Things I hope you don't hear today.

"You got a letter from the IRS."

"It's an emergency company-wide meeting."

"We have to talk."

THUNK THUNK THUNK [from automobile]

"You should get that looked at."

"HOW COULD YOU FORGET?"

"Ooh, that ain't gonna be cheap."

"Well, we can probably save some of your teeth."

"You have the right to remain silent..."

“They’re going to name a disease after you.”

“In my office. Now."

“I wanted to warn you, but it’s too late anyway.”

"Everybody's mad at you."

"This is NOT A TEST of the Emergency Broadcast System."

"It's the worst case of [FILL IN BLANK] I've ever seen, that's for sure."

"DUCK!"

"So... Remember last Saturday? Well, I just tested positive..."

Any Bon Jovi song.

Dunderland.

You all know I enjoy a good meme, and I'm willing to tolerate some memes that are affirmations. (Although not many.) But I will not tolerate even good-intentioned stuff that advances ignorance.   

When I see something with such active ignorance as this above exhibit, it makes me angry. 

Two facts:

1) Lewis Carroll's work fell into public domain more than a century ago; 

2) Nothing, and I mean nothing, is less trustworthy online than quotations. 

Quotations are the fact-checkers' bugaboo, as I have written before, and mainly because no one seems to care at all if they are accurate, as long as they advance an idea. I promise that the thing they mostly advance is ignorance. 

Take the above example. I love Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, but this quote has nothing to do with it. 

Now, it may be that in one of the many adaptations, pastiches, homages, parodies, sequels, and other rip-offs of Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a character actually gives a damn about Alice and would say something banal like the above. But in the actual book, where Wonderland is a bizarre and disturbing place, all the characters besides Alice are either:

1) Virtually Useless, or 

2) Total Jerks. 

Here's my breakdown: 

VIRTUALLY USELESS

White Rabbit, Mouse, King of Hearts, Bill, Dormouse, Frog-Footman, Duchess, Mock Turtle, Gryphon, Knave of Hearts, Cheshire Cat (arguably also a Total Jerk)

TOTAL JERKS

Caterpillar, Queen of Hearts, Mad Hatter, March Hare, Dodo, the Pigeon, the Cook

Some of the characters, even the Jerks, are helpful to Alice, but all of them are by design unpredictable and thus unlovable. 

Okay, but maybe it was from somewhere else in the Carroll oeuvre? Maybe a letter he wrote to Alice Liddell, the inspiration for the Alice books?

I followed a thread on Reddit that claims the quote can be found in an Emilie Autumn book, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, the title of which sounds as far away from anything life-affirming as imaginable, but who knows. I haven't read it, nor can I find a preview of it, so I can't confirm the quote. The book is on Amazon, but Amazon doesn't do previews of books anymore. And you know what? I don't care where it's from -- except that it is not from Lewis Carroll and sounds like nothing he ever would write. He would have thought Wonderland too dangerous to be a fun place to visit, let alone to identify with happiness. He knew no one there gave a damn about Alice's feelings. He ought to know -- he invented it. 

It's too much to ask people to look into these things before reposting, but man, the complete uninterest in accuracy these days just makes me sad. 

Januargh.

The winter months are like the sadistic drill instructors of popular culture. You’re happy if he’s just screaming and threatening and insulting, not actually beating the ever-lovin’ stuffing out of you.

Poor Izzy always gets up when I do, which is a rough deal for a dog owned by an insomniac. His morning walk could come at any time between three and seven a.m. He’s ready for it.

But he was not ready for the pounding rain this morning. 

I will gladly take the rain over negative Canadian type temperatures or sleet or a foot of snow, but this rain proved to be a deluge too far. Izzy went off the porch, peed, and turned us right around and came back. He’d had enough. I couldn’t blame him—unlike me, he carried no umbrella, and the rain was bouncing back into his face. 

