"I am Henry the Eighth, I am.
Henry the Eighth I am, I am.
I got married to the woman next door.
She's been married seven times before.
And every one was a Henry.
She wouldn't have a Willy or a Sam.
I'm her eighth old man named Henry
Henry the Eighth I am.
(Second verse! Same as the first...)
But there's a strange second verse that hasn't been been popular since 1910.
Archive.org has a recording of the original 1910
version — which reveals how the marriage worked out.
"It was against the law," Paul Simon sang. "What the mama saw? It was
against the law."
It's one of the great enigmas of pop music — what exactly did
she
see?
The song is "Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard." But what incident is it
describing?
It made the mama "spit on the ground every time my name gets mentioned,"
according to the mysterious lyrics, and made papa determined to stick him "in
the house of detention."
In a couple of days they come and take me away but the press let the
story
leak.
And when the radical priest come to get me released we's all on the
cover of
Newsweek.
It's bothered me for years, so I finally researched the song on Wikipedia.
"Fast Times at Ridgemont High" also became a TV series in 1986.
22 years later, someone has magically obtained over two minutes of video
footage from the series. (Jeff Spicoli was played by Dean Cameron instead of Sean Penn --
but they kept the same actors for teachers Mr. Hand and Mr. Varga.)
The word usually used to describe this series is "short-lived"
Nearly 40 years ago, a cartoon aired for two years -- then disappeared.
(Although 20 years ago it was re-broadcast on Spanish television as Ahi
viene cascarrabias.)
Imagine my delight when a cartoon I last saw at the age of six turned up on
YouTube.
Archie explains to Jughead about that girl
"whose dad was loaded," and
before long she's telling him "I want to live like common people...I
want to sleep with common people...."
Veronica never got a smackdown like this before... It's a
mashup of
the lyrics to the subversive Pulp song "Common People" with the
hopelessly
square comic strip Archie.
I wish more people on the net would do stuff like this.
It was the only time a fictitious rock group had the #1 song of the
year.
But The Archies got nearly all their voices from a man named Ron
Dante.
He
was Archie, Jughead, and Reggie — and according to Wikipedia, he even
sang
in a falsetto voice as Betty for the song "Jingle, Jangle."
"In 1969, Ron [also] recorded an album under the group name
of
The
Cufflinks... Providing both lead and background vocals through overdubbing,
Dante hit the U.S. Top Ten with the single "Tracy",
at the same time that The Archies' "Sugar, Sugar" was at the top spot on the
same chart. Dante was anonymous on both tracks..."
"We recorded maybe thirty or forty songs in a three or four week period, and
'Sugar Sugar' was just another song," Ron remembers.
In fact, he recorded over 100 songs for the Archies' show and five albums.
But over 40 of
those songs were never released on CD.
"[T]here is a chance that I will
get my
hands on the masters someday and release them on my own label," he vows in
this
interview.
In 1971 Archie's cartoon band even issued a pretentious "Summer Prayer for
Peace."
"The Archies are sometimes jokingly compared to the seminal 60s rock band
The Doors, as the Doors also had no bass player." — Wikipedia
The Archies burned through three
different female vocalists.
Dante's voice also sang the "Coke is..." counterpart on the famous "I'd
like
to teach the world to sing" commercial.
Jeane, I am so sorry. I know you swore to me that you'd never serve
another term in prison for prostitution, or anything else. You almost lost
your eyesight the first time. I'm sure you asked your lawyers if there was
any hope for your sentencing, and I guess it must have looked bleak.
I know how pissed you were. This was an act of revenge, and I know who
you're determined to haunt....
I feel like I committed the perfect crime. For 100 days Helium.com
promised their members up to $3 for every 400-word article they wrote. So
I cranked out nearly 300 quick articles, and now they owe me about $900.
MTV offers lyrics to Devo songs on their web page. But they got
frightened by the title of Devo's famous "Are we not men" song, and
couldn't bring themselves to write "Jocko Homo" on their page.
It's no accident. They have a page listing every track on
all of
Devo's
albums — and each of the 11 times "Jocko Homo" was
included in a new compilation, MTV changed its name.
William F. Buckley
talks
about Graceland. Buckley actually had kind words for young Elvis
Presley,
but he still bemoaned...
...the spiritual inclination of the American people, who do not require
that
the memory being venerated should have been a martyr or a prophet. Just
someone truly singular and mythogenic, who contributed to his own legend
his suicidal ending as a victim of the drugs he inveighed against with the
strange, disquieting, appealing innocence that marked his entire life.
