Whimsy: June 2005 Archives

It seemed timely to come across this during the Presbyterian Church in America's annual general assembly:

That's a screenshot from a Chinese bootleg DVD of the new Star Wars release, "The Backstroke of the West," with English subtitles translated back from the dubbed Chinese dialogue. winterson.com has this and ten more screenshots and explains why the Presbyterian Church makes an appearance in Star Wars -- it's the back-translation of the Chinese translation of "Jedi Council". (Hat tip to Language Hat.)

Makes sense. The Jedi Council sort of looks like a presbytery meeting -- you have a group of men (must have been PCA or OPC Jedis) conversing in serious tones about serious issues, and an emphasis on doing things "decently and in order." I'll bet more than one teaching elder in some of our far-flung presbyteries has wished he could attend presbytery holographically.

What do you suppose we'd find in the subtitles from the rest of the movie and the rest of the series? Did they translate "Trade Federation" into "Auburn Avenue Pastors Conference"? Does Obi-Wan say at the end, "Only a Sith believes in strict subscription!" Did Luke's sojurn on the ice world of Hoth make him the Frozen Chosen One? Does the "D." in D. James Kennedy stand for "Darth"?

Feel free, especially you fellow Calvinists out there, to make up your own jokes and post them in the comments.

(Oh, the title refers to an 18th century split in the Presbyterian Church between supporters of the Great Awakening revivalist preachers -- the New Side -- and those who believed revivalists were undermining established church order -- the Old Side.)

Father Shane Tharp at Catholic Ragemonkey paints a vivid picture:

Every priest has a couple of bridezilla stories, that is, brides who went on a rampage because they got the notion in their heads that their wedding day was meant to fulfill every pretty, pretty princess dreams and when things don't go their way, Tokyo must pay the price.

I'm proud to say that neither Bridezilla nor Groomzilla were present at our nuptials 16 years ago. And the even-tempered young bride who asked our four-year-old daughter to be a flower girl back in January wasn't the least bit perturbed at her attack of stage fright at the rehearsal (she got over it), nor bothered by her decision not to drop any petals from her basket during the procession.

To balance out my boasting of my score on the online IQ test, I feel compelled to direct you to this entry I wrote in my first month of blogging: "Smarts ain't all they're cracked up to be."

I think I've found the brainiest blog on the Internet. The blogger, named Tom, writes about favorite foods (often!), taxes, family, pets, pop culture, and his longing for a meaningful relationship. Here's a recent entry:

So, I was hanging out with Keith Richards last night, and I asked him something I've wondered as long as I've known him: "Why haven't you ever eaten Mick Jagger's brains?"

And Keith told me -- get this -- he told me he's not a zombie.

I know! What the hell! You could've knocked me over with a feather. I mean, he looks like a zombie, he smells like a zombie... I just figured: zombie.

I was so shocked, I forgot to eat his brains. Maybe next week. We're going to Golf n' Stuff on Tuesday.

I guess he was on TV recently:

I still say, if Dr. Phil didn't want to have his brains eaten, he shouldn't have gotten all up in my grill about being an undeadbeat dad.

That's from Tom the Zombie, and I found his blog, zombie eat brains, in a collection of undead links in a recent entry at Incoming Signals, a daily assortment of amazing links from around the web.

Full disclosure: I am posting this for my own self-preservation. (UPDATE: Maybe not! And Dwayne, if he shows up at my front door, he'll be handed a map to your house. And a PikePass.)

Your IQ Is 140

Your Logical Intelligence is Genius Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius Your General Knowledge is Genius

(Hat tip: Jack Bennett of Idle Mendacity, a New York City conservative Catholic blogger who has me on his blogroll. In recent entries he mourns the passing of Frank Gorshin and the hi-JACK-ing of the oldies format at WCBS-FM. Thanks for the link, Jack, and I've blogrolled you, too.)

I still haven't bothered to visit the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington's Left Coast glitterati group blog, so I can't even link to it. But I have discovered its parody site -- Huffington's Toast, and it's on my blogroll.

It reminds of National Lampoon's Letters section, from that magazine's heyday in the late 1970s -- brief opinions purporting to be from celebrities. (It took me a few issues to figure out that the letters weren't really by the celebrities named, and, no, that wasn't really Jimmy Carter's cousin writing a monthly column about his misadventures with Brother Billy.)

Huffington's Toast features blog entries that are explicitly labeled "not really by" famous folks. It's written by some of the best satirists in the blogosphere. (See their links under "Arianna and Her Stooges" in the site's right sidebar.)