The funny thing is, and I blogged about it back then, his late relative Nipper would not have stopped. Nipper was indifferent to the elements. He was going to get his walk or playtime in first thing in the morning no matter what. Blizzard, hurricane, ice storm, tornado, volcanic eruption, did not matter. He had the spirit of an Olympic athlete. His owner, not so much. 

And I was kind of relieved that Izzy is more like me. Screw this rain, we’ll try again later. That’s my boy! 

Magnus and AI.

By curious coincidence, two comic book characters by two different publishers were born just over sixty years ago, characters whose adventures centered around robots and artificial intelligence. And the characters had the same name: Magnus. 

The Metal Men were created by comic book veteran Robert Kanigher and appeared first in 1962. They were a team of six robots invented by Dr. William Magnus, each made of, named for, and with the physical and chemical characteristics of one metallic element -- Gold, Platinum, Tin, Mercury, Iron, and Lead. Each robot was self-aware and rational and had a distinct personality corresponding to its element (Lead was dumb, Mercury was snarky and egotistical, Gold was pure of heart, Iron was a bruiser, Tin was cowardly, and Platinum, the female type, was a sweetheart). In a way, these really weren't robots or even androids; depending on the era in which they appeared, they were tiny computers called Responsometers that not only served as the robot brain, but also caused quantities of the metal element to cohere into a humanoid shape around it. Inventor Magnus was a stalwart pipe-smoking type, but also had a tendency to lose his mind (or have it taken over) through the years, even building evil robots. Nevertheless, the heroes of the book, the bots themselves, were friendly and were friends to humanity, so AI was good; evil machines were an exception and frequently their opponent. 

Gold Key comics' Magnus, Robot Fighter of 4000 A.D., taking place in that far-future date when people forgot A.D. is a prefix, starred a very different kind of Magnus. American comic books are all about the superheroes now, but in the 1960s the field also had science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, humor, war, Western, and other genres represented. Magnus, Robot Fighter was obviously an SF title, by second-string publisher Gold Key, which is probably best remembered for its many TV show comic book adaptations like Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Star Trek. 

Magnus, created by writer/artist Russ Manning, took place in a fully-realized futuristic Earth, in which the world's enormous human population was completely dependent on robots -- leading to tyrannical robot rule. Magnus was specially trained to be able to fight and destroy these mechanical monsters, with his bare hands if necessary, in his quest to free mankind. 

Here artificial intelligence is the enemy of the heroes. But Magnus was helped by artificial intelligence that was good -- and in fact had been trained to be a robot fighter by a robot called 1A. 

This Magnus first saw print in 1963, and his adventures ran until 1977 -- a tremendous run for a non-DC/Marvel/Disney/Archie comic book. 

But why were both main human characters named Magnus? It's a famous and heroic name (Latin for Great, as in Carolus Magnus, better remembered as Charlemagne), but not common. Did Russ Manning pick up the name from the Metal Men's creator? If he did, I can’t find evidence. Manning died from cancer at the age of just 52 in 1981, so it's too late to ask. While Kanigher was based in New York, Manning lived and worked in California his whole life (I believe), so it's not like they met up to shoot the breeze and swap ideas at the Comic Book Tavern. Maybe Russ saw the Metal Men book and the name stuck in his head without him realizing it. Or maybe it's just one of those weird coincidences. 

Since the rights to the characters have never been owned by the same company at the same time, there's never been a crossover that might give some fictional background to the two Magnii. However, that did not stop the guys at Super-Team Family, the site that makes fake comic book covers for stories that should have happened ... but DIDN'T!

Artificial intelligence would never be the same! 

Nimrod.

When I was a kid, if you wanted to call someone stupid and had run through the greatest hits already (stupid, moron, retard, idiot, dumb, dimwit, brainless, dim bulb, dumbass, birdbrain) you might ultimately land on nimrod. We had no idea we were calling him this guy.

