March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Mnemonics versus Constellations

Mnemonics

The Case For: Puts your brain’s power to remember anything embarrassingly dumb to work for you.

The Case Against: So you remember stuff like how many counties are in Ohio.

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Constellations

The Case For: Organizes random patterns by giving them names that make sense if you see four times as many stars as you can anymore and remember the myth where Antipodes tricked the gods into making us forget what we came into the room for.

The Case Against: Carl Sagan did this projection for Cosmos where in like a hundred thousand years the Big Dipper is going to look more like a radio telescope even though now, only 45 years after Cosmos, radio telescopes don’t look like that anymore.

Reviewing _Popeye and Son_, Episode 11: Ain’t Mythbehavin’

Today’s Popeye and Son is the first episode with writing credits to Ken Koonce and David Weimers. Both are people with a healthy number of writing credits for kids’ cartoons. Weimers’ credits range from 1985 to 2003, with particular story editor credits for DuckTales, Rescue Rangers, and TaleSpin. Koonce has a similar history, reaching out a little longer and including credits for The Wuzzles, Galaxy High School, 101 Dalmatians: The Series, and both the Hercules and the Buzz Lightyear cartoons.

If you’d like to see the cartoon before I write about it, here’s the direct link on YouTube, before even the video that should be embedded. And as ever if you’d like to read all of the Internet’s best Popeye and Son reviews, look here. No, I don’t know what I’m doing in three weeks when I run out of these.

The Plot: After being laughed at for Popeye’s claim he found the Golden Fleece years ago, Popeye and Junior set out to find it again. Olive, bringing lunch along, follows them to Greece, where they counter a skeleton squadron (it’s too small for an army), a flock of harpies, a big ol’ purple dragon and discover what stinks about the Golden Fleece.

The Thoughts: While Thimble Theater is a continuity strip, the cartoons are not. Apart from clip cartoons I can think of only one case where any cartoon mentioned the events of another. Popeye and Son is the first time a Popeye cartoon series reasonably could show continuity. I mention because Popeye has, in an earlier TV cartoon, gone in search of the Golden Fleece. His retelling of the story to Junior doesn’t match the adventure in the King Features cartoon Golden-Type Fleece (and I guess it was Jason as played by Popeye anyway), but they could have written in a punch line like the Golden Fleece having fleas, a good-enough reference to the earlier cartoon. This never happened. I wonder if it was ever thought of.

I liked the start of the cartoon. I’m not sure that having the Sweethaven setting makes the Popeye and Son cartoons less adventurous than older ones. It may just motivate why he has this boring suburban house than what he did in the King Features or the 1950s days. There’ve been a couple Popeye and Son episodes with adventures — to Here Today, Goon Tomorrow, for example, or Olive’s Dinosaur Dilemma. I’m glad getting at least one more before the series ends, even if Greece is kind of a known land. Popeye and Junior first encountering a Golden Fleece tourist trap was an interesting direction, and I wondered if Popeye would remember he couldn’t take the Fleece without spoiling the local economy.

Why … why are the harpies Archie Andrews’s teacher Miss Grundy?

But after that twist — a good idea, at least — things went to a more normal direction. Popeye, Junior, and Olive face the perils that Popeye told Junior he’d faced before. There’s some good structure here in that Olive, without Popeye or Junior, faces the skeletons, and we get to see how Popeye defeated them before when nothing happens to them here. Junior’s the one who has trouble with the harpies, apart from them stealing Popeye’s spinach. We miss in the flashback how Popeye beat the dragon, so there’s room for it to be a fresh angle when we go see it. Popeye and Junior using their spinach power-ups to throw the Sleepless Dragon into a wooden crib is also a good joke too, better than usual for the punch-the-bad-guy-into-a-trap moment.

I think this cartoon’s poorly-served by its music, which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the screen action. It’s not distracting, it just doesn’t convey suspense or mystery or danger or anything particular. There’s enough good touches, like Olive Oyl’s poor outboard motor deflating from exhaustion, or the Skeletons’ marching cadence, that I’m distracted by the great cartoon I can see waiting for a little attention to bring out.

Bluto and Tank get back into the series, although only as motivators. The opening credits’ idea that they’re the steady antagonists for Popeye and Junior seems forgotten. I can imagine a version of this where the two were trying to sabotage Popeye, or race him to the Golden Fleece. That might have needed a faster pace than the cartoon was designed for.

And for all that we do get a continuity touch, Popeye mentioning Polecat Popeye, who never took a bath. That’s a cute something.

What’s Going On In Prince Valiant? Is Aleta trying to shoo Valiant away? October – December 2023

Oh, surely not. She loves the hero of Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant and would get less screen time without him. But in the interlude between the two stories this plot recap covers, we do get word from Camelot and it’s going surprisingly well ever since Valiant got away from it. Maeve and Aleta make an awesome regency. The Eastern Saxons have been held to Londinium. Nathan is, well, Nathan. Ingrid is, well, Ingrid. The coffee crop failed but everything else is bountiful. So there’s no reason they should hurry home. Heck, if you get the offer why not take a trip to Hibernia or something? Australia maybe? Valiant hasn’t been to Australia yet, has he? Maybe try there?

So this should catch you up to the end of the year (2023, our time) in Prince Valiant. If, for you, it’s after about March 2024, you may find a more up-to-date ancient scroll here. Or any news about the comic strip, in case some breaks out. It hasn’t produced any drama to speak of that I’ve heard about in years but you never know, right? Back now to the time of King Arthur …

Prince Valiant.

