Mood:  lyrical

I admit it: I love snark.  I try not to incorporate it into my daily weltanschauung, but once in awhile, there's nothing like a good splashing wallow inside the bilge tanks of pop culture.  Snark is a guilty pleasure.

So, if you secretly enjoy 300 reviews that are utterly hilarious, profane, and snarky, don't miss this assessment by Cav Gallagher.  Best quotes:  "I messaged a friend straight after I saw the movie swearing that it had made me 0.239% more gay than I had been before I walked in there" and "I'm patenting 'Shout-a-Longa-300' right now".

And, since Guilty Pleasures is today's topic, here's a list of some other guilty pleasures.  What are yours?

1.  Bread (the rock group).  "Baby, I'm-a want you" hurts my delicate grammar glands.  "If" sounds like it was recorded 35,000 feet under the ocean.   And yet...I've owned "Bread's Greatest Hits" in two different formats (cassette and CD), and the songs continue to metastasize inside my iPod.  There is no cure.

2.  Snocaps, small dark chocolate nonpareils.  I hardly ever eat candy, but once in a blue moon I'll buy an $8 box at the movies.  They're tiny, crunchy, and endlessly entertaining.  As a bonus, you get an avalanche of little white pebbles in your lap after the box is empty.

3.  Watching Faramir Get Abused By His Dad.  Whoops, was that out loud?

4.  Electric Light Orchestra.  I adore ELO, in all its cheesy synthesized extraterrestrial glory.  But only before Jeff Lynne started doing the paisley vest and cowboy boot producer thing in the mid-80s.

5.  Archie Comics.  This is more of a childhood guilty pleasure.  I've always been fascinated by the perpetual tic-tac-toe diagram branded onto the side of Archie's head, as though he recently took a nap on a griddle. 

What's Archie saying here?  No idea.  It's Greek to me.   (Possibly this is an early prototype of Frank Miller's 300.  Dilios yelling at King Leonidas: "What's my girlfriend doing in your Five?")

6.  Beverly Hills 90210.  Ah yes, I was glued to this show.  House fires, cocaine addictions,  Donna's abusive singing boyfriend, Dylan cooperates with the CIA, Steve makes out with a transvestite. Memories.  Misty, water-colored memories.

7.  Mambo #5.  Against my will, I like this song.  No, I hate it.  I really, really hate it.  Now it's stuck in my head.

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 10:22 AM EDT

Updated: April 20, 2007 12:05 PM EDT

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Mood:  on fire

Math problems:

1. If a 30' x 30' basement fills with 4" of standing water in 8 hours, how many cubic feet of water does the basement contain?

2. If Susie and Sammy begin bailing out the water at 11:30 pm with 8" x 8" buckets, which are then hauled up the steps, across the yard, and dumped out at the edge of the property, how many years will it take to empty the basement?

3.  Should Susie and Sammy just move instead?

4.  If a cat sits on the bottom step and laps up the sludgy water, floating leaves, and mysterious black ooze emanating from the rusty boiler, approximately how many minutes will pass before cat throwup materializes on the bathroom rug?

***

But let us pass on to more pleasant topics besides math and cat yak.  Horses!

Fans everywhere are enjoying the photos of David practicing horseback riding in Sydney, in preparation for filming Australia this month.  He looks so confident and tall in the saddle.

Unfortunately, I know absolutely bupkus about horseback riding, so I can't really offer much in the way of intelligent commentary here.  Like every other girl on the planet, I went through the Horsey Phase when I was six.  I wanted a horse SO badly.  Every birthday wish, Santa letter, and bedtime prayer was the same: "I want a pony.  Please bring me a pony.  I want a pony."   Bicycle seats, swings, and sofa arms all became transformed into swift Pony Express palominos.  I wrote and illustrated countless cowboy stories, in which the horses resembled cantankerous mules in need of liposuction.  (The bad guys' horses had fangs.)  I stuck Fisher Price people and #2 pencils onto model horses with clay and staged medieval jousts.  I wrote school reports on horses, thinly cribbed from Encyclopedia Brittanica ("A horse is an odd-toed ungulate mammal...") and illustrated with more grumpy, lumpy mules.  I dreamed of living out on the wide open prairie.  Just me and my horse, Wildflower.