Real Nimrod

Poor Nimrod. We don't know too much about him, but in the Book of Genesis (chapter 10), we learn the reputation for which he was remembered for thousands of years:  

8 And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.

9 He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord.

10 And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.

Thus Nimrod was a mighty hunter, a king and the founder of great cities. 1 Chronicles 1:10 reiterates his fame, and Micah 5:6 refers to the long-gone king's area as "the land of Nimrod." 

He was probably as famous as Orion the Hunter was in Greek mythology. Orion got in a lot of trouble, but wound up as a constellation, so he had that going for him. You wouldn't imagine someone saying "You're such an Orion!" 

The name Nimrod was even more cemented in the public consciousness than Orion's, back when we were a Bible-studying culture. H. D. Rawnsley's 1903 reminiscences, Lake Country Sketches, mentions Sir John Crozier, who owned a fox-hunting lodge in that bucolic English area. Crozier is remembered as "a North Country Nimrod."

The North Country Nimrod in question

 

Hobart Caunter's book Legendary & Romantic Tales of Indian History (1885) has a chapter called "The Mahomedan Nimrod," concerning "Mujahid, the son of Mahomed Shah, sovereign of the Deccan," who "was remarkable for his courage and amazing strength of body." Not someone to call a Nimrod, if the name was insulting. 

And let us not forget that Ernest Shackleton, a great explorer of the frozen wastes, sailed a mighty whaler named Nimrod on his 1908 expedition to Antarctica -- one of many intrepid vessels by that name.  

So what happened so unjustly to Nimrod? You probably know. As Ken Zurski noted on the site Unremembered History, in the 1940 Looney Tune cartoon "A Wild Hare," "a wise-cracking rabbit named Bugs Bunny called his nemesis Elmer Fudd a 'poor little nimrod,' a sarcastic reference to Fudd’s skills as a hunter." In fact (and was disputed online quite a bit), the line does not appear in that cartoon. It was not Bugs that called Elmer "my little Nimrod" -- that heap of irony apparently came first from Daffy Duck, in the 1948 short "What Makes Daffy Duck." 

Neither I nor any other kid knew who Nimrod was -- even kids from churchgoing families might be expected to miss a name so briefly mentioned in the Bible -- and Daffy's snottiness seals the deal. The phonemes of NIMrod trip easily off the tongue with disdain, so a kid who didn't know better would just take it as an insult. Plus, it rhymes with dimwad, which sounds very much like a euphemism for dickhead.

Fake Nimrod

In much the same way as irony turned "Entrance of the Gladiators" from a thrilling scene -- mighty warriors prepared to face dismemberment and death in battle -- into clown music, so did the ironic use of the name Nimrod in a Warner Brothers' cartoon turn the mighty hunter into a clown himself. 

I very much doubt that anyone will ever film a biblical epic in the English language entitled Nimrod at this late date. Even Merriam-Webster has as a definition for the name "Idiot, Jerk (slang)".

Alas, poor Nimrod! How unfair is life! To start out a mighty hunter and king, and end up as a Fudd due to ignorance and irony. 

Oh, Nimrod! Oh, humanity! 

Electric heels.

One of the things I miss least about working in an office is getting to the office and getting home from same. Since most of my career was spent commuting via public transportation and shoe leather, the winter was the worst. Heavy coat, heavy boots, sloppy streets, grumpy New Yorkers. A regular winter wonderland. 

In those days I would keep a cheap pair of loafers in my desk -- one of those Payless pairs or the like that seemed to be made of compressed Hefty bags. That way I wouldn't be clomping around the place all day in my boots. The downside was that the plastic shoes, combined with winter air so lacking in humidity that it actually sucked water out of our skin, plus industrial carpeting, made the static electricity awful. I would carry a quarter in my pocket to tap against door handles to avoid getting shocked. The sparks between quarter and handle were often quite visible. I'd think, Isn't this how the Electric Eel on Underdog got his powers?

Believe me when I say how happy I was to not have a job that required working outdoors on such days. The reward of working outside on lovely days instead of being stuck in an office did not make up for having to labor in the freezing cold and rain and snow on tough days. But still, the static electricity was annoying. I think you could have stuck balloons on the wall without even rubbing them on your hair. Just carry one around for a while. 

