60s Popeye: The Square Egg although I have to nitpick and say it’s a cube

Good news, everyone! The Whiffle Bird is back, and she’s a she again. We have Rosemary O’Connor to thank for this story. Direction is by Rudy Larriva, and the producer Jack Kinney. This is Rosemary O’Connor’s lone writing credit on the Internet Movie Database. She gets a good number of credits as background artist for the King Features Popeye cartoons (including this short). She has other shows from the 1957 Crusader Rabbit revival through to the 1984 Alvin and the Chipmunks revival. Here with us from 1960 is The Square Egg.

Nobody ever says Brutus’s name, this cartoon. I wonder if this was made early in the production run. Sometime before King Features had decided what to do about their (mistakenly) thinking they didn’t own the Bluto character.

And, as the teaser said, we have the Whiffle Hen back. She’s a hen, too, hen enough to lay a square egg. Brutus swipes the surely valuable egg, and then it’s all a chase to get it back. Brutus is foiled when the egg cracks, but happy news: there’s a cubical Whiffle Chick inside. There’s a little tussle over who’ll take the Whiffle Chick, quickly resolved to “the kid will stay with the Hen”.

Thing is, this script feels like a first draft. There are a couple of good bits. Seeing that Brutus keeps the stolen egg in a birdcage. Or Popeye looking over the smashed ruins of his henhouse and declaring “everything looks normal”. The hallway-of-doors chase between a bunch of trees that ends with Brutus popping up in front of the camera to say, “I’m surrounded!”

Against that, though: when Popeye slowly reads the ransom note he declares, “Well blow me down! … Oh my gawrshk! … Well blow me down!”. It’s like Jack Mercer ran through all the plausible responses and they didn’t decide which to pick. I get lingering on the note so the audience can read it, but why not “Oh my gawrshk! We’ve been egg-napped?” All right; that’s a sloppy edit.

The Whiffle Chick’s expression is my look in every picture, right down to my head being tilted for no obvious reason.

But consider earlier on. When Professor Wotasnozzle arrives, he’s stunned by the news of the square egg. What did they tell him he was coming out to see? Shortly after Olive Oyl says “Oh, Professor, you say such scientific things.” This after he said the egg would cause “a revolution in egghead circles”. What’s a scientific thing about that? Or the ending bit, with the newly-hatched Whiffle Chick growing quite large and then … being asked to pick where he’s going to go.

These aren’t major issues and I can imagine small dialogue changes that would fix them. Which is why I say it reads like a first draft.

I’m disappointed the Whiffle Hen doesn’t get to show off any of her natural extraordinary good luck. Or, as she’d become in other shorts, magic powers to do plot-generating stuff. But at least she gets to be mother to an oddly cute child considerably larger than she is.

How to tell which tablet gives you which Easter egg color

Three years ago I got annoyed enough with not knowing which color dye came from which Paas egg-dye tablet to do something. That something was taking notes. Last year, I posted the results. So you could know which of the nearly-identical-looking tablets is which color. Also so the one tablet which had to be mixed with vinegar instead of water — unless that was the one that had to be mixed with water instead of vinegar — could be told from the rest.

Also two years ago when we dyed eggs we found they’d changed the formula and now they all need vinegar. Or they all don’t need vinegar. I forget which. But now you have to work at it to get that wrong. I just remember being annoyed that they double-crossed me like that. Still, I hope the pictures at the link above help you with your egg-dye plans.

And over on my mathematics blog I worked out how often Easter would happen on each day that it could happen. (This for the Western tradition, on the Gregorian calendar.) So if you’d lke to know when’s the next time we’ll see Easter on the 25th of April? Here’s your chance to find out,

On the bellies of dragons

I was reading the IMDB page about Disney’s 1941 movie The Reluctant Dragon and found this trivia:

Portions of this film had to be redone because of objections by the Hays Office. The dragon was originally drawn with a navel which had to removed before the film could be passed.

Now I wish to believe the Hayes Office was sending many snippy letters explaining that as dragons hatch from eggs they have no biological need for belly buttons. And the Disney Office writing back that dragons are made up and can have belly buttons if we choose. I want to think they were arguing, by typewriter, for months. I decide to believe Ward Kimball sent the Hayes Office a most sarcastic drawing of a dragon mom nursing dragon toddlers. I choose to believe that the great-grandchildren of the people in this dispute are still angry at the other side. I shall not be accepting any evidence to the contrary. Thank you.

Fear Not, in these trying times, Compu-Toon is still baffling

So I know everybody’s having a hard time of it, except for those of us having an impossibly hard time of it. Thus I would like to reassure you all: Charles Boyce’s Compu-Toon is still baffling. Here’s Thursday’s strip.

Charles Boyce’s Compu-Toon for the 9th of April, 2020. Also I think some of her texting problem might be that she’s trying to text using an AT&T Cordless 5500 from about 1993.

This one hits a real sweet spot for being baffling. I think I can work out what neighborhood the joke should be in. My guess is Boyce wants to make some comment about the physical distancing that’s needed for public physical health, and the computer-aided socialization that’s needed for public mental health, and then … from there I lose the thread. But I think I’m looking in the right place. If someone has a better idea, please, let me know.