Years later, when I actually got to ride a horse, it was the most terrifying experience of my life.  Some friends and I rented horses from a shady character near the Giza Pyramids and went off riding in the desert.  My horse, "Mickey Mouse", was about two feet tall.  The saddle didn't have any stirrups.  I had to stick my legs out sideways to keep my feet from dragging in the sand.   Mickey had two speeds: stalled, and full-out gallop.

Stalled I could handle, but gallop was a different story.  Nobody had instructed me in the finer points of gripping with my thighs and moving in unison with the horse.  When Mickey suddenly burst into a gallop, I jounced around on his back like a sack of potatoes, the sand whizzing inches beneath my nose, then inches beneath my tush, as I sprawled across the horse's back, searching for a handhold.  A casual observer might have thought I was a trick rider, except for the curse words streaming out of my mouth.  I wasn't terrified of falling off so much as falling off and watching Mickey vanish over the horizon, leaving me to stagger to a lost, scorching death somewhere in the Saharan outback.  Hidalgo this wasn't.

Abruptly, Mickey stopped, nearly catapulting me over his neck.  No amount of clucking and heel-digging would get him to move.  We stayed put, my nose slowly frying to a crisp in the noonday sun, until something ticked over in Mickey's brain and we were off again.  Across the desert we went, stopping and galloping, stopping and galloping.

Miraculously, I was able to cling to Mickey's back long enough for him to find his way back to Giza.   My friends had long since disappeared, but Mickey knew where the oats were.  I could tell he couldn't wait to get rid of me.  The moment I caught sight of Mickey's owner and slid off his back, he bolted.

Dear Santa: you may give my pony to another little girl.  My preferred mode of odd-toed ungulate transportation is the camel.  They may growl at you, they may spit, but they're predictable.  They don't gallop so much as galumph.  The saddles are quite comfortable, and you get to wear a headdress and carry a little stick.  You're also high enough off the ground so that, if you do end up lying across the saddle on your stomach, you're not in any danger of having your face sanded off at high speed.

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 3:35 PM EDT

Updated: April 17, 2007 5:19 PM EDT

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Mood:  accident prone

Still lovin' the new toothbrush.  We're eloping to Cancun in the morning.

We've had 8 inches of rain this morning, driven sideways across the state by 70-mph winds.  The power is out everywhere, trees are down, roads are flooded, water is rising in basements, and people are being evacuated from the coast (I evacuated myself to work, where there's heat, light, and a microwave).  Apparently, when the weather is bad, people in pickup trucks have free license from God to drive like asshats.  That is the only conclusion I can make following this morning's incident, in which a small balding man in a pickup truck seventeen times the size of my Honda decided he wanted my lane, ran me off the road into a puddle, then made a point of stopping to give me the finger (in case I hadn't noticed that he was a jerk).

Blow, Winds, and crack your Cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes spout,
Till you have drench'd the four-wheel drive pickup
Of Idiot Jerkface Man.

(thought I to myself, somewhat uncharitably)

In this day and age of reality television, when everybody who's anybody has been voted off the island and dissed by Simon Cowell at least once, it's statistically amazing that I don't know anybody who's been on TV.  And refreshing.  I myself have been on TV twice, or rather, parts of my body have been on TV:

1.  When I was nine, the local Evening Magazine anchors came to interview my neighbor across the street who had invented some kind of new running shoe.  They wanted shots of kids exercising and running around, so a few of us neighborhood kids went down to the school playground and were filmed for two hours running around and committing mayhem.  A week later, a half-second shot of my feet jumping rope appeared on Evening Magazine.  My mom's comment: "We need to buy you new shoes."

2.  A few years ago, a friend roped me into volunteering for the Channel 2 Auction at the Boston PBS station.  My job was to stand in the background and circle, on a whiteboard, the current bid for the item on Table E as it was announced.  Due to a combination of bad stage fright and a dried-out marker, viewers were periodically treated to close-ups of a palsied hand drawing shaky, imaginary circles.  With loud skreeeeks and squeeeeals from the defunct marker.  Eventually I was reassigned to go-fer duty, as people stopped phoning in bids for fear of triggering yet another scene with Marker Hand.