Of course, my imagination and lack of scientific rigor expected more spectacular effects -- people's hair on end like they were hugging Van de Graaff generators; laptops shorting out at desks in a shower of sparks; the network being brought down by massive power surges; the combination of shocks and polyester clothes and negative humidity causing spontaneous human combustion. Fortunately real-world science is a little more forgiving than that. 

Winter still has lots of perils, so be careful out there, especially if you live in a land of ice and snow as I do. And if you work in an office, be careful in there. I'm not saying spontaneous human combustion is an actual danger, but the odds may be a titch north of zero. 

Willy Wrongka.

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I hate Willy Wonka. I don't know why others like him so much. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory scared the hell out of me as child when we read it in second grade, and the Gene Wilder movie was even worse.

That new Wonka movie that came out last year seemed to make a pretty good bit of money ﹘ $511 million worldwide against a $125 million budget, according to Wikipedia, And yet Kellogg's went with O.G. Wonka on its Froot Loops tie-in. 

Why? Did Timothee make a separate deal with General Mills? 

Poor Post -- stuck with the Johnny Depp Wonka.

My wife thinks I'm nuts for disliking the Gene Wilder movie, but she didn't grow up being told she was a spoiled brat all the time. I was certain that if Wonka lured me into and trapped me in his awful factory, I'd wind up squirrel food, or drowned in chocolate, or turned into a giant cantaloupe, or suffer some other bizarre and cruel fate. And my parents would figure I had it coming. Well, he was a spoiled brat.

Nothing against Wilder, mind you, who did a great job in the movie, and most assuredly has had a great post-life career as Wonka in the wide world of memes. For example:

Wonka has gotten far removed in many ways from Dahl's conception, I guess. And yet, while I have heard word-banning idiots want to alter his text so they can continue to milk it for dough without offending anyone (except, I guess, oversensitive kids like I was), I suppose the books will be with us for some time. 

Author Roald Dahl made a fortune writing children's books, but I think he despised children. However, I think he despised adults more. He killed enough of them in his stories for grown-ups (although "Lamb to the Slaughter" seems to be the only one of those anyone reads anymore) and I suppose he killed a few of them IRL as a fighter pilot in the war. He won three Edgar Awards for his mystery stories, and hosted a show called Tales of the Unexpected, which ran in the US in syndication. It was an anthology show that featured adaptations of adult mystery and crime stories by him and other writers like Robert Bloch and Saki.  

A couple of years before he died, Kingsley Amis wrote his Memoirs, which in addition to telling his own story devoted chapters to various people including other writers. It was an excellent job of dumping a chamber pot over the heads of his fellows as he headed for the final curtain, very much in Amis style. Roald Dahl gets his own chapter--he had died in 1990, a year before Memoirs came out. 

Amis describes the fabulously wealthy Dahl descending in a helicopter at a Tom Stoppard house party in Iver. This was the 1970s, when Dahl's kids' books were at their hottest and he flush with Hollywood cash. It was the only time Amis recalls meeting the man. 

     "What you want to do," he said, "is write a children's book. That's where the money is today, believe me." ("Today," as I said, was quite some time back.)
     "I wouldn't know how to set about it."
     "Do you know what my advance was on my last one?" When he found I did not, in fact had no idea, he told me. It certainly sounded like a large sum. 
     "I couldn't do it," I told him again. "I don't think I enjoyed children's books much when I was a child myself. I've got no feeling for that kind of thing."
     "Never mind, the little bastards'd swallow it."
     Many times in these pages I have put in people's mouths approximations to what they said, what they might well have said, what they said at another time, and a few almost-outright inventions, but that last remark is verbatim.    

Seems like a long way from Dahl to Froot Loops, but frankly, I have found most British authors of the twentieth century to be rather Froot Loops in various ways. So maybe not such a stretch.