Over? Nothing is over. It's only a beginning. A kindling of the
flame.
The 1957 movie Johnny
Tremain ends with the story of Paul Revere's
ride,
the battle of old
North Bridge, and "The Shot Heard Round the World." The colonies
will go to war with Britain after all...
Feed it, lads, as you fed it with your blood today.
It is the spark of liberty that you've touched a-fire.
Its light must grow until every dark corner has vanished
and it illuminates the world.
It was written by a med student (who later became
a doctor), who'd been friends with Jan Berry.
[T]he "union man" would knock
on the door precisely as the second hand would hit the "twelve,"
marking the end of the third hour. If the session didn't end at that
second, it was "overtime pay" for the musicians--which was about
triple the ordinary rates...
There are six minutes left until the
three-hour deadline is up. Jan rushes out into the room and passes out
the sheet music to "Little Old Lady." Take One . . . No good. Take Two
is finished as the "union man" starts knocking on the door...
It
spends the Summer of '64 climbing all the way to Number Three on the
Billboard pop charts.
A sequel to the famous Star Trek episode about tribbles was written
in 1973 by its original author as part of the often-overlooked Saturday
morning cartoon, Star
Trek: The Animated Series.
Apparently Cyrano Jones escaped from his
tribble-collecting
duty using a stolen tribble-eating predator developed by the Klingons.
Now the Enterprise is, again, on a grain transport mission at the exact
moment when the Klingons attack the space trader's ship. Inevitably
he's
beamed aboard -- along with his tribbles.
I
watched the episode tonight, and then discovered that it also has a bunch
of fan pages on the web. Ultimately Mr. Spock has the
best
line of
dialogue, after the Klingons have disabled the Enterprise's phasers and
photon
torpedoes.
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of
itself.
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detatched, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres
to connect them.
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile
anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my
soul.
You already know he's kind of a lech if you're reading Marvel comics'
The Irredeemable Ant-Man.
("The world's most unlikeable super hero.")
Young security guard Eric O'Grady stole the Ant-Man suit, and is living on
the run.
And being young, irresponsible, and able-to-shrink-down-to-ant-size,
he's been using his powers to peep on the ladies while they're
showering...
In Ant-Man #7, he stows away in a blonde woman's purse. (And yes,
those
were tampons in the
background.) He realizes she's a super hero, but then decides maybe her
apartment will be as cool as Batman's. "I bet this broad's got all kinds
of cool stuff back at her lair.
I could probably make off with a dinosaur, or a giant penny."
And then, it happens.
Hm. My 'Ant-Senses' are telling me that sounds unmistakably
not unlike a shower running. I must go immediately -- to investigate.
It's followed by eight small panels of Eric O'Grady, sitting motionless
on Ms. Marvel's shower head and smiling.
"You'd think this would get old after a while, but you know
-- it really doesn't."
I've always felt like an outsider. Every Thanksgiving, every Christmas,
it
was me, sitting at someone else’s table. It was that vibe like when
you're over at somebody’s house and they’re whispering in the kitchen,
"Why is he here?"
I came into life so hard that when I see other adults who say they need or
want their parents, it seems corny to me. When there’s nobody to hug you
when you cry, eventually you stop crying. I think that’s how I ended up
getting called "Ice."
In the early 1970s, four American ex-patriates in Paris had formed a band
called King
Harvest. But their one hit single was released
after the band
broke up...
It reached #13 on the U.S. charts in 1972, and stayed on the charts longer
than any other song that year (except one). The band re-united for their
first -- and
last -- American tour. (Their opening act was a young stand-up comic
named
Jay Leno.) Then they broke up again. (Though some members of the band
later toured with the Beach Boys.)
"A day after the recall of millions of Chinese-made toys
because of the lead content of their paint, critics are trashing Bratz:
The Movie...because of
the lead content of its story."
See, this is why
I
enjoy reading "Studio Briefing" at IMDB.com.
Ty Burr in the Boston Globe describes it
this way: "It's pure marketing chum for tweeners: a proudly shallow,
purposefully bland ode to girly-girl narcissism. I could actually feel my
brain stem shrivel up as I watched it."
Amy Biancolli in the Houston
Chronicle begins her review this way: "O.M.G. ! This movie is SO BAD!
I
can't believe I just spent an hour and a half of my life, like, watching
it, when I could have been totally trying on hairbands instead!"
