Well. That Plan Certainly Ganged Aft Agley, now didn't it.

I don't recall if I've ever mentioned it, but Vizsla's love rearranging furniture.

So the other day, in amongst a fit of trying to get the stupid computer working again (a struggle which I ultimately won, as you will observe) I decided that the obvious approach to the problem was to rearrange the den.

Step one of this plan, for reasons that are far too complicated to go into here, was to clear off the bottom two shelves of a bookshelf on the far side of the room so that I could lovingly display the VHS copies of Doctor Who episodes circa 1963-1989 in broadcast order next to the shelves of the DVD releases of same.*

*Yes, I realize how sad that sounds typed out.

In any case, part of the rationale of clearing off the shelves was that I really do have a hell of a lot of books in the den that don't really need to be there and now live quite happily on a shelf in the basement.  See, Doctor Who does fix everything.

So there I was, going through a buttload of P.D. James and Charlaine Harris and god knows what else, when I came across a small copy of Robert Burns' Tam O'Shanter (which as I recall I bought in a W.H. Smiths in Ayr, although I might be mistaken about that.)

Robert Burns, for those who are unfamiliar, was a Scottish poet (and so much more actually, but we'll keep it to the cliffnotes here) who - amongst other things - wrote a poem called, 'To a Mouse, On turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November, 1785.' 

The title may not immediately ring any bells for you, however it's relatively certain that you've quoted it at some point, as this is the one that contains the bit about 'The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men...'

The actual quote, second stanza from the end of the poem, runs thus-

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best laid schemes o' Mice and Men

Gang aft agley,

An' lae'e us nought but grief an' pain,

For promis'd joy

   
Now it's a safe bet that a reasonable percentage of you just said - 'That's not how it goes' or 'I learned it went 'Go Oft Astray' or 'I'm only here for pictures of Markie Post in a bikini.  Where are the pictures of Markie Post in a bikini?'

Robert Burns' primary contribution to poetry, literature, and art in general lies in this exact point.  He was one of the first - if not the actual first - writers in modern English (ish) to say 'screw all that formal English, I'm going to write in the dialect that people actually speak.'  Which is where all that so-called 'Mongrel' Gaelic blend 'Gang aft agley' business comes from.  It means more or less 'go oft astray', but no one in the real world would actually ever put it that formally.  In 1785 Scotland they would have said 'Gang Aft Agley', and so that's how Robert was Damn Well going to write it, formality and convention be damned.  He was tearing down the artificial distinction between 'legitimate' 'highbrow' language and the low-brow 'common' way that actual human beings spoke to one another. If you don't see why this appeals to me, allow me to refer you to Vizsla versus the Myth of High and Low culture, 17 Limericks about Orthography, and several other previous columns.

It's also worth noting that this is the same poem that gave the world (and Russell T. Davies) the phrase 'Tim'rous beastie', Which means that Burns is responsible however indirectly for John Steinback, Eddie Izzard and Tooth and Claw.

The point of the poem, should anyone care is that Robert was out plowing his field, accidentally ran over a mouse hole, thus destroying the tim'rous beastie in questions home, and basically spend a few pages saying, 'wow.  Sucks man.  You spent all that time building a nice house and somebody just comes along and screws it up for you.  Just goes to show, no matter how hard you plan things can still go wrong.  That's why it's a mistake to try.  Or care about anything.'*

*That last part is merely implied.

All of which is my way of leading up to the revelation that the diet isn't going terribly well.

To bring us all up to speed - Previously on: The 42nd Vizsla - I announced that I was attempting this 30 days with no carbs and no sugar thing despite the many reasons why that was a horrible idea.

Day 1 - All went well.

Day 2 - did pretty well until about 10:30 pm at which point I determined that I could not carry on working on my Halloween costume without a glass of scotch.  (In my defense, I was nearly done and the cuffs were kicking my ass.

Day 3 - Was a weekend.  Can of Soda on the way to a work event.  Large soda at the work event.  Large Scotch after the work event (In my defense, it was a kids movie screening.  I defy anyone working such an event to not have a largish drink afterwards.

Day 4 - Sunday.  Well, the weekend was already shot anyway...

Day 5 - Back on the wagon.  Until early evening when we had a chicken with rice hot dish, but it was delicious and I don't regret a thing.

Day 8 - Work Halloween party.  Then Halloween.  The predictable occurs

Day 9-12 - Who are you to judge me.

And so... I have to decree the great no crab/no sugar event of 2013 to be less than an entire rousing success.

BUT...

