How to Appease Made-up Pagan Gods

I decided to stop tempting the wrath of the health gods by never exercising at all ever, so I acquired this shiny, new offering. Hopefully they shall react favorably to my meager, semi-daily pedalings. 

What's Awesome Today: The Duck Knight Returns

So, the  boyfriend recently bought me a copy of Darkwing Duck: Duck Knight Returns, which is probably one of the best gifts anyone has ever given me. 

When I was kid, I loved Darkwing Duck. I mean, he was a superhero, he was always screwing up his own lines, he had awesome villains—remember Megavolt? Negaduck?—and though he usually prevailed in the end, he suffered many small indignities and embarrassments along the way. What's not for a kid to love?

However, even though I was into Batman: The Animated Series as well, I think a lot of the true humor of Darkwing Duck—the parody of the superhero genre—escaped me when I was a kid. The cape, the mask, the gas gun, the grappling hook, the Thunderquack plane, the Ratcatcher motorcycle (both shaped like a duck head, specifically Darkwing's), the mild-mannered secret identity (Drake Mallard), the flashy, egotistical introductions—one could go on and on. I'm experiencing no such ignorance this time around, though.

This comic reboot of the beloved series delivers on every level fans and newbies could hope for. The illustrations are beautiful, colorful, and firmly in the bold, flashy style I remember from the animated series. The humor is top-notch; reading at home, alone, I found myself actually laughing out loud at several points, which is rare indeed. And the plot delivers just what the title promises (see The Dark Knight Returns): Darkwing's pathetic civilian life (which makes for some hilarious office scenes), his return to crime fighting, and the reassembly of the Fearsome Five (Negaduck, Megavolt, Quakerjack, the Liquidator, and Bushroot—Darkwing's greatest, or at least most persistent, enemies) with one glaring absence: Negaduck, who is now too taboo to be spoken of (amongst the villains). 

And, I got one of my favorite things of all: fresh quotes to rattle off to anyone who will pay attention:

"I am the terror that flaps in the night!" (of course!)

"Let's get dangerous!" (also, of course)

"I am the awkward goodbye that lasts far too long!"

"I am the HR-Bot! Get ready for the employee evaluation...OF DOOM!"

"You don't say 'Let's get dangerous unless they find out where we live!' And you certainly don't say 'Let's get dangerous unless we can't afford it!'"

"Have you ever had the desire to go gallivanting through the night, ruining other people's fun?"

All in all, I was incredibly entertained, my nostalgia bone was tickled just the right way, and I was left wanting more (Negaduck!?!?).

I definitely recommend giving this comic a read. And hey, while you're at it, why not go watch some of those beloved old episodes, too?

Literary Geekery Redux

Persistent Sentences of the Moment, Part II:

1) "Whether you take a doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit." -Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

2) "What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don’t expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie." -Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

3) "We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some—perhaps many—may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe." -Jimmy Carter, Voyager Spacecraft Statement

Great because:

1) This is exactly the sort of sentence one needs to have in one's arsenal for those times one's philosophical friends require reality checks.

2) It is so satisfying to read words crafted by the sort of mind competent enough to carry an apt metaphor across several sentences. Also, I'm a sucker every time for complication of Truth.

3) How incredibly, movingly optimistic, unselfish, and good-willed. Sadly, the world is a different place these days.

Happy Halloween-Samhain-All Saints'/Souls' Day

Creepy clown courtesy of me. Lesson learned: do not attempt to carve small, jagged shapes without a carving kit.

Because I can't resist, go watch:

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Sleepy Hollow

Hocus Pocus

Beetlejuice

The Addams Family

Edward Scissorhands

Little Shop of Horrors

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

Monster Movie (Supernatural)

Halloween

Poltergeist

The Exorcist

The Crow

Psycho

Go listen to:

Thriller - Michael Jackson

Monster Mash - Bobby 'Boris' Pickett

Psycho Killer -  Talking Heads

Addams Groove - MC Hammer

Zombie Graveyard Party - Be Your Own Pet

A Nightmare on My Street - The Fresh Prince

The Devil Went Down to Georgia - Charlie Daniels

Go read:

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving

The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter 

The Tell-Tale Heart - Edgar Allen Poe

The Pit and the Pendulum - Edgar Allen Poe 

The Cask of Amontillado - Edgar Allen Poe

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge - Ambrose Bierce

Interview with the Vampire - Anne Rice

Frankenstein - Mary Shelly

Dracula - Bram Stoker

The Shining - Stephen King

It - Stephen King

  

...for starters...