Yes, it's been a long and distinguished television career.  I'm ready for my close up, Mr. DeMille.

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 12:05 PM EDT

Updated: April 16, 2007 1:27 PM EDT

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Mood:  suave

After years of brushing my teeth with spiky, abrasive nylon horrors, yesterday my new dentist gave me a toothbrush that's so soft, I actually went back and brushed my teeth twice after breakfast, and now I'm anxiously looking forward to our next tryst at the bathroom sink.  It feels like massaging your mouth with a silver cloud.  The head is compact, so it fits comfortably 'twixt my dainty, rosebud lips, and it has a flexible neck and a rubber thumb grip.

It really takes very little to make me happy.

This blog never passes up a chance to discuss delicate topics, so today let's look at some OTHER 300 controversies.  Besides the Iran thing.

Controversy #1:  David's voice. 

Lots of reviews and many, many bloggers have singled out the odd tone of Dilios' narration.  Why, they ask, does he sound more like Carl than Faramir?  Why the pinched accent?  Why the high pitch?

Now, none of us were privy to whatever discussions went on between Wenham, Frank Miller, Zach Snyder, and the other cast members.  My guess is that they made a deliberate choice to give Dilios's voice an eerie, otherworldly cadence in order to evoke an ancient and strange world quite unlike our own.  Telling the story in a high-pitched, vaguely unsettling tone helps reveal for the audience how wildly unreliable Dilios is as a narrator, how feverishly warped his imagination is, and how alien the ancient Greek mindset was to our own (except for all the people intoning "Never Retreat, Never Surrender").  If he described the rhinos and masks and whatnot in a deep, authoritative, matter-of-fact tone, it wouldn't be nearly as effective.  Like the skewed color scheme, David's voice is meant to be hypnotic and transporting.

I do love when David does a deep, commanding, Christopher Plummer-esque Faramir voice.  But I understand the fever-dream effect they were going for here.  They want you to feel like you've been huffing Oracle vapors.

Controversy #2: What, exactly, are they wearing?

Alright.  This one bugs me.  Everybody's been saying "codpiece this, codpiece that", but technically they're not codpieces.  A codpiece is a flap or pouch that attaches to the front of trousers in order to provide a snug home for the "wedding tackle" (to borrow a phrase from Austin Powers).  They were all the rage in Henry VIII's day.  As time went on, they became padded and ever more ornate and bizarrely shaped, some doubling as pockets to hold snuff and coins, until eventually men came to their senses and decided that in polite society, their Mini Me should not precede them into the room.

They're not thongs, either.  Thongs have a tiny string running up the back (though not as tiny as a G string, which in turn is not as tiny as an F string).  Outside of America, thongs are rubber sandals that you wear to the beach, a la Johnny Spitieri.

Nor would I call them loincloths.  They're not made of cloth, and loincloths usually leave most of the buttocks uncovered.  Neither are they jockstraps, or diapers, or girdles.

No, the official term for this costume is "budgie smuggler".

"Thingy slingy", "mankini", and "hoo-hoo canoe" are also acceptable.

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 2:35 PM EDT

Updated: April 13, 2007 3:32 PM EDT

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Mood:  vegas lucky

Somewhere-or-other, I read a review of After The Deluge which claimed that the title of the movie came from the Jackson Browne song "Before The Deluge".  Whether or not that's true, I don't know, but the chorus of the song goes like this:

Now let the music keep our spirits high 
Let the buildings keep our children dry
Let creation reveal its secrets by and by
When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky

Now, if you look at the first three lines of that lyric closely, don't they match up with the careers/concerns of the three sons? Martin the musician.  Alex the architect.  Toby, who struggles with infertility.

As for line 4, it touches on the themes of lostness and redemption (sky imagery) that figure so prominently in each of the character's lives.

