Item From the Past: Old Faithful

Seven years ago, I wrote: "Naturally we visited Old Faithful. Gotta go see Old Faithful, and wait for it to fulfill its impressive duty, which it did for us at about 6:45 pm on August 5, 2005, pretty much as the rangers predicted — at the information booth, they wrote an estimated time of eruption on a little whiteboard. I also saw it on chalkboards at other places around the geyser."

Do kids hear about Old Faithful in school any more? I think -- and I'm in no way certain -- that we discussed the geyser in second- or third-grade class, maybe because of an article in our Weekly Reader. (I'm certain that's where we heard about the exciting prospect of a new Disneyland in Florida.)

Then again, maybe I first heard of it from "Tweety, Tweety, Tweety," the Looney Tunes cartoon in which Tweety moves forward the hands of the clock predicting the next eruption of an Old Faithful-like geyser, causing it to spit out Sylvester with some force.

End of July Notes

I saw some Olympic diving out of the corner of my eye last night and wandered over to the TV for a look. Svelte lads in ridiculously tiny suits -- wait, there are two of them jumping at the same time. Since when has that been an Olympic event? Shows you what I know: since 2000.

Somehow or other, I'd never seen synchronized diving before. Actually, I know how that happened. I didn't watch much of either 2000 or '04 Games and simply missed the contests in '08, when my viewing was less-than-fanatical.

A credit card offer came in the mail today. Nothing unusual about that -- based on the continuous stream of offers, you'd think there had been no painful recession recently. It was a Disney-themed card issued by a too-big-to-fail bank. But not just any Disney theme: a mockup of the card attached to the letter features the Sorcerer's Apprentice Mickey in full-magic mode. On the back of the card is Mickey and a couple of the broomstick servants he created.

I thought about that. He's one of the iconic Mickeys, of course. But he's also the one who inadvertently creates a catastrophe instead of the useful servant he imagined he was getting. It started small, but got out of hand. You know, something like a credit card can.

The toys of the moment for Ann are her Monster High dolls. They're Mattel creations, released only a couple of years ago now, and the conceit is that they're teen offspring of famed public domain monsters -- Frankenstein's, Dracula, the Werewolf, the Mummy, et al. Lately Ann has been creating derivative characters on paper based on monsters not mentioned in the series featuring the dolls. Sometimes she asks me for input.

So far, we've come up with the children of the Bogeyman, the Devil, Godzilla, the Loch Ness Monster, a Bug-Eyed Martian, a Roc, the "Seaweed Monster" and -- my favorite -- the daughter of Them. As in monster ants, the kind featured in Them. That was her idea.

She's also been taking pictures of her Monster High dolls.

In black & white, for some reason.

July Blows In

One question I asked myself this weekend was, "Haven't there been enough Spiderman movies?" That's because marketing for the latest such movie finally got my attention, for all of a few seconds. My answer is, yes, there have been. I can't take Spiderman seriously anyway, because of lasting first impressions. As far as I'm concerned, Spiderman is pretty much this (which has had a remarkable 23+ million views). Just as Batman is this. .

Today during the early afternoon, the sky darkened as if a thunderstorm were getting ready to hit. The wind picked up and it got even darker. A classic pre-thunderstorm sky. Except that it didn't start raining. Instead, the wind grew stronger. Ann was so worried about a "tornado," she asked me to look out the back door.

It was a wicked wind, all right. A couple of loose items were moving across the back yard and the all the trees within sight were shaking. But I assured her that this wasn't a tornado. I wasn't quite sure that some major tree part wouldn't fall, however.

It was over in about 20 minutes. No rain, just dark clouds and high wind. At about 4, I took Lilly to a bookstore a couple of miles south of where we live. By then, the clouds were mostly gone and the summer heat had returned. Along the way, we discovered that starting about half a mile away, every traffic light along our route was out of order -- making for some tricky eight-lane, four-way stops. Tree branches were scattered in the street in spots, and a handful of trees along the way had been split in half or knocked over, though none directly into the street. Parts of fences were down in places, too. We'd had a wind event.

Small potatoes compared to a real tornado, say, or the storms that pummeled the eastern U.S. on Friday. But enough to remind you that the atmosphere has the potential to knock you around when it feels like it.