8 October – 31 December 2023.

Prince Valiant and his son Arn, sent out to what’s now Wales to fix all the warfare with Saxon invaders, were trying out kidnapping. Baedwulf, leader of the small band of Saxons who’ve been making life hard for the Gwynedd folks, likes the spunk Valiant and Arn show here. And he and Caitrin, one of the Gwynedd locals who’s married a Saxon, lay out the sad facts. Camelot hasn’t got the manpower to spare to drive out the Saxons. There isn’t enough geld in all the Danes to get the Saxon mainland interested in sending reinforcements. They can keep bleeding each other to death or they can stop fighting and have fish fry together.

Eating without death sounds good. There’s some fiddly little details to work out and Valiant’s amazed to watch how much fun Arn has doing that. And then Galahad arrives, bearing news from Camelot. Turns out since he, Valiant, and Arn left things have been going great. He can head go out any way he likes, away from Camelot.

Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant for the 19th of November, 2023. This turn of events brings up something I didn’t realize I was missing in Prince Valiant, but the appearance of the ambiguous, ominous mystical world is doing a lot to make the story more real and vivid to me. I’m not saying I want the strip to entirely become one of magic and fairy stuff, but bit of that makes a great boost.

And there’s reason to head out. Baedwulf and Caitrin’s sister Bronwyn saw an omen over some boat construction. Baedwulf says a beautiful cat appeared on the boat, and then in the sky, Freo, goddess of love, appeared. Bronwyn says no, it was the demon Cath Palug, harbinger of despair. Caitryn interrogates Bronwyn, establishing that the cat departed to her left. So that’s great, because that means they’re blessed, not cursed. And Baedwulf declares it’s a sign he must go to Hibernia, to present his betrothed — Bronwyn — to his lord and see if this whole “food, rather than death” thing sounds good to them too.

So it’s a journey to the west for Valiant and Arn, and more, including a stowaway cat. There’s what Baedwulf insists are selkies in the water, but you’ll get a certain amount of that on any sea voyage. A change in the wind pushes them off course, though, and they come ashore in a deserted fishing village. Well, they’ve got whole hours before sunset and probably Valiant’s Singing Sword just does that vibrating now and then. You know how they are.

Next Week!

Which of five generations of characters is going to be Santa Claus this year? And why the heck are they doing it in Charlotte, North Carolina? I ask the tough questions about Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley next week and probably come out learning about some weird Lum and Abner clone I never heard of before next week.

Plus He Probably Rolls Like Two-Thirds of the Way Back Up the Mountain

Continuing to think about the legendary creatures of Pac-Land, because of my reasons, has made me consider. Pac-Sisyphus has got to have it a lot easier than our Sisyphus did, right? Because all he has to do is roll himself up to the top of that mountain over and over. And then he gets to roll all the way back down. He’s probably not only happy when he gets all the way up to the top but rolling all the way down again, because that’s got to be a lot of fun when you have so many directions you can roll without getting stuck, right? It’s just logic.

In Which I Think About the Legends of Pac-Land for No Good Reason

I’m glad not to be thinking about this so seriously as to run late, but … so, in Pac-Land as seen in the documentary Hanna-Barbera cartoon of the early 80s, like, are there equivalents of the various Ancient Greek legends? Because I have to figure they would totally have done a King Midas episode if they had figured a way to draw a goldificated Pac-Man that didn’t look just like Pac-Man. But now what’s on my mind is Argus, the son of Gaia, who had a hundred eyes all over his body. How would Pac-Argus fit a hundred eyes over his body? Would it be all smaller eyes, or eyes of different sizes so they all fit together? Or would he just have a really, really big body? I think you could make a fair case for either, but you’re going to get protests from those people with that phobia about large surfaces with lots of organic-looking holes in them.

This Feels Like an Incomplete Explanation

I realize that everyone’s situation is complicated and there’s stories behind what we see but I also feel like Sammy has to be leaving out parts of the explanation. Like, I know I grew up in the 70s and things were more open-minded then. And also our schoolteachers liked showing us movies where, like, the green people learned there was no reason to hate the purple people once they tried talking to them and stuff. This taught me well in that I harbor no conscious prejudices against green or purple people.

This is the title panel and adjacent panel for a two-page story on page 12 of Li’l Pan Comics #7 and while that story is fine I can not advise reading the whole story. Li’l Pan — a genial satyr kid who just wants to play music everyone can dance to — is pleasant enough and reveals a surprising gap in the Harvey Comics universe. But this story is about a search around the world and it is nothing but ethnic stereotypes the way 1947 can deliver.

Allowing for nostalgia, though, I think at least in my group we weren’t going to refuse to be friends with a kid because he was half-horse. You just needed some interesting trait to make up for it, like your family had the basement with a million wood blocks of irregular shapes and the continuous electric power strip reaching around the whole baseboard that you could plug anything into anywhere, or you had a Coleco Adam, or something like that. I’m sure Sammy could rise to that level.

Have to admire the artist’s decision to answer the question “how would a centaur wear pants?” with “wrong”.

60s Popeye: The Leprechaun, a title that gives away the last scene

The title of this week’s King Features Popeye had me expecting a Jack Kinney short. Somehow it felt like a story built around a “real” legendary creature fit that studio’s style more. Nope; this is Paramount Cartoon Studios. So director and producer credits go to Seymour Kneitel. The story’s credited to Carl Meyer and Jack Mercer. From 1961 let’s see Popeye tangling with The Leprechaun.