Shakespeare is Shakespeare is Shakespeare

On the last day of its run this summer, I saw Othello at Shakespeare on the Common. The characters wore 1940s garb for no apparent reason, the backdrop was a metallic slab reminiscent of the Aggro Crag, and I'm pretty sure an understudy was on Iago duty, which is a shame since Iago is pretty much the only reason to like Othello. Instead of the devious, evil, unrepentant villain I love, the actor came off as, well, what he was: a nervous guy who didn't quite remember all his lines and had to keep reminding himself to speak loud enough to be heard across the Common. Still, Shakespeare is Shakespeare and free is free. 

For my own amusement, I made a list of the words that made me go "pffft, you made that up" (until shortly after intermission when I decided I'd need a more attentive ear and a lot more paper if I really wanted to keep up):

englut                                                    

slubber

satiety                                                     

disrelish

displant                                                   

quillet

engraft                                                    

mazard

infortune                                                 

insufflate

unswear                                                 

beshrew

direful                                                    

continuate

Despite my conviction at the time that Shakespeare just threw a prefix or suffix on a word whenever he needed another syllable for his iambic pentameter, turns out most of these actually are or were real words.


I also made a list of my rediscovered favorite Othello quotations:

"I am not what I am." (I.i)
Because that's so Iago.

"Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs." (I.i)
Because, oh, that's where that saying comes from.

"Men should be what they seem; / Or those that be not, would they might seem none!" (III.iii)
What can I say? I'm a seeming-versus-reality fan.

"O! beware, my lord, of jealousy; / It is the green-ey'd monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on." (III.iii)
Again, etymology.

"Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore, / Be sure of it; give me the ocular proof; / Or, by the worth of mine eternal soul, / Thou hadst been better have been born a dog / Than answer my wak'd wrath." (III.iii)
Because angry Othello is not a man to be trifled with.

"Unkindness may do much, / And his unkindness may defeat my life / But never taint my love." (IV.ii)
Because that's so Desdemona.

"Demand me nothing: what you know, you know: / From this time forth I never will speak word." (V.ii)
Because "What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask." (Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays)

"I kissed thee ere I killed thee, no way but this, / Killing myself, to die upon a kiss." (V.ii)
Because everyone loves a little morbid romance. Right?

Irony

You might think an institution of learning is one of the most likely places for the word "school" to be spelled correctly. But, you'd be wrong.

Jabberwocky

I recently discovered Merriam-Webster's Open Dictionary. Anyone can submit to and view words that have been submitted to the Open Dictionary. The service is to catalog words that have not yet appeared in dictionaries, either because they have only recently come into existence or because they are forehead slap-inducing stupid (do not fret; I shall, of course, elaborate).

In the spirit of democracy, I'm all for an open dictionary. You may or may not be aware, but putting together a dictionary is a political affair. There are liberal and conservative dictionaries. There are dictionaries that take pleasure in finding the cleverest, quirkiest, idiosyncrasies of living language. And there are dictionaries that obsessively seek to protect The King's English from those mean, nasty jerks: addition, permutation, evolution. For further information on this point, please see "Authority and American Usage," also know as "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage" by David Foster Wallace, which is one of the most interesting pieces of non-fiction writing I have read in my life. "Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a nearly hanging-chad scale? [...] Did you know that U.S. lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?" No? Then go read the essay. Seriously. Even if that sort of thing doesn't appeal to you, David Foster Wallace was one smart, funny, entertaining man. He'll make it worth your while.

Point is, I think an open dictionary is all to the good. In theory. For instance, these words

—

isogram (noun) : a word or phrase in which no letter is repeated; minorly (adjective) : in a minor way; shapewear (noun) : underwear that is made with elastic nylon so that the wearer has a slimmer appearance; and smartphone (noun) : a phone (especially a mobile phone) that provides additional capabilities including Internet access and which has an operating system comparable to a desktop computer operating system—are all useful, logical additions to the language. However, these words—sturdability (noun) : sturdiness; globalistic (adjective) : concerning or encouraging globalism; and elaboratize (verb) : to make elaborate or complex—make me want to slap someone in the mouth. People, if you need to define a word by using a different form of the same word, there's already a word for the thing you are attempting to invent. Duh! In these cases, they are: sturdiness, global, and complicate. Id est, refudiate is not the coining of a new word, it is the garbling of two already-existing, perfectly serviceable ones. Also known as portmanteau. But hey. Why not just call it the Palin-Upchuck Phenomenon?