The Wit & Wisdom of Foghorn Leghorn

A chill enveloped northern Illinois today. Mild compared to the arctic waves inevitably coming in future months, but still a sizable drop compared with Sunday or Monday. Winter's in his dressing room, getting ready for his big show.

A virus has blown through as well -- only through our house, as far as I'm concerned. Ann stayed home today with a mid-level cold. Treatment: bed rest, fluids, cartoons. I was feeling it too, but maybe my more experienced immune system held it off better. I sneezed and blew my nose from time to time, but I still filed the stories I need to file.

I also watched a few cartoons with her. One was "Strangled Eggs," a late (1961) Foghorn Leghorn vehicle. Been a while since I've seen any of those. During my major cartoon-watching years, Foghorn Leghorn was a Warner-stable favorite of mine. He still is. I can appreciate him better now, in fact. Such lines as these (from "Strangled Eggs") would have meant little to me at Ann's age:

"Bare, I say, bare as a cooch dancer's midriff."

(Said as he looks at his empty cupboard. I had to look up that old slang.)

"I got, I say, I got this boy as fidgety as a bubble dancer with a slow leak."

(More burlesque. What don't we know about Foghorn Leghorn?)

"My pappy used to say, 'Shoemaker, stick to your last.' And this is my last!"

(Said as he failed to get what he wanted, right at the end of the cartoon.)

Popeye Goes to War

I found Popeye the Sailor 1941-1943 at the library not long ago and I had to take a look at that. It's the third volume of the Warner Home Video release of Popeye cartoons made from 1933 to 1943. It includes two disks and 32 cartoons. I didn't have time to see them all in one week, so for my own viewing I picked those that sounded the most interesting (or strangest).

The collection is interesting for a number of reasons. For one thing, it covers the transition from Fleischer Studios to Famous Studios. It also features the last of the black-and-white Popeye cartoons. And of course many of them are World War II cartoons, some of which are every bit as racist as you'd expect when depicting the Japanese. More on these matters can be found in this detailed Wiki article on the collection.

I thought Bluto had the best line among the ones that I saw. In "Seein' Red, White and Blue," he receives a letter that turns out to be from his local draft board, but before he opens it, he looks at it and asks himself, "Who do I know that can write?" It's also an unusual cartoon in that Popeye and Bluto, in the end, team up against a common enemy -- Japanese spies disguised as orphaned babies (don't ask). At one point Popeye actually feeds Bluto some spinach so that he can help Popeye vanquish those minions of Hirohito. I don't think I've ever seen Bluto access spinach the way Popeye does. You'd think he would have tried that some other time.

Much more information about these particular cartoons is at the last three subpages at this web site, "Popeye in Black and White: The Fleischer and Famous Studio Cartoons." The writer(s) obviously had more time to think about Popeye than I do. But they're well-written reviews. I like this description of one of the worst cartoons I saw in this particular collection, the God-awful "Spinach Fer Britain."

"There is a curious lack of detail in 'Spinach Fer Britain,' a short in which a Nazi submarine attempts to keep Popeye from delivering his boatload of spinach to No. 10 Downing Street," the site says. "For a series that always prided itself on distinctive backgrounds and painstakingly detailed textures, 'Spinach Fer Britain' often resembles one of the careless and shoddy Popeye television cartoons from the 1960s. There is not a single label on any of the cans of spinach in Popeye's rowboat, the clouds are just blobs in the background, and half the time, Popeye doesn't even look like Popeye but rather like the third runner-up in a Draw Popeye Contest for six-year-olds."

Years Discussed in This Post: 1969, 1979, 2004, 2009

Back in late August 2004, on the original blue-and-white blog, I wrote this: "Yesterday was Lilly’s first day of first grade. It was also 25 years to the day after I flew from San Antonio to Nashville to begin college at Vanderbilt, so long ago that I flew on Braniff. Synchronicity or mere coincidence? (Coincidence, I think.)"

Today was Ann's first day in first grade, and it was 30 years to the day that I started at VU. Still probably a coincidence, but one that's appealing. Time to muse on the inevitable passage of time, etc. Which wouldn't be so bad if you could, now and then, relive the best parts of the past.

I don't mean merely remember it fondly, but actually go do it again. I'm not sure the 1979 transition from high school to college would count as a great moment anyway, and in fact the memory is dim. I remember getting rained on while going to wherever it was VU issued student IDs, so for the next four years I carried around a picture of myself with wet hair.