The analogy isn't quite solid. "Before The Deluge" is an anti-nuke manifesto, born of Cold War atomic anxiety, and has a socially conscious edge.  Still, the broad themes are the same.  Both song and movie deal with the bright promise of youth derailed by a catastrophic external event, and the attempts of the survivors to live on in the aftermath.

This thought jumped out at me the other night when I was washing dishes, listening to Late For The Sky and enjoying some Sensitive Mopey 13-Year-Old(tm) flashbacks.  Throughout much of my youth, I regularly had vivid, awful nightmares about nuclear war and radioactive fallout, and this album brought it all back.  Thanks a lot, Ronald Reagan.

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 1:47 PM EDT

Updated: April 6, 2007 2:26 PM EDT

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Mood:  lazy

They both have beards, they both wear capes, they both carry swords, they both survive terrible one-sided slaughters, they both got severely beaten by the Sexy Stick.  And yet their characters are very, very different.  How can the casual viewer tell Dilios and Faramir apart?

Here's our handy side-by-side comparison, done in classic Goofus-and-Gallant* style.

*Explanatory note for non-US readers: Goofus and Gallant are a pair of morally contrasting brothers from Highlights, a children's magazine beloved of dentist waiting rooms across America.  Goofus, whose barbed hairdo juts threateningly from his forehead, is clearly headed for a career in the slammer unless he stops grabbing fruit, lays off the steroids, and learns to be polite to his friends like his brother Gallant.  This is how Brett Sprague got started.

Anyway, on with our feature presentation:  FARAMIR vs. DILIOS

Faramir sees a dead soldier from the East.  He says: "The enemy?  His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem.  You wonder what his name is...where he came from...and if he really was evil at heart.  What lies or threats led him on this long march from home, and would he not rather have stayed there, in peace?"

Dilios sees a dead soldier from the East.  He says: "Obviously, a major perv.  He wore earrings, had tentacles growing out of his back, and took part in omnisexual goat orgies.  His mother wore army sandals.  Plus he was a total wuss.  Let's stab him again."

Faramir says "It belonged to a young boy of the city...A very foolish one, who wasted many hours slaying dragons when he should have been attending to his studies."

Dilios says "It belonged to a young boy of the city-state...A very foolish one, who wasted many hours studying and reciting poetry when he should have been drinking the blood of his enemies."

(Um.  Let's pretend he's handing down his childhood cape here, not his childhood codpiece.)

 Faramir yells, "NAZGUUUUUUL!"

Dilios yells, "HA-OOOOH-WAAAAH!"

 Dilios tells stories by the campfire.

Faramir is the campfire.

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 11:30 AM EDT

Updated: March 30, 2007 1:00 PM EDT

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Mood:  lyrical

Last night, on American Idol, contestant Sanjaya Malakar showed up wearing a fauxhawk clearly inspired by the Spartan helmets in '300':

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 1:22 PM EDT

Updated: March 28, 2007 1:59 PM EDT

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A recent study by two political scientists from Princeton and West Point examined 250 asymmetrical conflicts (wars in which one side had a huge advantage in numbers or technology).  They concluded that, prior to 1850, the more powerful nation or army was 85% likely to win one-sided battles.  Since 1950, the more powerful nation has won only 21% of the time.

The reason the odds have changed is that warfare itself has changed.  Modern bands of guerilla soldiers (insurgents, rebels, terrorists, freedom fighters, whatever you want to call them) are usually more mobile, more motivated to defend their land, culture, and religion, more familiar with the terrain, and less reliant on complex technology, logistics, and lines of communication than a large attacking army.  When larger armies try to draw out guerrilla fighters to fight on their own terms, they're usually unsuccessful.  The smaller army just has to dig in and wait.  This was not the rule prior to the 20th century, when the rules of warfare dictated that both armies line up facing each other in an open field, with infantry and pikemen in the center, cavalry off to the side, and artillery at the rear.