I have cut pop intake down to less than a can every other day

I haven't actually had any carbs at work since I started - it turns out the vending machine has almonds.

It actually got me to start working out daily again.

So, all things being equal, it can't be said to be a total failure either.

Now I just have to deal with this guy who just drove a plow through my house...

Vizslka Flashback - For the record - 'Jason Statham-y' is a totally legitimate adjective

Earlier today I was trying to explain a certain look as being 'Jason Statham-y'* And was pleased to discover that the person I was talking to instantly understood what that meant.  So I'm going to take that as a sign that The Transporter movies were not a complete waste of time.  (Crank, however...)

*It means - Shaved head, unshaved face, dress shirt and tie, and a slightly menacing air that indicates one might whip off the shirt and tie and start kicking peoples asses at any moment.

The interesting thing about this is that back in the bygone days of yore, before he was legally required to appear in any movie that features three or more machine guns, Our Jason actually began as an Olympic Diver for Great Britain.

What I like about this little fun fact to know and share is this-

Diving is hardly considered to be the manliest of your Olympic events.  Generally speaking it's held to be only slightly manlier than Ribbon Dancing and Soccer.  (In the US in any case)

But I think we're all unlikely to point that out to Mr. Statham.  For fear that the shirt and tie would be coming off and the ass kicking would commence.

btw - Mr. Statham, if you're reading this - this is merely an observation about the biases of the general public and you and me are still totally cool, right?  Also, I loved you in Snatch.

(It's a movie.  Get your mind out of the gutter, you.)

"You are one cotton twill suitcoat away from the ass kicking of a lifetime, my friend."

Happy Halloween from the four legged set

As I've noted once or twice here in the past - Halloween is the best Holiday by a country mile.  No obligations, no schedules, no endless shopping requirements.  It's a day devoted entirely to two things and two things only - Wearing ridiculous outfits and making little kids happy by giving them candy.

And while dogs- Stanley notwithstanding- are not usually huge into the whole costume scene, if there's one group that is solidly behind the concept of 'treats' it is dogs.

So, on behalf of dog-kind everywhere, here's to having a great Halloween.  Now go have a treat. 

Wither Thou, Frute Brute?

Back in my day, before anybody cared about feeding kids a ton of sugar because we were just going to run around outside unsupervised burning it off*, General Mills produced a range of 'Monster' themed kids cereals that were really just a thinly veiled excuse to cram as many marshmallows as possible into a cereal bowl.

*Often until well after dark.  This is of course when we weren't busy bicycling without a helmet or standing up on the front bench seat of the car while it was being driven down the freeway.  The 70s were a magical time.

The main three monster cereals that everyone remembers are of course Count Chocula (chocolate, obviously), Franken-Berry (Strawberry), and Boo Berry* (Blueberry).

*This subject was broached on a friends Facebook Feed where Boo Berry prompted some curiously impassioned hostile responses in the comment thread.  I feel sure there was a back story behind them but was kind of afraid to ask.

What is less widely remembered (until recently, for reasons that we'll get to in a moment) are the lesser two monster cereals.  The marshmallow laced bastard children of the General Mills Product family.  I refer of course to Yummy Mummy and its immediate predecessor, Fruit Brute (as it was then spelled)

A bit of history - Count Chocula came first (although he was originally Dr. Count Chocula - apparently he had his credentials stripped from him at some point in the early 70s, although no information is readily forthcoming as to what academic scandal precipitated this.)  Then FrankenBerry, Then BooBerry.  Then they branched out from single flavor marshmallows and attempted a fruity blend of flavors all in the same bowl.  Having already tapped the iconography of Vampires, Frankenstein's Monster*, and Ghosts they went to the next obvious monster The Werewolf.  I'm guessing however that 'Fruity Werewolf' didn't test market well as a name and so they instead went for a picture of a werewolf with a cereal name of 'Fruit Brute'.  A few years later they decided this wasn't really making a killing in the market (see what I did there?) so they discontinued it and replaced it with 'Fruity Yummy Mummy'.  This also didn't do well (despite the slightly desperate inclusion of the clarifying adjective in the title) and so they gave up on it as well and focused instead on the big three.

*not Frankenstein himself, as that was the scientist.  Seriously people, it's not that hard to keep straight.

Eventually the 80s happened, some jerk pointed out that stuffing kids full of marshmallows at breakfast might not be the healthiest option, and the line was cancelled.*

*This is roughly the same time that 'Sugar Bear' encountered his own significant PR problem from which he never recovered.  I believe he can be currently found in the parking lot adjacent to the Chinese Theater offering to go 'around the world' for 13 dollars.  Sad.