Speaking of living in the past, the other day I passed a magazine rack and noticed a special Time publication devoted to 1969. That kind of thing is, I believe, known in the publishing business as "cut-and-paste for nostalgic suckers." Sure, it was an eventful year, especially because of the Moon landing. But name a year in the last few centuries that wasn't eventful. I also wondered: where's 1979? You can't tell me it wasn't exceptionally eventful, too, personal considerations aside. All the same, I won't buy it even if Time produces one.

Back to the present. Ann was enthusiastic to go this morning. Lilly, who started sixth grade, wasn't exactly enthusiastic, but I knew she was looking forward to seeing her friends on a daily basis.

The pic of Ann and her backpack wasn't this morning, but it pretty much sums up her mood today. Tinker Bell, incidentally, is the centerpiece of a full-court marketing press by Disney these days. A whole world of fairies has been dreamed up to go with her, and she even received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame earlier this year.

Kerokerokeroppi Abides

Ann and her mother came back from a major big box retailer the other day with a new lunchbox, since she will be carrying one starting in a few weeks. She'd picked a Kerokerokeroppi lunchbox. I always did like that name.

Shortened to Keroppi in this context, the onomatopoetic Kerokerokeroppi's a 1980s-vintage character in the Sanrio stable, and probably jealous of the more popular Hello Kitty. The ever-sunny Sanrio web site, however, says, "Keroppi loves adventure, and his bubbly personality makes him popular around Donut Pond. He has a brother called Koroppi and a sister called Pikki. Keroppi is a fantastic swimmer and singer (but not at the same time!)."

Why not at the same time? Surely anime frogs would be able to pull it off. I didn't know he was popular enough in the United States to appear on kids' lunchboxes, but there's a lot I don't know about pop culture. For all I know, a big-budget, live-action Keroppi movie is in production, with Jim Carrey as the lovable amphibian.

He's already been in regular animated movies. Or at least cartoons; I didn't stick it out long enough to find out. But I'm pretty sure that somewhere around here on a VHS tape that we haven't watched in years, there's a cartoon adaptation of Gulliver's Travels starring Kerokerokeroppi.

Magoo's Tea Party

I had my own tea party today. I boiled water, poured it over a low-cost tea bag, and drank the results a few minutes later. Actually, I do that most days, so "party" in the literal or figurative sense doesn't really apply.

Speaking of which, Lilly's social studies (that is, history) text mentions the Edenton Tea Party in the same paragraph as the more famed affair in Boston, which says more about the difference between text books of my school days and those kicking around today than about political protest in the Thirteen Colonies. I only have scant knowledge of the Edenton incident, but it sounds like a straightforward boycott, rather than the exciting direct action taken by the Bostonians.

Including Mr. Magoo. I puzzled about it briefly today, but I was fairly sure that Mr. Magoo helped dump tea into Boston Harbor, at least according to a cartoon I once saw. Or did I? Forty years is a long time to hold on to the details of sometime you might have seen only once. But I needed to look no further than that library on my desk to find out. Sure enough, Magoo "played" Paul Revere in the cartoon (a near-blind silversmith?), participating in the Tea Party, dressed as an Indian. Somehow, I'm glad I remember that.

The Critic in Her Formative Years

Just before Christmas, I bought a three-disc DVD collection called 150 Cartoon Classics for a low, low price and gave it to Ann, by way of Santa Claus. It was cheap, of course, because it should have been called 150 Public Domain Cartoons Slapped on Three Discs. And "slapped" is the right word. One of the three discs makes an annoying buzzing sound when played.

Among the 150 are the likes of copyright-not-renewed Popeye, Betty Boop, Felix the Cat, Mighty Mouse, Woody Woodpecker and Casper the Friendly Ghost. Less known, but of some interest, are late '30s/early '40s cartoons such as Gabby, a Fleischer Studios creation featuring a Lilliputian character from Gulliver's Travels, and Little Lulu, the two of which on the disc seem to include the voice of this fellow as the man vexed by Lulu. He sounds very much, but not quite like Bluto in these cartoons.

The collection also has an unaccountably large number of The New Three Stooges, a mostly animated series from the mid-60s. The other day, Ann asked to see some of the discs again, the first time since the Christmas novelty wore off a few months ago.

After suggesting a few possible groups of cartoons for her to watch, I mentioned the animated Stooges. "You want to see the Three Stooges?" I said.

