Cuke-a-Cola

"Can that Coke, keep cool with a cucumber Pepsi
As the summer begins to sizzle, we can think of no better way to
slake our thirst than with a cold carbonated beverage. And if you're
in Japan, now you can keep cool with a cucumber-flavored soda."
Story at msnbc.com.

Old-timey Slang of the Day

refrigerator: a prison

Cougars in Wisconsin

Earlier this week, I read about a sighting of a big cat in Milton, Wisconsin, which isn't that far from here. Here is an article from today's Wisconsin State Journal confirming that genetic testing on the animal's sundry residues suggest it is in fact a cougar (and, in my favorite part of the ongoing story, that it is a wild cougar, not an escaped pet . . . who keeps cougars as pets?!?).

People have been seeing these things for years, though. This article is from 2003, for instance. And here is a Cryptomundo post from last year that details some of the work being done to prove that these animals are running around up here.

Old-timey Slang of the Day

cheechako: a tenderfoot. My dictionary says this was used in Alaska and by fur traders and comes from a Chinook word.

I'm an Ape Man, I'm an Ape Ape Man, I'm an Ape Man

Monster Quest, a fun cryptozoology show on The History Channel, is running an episode this week focused on an alleged plan of Stalin's to create an army of ape men, which it turns out didn't really happen. However, the show is absolutely fascinating anyway, especially if you're not in the habit of keeping up with all the COMPLETELY INSANE things scientists have tried to do over the past century or so.

Here is the article that kick-started the "Stalin tried to create an army of ape-men" story, which was published in The New York Times and got picked up with some distortions by The Scotsman.

Here is a site devoted to ape-like cryptids, including the Alma, which are also discussed in this show.

The Monster Quest episode also covers other crazy stuff I wasn't aware of, including the doctor who semi-successfully performed a head transplant (the show includes very disturbing footage of this) and of course the Soviet scientist who really did try to cross-breed chimps and humans.

Anyway, this show is awesome. Watch it.

Sociology in Space

Interesting little piece about alien sociology over at space.com.

Old-timey Slang of the Day

sizz-water: carbonated water

My old dictionary has a great sentence to illustrate this, from a 1905 book by one Hugh McHugh called You Can Search Me: "The waiter had crowded the sizz-water into the wood alcohol."

Whuh? You can search me.

The Mist

I have not yet seen The Mist, Frank Darabont's movie of Stephen King's fine story, but I am really excited about the fact that the DVD will include a black-and-white version of the film. Even if the movie isn't great, this idea is.

Leningrad Cowboys Go Alabama

Old-timey Slang of the Day

This one requires the full dictionary definition again. It's another lovely phrase. I haven't heard this one before, even in old movies, though it has the ring of 1930s gangster movie lingo. The old dictionary I found this in didn't list dates for the period in which this word was in use, so maybe it predates the age of Edward G. Robinson and Jimmy Cagney.

clutch the gummy: "To fail; to be left to take the blame; to be cheated. Orig. on model of 'hold the bag' = to clutch the gunny bag or sack; reinforced by 'gummy' = sticky."

Weird Tales

Here's a nifty list of 85 Weird Tale-tellers. I like this list. Most of these are people whose work (music, movies, books, whatever) I sincerely dig. A few are so-so. But, hey, it's a list. That's what lists are for.

Old-timey Slang of the Day

zib: I'm going to quote my trusty old Dictionary of American Slang here, cause their definition is very specific. "A stupid person with unknown political or personal opinions; a nondescript nincompoop. Not common."

Is there an equivalent for this in modern lingo?

Comedyball

From one of my favoritest web sites: some baseball-related comedy yucks.

Old-timey Slang of the Day

heavy-cake: a ladies' man

ABC Links (mostly Wikipedia, mostly awesome)

A. Recently, a parachute possibly belonging to the infamous D.B. Cooper was found up in Washington State. (On a side note, while I've grown very tired of the increasingly ridiculous show Prison Break over the last two seasons, the first season was kinda good, largely because it featured D.B. Cooper as a character).

B. Also got this today. Now he would have been an interesting Vice President.

C. Speaking of Vice Presidents, my brother sent me this a while back. Richard Mentor Johnson had the best/worst campaign slogan ever: "Rumpsey Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh." I guess it's not as bad as "Whip Inflation Now."