A couple of years ago, however, nostalgia for the 70s happened (curiously at around the time that Gen-Xers were settling down to a nice paycheck and a bit of disposable income.) and they Monster cereals were brought out of the vault. 

However, as I only recently discovered, they didn't actually come out entirely (insert joke here).  Instead, General Mills dodged the whole 'My isn't that a bowl of marshmallows' issue very cleverly by only producing the monster cereals for the three months before Halloween, thus getting them grandfathered in on the loosened sugar intake standards of the Halloween season AND making it look like that was a mere coincidence as 'honest, we're just celebrating our beloved Monster Characters in the spirit of the season. 

Well Played, marketing department of General Mills.  Well Played.

This went so well for the first couple of Halloween seasons with just the big three that THIS year they went whole hog and included both Yummy Mummy AND Fruit Brute.  (Because -  What the Hell.  How much sustained loyalty do they need to have to cover a three month window?)

Here they encountered a problem, however.  It turns out that since 1973 the FDA had gotten a little pickier about labeling something as 'Fruit'.  It turns out that just having a picture of an orange on the box wasn't enough.  And so, the re-release was rechristened 'Frute Brute'.*

*The label of Fruity Yummy Mummy was allowed to remain unchanged, which is an interesting distinction. 

Fruit loops underwent a similar issue a fair while back and is now 'Froot Loops'.  What I'd like to draw your attention to here is that through the necessity of having to deliberately misspell the word 'Fruit' in order to avoid accidentally fooling anyone into thinking there was any actual 'fruit' in the content', both cereals chose to adopt a visual rhyme to the spelling - in many ways making the new name feel much more fundamentally 'right' than the correct spelling had been.  To illustrate what I mean just try flipping the misspellings and see how discordant it feels in comparison.

So, for at least the next week and as long as supplies last, enjoy your daily serving of frute.  Remember - at the end of the day Werewolves are always cooler than any other monster.  Always.

C-3P0 and Diminishing Returns

<I promise - this actually comes around to a relevant point.  Eventually.  >

Around 4 AM this morning I became vitally concerned with an essential truth.

Like most essential truths discovered at that hour, this was Star Wars related.

I should preface this by saying that I have absolutely no idea what I was dreaming about prior to this, nor do I know what brought the thought to mind.  Nonetheless, there - in the wee hours of the night - the unvarnished truth of it became clear.

C-3P0 works in Episode 4 (A New Hope (or simply Star Wars if you're not terribly pedantic about these things)) largely due to the fact that George Lucas never intended him to be like that. 

(This is where I traditionally would include a photo of C-3P0 with some sort of snappy caption.  But have you seen Lucasfilm's legal team?  No thank you.)

I'll explain (again for the non-pedants among you.*) 

* No, it means 'overly concerned with the small details at the expense of the larger picture'.  Yes, I'm sure.  No, you're thinking of either 'Pederast' or 'Pedophile'.  Yes, those are very different.
 
In the script for the Original Star Wars (1977) the character of C-3P0 is very different from how he ended up being portrayed on screen.  George Lucas' original intention was that C-3P0 had the personality of a sleazy used car dealer (this is how he himself describes his original plan for the character.

Anthony Daniels was hired to play only the body of C-3P0 - largely because he was skinny enough to fit in the suit and had at one time been trained to move properly.  Because the voice was going to be dubbed in later, Tony was just speaking the lines on set so that others had something to react to.  It was only later that the decision was taken that Tony should be the voice as well, once George Lucas had been won over by Anthony Daniels' take on the character (and, one supposes, Anthony as a human being, as the two do seem to be genuinely fond of each other in a way that - say - he and Harrison Ford do not.)

What makes this relevant is that none of the scripted lines changed, only the way that they were said.  If you go back and actually read the lines themselves you'll see that in that first film 3P0 is a gigantic prick for pretty much most of the film.  He calls R2-D2 names, Blames R2 for his own earlier mistakes, and sucks up in the most obsequious way possible to every human being he comes into contact with.  If you imagine the part as Joe Pesci would have played it you pretty much have what George originally wanted the character to be.

It's only at the end of the movie when 3P0 (if I might use the familiar) comes around and volunteers to donate his own parts to R2-D2 after he gets shot by crossfire during the end run sequence in the Death Star trench.  One imagines that George originally wanted this to be played terribly earnestly, making the crux of the story 'Little C-3P0 grows a heart'

Not a subtle writer, George.