This is not a funny cartoon, which does not bother me. This is an adventure cartoon instead, a striking lot of story for five and a half minutes of animation. The Sea Hag has a plan to set her up for life: catch a leprechaun and steal his gold. Popeye spots her — in a neat and surprisingly smooth bit of animation, at about 33 seconds in — and decides he needs to be in the cartoon too. The Sea Hag finds the leprechauns on an island so lush it has detailed, even shaded, backgrounds. Her not-bad plan: beg for help from a kindly leprechaun, and to repay him, offer him tea. It’s laced with truth serum so he can’t not tell the location of the leprechauns’ gold.

The other leprechauns banish him for this. This doesn’t seem fair of them. I don’t know much about Irish mythology but from what I have learned, the only thing more dangerous than accepting a stranger’s offer of food and drink is not accepting. They should have sympathy; it could have been any of them. Popeye runs across the poor leprechaun, “banished forever” until their gold is returned, and he catches the Sea Hag at the docks. She uses her Evil Eye Whammy. He uses his spinach to punch it back at her, knocking her out. I guess this doesn’t break his resolve to not hit a woman, but it’s a close thing. The gold’s returned, Popeye’s made an honorary leprechaun, and I’m not sure we ever hear the victimized leprechaun’s name.

I’m not the only person who expected a mention that Shamrock Juice contained a squirt of spinach, am I? Really expected that, possibly as the way Popeye would get his spinach power-up. Maybe if they had a full seven minutes for the short.

As said, this isn’t a funny cartoon. I’m not sure there’s even an attempt at joking. Doesn’t matter. There’s a story here, and a well-constructed one. For example, when Popeye first challenges the Sea Hag her buzzard sneaks up and knocks him out. This balances with Popeye sneaking up on and knocking out the buzzard at the end. The kind leprechaun finds the knocked-out Popeye and helps him; this establishes his nature before the Sea Hag can take advantage of it. And while we know Popeye would help a sad-looking fellow, it gives him a stronger reason to try and help the banished leprechaun.

And there’s some production bits. The bit with Popeye looking through his telescope and turning his head, for example, a bit of animation so good I expected them to reuse it at least once. Maybe it’s put into the Paramount stock library and turns up in other shorts. Or there’s the great children’s-book illustration of the forest. It’s got so much depth as to make the other backgrounds look chintzy. It gives a suggestion of the forest as this magical, more-real-than-real setting. Or maybe it reflects the background having been designed for a theatrical cartoon and getting pressed into service here. I don’t know, but I love the decision to use this.

I bet Popeye gets a lot of mileage out of being an honorary leprechaun in future cartoons. Can’t wait for next week.

Some Astounding Things About The Moon

You maybe heard NASA want to announce something astounding discovery about the Moon. I bet it’s something about water. They’re always astounded by discovering water on the Moon. If you put all the water they’ve found on the moon together you’d have, like, six ounces of water. I know that’s not much, but it’s a lot considering the Moon is made out of rock. Anyway, while we wait for them to announce how they’ve spotted four micrograms more water let’s consider some real astounding facts about the Moon:

Because of the way the Romans set up their calendar, and defined the ides at the middle of the month to lunar phases, it’s impossible to have a full moon on the 16th of a month. If it looks like the 16th is going to be a full moon anyway we insert leap seconds as appropriate. There’s a risk of a full moon on the 16th of September, 2800, despite all these corrective measures. Most experts think we’ll solve the problem by doubling up the 15th of September, the way we did with the More-15th of February, 684. Note, as the experts do, that the 15th is not the ides of September and if you make that mistake they’ll know you’re an impostor.

Ham radio operators are allowed to bounce any signal they like off the Moon. However, the operators are held responsible for any damages or for any settling the messages do while in transit.

The Moon has never actually listened to Pink Floyd. It acknowledges that Pink Floyd’s probably played on the radio at some point and they didn’t turn it off, so far as they know. But the Moon is more of a Strawberry Alarm Clock fan. At least the early days, when they got on stage riding magic carpets their roadies carried. The Moon claims to be a big fan of Walk The Moon, but still hasn’t listened to the copy of What If Nothing that it bought in 2018.

The Moon won $27,500 in the Rhode Island lottery in 2014, but never roused itself to collect its winnings. It’s still getting in arguments about this.

The Moon believes itself to have a great sense of humor. This isn’t so astounding since everybody does. But the Moon is in there trying. Unfortunately all it’s discovered, as a premise, is the antijoke and boy does it hit that button a lot. It’s not even good antijokes, either, just something that denies the premise of the gag as fast as possible. If you stick it out, and make the Moon carry on a bit it eventually digs into interesting or weird antijokes and there’s something there. But it insists that the first, instinctive response is the good one and it’s just, you know, you could do so much more.

The concave surface of the Moon is why it always seems to be looking at you.

The Moon insists on tipping 20%, which is fine, but insists on doing it to the penny. This is all right, but the Moon also has absolutely terrible group-check etiquette, insisting that it’s fine if everybody just tosses in money until it reaches a pile that is the bill plus 20% exactly. The protests of everyone that this is making it take longer, with more stress, and come out less fair, than actually figuring out who got and who split what with whom fall on deaf space-ears.

Monday was not named after the Moon. The day was named first, and then someone happened to notice the Moon on a Monday. Yes, this implies an alternate history in which we call the Moon “the Day”. That timeline must be quite confusing.

The Moon has heard about those Quiznos advertisements back in the 2000s that everybody found weird and confusing, but never saw them and thinks it would be a little creepy to go look them up now.

The Moon claims that when it finds those “disruptive” scooter-rental things abandoned on the sidewalk it picks them up and tosses them in the street. We can all agree that, if we must have dumb tech companies wasting investor money on “disruptor” technologies, they should be punished for leaving their litter in the sidewalk. But pressed on when the Moon last actually did this it turns out it never has, but it’s totally going to start next time it sees one.

