Statistics Saturday: Adaptations Of _A Christmas Carol_ Ranked

1. Alastair Sim’s version
2. Reginald Owen’s version
3. The Odd Couple version
4. Lionel Barrymore’s version (radio only)
5. Patrick Stewart’s version
6. The Real Ghostbusters version
7. Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds version
8. The Pac-Man cereal box version
9. The Back to the Future cartoon version
10. The Oddball Couple version
11. Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds version
12. This really good sink fixtures display they had one year at Rickel’s, though.

Reference: A Voyage Long And Strange: Rediscovering The New World, Tony Horwitz.

MiSTed: The Tale of Fatty Raccoon, Conclusion

I decided to write a concluding host sketch for my MiSTing of Arthur Scott Bailey’s The Tale Of Fatty Raccoon. It’s just the Brains aboard the Satellite of Love. If I ever did reassemble these chapters into a full, complete, MiSTing, I might rewrite or replace this.
https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/tag/fatty-coon/

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[ SATELLITE OF LOVE. TOM zips in, wearing a nightshirt, cap, and an eye mask over his transparent dome. CAMBOT is close on TOM. ]

TOM: I’ll change, I’ll change, I’m not the raccoon I was! [ Looking to the opposite corner of the screen ] You there!

[ CAMBOT pulls back, revealing GYPSY in front of the desk, at the corner of the screen ]

GYPSY: Me?

TOM: What day is it?

GYPSY: What day? … Why it’s Thursday.

TOM: Thursday! Then I haven’t missed it! The spirits must have done everything in one night!

GYPSY: Uh-huh.

TOM: Well, of course they can, they’re spirits — Tell me, Farmer Green’s house, does he still have those turkeys there?

GYPSY: The ones as big as me? They’re still there.

TOM: Quick, run there and tell them I’m not going to eat them! Do it in less than five minutes and I’ll give you half a crown!

GYPSY: Uh-huh.

[ GYPSY leaves the frame; CAMBOT pans back in on TOM ]

TOM: [ Sing-song, dancing about ] Oh, I don’t know anything, I never did know anything, I don’t know anything … I need to … I need to stand on my head!

[ TOM wiggles a bit and, of course, does not ]

TOM: I *don’t* need to stand on my head! … Oh, oh, to work, now. To setting things right.

[ TOM zips off-camera, and reappears with a decent coat and a hat on. As he crosses the desk, the off-camera voice of CROW becomes audible. He’s singing ‘Barbara Allen’. TOM comes up to MIKE, who’s holding a feather duster and wearing a ruffled collar to evoke a maid. TOM looks wistfully out of frame, in CROW’s direction. MIKE gently takes TOM’s hat, smiles the tiniest bit and nods, and steps out of frame. CAMBOT pulls back to reveal CROW, wearing rabbit ears, and pink eyes. CROW is singing and whooping it up in front of an imaginary party. ]

CROW: [ Singing ] For love of Barbara Al — [ Abruptly stopping ] Uncle Fatty!

TOM: Jimmy … is it too late to accept your invitation to dinner?

CROW: Too late? Too late! I’m delighted, Uncle Fatty. [ Talking to the air ] Brother, look who it is!

TOM: Can you forgive a pigheaded old fool? For clinging to my soreness about the barber shop thing? For not visiting you recovering from your pink eye?

CROW: Of course, dear Uncle! Oh, bless you, you’ve made me and my brother [ waving his arm out to nothing ] boundlessly happy!

TOM: Yes, Jimmy. You … [ looking to the camera, shaking his head ] … and your ‘brother’. [ He looks down, sad, a moment ]

CROW: Jasper, a polka! o/` Pol-i-tics and foreign wars! o/`

[ Music; CAMBOT focuses in on TOM as the light dims and he moves back to the original side of the desk. After a short while, the lights come on again. MIKE, holding a pitchfork, enters from the opposite side of the screen. ]

TOM: [ Surly ] Farmer Green! You’re late! What do you mean coming in this time of day? Mmm?!

MIKE: [ Baffled ] I’m … sorry?

TOM: Well, we won’t beat around the bush. I’m not going to stand for this sort of thing any longer; I have *no alternative* but to raise your corn. …

[ MIKE shows no sign of understanding any of this ]

TOM: Oh, I haven’t taken leave of my senses, Green. I’ve come to them. I’ve seen what my gluttony, my selfishness, my pettiness has done. I — I want to try to help you and that boy Johnnie of yours. No one should grow up without benefit of raccoon.

MIKE: [ Jabbing TOM with the pitchfork ] Shoo! Shoo, raccoon! Go on! Get out of here!

TOM: No! Wait! I’ve learned the errors of my — Ow! Ow! Stop! I know what —

[ MIKE jabs a bit more ]

TOM: These spirits showed me how my refusal to connect —

MIKE: Git on home!

[ MIKE connects with the pitchfork again; TOM moves away, eventually going off-screen ]

TOM: Stop it! We could make viral videos together!