I especially enjoyed the exchange between evil galactic warlord Xenu* and Sc**nt*l*gy devotee Tom Cruise*, and political consultant Bob Shrum*'s prescription for the Democratic Party. Don't overlook the mugshots for each writer. (In Andrew Sullivan's case, that's the mugshot of Paul "Pee Wee Herman" Reubens, from his 1991 indecent exposure arrest.)

It's frequently updated and always good for a laugh.

(* Not really.)

I wondered about the same thing:

Re: Coruscant apartment codes. The architecture of the city is one of those giddy treats for city geeks. All those sleek Moderne towers and endless urban canyons. One of the best sequences consisted of Vader and Padme looking into the city, considering their fates; the camera moved slowly between the towers, for no particular reason; what, do the astral project when troubled? But any excuse for a flythrough. It’s just a cool place. But. BUT. For God’s sake, why aren’t there any railings anywhere? You build a docking pad so people can visit your 127th floor apartment, but you don’t build a railing? It’s windy up there. I’d get out of my car and crawl on my belly to the porch, and I wouldn’t stand up until I saw something I could grab. Like the hostess.

Read all of James Lileks' "disconnected observations" on "Revenge of the Sith" in today's Bleat.

Is there anything you can do with games that are missing pieces? Dwayne the Canoe Guy has a brilliant answer to that question: He's bagging them -- 20 to a package -- and selling them at scrapbooking stores. You can see a photo of one of his packages, which includes cards from the '70s Parker Brothers board game The Inventors and tiles from Trippples.

It's fascinating to comb through the raw server logs for my website. awstats does a pretty good job of summarizing who's visiting, where visitors are coming from, and what they're looking at, but the detail in the raw log allows me to put it all together.

For example, it allows me to see that someone behind the Tulsa Whirled's firewall (209.184.242.253) got to BatesLine via Google searches for "Bobby Lorton" (on June 2) and "robert e. lorton iii" (on June 3). A bit of vanity Googling, perhaps? BatesLine is the first result for both of those searches, thanks to tulsaworld.com walling itself off from the Internet and sounding retreat in the battle for Googlespace.

Then there was this intriguing search: lorton tulsa klan. On my site, that leads to a couple of category archive pages, where the words are all mentioned, but nowhere near each other.

Just below my result was this: A 1993 issue of a newsletter devoted to the murder of Hollywood silent film star, director, and Casanova William Desmond Taylor, shot to death in 1922. Taylor's death came not long after the trial of Fatty Arbuckle, and Hollywood was regarded around the country as a modern day Babylon.

The newsletter includes a collection of headlines, editorials, and one-liners from newspaper coverage of the Taylor murder. Within days of the killing, newspapers from Boston to Seattle to Wichita to Savannah were responding with pointed, punny comments about Taylor, Hollywood morals, and the investigation:

February 4, 1922, DES MOINES REGISTER: The recent movie tragedy was too realistic for the director's health.

February 6, 1922, RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH: The question now is, who saw Director Taylor last. Until recently, the burning issue among the movie queens was, who saw him first.

February 7, 1922, PITTSBURGH SUN: Nowadays a great many screen luminaries are being tried and found wanton.

February 8, 1922, BOSTON HERALD: A "gruelling" examination, as the police employ the term, is one expected to put its recipient in the soup.

February 9, 1922, INDIANAPOLIS STAR: A movie funeral seems to be one thing that will get the Los Angeles people out to church.

February 16, 1922, BOSTON ADVERTISER: Police in Hollywood have not thought of questioning the movie bathing girls. Experience proves they conceal little.

Apparently there was a flimsy but important piece of evidence in the case:

February 10, 1922, COLUMBIA STATE: In the modern murder case it is not only cherchez la femme, but cherchez la lingerie.

February 11, 1922, DES MOINES TRIBUNE: Incidentally, the Hollywood tragedy has brought home to some women the advisability of omitting initials from nighties.

There's more from the nation's newspapers in that issue, including a short excerpt from a Tulsa World writer named Otis Lorton.

You Are a Pundit Blogger!

Your blog is smart, insightful, and always a quality read. Truly appreciated by many, surpassed by only a few.

(HT: Badger Blogger, a blog devoted to Wisconsin politics and media criticism.)

Alt-comic icon Zippy the Pinhead was in the neighborhood recently, having a chat with the Golden Driller. Tulsa Time has the comic, from May 24, along with Zippy's visit to the Blue Whale in Catoosa, from July 15, 2002.