And
Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune dismisses it as "the most
horrifying film of 2007."
#81 - YouTube's All-Time Most Discussed Comedy Video
#52 - YouTube's All-Time Most Linked Comedy Video
#87 - YouTube's All-Time Most Viewed Comedy Video
"With a corporate office in New York City, Dunder-Mifflin
has branches in Buffalo, Stamford, Albany, Utica, Scranton, Akron, Camden,
Nashua and Yonkers..."
I always enjoy visiting NBC's web site for The
Office. It's got deleted scenes, original "webisodes", and fake
public service announcements - and even a fake web site for the paper
company where the show takes place.
Dunder-Mifflin Inc. (stock symbol DMI) is a mid-cap regional paper- and
office-supply distributor with an emphasis on servicing small-business
clients....
"When we said we wanted to combine the excitement of 'Snakes on a Plane'
with the intellectual stimulation of sudoku, everyone said we were crazy.
Well, who's
crazy now?"
Oh no, you didn't....
"We totally took regular sudoku puzzles, got rid of those
safe 3-by-3 squares, and replaced them with deadly snakes. There are over
1,500 snakes in this book, and Agent Flynn [Samuel L. Jackson] isn't here
to help you."
I saw it in the bookstore tonight.
Though, honestly, I was disappointed that the puzzles inside had actually
kept the 3-by-3 squares after all. There were two
fan-createdSudoko
puzzles on the Snakes on a Blog fan site that actually
twisted the 9 digits into snake-shaped
polygons.
Anton Gustavsson was a "conspicuously uncool" 19-year-old in Sweden. He
was a computer programmer with an ordinary voice who nonetheless recorded his impassioned
vocals for Iron Maiden songs over simple computer MIDI music files in
1999.
His honest energy endeared him to an online audience, and he became the
prime example of a "DIY celebrity", even distributing a CD on an
alternative label. (Click here to listen to Anton Maiden mp3s).
"I thought it was an off day," pitcher Dock Ellis wrote in his
autobiography.
So he'd dropped acid with his girlfriend in a Los Angeles hotel room.
Glancing at the newspaper, she then realized that he was scheduled
to play that day.
Six hours later, he was on the mound.
"I can only remember bits and pieces of the game..." he wrote in 1984.
But it's lovingly remembered in an article from GettingIt.com.
("I had a feeling of euphoria. I was zeroed in on the catcher's glove...
sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn't...")
When the game was over - he'd pitched a no-hitter.
A great moment in western civilization is preserved in this Amazon
DVD review.
It was a thing of beauty what happened back in 2003. People of all races,
nationalities, socioeconomic backgrounds, political affiliations,
religions, and any other differences you can think of that polarize us
finally agreed on one thing. We all took a stand against the syphilitic
evil of reality programming by laughing The Real Cancun out of the
theaters.
Of course, any uprising of this magnitude is bound to have
opposition. The bad guys aligned themselves with the thirty-three people
left, most of them in the 14-16 year old age bracket, who still watch
eMpTyV (and buy any products that eMpTyV hawks) and a bunch of horny frat
boys waiting for something to tide them over until the next Girls Gone
Wild DVD hit the shelves.
When the smoke cleared, the good guys
were
victorious for a change.
Now for network television.
WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER!!!
"4 of 6 people found this review helpful."
Reviewer: Habitual Linestepper "The Thompsonian Institute of Bad
Reviews"
"And let us not forget to toast
everyone who might have missed the boat.
And to everybody else who waits
till the next one sails in again..."
I thought that would be a beautiful epigram for a book about the dotcom
days in the 90s. But though the Devo song is called "That's Good,"
someone else has a different
opinion.
This is some of the laziest rhyming I've ever heard. These lyrics are
especially bad, because earlier in the song the lyics to this part of the
structure did indeed rhyme. ("Ain't it true, there's just no doubt /
There's some things that we can't do without...") That's not good at all!
It's just one of many examples submitted to a site listing
nearly 400 artists
who are guilty of badly-rhymed lyrics.
Former child star Barry Williams remembers this moment in his biography
I was a teenaged Greg.
(Chapter 17 - "One toke over the line.")
He'd been given a day off, when some friends of his older brother visited.
"I was introduced to a thin,
hand-rolled, yellow joint. 'Listen, man' said one of the buds, 'toke slow
-- this is some
real heavy shit.'"
"'Cooool,' I thought... Several drags later, the stuff had kicked in
hard."