The word “Moon” did not rhyme with “June” until the Tin Pan Alley Crisis of 1912. It had the vowel sound of “Mon” in “Monday” before then.

While in mythology there are rabbits living on the Moon, in fact the Moon is living on rabbits, who are still really upset about that lottery ticket thing. I can’t say they’re wrong, either.

Maybe it’s five micrograms more water. That would be astounding. We’ll see on Monday.

60s Popeye: Popeye goes after the Golden-Type Fleece

There’s four cartoons in this YouTube video that King Features Sydnicate posted. Last week I discussed Coffee House. The week before, I discussed The Billionaire. Also in this quartet is Dead-Eye Popeye. I’m not going to review that. If you want to watch Dead-Eye Popeye, go right ahead, from this link. Popeye as a Western sheriff. It’s a Larry Harmon-directed cartoon. It’s not a great cartoon. It’s not terrible. A week after you watch it last you’ll remember nothing from it. I watched it six days ago. I remember there was something amusing about Bluto and his identical brothers. I don’t remember what.

I’m interested instead in Golden-Type Fleece. It’s another Jack Kinney-directed cartoon. We saw him with the Coffee House last week. It promises at least stylish drawing, such as the title card’s illustration of the Argo. It also promises odd pauses in conversations. Be warned: there’s a bit here that’s been running through my head, nonstop, since 1978.

Once again Popeye’s telling Swee’Pea a tale. The King Features cartoons used this frame a lot. I don’t know why. I think I’d accept a cartoon where Popeye just played Jason of the Argo. Or playing Aladdin himself. But having a frame like this solves some narrative problems. The cartoon can patch any holes in story logic by having Popeye say “then later”. Maybe that’s all they needed. It reminds me of SCTV throwing a “coming soon” bumper around any spoof they only had partially finished.

And what’s left in the story is a bunch of Greek Mythology jokes. The normal Popeye cast gets to be Greek Mythology characters. Popeye as Jason is almost required, certainly. I guess Wimpy is then the only choice left to be the King who sends out Jason. (Who else could they use? Toar? Roughhouse? Castor Oyl?) The Sea Hag as the Queen is similarly forced. This may be an accident, but it does reflect a thing from the comic strip. In the comics the Sea Hag is kind of enamored of Wimpy. Or at least sees him as a way to crush Popeye. Wimpy certainly won’t turn away someone who thinks she can use him, too. And he is smart, or at least cunning, enough to stay ahead of her. It’s a great plot-generating relationship when the comic remembers it.

Bluto as every (male) antagonist — Jupiter, Neptune, a centaur — is forced on the plot. You could read the triple casting of Bluto as a comment on the whole Bluto/Brutus/Pluto/etc shenanigans. You couldn’t make that stick, though. Olive Oyl as a ticket taker who isn’t enamored of Jason/Popeye is a fun bit. It’s disappointing when she does kind of fall for him later. I don’t know whether the sirens are supposed to be Alice the Goon. She’s off-model if she is. But, I mean, look at Popeye’s hands this cartoon. Not for too long. I don’t know who the bird on the prow of Jason’s ship is. Researching this cartoon taught me the Argo had a plank of sacred wood with the power of speech. That’s neat and I don’t remember seeing that in any Ray Harryhausen-animated movie.

There are a fair bunch of funny pictures here. King Wimpy summoning Jason using semaphore flags, for example, on a pier with posts that I’m going to call Doric columns. There’s not enough scenes funny by themselves, though. I notice how often a scene is one character speaking, on a nearly featureless background. The animation looks like it came in on budget. The dialogue is more interesting. The characters in the story tend to talk in rhyming couplets. I don’t know why. I guess to make it sound faintly more like this is from an epic poem? But without being too complicated to write, or for kids to understand? But the rhyming isn’t done too rigorously. There’s good about this. It means Jupiter doesn’t need a complicated way to order a lightning bolt to “get back there!” He can just deliver the laugh line.

The plot, so far as there is one, is much more The Odyssey than it is Jason and the Argonauts. And each scene is just enough of a setting to hang jokes on. Look at the bit with the Lorelei Loons, “cousins to the Goons”. Mae Questel warbling “rock rock rock, rock-a-bye-sailor and a rock rock rock” is the bit that’s been going in my head for decades now. I know that some writer circa 1960 thought this was a great bit of snark about that awful racket his kids call music. I don’t care. The dumb bit works. It also inspires in Popeye some awesome weird facial expressions. One of them my love pointed out when I discussed Popeye’s weird face two weeks ago.

That’s a nice wholesome look for Popeye the Sailor OH LORD HIS TONGUE GOES UNDERNEATH HIS EYE WHAT IS THIS STOP IT STOP IT NO IT’S NOT STOPPING ENOUGH STOP IT MORE!

There’s a lot of spinach eaten this cartoon, most of it off-screen. There’s only one can eaten while the viewer’s there. Jason says he ate a can right before punching Jupiter’s lightning bolts back. He’s said to have eaten two cans to cover his ears against the Loons. He says he’s going to eat spinach to deal with the Blutaur, but we don’t see that. Five cans would beat the record that Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp set, if we count spinach we’re told but not shown was eaten.

I like this cartoon. I’m not sure I can justify that like. Popeye as Jason is a good premise. And I like telling The Argonauts The Odyssey as a string of set pieces with dumb jokes attached. This includes sliding the Golden Fleece to the Golden Fleas Circus. It’s kind of a Dad Joke but, you know? Tell your Dad Jokes without apology. It’ll be all right.