Step Right Up

Carny tricks!

Old-timey Slang of the Day

sitzbein: da butt (it's from da Germans)

So Crazy It Might Be True!

A couple of interesting stories I saw on Boing Boing today:


The more believable one first: this dude is preggers. Is this a first? It seems like it would have happened before, since I assume it has been technologically possible for some time. And, no, you can't count Arnold Schwarzennegger.

I find this story about a dude who regrew his severed fingertip a bit hard to believe, though it is from a reputable news source. If this one's true, then, wowee zowee! People will be like Swamp Thing in the future! Just chop off an arm, sprinkle on some piggy dust, and it sproings right back. Awesome!

Old-timey Slang of the Day

A lovely phrase for today:

scratch gravel: to leave quickly. This one is a mid-19th century phrase. I like it a lot. It conjures up images of flying chunks of rock and cartoony fast-moving feet.

Old-timey Slang of the Day

Here's one that surprised me when I looked it up in my slang dictionary.

zilch: gibberish; double talk; meaningless language

Huh? It doesn't even list the more common meaning ("zero" or "nothing") in my dictionary (Wentworth and Flexner, eds. Dictionary of American Slang), which was published in 1960. Weird.

Beards Again

This list of bearded vice-presidents is somewhat amusing . . . and informative. I was not aware that the United States had ever had a Native American VP. I suppose I could be a typically dumb product of our nation's education system, but I prefer to think of myself as vice-presidentially challenged. Did you know that?

Old-timey Slang of the Day

Here's an odd one.

marfak: butter.

Apparently, this was used in the army for a while, and it comes from an old brand name for a chassis lubricant made by Texaco. Clever!

1 Fish, 2 Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

Fish can count. It's kinda cool right now, but when they become our Fishy Overlords, will it seem so nifty? Who will be laughing then? Probably not the fish, cause fish can't laugh. They can count, though.

Old-timey Slang of the Day

Today's word:

darb: an excellent person or thing. As in, "Ain't that a darb?!" or "She's a darb, Sully, a darb!" or "My new jalopy is a real darb, I tells ya."

This comes up a lot in movies from the 1920s and 1930s. I've also seen it in an old Krazy Kat cartoon from the 1910s. Most recently, I heard it in Sons of the Desert, a great Laurel & Hardy comedy I saw on TCM the other day. I think I heard three different permutations of it in that one.

"People think it's a lot easier to break blocks than it actually is—I make it look easy."

Brick-smashing! A Cornish strongman (how cool does that sound?!?) has broken the world's record for smashing stuff.

Another good quote from The Smasher, "I used to break things when I was a kid for fun with my friends and I would break things easily whereas my friends wouldn't."

Sweet!

Old-timey Slang of the Day

I think I will start collecting old-timey slang and posting it on this blog. Here's one.


flub the dub: to loaf, to "screw up" (used in the 1940s)

Wolfman, Jack!

Entertainment Weekly has some awesome pics of the new Wolfman movie. I love me some werewolves, and these photos look like they got it just about right this time.

NOTE: That's not him above, though that one is pretty good too.

Cons

I like a good con artist story. Here's a pretty interesting one. Apparently, a woman disguised as a male army major conned a bunch of women out of a bunch of money over in China. The best part of this article is where the investigators become convinced that something is a bit off when they hear the fake major's "high-pitched voice."

ADDED: If this was primarily an internet scam, why did this person go around dressed up in uniform? Were the police really unsure this was a lady looks like a dude? Is ananova.com trying to fool me into thinking this is a news of the weird story, or is it really a news of the weird story? Hmmm....

Monkey Bidness

I enjoyed the heck out of this gallery of medieval monkey imagery. If you like monkeys, or the Middle Ages, or storks "with a demon's head for a butt," this is for you.

Waiter, there's a bear in my courtroom!

When I was a kid I always enjoyed checking out these books from the library about odd laws from the past. Many of them revolved around animals being put on trial. I hadn't heard much about this of late, though I seem to recall a story from a few years ago about a dog being put on trial in Michigan or some such fantastic place. Well, thanks to Macedonia, my long nightmare of waiting for a story about a bear being put on trial and convicted of theft is finally over. Stephen Colbert will probably enjoy this.