It's quite interesting to observe, then, that the 300 Spartans were ahead of their time in their brave stand against the Persians.  Like a modern-day army, Frank Miller's Persians relied heavily on technology (i.e., arrows, exploding urns, rhino shock troops) instead of actually engaging the Spartans in battle.  When they did meet in hand-to-hand combat, the Spartans had the clear advantage of training, motivation, and especially terrain.  In fact, both Thermopylae and Agincourt hinged on the underdog army having the better position.  At Agincourt, the larger French army became trapped inside a funnel-shaped piece of high ground, where they were easily routed by Henry V.  (It didn't help that there was 4 inches of mud and the French were wearing extremely heavy armor, of the sort that, once you slip and fall, you're not getting up again.)

After rambling on in a such a nerdy fashion, now I feel the need to switch to a more shallow topic.  So close your eyes, and I'll tuck you in and tell you a fairy story.....

GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE SPARTANS

Once upon a time, a little girl named Goldilocks went for a walk in the forest.

She came to a cinema.  The door was open, so she went in.

Nobody was home.  There was a movie about 300 Spartans playing on the screen.

Goldilocks sat down and began to watch the beautifully honed men.

"This Spartan is too skinny," she said.

The camera panned across the line of warriors waiting for battle.

"That Spartan is too bulky."

Dilios appeared on the screen.

"Oh!  This Spartan is juuuuust right!" cried Goldilocks.

Then the fighting began.  The captain spoke.

"This Spartan is too British," said Goldilocks.

She waited for the next scene.  The king began yelling.

"This Spartan is too Scottish."

Then the theater filled with the dulcet, honeyed tones of the narrator.

"This Spartan is just right!" Goldilocks sighed.  She fell asleep with a smile on her face.

While she was sleeping, Frank Miller and Zach Snyder entered the theater.

"Someone's been ogling my characters!!" cried Frank Miller.

"Someone's been ignoring my super-cool color crushing and CGI effects!" cried Zach Snyder.  "AND THERE SHE IS!"

Goldilocks was frightened.  She jumped out of her seat, ran out of the door, and back into the forest.

And she never went exploring in strange theaters again without a personal bodyguard.

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 2:08 PM EDT

Updated: March 26, 2007 2:57 PM EDT

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Last Sunday, when I walked down to the local bookstore to get the paper, there, sitting on top of the newspapers, was a copy of Frank Miller's 300.  Someone, maybe, had started reading it, gotten excited, dropped the book like third-period French, and rushed off to the local Octoplex for a matinee.

Or, maybe, an aghast mother had pried the book out of the hands of her four-year-old and left it there, on the Wall Street Journal.  It's hard to say. 

Anyway, yesterday I saw an ad for kettle bells on the internet which promised to "Melt Flab Without The Dishonor Of Aerobics!"  No wonder I've had this pervasive feeling of shame about my gym routine.  I've been dishonoring my body with leg warmers, pink 2-pound barbells, and "Carmen Electra's Cardio Blast".  (No, just kidding.  I hate aerobics.  Give me sunshine and fresh air instead of mirrors and sweat.)

I have to say, though, I have a huge amount of admiration for the men of 300 who made it through Mark Twight's training regime.  It took the utmost dedication, commitment, trust, and discipline to allow themselves to be broken down, prodded, pushed, and built up again into superbly fit screen warriors.  Amazing that they were able to do this in just a few short months (though it probably felt much, much longer while they were training).

The downside of 300 is that, being an unabashed celebration of testosterone at its finest, it seems to have brought out ugly behavior in a few viewers who have trouble distinguishing between entertainment and real life.  One teenage boy on a 300 message board was recently bragging that his friend had gotten kicked out of a theater for yelling "THIS IS SPARTA!" and kicking a "horse-faced lesbian" in the chest, down 8 sets of stairs.  Just like the well scene.  Lovely.  I doubt very much that the story's true, but even so, the fact that this Leonidas wannabe equates gay-bashing and violence against women with courage and manliness is disturbing.  Even more disturbing, the rest of the board reacted with laughter and high fives.  There's a huge difference between bullying the weak and defending yourself when attacked, a distinction which some moviegoers (and politicians) have failed to grasp.

300 certainly isn't to blame for this.  It's a powerful movie, and it stirs up strong and primitive emotions, but it only stirs up what's already there.   What people get out of the story is up to them.  Racist people love inventing excuses to be racist.  Warmongers love inventing reasons to send other people's kids into battle.  Adolescent boys love to fantasize about going nuts with a sword against their enemies.  It takes a certain amount of self-control not to use the movie as a springboard for bad behavior in real life.