But the cartoon is shoddy. Look at King Wimpy’s talk cycle. It’s some movement, yes, but it’s pointless, not bothering to be funny at any point. There’s a five-second stretch of showing nothing but water waves, while Jason’s off-camera, talking. It’s not even funny waves. Maybe all the animation budget was eaten up with designing new outfits for Wimpy, Popeye, and Olive Oyl, and coming up with a mer-man and a centaur design for Bluto. The music is the usual hit-shuffle-on-the-background-library. I know these cartoons wouldn’t get fresh orchestration for anything, but, like, couldn’t they have underscored the “I’m-Jason-the-sailor-man” to any of the instrumentals of the Popeye theme song they already had? Jack Mercer could sing along to that beat, or at least near enough.

So I like it. But I can see where this is so close to being a much better cartoon. At least it’s got that “rock rock rock, rock-a-bye-sailor and a rock rock rock” hook. You won’t forget that a week from now.

Thinking About The Afterlife In Ancient Greek Mythology

So, like, imagining some Hero who’s gone to the underworld for whatever fool thing ancient heroes were always going into the underworld for. And they’ve got to get out past Cerberus, the three-headed dog guardian of the afterlife, right? So what I’m thinking now is the Hero trying to get past Cerberus by warning, you know, if we fight I’m going to kill you. Wouldn’t Cerberus just have to laugh because, “Oh, yeah, you’re going to send me right here where I already am? I’m going to be trapped staying within sight of me?”

Anyway please send me $200 million to make this movie thank you.

On Things You Can Touch Or Punch

I was with a friend at the local hipster bar. I mean my local hipster bar. We weren’t anywhere near his. I know I talk about it a lot as the local hipster bar, but please understand. Their new logo is a rendition of their raccoon puppet, holding a couple of fireworks and a can of beer that’s labelled “Ham”. It’s a fine place and they’ve started having glazed-pottery nights.

My friend got to mentioning something or other coming up, and how he hoped it would go, knock wood. And he knocked on the bar. To this extent all seems well. I’m pretty sure the bar is wood and his knocking was in fine mid-season form. He carried off the knocking with no injuries and no dryads left stranded on base.

It got me thinking about the custom of knocking wood. It’s a good-luck gesture. It’s supposed to work by getting the attention of the wood-spirits who overheard you. You can see why that would work. Gumans drawing the attention of supernatural spirits has worked out well for the human according to every legend ever. “Well,” say many humans in these legends, “drawing the attention of that naiad or whatever it was sure has cured my problem of not being turned into a grasshopper!” Or else, “I used to think there was no way I would wake up chained every morning to be torn apart by hyenas. Then I stumbled into that pooka drinking party!” “I didn’t ever used to have a ferocious lightning-beast living in my belly button. But then thank goodness I fell through the wall of that Shinto shrine!”

Still, apparently the knocking of wood does help, if we can take any guidance from how rarely people at hipster bars get their eyes dipped in magic nectar so they can see the fairy creatures and then have their eyes gouged out so they can’t see the fairy creatures anymore. It did get me to thinking about one of those little cross-cultural differences. The English, I understand, merely touch wood, tapping the nearest piece lightly, rather than rapping sharply on it.

Full disclosure: I’ve never been a dryad. And I couldn’t find any to interview before deadline. I have to think if I were one, though, I’d be more inclined to do favors for someone who tapped me rather than knocked on me. It’s got me wondering about the cultural differences. Why should Americans figure the best way to get a magic spirit to do what you want, or at least leave you alone, involves punching it?

Well, because Americans are good at punching, I admit. Look at the great legendary figures of 20th Century American Culture: Popeye, Superman, Dwight Eisenhower, Muhammad Ali, Mary Richards. They’re all people who punch through problems. Even Captain Kirk only used his phasers when he couldn’t punch for some reason. And they’re all pretty successful so maybe they have something with their punch-based plans.

At least they look successful. But, like, if you watch the cartoons Popeye gets shipwrecked a lot. Probably that’s because he has more chances at shipwreck than the average person. Someone in, say, Havre, Montana, who never enters a body of water bigger than a coin fountain might expect to be shipwrecked only eight times in her life. Popeye must run a higher risk. Still, you have to wonder about if he shouldn’t pass up on sailing in favor of a punching-based lifestyle.

But punching is a cherished part of American culture. One of the leading myths of the early 19th Century Mississippi River valley was of Mike Fink, a bombastic, tough-talking, hyperactive bully who spent his time punching, shooting, or punch-shooting (punching with a gun) everything he could find, especially if it wasn’t a white male. His friends explained he was really a great guy, just you had to understand his point of view, before he punch-shot you. But that’s what friends of sociopaths always say so that they don’t get punch-shot-punched next.

I can’t draw any big conclusions about British touching and Americans knocking wood, though. Most of the differences between British and American cultures were invented by the Tourism Boards in 1958, so that people could share stories of how different things were on their vacations. I’ll bet any number of British people who don’t care about tourists knock wood whenever they feel like.

It still seems risky. I’d stick with touching, or if it wouldn’t be redundant buying the wood-spirits a round. Culture is a complicated thing.

Those Who Do Not Study The Pasta Are Sure To Reheat It

I know I’ve written several essays inspired by books I was reading recently. I can’t help it. I keep finding my reading inspirational, and that’s why I’m doing another one like it. This time the book is Pasta And Noodle Technology, edited by James E Kruger, Robert B Matsuo, and Joel W Dick, and published in 1996 by the American Association of Cereal Chemists. Yes, I read a book about the noodle technology of nineteen years ago. Maybe more than nineteen years ago. The book collects scholarly articles that probably weren’t written after the book’s publication.