I will assume that this was the defense lawyer.


P.S., this story has a reference to "turbo-folk," which you can now "understand" thanks to "Wikipedia."

"O-kay!"

Check out this freaking awesome Japanese propaganda cartoon from 1934. It's got an evil Mickey Mouse riding a bat that shoots bullets out of its mouth.

Bark!

Dog goes nuts.

Right Outta The Screen!

I found this New York Times article on upcoming 3-D movies helpful in figuring out what I'm gonna go see this summer. It's like you're right there, getting poked in the eye!

Seriously, though, 3-D is cool. I don't care what any of you say.

Neato Toledo!

Here are some fun kaleidoscopes you make with your internets.

Kaleidoscope 1

Kaleidoscope 2

Gnomishness

Uh-oh! A gnome sighting.

It's good, but is it THIS good?

Cape and Tights

While we're reading, this New Yorker essay by Michael Chabon is quite good, too. It's about superhero costumes. Y'know, capes and like that.

Hello

I enjoyed this article about weird names today. It's a good article detailing some of the unusual names uncovered in a new book and some of the historical and cultural reasons for the names people give their kids.

On the same page in today's New York Times was this article about the end of the planet. This second article is quite interesting on its own, especially if you enjoy that feeling of awe that you can only get by thinking about space and the impossibly distant future. My juvenile brain, though, happened to notice one unfortunate name in the article, which I probably wouldn't have caught had I not read the other article first. You'll see.

More bad name ideas here, from the co-author of the book I just mentioned.

Oh, and there's a guy on this show right now named Wendell Mendell.

As they say on The Wire, it's all connected.

"A consumer advocate is a person in your neighborhood..."

I love this scene. And Sesame Street.

"Death comes in the night on little cat's feet"

Andrew W.K. meets John McLaughlin here. Oh, and it's awesome.

ADDED: Here is the actual exchange, from Wonkette.

Hey, A Movie!

I ordered my Wisconsin Film Festival tickets today. Here's what I plan to see, at least for now:

*My Winnipeg

*OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies

*Bon Cop, Bad Cop

*Timecrimes

*The Pixar Story

*You, the Living

*The Wonderful World of Sid Laverents

*Mongol

*Planet of the Apes

*Flight of the Red Balloon

*The Singing Revolution

Squiddy Squiddy Squiddy, Rock and Roll

A friend of mine sent this to me; it's amusing.

Another friend sent me this only an hour later.

Cephalopod synchronicity?

Old Ladies With Guns

A 100-year-old woman in Russia is the best hunter in her area, according to local officials. This is a cool story; she became a hunter because she was "bored."

Note: that's not her pictured above. You can tell, cause she'd have a gun, or maybe a crossbow.

Fact or Fiction?

Another writer has admitted making up her "memoirs."

This news follows another case of writerly shenanigans.

Here's the story from today's New York Times about these recent incidents. Of course, there's a reference to the most famous case of this in recent years.

This reminds me of my favorite episode of Leave It To Beaver, the one where he writes the fake diary because his real life is too boring and depressing.

Why don't people just start writing, I dunno, fiction?

Comics, Stripped

Comic strips are sometimes funny. Comic strips that people mess with on the internet are a lot funnier. For example, see Garfield minus Garfield.

There's also Garfield without speech balloons. (What is it about Garfield?)

Or perhaps you'd prefer to have Marmaduke explained to you.

Manigator?

Boing Boing has a cool story about the The Return of the Lizard Man.

More.

Carnies!

Elegy for a vanishing way of life.

Subliminable

An interesting post on Althouse about a possibly intentional, racist, subliminal message in the "3 A.M." ad got me thinking a bit about subliminal messages in other contexts.





A short subliminal roundup:

* Other campaign ads.


*Info on a subliminal message controversy surrounding Disney movies (see Snopes.com for more on this).


*A number of subliminal (and not-so-subliminal) images.


*A piece on research from New Scientist.


*An article from the BBC.


* A skeptical view.


Clearly, further research is needed.