Which is when the Brady Bunch's assistant director called him back to the
studio "to shoot the driveway scene"...
The makeup man helpfully handed him a bottle of visine - and then Barry
strutted onto the set,
"thinking to myself that my now-heightened sense of consciousness and
intensity might give me a chance to completely recreate my role..."
Williams high-fived
the
crew, "feeling very cool."
When they'd gathered on the set, Williams "saw it as
crying out for innovation and improvisation." His biography's confession
includes detailed memories of the minutes that followed.
"In my mind, I made up a history for the bike; why it needed air, what
happened to the tire, where I had
been riding it at the time. When rehearsal began, I proceeded to get
involved with the
spokes of the wheel, forming a relationship with each individual spoke,
and then trying to come
up with a more aerodynamic design for them."
"Instead of merely crossing over to the car and standing there as
expected,
I invented a new saunter..."
"Instead of just standing and listening to [Mr. and Mrs. Brady]
while they were talking, I opened the
car door and stood on its threshold to reach boat height and worked on
loosening the straps."
"I experimented with my speaking patterns and inflections, giving each
individual word
undue weight and significance:
YOU didn't SAY anything ABOUT getting a boat, Dad
You DIDn"T say ANYTHING about GETTING a boat, Dad.
YOU didn't SAY ANYTHING ABOUT getting a BOAT, DAD!
"In subsequent rehearsals I changed my lines altogether, or simply made up
new ones as we went along."
But when the filming actually started, Williams suddenly became paranoid.
"I was now
second- and third-guessing my
every move, my every word, my every action." And then - the cameras
rolled.
(Brady calliope music) Williams waves, trips over the bike pump. Mrs. Brady opens the
sliding
door.
Greg: Hi dad! Mr. Brady: Hi! Greg: (pause) Uh (laughs) you didn't say anything about getting a
boat!
Mr. Brady: ...I thought with a little work, we could fix it
up!
Greg: Far out!!
To this day you can still see Greg sleepily waving 'hi" to his dad in the
clip - and
then tripping over the bike pump. "I pretended not to notice my
stumble...I
continued on like nothing happened and hoped
somebody else would mess up."
How does Williams sum up the experience?
"Getting stoned instead left me...feeling as phony as the turf in the
Brady's backyard.
UPDATE:
How do you take a song about irrational, fatal desire, and change its lead
singer
from a 32-year-old male to a 13-year-old girl?
That was the task Devo faced when they handed off "Girl U Want" to
the all-kid band they'd assembled for Disney's
"Devo 2.0".
Though Disney's web site
shows Nicole Stoehr singing a neutered
version of "Girl U Want," the album has her singing "Boy U Want," a
song where nearly every lyric has been changed.
I wondered if it might empower a generation of girls,
with an animated male floating through the video as the object of
desire.
But in the
song's lyrics, it's still the woman who's driving the man
crazy.
You've got him thinking that he's out of his mind.
This kind of feeling isn't easy to find.
But then, look how strongly the song's writers (and re-writers) had felt
about
its original message. (Below is my original post about the song...)
*
*
*
Sunday night, somewhere in England, a mysterious post-industrial figure
types into Google U.K.
song meaning girl u want devo
Since I'm now the #2 match, I felt compelled to find the answer...
"It's about the essence of desire," says co-author Gerald Casale.
"...aching desire. She sings from somewhere you can't see,
like the famous myth of the sirens that used to lure the sailors to their
deaths by singing to
them in the night.
"They'd go try to find these girls that didn't really exist, and the boat
would crash on the rocks and they'd die."
I was browsing my local bookstore when I spotted it.
"Snakes on a Plane" - the book.
"A snake jumped right out of this book like a spring-loaded projectile of
venom and bit me right on the nose!"
writes one
Amazon reviewer. "It's just THAT intense!" ("7
of 7
people found this review helpful...") ("Add to baby registry!")
UPDATE: The mysterious reader of the book
has
been identified! ("Since I didn’t want to ruin the ending, I’m only
going to read the first
chapter....")
His blog post included an excerpt from the opening of
the book - which
drew
the following reader responses.
"That first paragraph suffers from a severe lack of snakes."
"Also planes."
The film's merchandisers appear eager to capitalize on the movie's
internet buzz.
Also available:
Snakes
on a Plane: The Album, whose product description notes that the best
fan-produced songs are included on the enhanced portion of the CD.
Johnny Depp has played pirate Jack Sparrow in two Pirates of the
Caribbean movies - and said he modelled his character on
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.