And, again, I don’t want to slag Charles Boyce too hard here. From what I can make out, he seems to be a kind-hearted and well-intended person. And he’s that rarest of things, the cartoonist who’s older than Gen X but who still likes the Internet. At least as a concept. It’s just, sometimes, the idea in Boyce’s head doesn’t make it onto paper recognizably. I know that pain.

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Also, since this is the weekend people would like to know, here’s my little guide to what color eggs the various Paas tablets are. Good luck with your own eggs.

In Which Have You Maybe Considered IT’S YOU WHO ARE VERY UPSET PAAS CHANGED ITS DYE KITS INSTEAD?

No, really, I am COMPLETELY FINE WITH LEARNING that Paas went and changed its egg dye kits over the last year so now there’s NONE that tell you that you have to use vinegar, or you better not use vinegar, and you don’t have to pick out the pink one for ANY special treatment. That’s FINE. That makes EVERYBODY’S LIFE ALL THE MUCH BETTER and I am NOT AT ALL UPSET that my guide from last week is now COMPLETELY USELESS except for people who have kits from last year and before, all right? I’m FINE. THANK you. Everybody STOP ASKING. And we are NOT having an argument about which of the two they-sure-look-pink tablets is the TRUE pink this year.

Which Color Paas Tablet Is Purple? Which is Red? Which is Pink?

Today I post what will surely come to be my most-referenced post of all time. Last year after yet again being annoyed that we couldn’t tell which color Paas Easter-egg tablet matched with which color I did something: I took pictures of every tablet, and how it looked mixed with vinegar or water, and how the resulting egg looked. I share that information with you here and now. In this way we can maybe prevent the catastrophe of that one tablet that’s supposed to be mixed with vinegar instead of hot water for some reason, only to find you used the other tablet of basically the same color and now everybody is shouting and there aren’t enough of those little plastic ones that wrap around the egg with a complicated scene instead and Easter is just ruined.

Colors are a hard thing to reproduce online, so I took pictures of as much as I could with a can of Coke Zero Sugar, so you can use that as reference. See if you can spot the moment when I realized I was letting the tablets be shaded by the soda can and swapped their placement!

Also there was a six-tablet Paas packet, and a nine-tablet Paas packet. I’ll label which is which. The nine-tablet packet is all the stuff from the six-tablet package, plus an extra package of three more colors. I took a picture of the six normal dye tablets before we started mixing things up, but I didn’t think to take a picture of the extra three tablets. So, well, good luck with those.

And because I forgot to mention: all the eggs were dyed to about the same length of time. It was about three minutes, although I can’t say precisely how long. I remember the fact that I timed it by some piece of music that came on the iPod but I don’t remember which song it was. Well, check my or my love’s iPods and pick a song that seems like it would have been on when we were dyeing eggs last year and there you go.

The pack of six normal dye tablets.

The nine eggs, as they look when they’re getting more dry.

The dyes which produced these eggs, in the same positions.

Finally Some Good Trustworthy News About Food And Drink Colors

Yes, I am still feeling the sting of terrible betrayal about how Diet Faygo Arctic Sun is, despite the bottle, actually slightly less blue than a bucket of orange paint would be. Even as we speak, if we get together the minute I’m writing this, I’m consoling myself with a can of Fresca, where the relevant soda pop is “I have no idea what color. It’s in a can”. However, we do have this exciting development. It came about from my love stopping in the cider mill to get … well, go ahead and guess. But also eggs because we were, so far as my love was aware, out of eggs. I also got eggs, because so far as I was aware I was the only person in a position to get eggs. The important thing in our state of being temporarily flush with eggs is that the cider mill eggs are a mix, not all a bunch of uniformly Same Color White Or Brown. In fact, we’ve got this:

We’re still waiting on whether we can fairly call any of these pink or orange eggs. Also some of these eggs are small enough that they’re half their own size, while others are large and heavy enough I could not swear that they aren’t being used to smuggle emeralds out of the chicken coop. In which case I guess we’ll know within a couple weeks?

So yes, that second egg from the right, top row. It’s a pale color, yes, and it photographs as pretty darned grey. But we got the tests back from the Pantone Laboratories just hours ago and it does fit within the technical standards to pass as a “green egg”. I can’t tell you exactly what we’re going to do with this wonder of nature, except that it’s probably going to be eaten.

Exclusion

I’ve got the usual Sunday comic strips post over in the mathematics blog. Have you given it a try? It might like the company. There’s an Archie comic over there, if that affects your choice. If not, that’s fine. We’ve been spending the weekend trying to figure out which of Paas’s four egg-dye tablets that could plausibly be pink actually is the pink already. People keep asking the Internet this question and there’s suspiciously few answers considering it would just take one person with a dye kit and two pictures, and then we’d know which tablet isn’t supposed to get mixed with vinegar. Fix that problem, Internet. Anyway, fresh off yesterday’s activities, a scene that came to mind:

Not pictured: the eggs we put in the shrink-wrap leopard-print plastic thing, which is a shame because until this year I had no idea what Edith Prickley would look like as an egg.

