in downtown Bangkok. I’ve been playing some very entertaining games I’d been missing out on, including Phoenix Wright, Nintendogs and Rune Factory. I have also been playing Super Mario Galaxy, which I think is the first video game in my 25-year career of playing video games that’s repeatedly made me stand up and burst into loud, gleeful laughter while playing it. Something about jumping Mario not from platform to platform but from little orbiting moon to freakin’ moon like a non-gay version of Le Petit Prince fills my heart with inexpressible joy.


-Visited some great parts of Bangkok that I’d never even been anywhere near before, including the Little India district, which was probably the filthiest, most surreally hellish ghetto I’ve ever seen in my life. The center of the ghetto is a burnt-out rubbish pile with a gleaming 10-story Sikh temple looming over it. My brain had trouble processing the image. What is wrong with humans that gilding the dome of an enormous and immaculate temple clearly has priority over hiring a f*cking garbageman? Given the number of people in that disgusting slum who must die of cholera every week, I guess it’s a good thing they have a gargantuan whitewashed temple to mourn them in.


This is the grand, fanciful mega-temple which rises above the slums of Bangkok’s Little India district. Below is an image from Google Earth showing the burnt-out shell of the building next to it, which is the centerpiece of the neighborhood and which has clearly been used as a communal dump and unspeakably filthy sewer for several years. Way to go, ghetto dwellaz! Keep on praying!


-Celebrated Loy Krathong, although we launched our magical wishing bargelets a little early in the evening, before it looked like the picture below.


-Hanging out with my pal Elliette.

-Finally visited the famous Jatujak market, and spending a horrid few hours in that godforsaken maze failing to find carved wooden chess sets. I found a nice set which looked sort of like the picture below, but the guy claimed that it was a valuable museum piece he wouldn’t part with for less than 3000 baht. Kim put the kibosh on that.


-Enjoying winter in Bangkok. It’s quite cool and breezy. I’m serious. I had no idea the seasons changed here, but I guess they do. Right now it’s like a cool early fall day in Munich, i.e., Biergartenwetter.

The Loch Nichada Monster

I live in Bangkok, but I don’t really LIVE in Bangkok. I live in a pleasant, Epcot-Center-like community of the future, where cheerful Swedes and Koreans zip around on electric golf carts, jackbooted yet oddly childlike Thai guards pick flowers, nap and tickle each other at every corner, and everything - from Baskin-Robbins ice cream to the legendary “Strong and Bitey” Australian cheddar to my personal favorite grocery store item of any kind, ever (for the story behind it, not the taste), Weihenstephaner Korbinian - is available at the local store. Our apartment is near a pleasant artificial lake, ringed with tropical trees and a few apartment buildings, with the school looming in the background.

However, there’s a dark side. I’ve already mentioned the strange plague of albino geckos. There are also an awful lot of bats, and centipedes as big as a man’s finger. There are snails nearly the size of my fist that often get stepped on or run over, leaving a tragic, omelette-sized smear of invertebrate gore. There are glistening things that rustle in the undergrowth as you hurry down the slimy, uneven lakeside path.

And there are... things... in the lake. Large things. I don’t know what they are, but they thrash periodically. The sound is exactly like the sound of Shamu leaping ten feet into the air, through a hoop and slapping back down into the water. When this happens as I’m strolling around the lake, I always look, but a moment too late, and all I can see is a giant welling circle of disturbed water, as if someone had just dropped a boulder into the lake. I have no idea what sort of sea beastie could possibly be making splashes like that in a peaceful little pond. I am picturing something roughly dolphin-sized. With needle-sharp teeth and a taste for human flesh. I tried to take a picture of one of the splash blast zones earlier, but it didn’t come out. You can’t see it, but half of the lake in the picture below is rippling from the aftereffects of a creature’s vigorous, whalloping aquathrash. I’ll try to capture this phenomenon on film later today. If I don’t post after this, you’ll know what happened.

They Do Move in Herds

We lived in Malaysia for the past two years. In Malaysia, there were geckos. Many, many geckos. They were speedy little greenish lizards that like to sit out on rocks, or on walls in the evenings, and eat bugs. If you come near them, they either a) freeze and don’t move a muscle, b) scurry away, or c) leap straight off the wall or ceiling in complete terror, flip and flop around on the floor, and scurry away. They only do option C if you really surprise them. It happened to me about four times in two years. One landed on my shoulder. I shrieked like a girl scout.