“But wait,” you may ask, “Joseph, why would you pick up such a book?” I give my permission. You may also note, “While you’re most interested in eating food, you almost never have any interest in where it comes from.” Go right ahead. If you like, point out the time some people in Singapore’s Orchard Road shopping district set up a trailer-home exhibition dedicated to some athlete, and passed out waffles, and I took and ate one without considering how odd every piece of that scene was. But I had good reason to pick up the book: I have absolutely no self-control while in a library. Put any book at about shoulder height on a shelf near the space history books and I’ll take it.

But the book rewards its reading. Just on page two we get this:

The legend [ of Marco Polo bringing spaghetti to Italy ] published in the year 1929 in The Macaroni Journal, the magazine of the American Association of Pasta Makers, still survives today.

I don’t know how rough your week has been. But I say that it’s better now that you know there is an American Association of Pasta Makers. And you probably grinned at learning there’s a trade publication called The Macaroni Journal. And it’s surely delightful to know that magazine still exists today, in 1996, even though that isn’t quite what the text says. The week is better still because of what came before. The text had just described the legend that the muse Thalia “kept secret for years” how to make macaroni but finally shared it with the mermaid Parthenope. Parthenope shared it with Naples, who shared it with everyone else. It adds a whole new dimension to the muse Thalia, who I thought was just the muse of comedy. Apparently she was the muse of comedy and macaroni, and now “muse of comedy and macaroni” is my new dream job.

Another discovery is that the Minolta corporation even today in 1996 makes chromatographs which pasta-makers use to make sure noodles are colored correctly. I’m not clear whether Minolta was hired for pasta-color-validation technology. It could be the pasta-makers kept their intentions secret. I’m entertained by imagining someone rushing in to Minolta Master Command and crying out, “I just found out what those maniacs at San Giorgio are using our chromatographs for!” Gasps all around, and then she tells them what the use is. They shake their heads and say, “There is no recovering. Close up the business.” I guess it’s closed up. I never hear about Minolta anymore.

Another valuable discovery from the book: pasta-making requires a lot of uses of the word “extrude”. I like “extrude”, as a word. It’s faintly funny-ish without being worn out the way “nostril” or “moist” are. If you want to use the word “extrude” a lot without people thinking you’re deliberately being a clown, then get into pasta scholarship.

The articles include many close-up photographs of noodles that have long since rotted away. For example, in Figure 11 (Figure 1, scanned best I can) a close-up picture shows what spaghetti produced in a vacuum looks like compared to spaghetti not and … I don’t know. I think the point is that vacuum spaghetti is better, but I have no idea what I should be looking at. I can’t even swear there’s a difference.

Figure 1: Figure 11. Appearance of spaghetti produced without vacuum (left) and with vacuum (right). From Pasta And Noodle Technology, edited by James E Kruger, Robert B Matsuo, and Joel W Dick. 1996.

But this shows how untrained my eye is. The many charts of variables plotted against one another also show how untrained my pasta brain is. The lesson I draw from this is that pasta is too complicated for me to understand. If I were thrust into a non-technological world there are many things I might be able to rebuild by myself. I don’t want to brag but I’m very good with inclining planes. But I would never manage even a primitive kind of ravioli. It’s humbling, and isn’t being humbled the best reason to read about pasta technology?

Things I Don’t Understand About Another Ancient Greek

My dear love was looking up information about the ancient Greek wrestler Milo of Croton for good reasons that I’m sure existed. The interest in Milo was pretty casual up to the point of discovering that he was affiliated in some way with Pythagoras of Samos, the Pythagoras famous for siding with squares and making people laugh over his bean issues, assuming he and his followers had any particular bean issues and people didn’t just make that up so people would laugh about the Pythagoreans. You probably have problems like that too. Famous figures of Ancient Greece usually have hilarious stories attached to them, but when they intersect with Pythagoras — whom you’ll remember as a man who allegedly claimed to have a golden thigh and the ability to write on the Moon — the crazy-funny level just leaps up and usually off the charts and lands in a beanfield where it dies of embarrassment.

For example: it’s apparently argued whether Milo had anything to do with the famous Pythagoras of Samos, because he might have just been associated with another Pythagoras of Samos who happened to be an athletic trainer. See, Milo was a seven-time Olympic athlete, so he’d have good reason to bother with athletic-type people. This is assuming that Pythagoras of Samos the Athletic Trainer wasn’t also Pythagoras of Samos the Loopy Philosopher/Mathematician/Cult Leader.

But as Olympic athletes go, Milo was apparently one of them, with a win in boys’ wrestling and then five men’s wrestling titles. Apparently he was beaten at his seventh Olympics by a young wrestler who’d developed a style of “arm’s length” wrestling. My love and I aren’t sure exactly what that style is. It makes it sound like he was beaten by slap-fighting. I’m not surprised he didn’t return to the games after being beaten by that; I wouldn’t blame him if he died of embarrassment. But maybe I’m reading it wrong. Maybe he was bested by an opponent who stood at arm’s length and held out his arms and kept pointing out “I’m not touching you” until Milo stormed off in disgust. Again, I wouldn’t fault him for not returning with something to foil this tactic, like, telling his opponent’s moms on them.

But being unable to believe the slapping and not-touching in the Olympics was the least of his accomplishments. Apparently he was a military leader who convinced the Crotoniates to lead an army to defend the Sybarites against Telys, tyrant of Sybaris. Now to be fair, by which I mean dismissive, that’s just the sort of thing you did in those days. You just weren’t part of Ancient Greek society unless you were setting up a tyrant or overthrowing a tyrant. And it was important to cities, too. Not getting the occasional tyrant to be overthrown marked a city as the seriously hick part of the Peloponnese, the way you today might look askance at a metro region that can’t even get an Arena Football team. Some up-and-coming cities would rent out a battlefield and set up themselves while overthrowing them and put themselves on the map that way.