It's been confirmed. The next movie in the series will include an
appearance by Keith
Richards himself.
In the third film ("At World's End"), the main characters "sail off the
edge of the
map, navigate
treachery and betrayal, and make
their final alliances for one last decisive battle," according to the
plot
summary at
IMDB.com.
"The Golden Age of Piracy is finally at its end. The East
India Trading
Company has amassed an enormous fleet with one purpose in mind: riding the
waters of all pirates... Our heroes must face
Lord Cutler Beckett, Davy Jones and Admiral James Norrington in a titanic
showdown that could eliminate the freedom-loving pirates from the seven
seas -- forever."
Rumor has it that Keith Richards will be playing: Jack Sparrow's father.
Roger Ebert's wife told
the Chicago Tribune: "[P]lease give the big guy the space and time needed to recover until he
is ready to use those thumbs again."
Today she added,
"Roger would also want you to go out to the movies. He gives you
permission
to see even those movies that don't have his personal 'Thumbs Up'."
Girl U Want
Uncontrollable Urge
Freedom of Choice
Whip It
Beautiful World
Big Mess
That's Good
Cyclops
Peek a Boo
UPDATE: I don't know why the kids were playing instruments in the
videos, since all they did on the CD was sing.
But
"Cyclops" is one of the first new Devo tracks in 20 years. And then
there's the Disney kids' version of Devo's 1982
classic "Peek A Boo." ("I know what you do, 'cause I do it
too.")
"The way that we weren't is what we'll become. So please pay
attention
while I show you some of what's about to happen."
UPDATE: An entry about Devo 2.0 on Wikipedia has apparently been
hacked
in retaliation. The phrase "vocals provided by children" has been
re-written so the page now describes a new Devo album with
"vocals provided by yeti children."
Actual changes in lyrics appear below.
Devo sang "It's a beautiful world for you... It's not for me."
Devo 2.0 sings: "It's a beautiful world for you...I guess me too!"
Devo sang "A dog who found two bones...he ran in circles, til he dropped
dead."
Devo 2.0 sang "A dog who found two bones..he ran in circles, til he
dropped down"
Devo sang: "I'm a man with a mission, a boy with a gun."
Devo 2.0 sings "I'm a girl with a mission...a girl having fun."
Devo sang: "Life's a bee without a buzz."
Devo 2.0 sings: "Life's a bee that doesn't buzz."
Devo sang: "It's got style, it's got class, so strong, I can't let it
pass."
Devo 2.0 sings: "Fogged in, after lunch, I get a snack attack, I need to
munch."
Devo sang: "Eliminate the ninnies and the twits."
Devo 2.0 sings: "Eliminate the time you waste in cliques."
Devo sang "Look at you with your mouth watering."
Devo 2.0 sings: "Look at you with your mouth muttering."
Devo sang: "You know you're headed for the pleasure burn."
Devo 2.0 sings "You know you're shaking and you're ready to learn."
Thanks to X-Ray
specs for the last one. They add that "The sooner my daughter can be
through being cool and snap the trap of going with the flow, the
better."
Many more lyric changes were added for an alternate version, Boy U
Want
An entirely new set of lyrics was created for
Jerkin'
Back and Forth
John Grisham only wrote
one
story that became a movie without first being
published as a book.
A hot lawyer (Kenneth Branagh) squares off against a mentally disturbed
backwoods Southerner (Robert
Duvall) in the 1998 film The Gingerbread
Man.
But the great film-maker Robert Altman was chosen to direct, adding his
own distinctive
visual touches &mdash chaotic atmosphere, bad weather, unexpected cruelty,
and
full-frontal nudity.
Amazon's review applauds
the intrigue in "the combination of Grisham's mainstream mystery and the
offbeat style of [the] maverick
director...The Gingerbread Man demonstrates [Altman's] skill in
bringing
a
fresh, characteristically
offbeat approach to conventional material..."
Both Altman and Grisham have given thought to the lawyer's character,
though
for Altman his complaint
is simply
that "the minute he gets outside his own element, he's dog meat." The
thriller
leads the
attorney into increasingly dangerous situations.
Now here's where it gets weird. The Internet Movie Database gives a
traditional summary for
the movie's gnarly plot. ("Lawyer Rick Magruder has a one-night-stand
affair with caterer Mallory Doss...")
But for the movie's poster, they display this.
"To my knowledge," I emailed the web site, "Robert Altman did not direct
Adventures of the Wishing Chair,
and John Grisham did not write its screenplay."