Those were the days. I long for the days of option C.

In Bangkok, they have MUTANT ALBINO geckos that have GENETICALLY ADAPTED TO LIVING ON PEOPLE’S PAINTED WALLS. Just think about that for a second. THEY EVOLVED TO MATCH OUR PAINT SCHEME. These things are pale whitish yellow, they’re plump, wrinkly and impudent like old Finnish men in a sauna, and they are basically like having wriggling human fingers clustered hungrily around every light fixture. They’re smart, too. These translucent monstrosities stick much closer to the light than their dull-witted jungle-dwelling Malaysian cousins. In a few years they’ll have evolved heat shields which allow them to cling directly to the light bulbs. At this rate, there’s very little else for me to do but urge you to enjoy what little time you have left before the geckos become sentient and put us to work in their vast fluorescent bug zapping mines. I give us about five years.

The pig says “my wife is a slut”?

Until a couple of years ago, all I knew about the New Yorker was that it tended to feature strange short stories where someone boring, usually from New York, would go through their normal day and then stop and suddenly realize they’d wasted their lives, or something. I only knew this because one of my English teachers photocopied a couple of the stories and had us read them in high school, as examples of modern “slice-of-life” writing. I think John Cheever may have been involved somehow.

The handful of times I myself physically encountered the magazine, it was always in a doctor’s waiting room, and I would flip through the magazine, squint at the tiny, opaquely written reviews of strange foreign movies I’d never heard of, try to understand the strange cartoons, and give up.

So in 1998, when I saw the Seinfeld episode which poked fun at the New Yorker cartoons’ frequent lack of discernible humor, I had just enough previous knowledge to share Elaine’s frustration and see the point of the jokes. It was true – why would someone print cartoons that could not be figured out?

Since then, I’ve started reading the New Yorker web site. Since I’m older and more boring than I used to be, I now see that there are some really good articles and reviews in that magazine. I still avoid the parts of the magazine that involve the cartoons and fiction, however, because I felt I’d been burned enough before. I didn’t want to waste time staring at cartoons of two animals talking in an office, or read a story about an old man feeding the birds in Central Park, who realizes he’s wasted his life.

But from time to time the cartoons pop up in the middle of an online story. This happened today as I read an interesting article on the Anticythera Mechanism. There was a cartoon of a dog in a suit waiting at a suburban bus stop, saying “I remember when this was all farmland.”

Oh hell no. No they didn’t. Didn’t they learn their lesson after being mocked by Seinfeld?

THAT IS NOT FUNNY. I spent a minute staring at it. Dog. Bus stop. Used to be farmland. What the freaking hell? Why, New Yorker? WHY? Why mess with my head like that?

Enraged, I clicked around on the website and looked at some other cartoons. Most of them made some sort of sense. Even the ones that weren’t funny were at least recognizably attempted jokes. But then there were The Unfathomables. The five percent or so of the cartoons that just make no damn sense. Like this one, of Don King in a yoga position levitating above a catering table. WHY? DEAR GOD, WHY?

On this archive site, underneath the cartoons, there are little captions that describe the action. Only through that site was I able to decipher the cartoonist’s original intentions. I’m not going to spoil the surprise for you here, however, because I want others to feel my pain and wounded confusion upon encountering these incomprehensible monstrosities of cartooning gone wrong. Some of you will probably see the “real” “jokes”, but for those who are like me, just be aware that there are semi-humorous ideas behind these two panels, but they were both totally botched by misleading artwork - at least at the resolution of these online versions.

My question is, how did the editors let these by without suggesting slight changes so we could, um, GET THE JOKE? Unless you either have the exact same perceptual framework as the cartoonist, or work painfully backwards from the punchline and reconstruct the garbled original intent behind these comedic abortions, you can’t tell why they’re supposed to be funny. At all. They fill me with confusion and rage.

p.s. During my elaborate preparations for this article (stealing pictures), I found out that the writer of the Seinfeld episode is actually a frequent (and usually, in contrast to the above cartoons, funny) New Yorker cartoonist named Bruce Eric Kaplan. His name rang a bell because there’s a Futurama producer named Eric Kaplan, and I’d wondered if they were somehow the same guy. They’re not, but the writer of the old Seinfeld episode is indeed the still-active cartoonist “BEK”. Small world. I commend him on his script, which is clearly just as relevant today as it was almost ten years ago.