“Hey? Hey guys? Guys? What are you talking about? Are you doing something? Are you talking about me? Can I come over and talk with you? Can I? Guys? Hey, are you ignoring me? Do you wanna talk about me? It’s okay with me if you wanna talk about me. Hey?”

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose three points today as those turned out to be peanut butter smidges we got from the candy store. Not that caramel isn’t good too, you understand, just that peanut butter smidge.

136

Some Easter Stuff Poorly Explained

Why Easter eggs? Why bunnies? Why chocolate? If so, whom? These are some good questions. The last one looks like the result of youthful enthusiasm. It’s probably grammatically wrong anyway, unless “who” would be wrong instead. I bet it was submitted by someone who hypercorrects things. Hypercorrecting is a fun pastime. You start out with something that’s okay and then apply the grammatical rule of “people don’t sound like they know what they’re doing, so make it sound more obscure or complicated”. It’s good fun. It appeals to people’s desire to sound like they know a better set of rules than everyone else does. And it gives people who like to correct mistakes something to write about. There’s nothing so fun as correcting the hypercorrect. I thought that time I got a bag of rabbit litter at half-price was that good. I was wrong.

Anyway, Easter we can understand. If we didn’t have Easter then there’d be this huge attention-getting gap in-between Ash Wednesday and the Feast of the Assumption. “Shouldn’t something go in the middle, here?” people would ask. Eventually all sorts of folk explanations would spring up. Maybe they’d tumble across “there ought to be a particularly holy day for one of the top religions” there. “Also we should have plastic eggs and rabbits made of candy” I bet wouldn’t. Maybe people would do some more research and figure, “Hey, there’s got to be something that’s seventy days before Septuagesima, unless that’s supposed to be seventy days after Septuagesima.”

I mean if there still is a Septuagesima. I haven’t checked and I have the feeling it’s been downplayed ever since Vatican II: Vaticannier. But it’s a heck of a name for something. It isn’t seventy days from anything interesting in either direction. There’s probably a reason for that. Yes, I meant the Feast of the Ascension. The Assumption is a completely different thing. Don’t challenge me on this. I was raised Catholic so I remember there was something called the homoiousian controversy and couldn’t deliver the Nicene Creed with cue cards. We said the Nicene Creed every Sunday. Nobody ever talked about the homoiousian controversy.

Since we have Easter, we don’t have to worry about why there isn’t an Easter, although if it ever goes missing you know what to look for. Easter eggs we can wonder about. If there’s anything that we could get straightened out then we’d have one thing straightened out, and that would leave is in much better shape. For instance, let’s do away with the folk etymology that says they were originally “yeaster eggs”, egg-shape snacks made out of extremely bread-based foods. We can also do away with the tale that it started out as “Easter yeggs”, roving packs of 19th-century Bowery B’hoy toughs prowling the riverfront and painting themselves brightly. These theories were popular in the 1970s when they were thought to be hoaxes played by angry writer H L Mencken. But we now know the claim that they were a hoax was a prank on Mencken played by President Taft.

The tradition of hiding Easter eggs come to us from Renaissance Germany, with an assist by the Princely States of India and a rebound against Grand Columbia, which does not figure in this narrative. The problem originally was one of planting the seeds of useful crops like barley or bauxite or jute or other stuff from social studies textbooks without having birds flying in and eating them all. Somewhere on the upper Rhine the locals realized they could plant the birds instead and wait for the seeds to fly in and carry them off. The practice spread and grew to be very popular, eggs put in all sorts of places on the ground, and didn’t lose popularity even when it turned out to not even begin to sort-of work.

Since that failed, they tried making the process more complicated. Painting the eggs turned out not to be a way to get blue chickens with yellow zig-zag stripes, but wasn’t it worth trying, just in case? Do you know anyone who has better ideas to handle our shortage of blue chickens with yellow zig-zag stripes? It’s not so easy to achieve, is it? Anyway, during the Thirty Years War the tradition fled Germany, and who could blame it? The tradition’s got some sense after all.

There is no explanation for how the rabbits and chocolate and all that got involved. I’ll try to write that up next year before Easter.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped nine points as traders struggled to remember the name of that astronaut mentioned yesterday. Peggy … Whitman? That sounds kind of right.

133

Because I Felt Like Writing A Dopey Gag

“So, I couldn’t help noticing your horse there … ”

“Yeah, he gets a lot of attention.”

“Don’t see many horses that cluck.”

“He’s very sure he’s a chicken.”

“And you’d get him treated but … ”

“Yup. Need the eggs.”

“Figures. Now, me, I’ve got a chicken that thinks he’s a horse.”

“Going to take him to an animal psychiatrist?”

“Never. I like him thinking he’s a horse.”

“You need your chicken to pull stuff?”

“No, I just hate eggs.”

[ Thanks for indulging me. I’ll try to do better in the future. ]