Not that women have been all that levelheaded about the movie, but that's mostly due to the sculpted bodies and leather thongs.  We walk out of the movie with the urge to knock boots, not the urge to kill.

On a lighter note, Astinos, the Captain's son, reminds me greatly of Figwit the Elf from Lord of the Rings.  Astinos, we hereby dub thee Digwit (Dilios Is Great...Who Is That?)

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 11:06 AM EDT

Updated: March 23, 2007 12:54 PM EDT

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Mood:  smelly

Since 300 came out, I'm learning to see allegory in all sorts of new places.  For example, did you know Spiderman 2 is really about the War of the Austrian Succession?

Or that Alexander is actually a metaphor for Congressman Edward Markey's courageous battle to get Daylight Savings Time moved back three weeks?

But let us not be distracted by snark.  We have serious work to do.  Today I've decided to list some other nicknames for David that I've encountered in my life.  In order to appreciate "Daisy" as a nickname, sometimes you have to step back and gain a little perspective from other Daves who haven't been quite as fortunate.

1.  Daisy.  Not just our dear dreamy Daisy W., of course, but Charles Dickens' David Copperfield, whom Steerforth dubs "Daisy" because of his simplicity and freshness and innocence.

2.  Bob Bitchin'.  This nickname belonged to a Dave I went to high school with.  He wore a blond crewcut, army fatigues, mirror sunglasses, and played the trumpet.  For some reason, he insisted that everyone (teachers and students alike) address him as Bob Bitchin' instead of his real name.  It seemed like a name more suited to a surfer than an aspiring staff sergeant ("SIR YES SIR BOB BITCHIN REPORTING FOR GNARLY WAVE DUTY SIR!"), but we all went along with it.  All the girls on the flag team loved him.

3.  Fetus.  Another Dave I went to high school with.  Nobody quite knows where this nickname came from, but it sort of fit.  Fetus was exceedingly high-strung and twitchy, with the metabolism of a Type A hummingbird.  He could usually be found orbiting around the school candy store.

4.  Diesel.  A Polish Dave I played softball with in an architectural league.  As the name suggests, he was a total cementhead.  "Diesel" liked to strut past the other team's bench and yell "BOO-YAH!!" in between innings.

5.  Dinky Davey Diddums.  My father had a talent for inventing weirdly embarrassing pet names for all of his kids, mostly based on cute things we said as babies.  Like secret Indian names, they must never be uttered aloud outside the family (this is the world wide interweb, after all), and so this is only a close approximation of my brother Dave's pet name.

Dad had a disconcerting habit of letting these pet names slip at the top of his lungs while dropping kids off at football practice, or standing in a long line for ice cream.

6.  Bob.  The fake name my brother Dave gave the guy at the desk when we went on the E.T. ride at Universal Studios.  (What is it with Daves and Bobs?)  At the end of the ride, E.T. was supposed to say goodbye to each person by name.  As we were exiting, E.T.'s computer voice chip got stuck and he snarled "Byyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyye, Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooobbbbbb" at Dave in a menacing, Satanic-alien kind of growl.  We could hardly get off the bikes, we were laughing so hard.  To this day, I often say goodbye to my brother this way.

7.  The Thinking Woman's Crumpet.  Another excellent nickname for David.  The Brainy Gal's Eclair.  The Shrewd Dame's Croissant.  The Intellectual Filly's Cream Scone With Strawberries.  The list goes on.

So, whether it's Fetus, Diesel, Bob, or Daisy, remember that underneath them all is a man named for an Old Testament king, yearning to be loved for who he is.  Have you hugged a Dave today? 

Small aside: My own childhood nickname was "Sassafrass", which has a curiously Australian etymology, now that I think about it.  It started out as a name-shortening ("Sass"), then evolved into a plant.

Posted by dessicatedcoconut at 1:11 PM EDT

Updated: March 23, 2007 12:57 PM EDT

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