MIKE: Crazy old forest animals. Don’t know what gets into …

TOM: [ Simultaneously ] I HOPE YOU GET EATEN BY A FLIVVER!

CROW: [ Leaning into camera ] God … bless us? Everyone?

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Mystery Science Theater 3000, its characters, its setup, and whatever else I’m overlooking are the property of someone who isn’t me. Satellite of Love, LLC, I guess. Arthur Scott Bailey’s _The Tale of Fatty Raccoon_ is in the public domain and so *does* belong to me, and to you, and to anyone else who wants to create something new that brings joy to the world. So now you go out and bring some world-joy with all this. No pressure. But start … *now*.

> “Ho, ho! That’s a good one! That’s a good joke!” The tramp
> raccoon laughed heartily.

Statistics Saturday Bonus: Best Versions of A Christmas Carol (Reevaluated)

I thought I’d see how I felt if I looked at the question again.

• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)
• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)
• A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol
• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)
• A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol
• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)

Reference: The March of Folly, Barbara W Tuchman.

Statistics Saturday: Best Versions of A Christmas Carol

• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)
• A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol
• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)
• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)
• A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol
• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)

Reference: The March of Folly, Barbara W Tuchman.

Finger on Remote Control, We are Wired to Your Soul

Nineteen years ago my love bought a TV set. Nobody thought that exceptional, but the thing is we were still watching it until last month. My love and I share an attitude toward durable goods, which is they ought to be. So we’ve had about five years of people asking, “seriously, you don’t have an HDTV yet?” But we were fine. TV shows would just assume we had more horizontal space than we did, like when The Price Is Right changed the Showcase Showdown wheel into a fat ellipsoid, but we rolled with it.

All was fine until one Tuesday after I’d watched a Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVD and then my love noticed the screen was flickering and the TV softly hissing. Then it got to hissing a lot louder, and the picture on screen contracted to a temporal anomaly letting through alternate-history episodes of Voyager. Friends who seem to know about this stuff told us the flyback transformer had broken, and that needed to be replaced or else it would explode and cover a four-mile radius with a black, sticky tar, made of the substance left over from leaving How It’s Made on as background noise. Fair enough.

And as we promised, finally time to get a brand-new High Definition set. We shopped around until finding the right set for us: one that a friend had and wasn’t using and that didn’t require us to put the back seat of the car down to fit in the trunk. My love and I grew up in the picture-tube era when a 14-inch set was respectable, and 21-inch meant you’d really made it. In the modern era a 21-inch set is the one you put in the bathroom so while showering you can watch steam. My parents picked up a bed-sized TV set for the living room, and demoted that to bedroom purposes when they got an even larger one, I believe folded up many times over and included with a box of cereal. A large box, mind you, they’re not giving those things away in a mere 12-ounce box of Honey Nut Cheerios. You need the 20-ounce at least. And maybe Golden Grahams instead. We had to rearrange the living room furniture is what I’m getting at.

The hard part was moving the bookshelves, which had been where they were since they were first put in place by glaciers in the Wisconsin Glaciation. This let us discover there wasn’t as much dust as we expected. There was evidence of mice, though. A few years back we had some of the least efficient mice in the world in the house. You know the thing where mice are quiet and kind of shy? They were prowling around, coughing loudly and demanding attention and sitting up next to our pet rabbit looking for all the world like rowboats approaching a dreadnought. We found accommodations for them where we don’t have to hear them all the time.

No mice there. But we did see a few pages, all that was left, from a chewed-up copy of the Consumer Reports Buying Guide for 2008. As best we can work out, the mice were diligently researching which microwave oven to get. I guess they chose wisely. We haven’t heard any complaints.

The other challenge was getting the old TV out of there. I know everyone has problems with power cords and antenna cables and all tangling together. But our house has some special space-warping power around it. I’m fussy about plugging stuff in, and I still have stuff where I plug in my iPod and the digital camera and the cables instantly knot together and there’s fourteen separate USB end plugs, most of which don’t even exist. Between the TV, the cable box, the DVD, the Wii, the record turntable, the CD player, and the audio thingy that I have to keep pressing buttons on to get sound out of, I’m still behind the TV stand now, screaming at wires. It’s been over a month. Send help.

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?” Scrooge trembled more and more. “Or would you know,” pursued the Ghost, “the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was as full and heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!” Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he could see nothing. “Jacob,” he said, imploringly. “Old Jacob Marley, tell me more. Speak comfort to me, Jacob! I mean wholeheartedly that I shall watch that like season and a half of Doctor Who that’s been piling up!”

Thing is it wasn’t that awful a movie on that Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVD. If I had known the trouble it would cause I’d have watched something more epic.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose six points responding to market information that there were abundant Reese’s peanut butter eggs and they were all discounted fifty percent, which means it’s just fine to eat a whole package of six of them in under a minute, okay?

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