Again, to summarize:
In the movie:
Not in the movie:
I wonder which child in the armchair was the lawyer's one-night stand?
"But wait. Maybe we don't want to hear Paul Newman's voice coming
out of a car."
Yeah, the movie didn't really work for me either. But I applaud the
film-makers' obvious love for Route 66.
Even in the closing credits,
Pixar included a list of Route 66 businesses that had inspired them. And
Salon's reviewer
also points out that the voice of the small-town sheriff in Radiator
Springs was provided by the author of a book about Route 66.
The closing credits also included Pixar's traditional list of "production
babies".
I finally watched the last episode of "That 70s Show." TV.com reports
some interesting trivia about the closing credits.
"The gang is in the Vista Cruiser, singing along with 'Hello
It's Me' by Todd Rundgren; they're coming home from the Todd
Rundgren concert... that they went to in the
pilot."
The episode takes place, of course, on the last night of the 70s -
December 31, 1979. Which creates an opportunity for even more trivia...
"The outfit that Kitty wears in
the New Year's Eve party scene (red
blouse, flowered skirt)...is the same outfit she wears when she
is first seen in the party scene in That '70s Pilot."
But you know who really got sentimental? The show's actors.
Laura
Pepron, who played Donna, tells
E that the first time the cast read the
last episode, "We were all just crying... I'm probably going to watch it
just by myself,
not in front of a lot of
people because it's really special, and I'm probably going to be crying
like a little baby."
And the actor who played Hyde added that while they were working on the
last episode, "There were people losing it."
And -- one more time -- Eric told Donna he was sorry...
Four years before his death,
69-year-old Louis Rukeyser found a nasty
network surprise. Maryland Public Television tried to oust the
commentator from
the position he'd held 32 years. (AOL Time-Warner had offered them more
money to
re-brand the show as product placement for Fortune magazine.)
Not missing a beat, the shrewd, unflappable host used his weekly monologue (mp3) to
urge viewers to follow him to a different network. "It turns out that the
woods are
full of smart television executives," he chuckled.
His debut on CNBC drew the largest audience in CNBC history.
Within four weeks, 61% of PBS stations across America had chosen to
re-broadcast it.
The old PBS show (without Rukeyser) lost half its audience almost
immediately.
When asked if there was room on TV for both shows, the Wall Street
commentator joked:
I've always liked drinking Black and Tans - and apparently Ben and Jerry's
does too. They created a
new ice cream flavor with "blended real cream stout" ice cream - and a
swirl of chocolate. And
they named the flavor "Black and Tan."
This got them in trouble.
Tonight Reuters ran a story from Dublin reminding
us that
the "Black and Tan" was a notorious British paramilitary unit from the
1920s, adding that the name "still arouses strong feelings in Ireland."
Wikipedia describes
the group's violent history and
the origins of their name.
"Any reference on our part to the British Army unit was absolutely
unintentional and no ill-will was ever intended," said a Ben & Jerry's
spokesman.
"Ben & Jerry's was built on the philosophies of peace and love," he added.
One of its
ingredients is "carrageenan." What's that? According to this web page, it's "a
colloidal extract from carrageen seaweed and other red
algae."
As I've travelled through life, I've never found myself pausing to ask:
How does "Urban Dictionary" define this phrase?
I'm actually not even sure what "Urban Dictionary" is, but they're one of
Google's top matches for the phrase "Snakes on a Plane."
It was kind of interesting watching
them going through the motions of a
definition.
A simple existential observation that has the same meaning as "Whaddya
gonna do?"
There's about four more examples on that page...
I've got my own definition. I play Quake III a lot, and am always
switching
in new goofy names for my avatar. ("You were fragged by...Gilligan!"
"You
were fragged by....a pwetty widdle girl.") Lately it's been "Snakes on a
Plane."
And I have this fantasy that somehow through the games I've played, my
lousy
Quake-playing strategies will become immortalized.
"So our avatars
were
spawning in the red cathedral area, and suddenly there's all these
grenades
raining down from the high window. Some lamer was continuously firing
grenade after grenade in the hopes that one would randomly hit us.
"So the floor of the cathedral is covered with grenades. Everywhere you
step - boom! There's something bad there! It's, like, I dunno, what
would
you call that?"
I feel like I committed the perfect crime. For 100 days Helium.com
promised their members up to $3 for every 400-word article they wrote. So
I cranked out nearly 300 quick articles, and now they owe me about $900.