But not everyone did this work in style; according to Didorus, and if you can’t trust him who can you trust, said he lead the Crotonites into battle while draped in a lion’s skin, wielding a club in a Hercules-like manner, and wearing his Olympic crowns. The lion skin I don’t wonder about, but: his crowns? All five of them? How? I know they weren’t, like, the crowns the Queen of Britain wears — remember, Pythagoras of Samos and the ancient Greeks lived literally more than three centuries before Queen Elizabeth II — and were more kind of wreaths of flowers of the kind you wear when you’re a charming bride. But that’s still, five. Put five crowns of anything on your head and you’re going to have them flying off all the time, unless you keep one hand clinging to your scalp so as to maintain some semblance of balance. It’s got to throw off his club-wielding. This is the price for not being able to pick just one crown.

Of course, who says he wore them all on his head? Maybe he put one on his head, and one on each arm, and one around each thigh? That would be quite practical as long as he didn’t have to share a tight seat, such as on a roller coaster, with someone. But why would he? Chairs wouldn’t be invented for dozens of years until after his death, the date of which is not actually known.

According to further legend, he died when he attempted to split a tree down the middle with his bare hands, which got stuck, which sounds like a worse way to die than just “of embarrassment following an Olympic slap-fighting loss”. But apparently while his hands were stuck he was set upon by wolves, who ate him, which raises a further question: what, he couldn’t tear some wolves limb-from-limb using just his feet? There is a painting by Joseph-Benoit Suvée (1743 – 1807) which purports to show Milo at his wolf-induced death, arguably fighting off the wolves with his feet, although it really looks to me more like he’s working on advanced belly rubs. I have to point out that there’s little evidence Suvée ever met Milo and none that he interviewed any of the wolves involved.

There’s much more to the legend of Milo of Croton, of course, and I may come back to it, but for now I think it fair to say: Ancient Greece. Like, what the heck, guys? You know?

The Thing About Medusa

So, if Ben “The Thing” Grimm were to fight Medusa, would he have to avoid seeing her? I mean, what’s the worst that could happen, he’d be turned into even more stone? I feel like there’s probably an implicit answer in that The Thing is still around in comics, I think, and surely the Fantastic Four battled Medusa at some time in the 60s because if it was the 60s and you were a superhero you just did that sort of thing, battling ancient Greek mythological figures, possibly in space. So The Thing is still around, and you don’t see Medusa’s face slapped all over comic books, but that’s surely just because she’s waiting to be rebooted into a new movie series of her own, right? And that means he probably handled things just fine.

Anyway, I feel like there’s probably someone well-versed in the details of the Marvel comic books universe who could tell me with certainty about their fight and whether he had to do anything special, but, I dunno. I feel vaguely bad when I can effortlessly explain subtler points of 1980s G.I.Joe episodes to people, and I don’t want to make the Marvel comics expert have to feel like that too.

Robert Benchley: Opera Synopses I

[ Since it’s such a busy week all around why not return to the pages of Robert Benchley’s Love Conquers All and to the part where he summarizes some opera for our convenience? Here, his notes explaining Die Meister-Genossenschaft. ]

DIE MEISTER-GENOSSENSCHAFT

Scene: The Forests of Germany.

Time: Antiquity.

Cast

Strudel, God of Rain	Basso
Schmalz, God of Slight Drizzle	Tenor
Immerglück, Goddess of the Six Primary Colors	Soprano
Ludwig Das Eiweiss, the Knight of the Iron Duck	Baritone
The Woodpecker	Soprano

Argument

The basis of “Die Meister-Genossenschaft” is an old legend of Germany which tells how the Whale got his Stomach.

ACT I

The Rhine at Low Tide Just Below Weldschnoffen.—Immerglück has grown weary of always sitting on the same rock with the same fishes swimming by every day, and sends for Schwül to suggest something to do. Schwül asks her how she would like to have pass before her all the wonders of the world fashioned by the hand of man. She says, rotten. He then suggests that Ringblattz, son of Pflucht, be made to appear before her and fight a mortal combat with the Iron Duck. This pleases Immerglück and she summons to her the four dwarfs: Hot Water, Cold Water, Cool, and Cloudy. She bids them bring Ringblattz to her. They refuse, because Pflucht has at one time rescued them from being buried alive by acorns, and, in a rage, Immerglück strikes them all dead with a thunderbolt.

ACT 2

A Mountain Pass.—Repenting of her deed, Immerglück has sought advice of the giants, Offen and Besitz, and they tell her that she must procure the magic zither which confers upon its owner the power to go to sleep while apparently carrying on a conversation. This magic zither has been hidden for three hundred centuries in an old bureau drawer, guarded by the Iron Duck, and, although many have attempted to rescue it, all have died of a strange ailment just as success was within their grasp.

But Immerglück calls to her side Dampfboot, the tinsmith of the gods, and bids him make for her a tarnhelm or invisible cap which will enable her to talk to people without their understanding a word she says. For a dollar and a half extra Dampfboot throws in a magic ring which renders its wearer insensible. Thus armed, Immerglück starts out for Walhalla, humming to herself.

ACT 3

The Forest Before the Iron Duck’s Bureau Drawer.—Merglitz, who has up till this time held his peace, now descends from a balloon and demands the release of Betty. It has been the will of Wotan that Merglitz and Betty should meet on earth and hate each other like poison, but Zweiback, the druggist of the gods, has disobeyed and concocted a love-potion which has rendered the young couple very unpleasant company. Wotan, enraged, destroys them with a protracted heat spell.