In the finished product, that offer of spare parts comes across as one more example of character fussiness, and an expression of the genuine affection the two droids have had for one another all along under the surface rather than the sort of ham-fisted 'What is this thing... 'love'...?' moment so beloved by a certain thread of science fiction.

My point is - for this one film and one film only there in a beautiful dissonance between the words being spoken and the character being played and it makes him a billion times more interesting than the straightforward C-3P0 who was scripted in every Star Wars film after this point.

It's a mistake to get too much of your own way too often.  Quite often the most wonderful things are the result of somebody unexpected coming along and completely screwing up your plan.

Halloween down in the Lab

Long term readers may recall that I've mentioned my friend Stanley once or twice.

Stanley's a black lab, which is a pretty solid thing to be.  If you can't be a Vizsla you should totally be a lab.  or Batman.  Or a lab dressed as Batman.

Which brings me to Halloween.

Now, Vizslas aren't huge supporters of Halloween as far as costuming goes.  I have a pirate costume that I may put on on Thursday.  The Shelties have costumes that they do no enjoy (Dinosaur and Princess, respectively) and the last time anyone tried to put a costume (reindeer antlers specifically) on Jake he peed on them and then hid under a desk for the rest of the day, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's unlikely anyone will attempt to costume him again anytime soon.

Treats I'm all for, it should go without saying.

Stanley, on the other hand...  Well, Stanley's Mom is enthusiastic on the subject of costuming.

See below - Stanley's new costume for this year-

Yes.  It's the tiniest and most adorable Headless Horseman you have ever seen.  And I think I speak for all of us when I say that if the Headless Horseman's steed was that adorable he would have been far more successful picking people off on that covered bridge.  Ichabod Crane would have been so busy scritching ears and rubbing bellies that he probably wouldn't even have noticed his own imminent decapitation.

Vizsla Flashback - The Elephant Seal thing is probably going to have a negative impact on tourism...

Back on the Halcyon days of July 12th, I posted the following in response to the previous days discussion (17 Limericks about Orthography)

Enjoy--


The Elephant Seal thing is probably going to have a negative impact on tourism...


The original intention for today was to do 17 orthographic thoughts about Limerick (The City), but I soon discovered that I didn't really have 17 orthographically themed thoughts about Limerick (The City) outside of the fact that in Irish it's name is Luimneach, and thanks to The Lord of the Rings everything written out in Irish looks like it's supposed to be sung by magical elves.

"Poguuuuuue MaHONE.....Ta lourahlourahlourah!"

*It's also apparently in the province of Munster, which is just neat

What I did however discover in my admittedly sparce  research, is that the center portion of the city is actually an Island (the river cuts around it on either side) which is now known as Kings Island.

But originally it was called Inis an Ghaill Duibh (insert singing elves here) which translates to 'The Dark Haired Foreigner's Island', which I'm choosing to interpret as evidence that at some point around 812 AD the island was visited by the Second Doctor.

The point that I'm trying to circle in on here - Before we started thinking about the naming of things as a formalized process, people just called things by whatever reference that they had on hand and everyone else was sort of ok with it.  And so you ended up with place names along the lines of 'The smallish hill next to that mean ladies house', or 'The beach where Joe got raped by that Elephant Seal'

Which reminds me a time a few years ago where someone was trying to publish a map of Olde London Towne circa the time of the Great Fire (That would be September 1666 for those Americans in the audience who might be forgiven for never having heard of the event as it didn't happen to us so why would we bother knowing about it.)

The problem that they ran into while putting the map together is that there were a number of streets whose names were a little more on the 'colorful' side than we modern folk are used to seeing.  'Shithouse Street' being one of the tamer examples that they actually were able to get away with printing.

In the Continental US things are a little different.  We don't have a thousand odd years of living here to have gotten used to the old names just sticking around.  Place names in the US are typically a zesty mixture of ridiculously optimistic praise selected by settlers who were just happy to have finally freakin' arrived at the damn place ( 'Eden Prairie', 'Golden Valley', 'New Hope', etc.), and adopted titles from the Athapaskan of Algonquin names for the region ('Shakopee', 'Keewatin', et al., which by and large probably are along the lines of 'the smallish hill by that mean woman's house', but since we don't speak the languages in question we simply don't notice.  That said, Shakopee could equally well be Ojibwe for 'Look at me, I'm a stupid pale moron who like to eat butt' and they just told the settlers it was someone's name as some sort of elaborate practical joke.  In fact, I kind of hope it does, now that I think of it.)

Look out for those elephant seals

-Vizsla Out