Encouraged by this sudden turn of affairs, Immerglück comes to earth in a boat drawn by four white Holsteins, and, seated alone on a rock, remembers aloud to herself the days when she was a girl. Pilgrims from Augenblick, on their way to worship at the shrine of Schmürr, hear the sound of reminiscence coming from the rock and stop in their march to sing a hymn of praise for the drying up of the crops. They do not recognize Immerglück, as she has her hair done differently, and think that she is a beggar girl selling pencils.

In the meantime, Ragel, the papercutter of the gods, has fashioned himself a sword on the forge of Schmalz, and has called the weapon “Assistance-in-Emergency.” Armed with “Assistance-in-Emergency” he comes to earth, determined to slay the Iron Duck and carry off the beautiful Irma.

But Frimsel overhears the plan and has a drink brewed which is given to Ragel in a golden goblet and which, when drunk, makes him forget his past and causes him to believe that he is Schnorr, the God of Fun. While laboring under this spell, Ragel has a funeral pyre built on the summit of a high mountain and, after lighting it, climbs on top of it with a mandolin which he plays until he is consumed.

Immerglück never marries.

Breaking Mythological News

There’s some excitement over a neat discovery in ancient Greek Or Maybe Roman Mythology. Apparently they’ve managed to find a human who appeared in a myth and who didn’t come out of it in pretty rotten shape. This is really neat, since the best you can usually hope for if you find yourself a human in a Greek Myth is maybe getting turned into a grasshopper and then eaten by a loved one. Getting off scott-free was unheard of.

Anyway, the newly unearthed story goes something like this: Uhhurmneoc, the Goddess of Throat-Clearing, was discussing with Mauvetica, the Goddess of Colors You’re Not Really Sure What They Look Like, about whether any particular human was going to say or do something that got them in trouble that day. Just then they overheard a young lad, Oneoftheoselladicus, mention how he’d had a bee that sat on his chin for an unusually long time and he thought that was neat. The gods naturally poked in to see if he was going to say something that could set off Appiopithenes, God of Bee-Chin-Wearing, but the lad suddenly noticed the scroll-taker and shouted, “Look over there! It’s King Midas and he’s saying something!” Naturally everyone dashed off to see what the lunkhead had got himself in for this time, and the forgotten Oneoftheoselladicus escaped to a competing mythology that’s now believed to just be fan fiction. Midas, naturally, ended up spending three weeks speaking to and understanding only what in those days were called “torpedoes” (which we should read as “sub-aquatic propelled missiles used to sink ships or destroy harbors”), but for him that’s doing better than average.

I’m always delighted to see how we better understand the world-view of the ancients by seeing their legends and stories come back to life like this.

Robert Benchley: Odysseus to Penelope

[ Among the essays collected in Of All Things, Robert Benchely included a fairly substantial piece, “When Genius Remained Your Humble Servant,” about the changing tenor of letters. I don’t want to reprint the whole essay here, but enjoyed the amusing hypothetical exchange here that showcases the lovely blending of high culture and pedestrian business that is so fruitful for humorists. ]

So explanatory has the method of letter writing become that it is probable that if Odysseus were a modern traveler his letters home to Penelope would average something like this:

Calypso,

Friday afternoon.

DEAR PEN: — I have been so tied up with work during the last week that I haven’t had a chance to get near a desk to write to you. I have been trying to every day, but something would come up just at the last minute that would prevent me. Last Monday I got the papyrus all unrolled, and then I had to tend to Scylla and Charybdis (I may have written you about them before), and by the time I got through with them it was bedtime, and, believe me, I am snatching every bit of sleep I can get these days. And so it went, first the Læstrygones, and then something else, and here it is Friday. Well, there isn’t much news to write about. Things are going along here about as usual. There is a young nymph here who seems to own the place, but I haven’t had any chance to meet her socially. Well, there goes the ship’s bell. I guess I had better be bringing this to a close. I have got a lot of work to do before I get dressed to go to a dinner of that nymph I was telling you about. I have met her brother, and he and I are interested in the same line of goods. He was at Troy with me. Well, I guess I must be closing. Will try to get off a longer letter in a day or two.

Your loving husband,

ODIE.

P.S. You haven’t got that bunch of sports hanging round the palace still, have you? Tell Telemachus I’ll take him out of school if I hear of his playing around with any of them.

Everything I Know About Some Plants

There’s nothing quite like wandering around a garden nursery looking at all the various tiny plants that I’m far too stupid to actually manage. Of course you can say that about many things: there isn’t anything quite like building a multi-use sports arena out of nothing but discarded satellite TV dishes, for instance, unless you count building several single-use sports arenas all close up against each other. But that shouldn’t be counted against the fun of wandering around all these little rows of plants nestled in tiny plastic pots and reading how relentlessly Anglo-Saxon a name they can get, and what sorts of folklore attach to them.

Many plants enjoy these blunt, old-fashioned names that speak of their folkloric origin or of something we were trying to keep secret. Putting the secret right there in the name of the plant doesn’t seem to have worked but bear in mind, before the rise of mass printing where were we going to put secrets instead?

Shunted Gutter-Berrys, also known as King Pym’s Chortles. These are found lining the roofs that other, lesser, plants build to shelter them from the elements and clumsy, plummeting chipmunks. They have become invasive in parts of the country (any country) with a chipmunk shortage, such as the space between eight and twelve feet above the ground and away from all trees or other structures. A post-Columbian Exchange plant, these were first identified by settlers in Connecticut who asked the Indians what they were, and didn’t recognize sarcasm when they heard it. Their flowering between the 30th of April and the 1st of May is considered a sign that your calendar-maker ripped you off.