"No, they're bad. The real Stooges are very, very funny. But those cartoons are bad."

There you have it. Something best left in the dustbin of pop culture -- a cartoon so bad that a six-year-old doesn't like them.

Check Out That Crazy Cigarette, Scoob!

Ann went to a birthday party a little while ago and picked up a bag of favors that included some Scooby-Doo candy cigarettes or, to be more exact with my confectionery nomenclature, Scooby-Doo! Candy Sticks. Featuring Shaggy in a more-or-less typical pose.

That endless swamp of knowledge Wiki tells me that Shaggy actually has a formal name, Norville Rogers, which has the added bonus of sounding like the original name of any number of hiphop stars. I'll take the swamp's word for it, since looking more deeply into the matter would be a waste of time, even by my lax standards.

Anyway, she opened the box and inside were two ordinary cylindrical candy sticks. I was disappointed. They should have been tapered at both ends and fat in the middle. The fatter the better, right Scoob?

Today, I Learned About Castle Grayskull

Mimi Smartypants is still worth reading: Speaking of bad-assery, Wikipedia recently taught me that Castle Grayskull was surrounded by a 'bottomless abyss,' she writes. I did not know that! What a great feature! LT and I would really like to remodel our condo building to look just like Castle Grayskull, just need to get the other owners' approval (we will wait for one of those drunken board meetings). Now that I know about the bottomless abyss I will definitely include it in the plans. Cancel the garbage pickup and the recycling service! We will just throw everything in the abyss! And it will never fill up, no matter how many old newspapers or takeout menus or door-to-door Mormons we toss in there.

I had to look up Castle Grayskull, since I was only vaguely aware of it as a feature in a cartoon I've never watched, and I couldn't remember which cartoon, though I suspected it had something to do with fantasy heroes, the eternal spat between good and evil, and such like.

I was right. The castle features prominently in He-Man and Masters of the Universe, a cartoon franchise after my time, beginning as it did in the early '80s. Internal evidence in her blog puts Mimi at about 10 years younger than I am, and thus in a better position to appreciate the merits of He-Man and Skeletor. Somewhere in this house, however, I do have one or two action figures from the series, or maybe some other iteration of the series, though I don't know where or when I got them (cereal box? McDonald's?), or where they are at this moment (maybe the garage, but it's too cold to check). Such is my cluttered life.

That's not the only thing that's cluttered. If you look at the Wiki entry for Skeletor -- which is roughly the same length as that of Isaac Newton, except with fewer footnotes -- there's an entire section of four paragraphs devoted to "The question of Skeletor's head." Plus some amusing links.

I Yam What I Yam

In case anyone's forgotten, today is the 80th anniversary of the first appearance of Popeye. His endurance spans the continents -- I've seen his face in public places in Japan -- and the decades. During the tainted spinach scare not that long ago, for example, Dave Letterman could joke that "it's a good time to pick a fight with Popeye" with complete assurance that the audience would get the joke.

The Art of the Disclaimer

Tom and Jerry: The Spotlight Collection, Disc 1, which recently arrived in our mailbox, contains the following verbage right after it admonishes would-be video pirates:

"The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices of that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and they are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today's society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed."

In other words, leave us alone already! I've read that this collection originally came out with some clumsy editing, and that later, most of that was removed, leaving the cartoons closer to their original shape. Maybe. I don't have the time or energy to watch all of the cartoons that closely. Naturally, there are people who do pay really close attention to the various incidents of Tom and Jerry censorship.

The amazing thing to me is that I haven't seen all of these cartoons. Program directors of the early '70s shorted us kids when it came to Tom and Jerry, and seemingly not just because of embarrassing retrograde stereotypes. I don't think I'd ever seen "The Zoot Cat" (1944) before; certainly I would have remembered it. When Tom first appeared in his orange and green zoot suit, I laughed louder than the kids. But then, they've never heard of zoot suits. Arguably, that could be considered an element of ethnic stereotype, though I think the cartoon was taking aim at hep cats, rather than any ethnicity.

SpongeBobbery

I’ve been remiss. I haven’t posted about SpongeBob lately. Time to rectify that omission because, if this site is anything, it’s a chronicle of things seen (note title), and boy do I see a lot of that cheerful yellow bastard.

I don’t mean the cartoons, either, though lately we had a rental disc pass through our DVD player. I mean objects. For instance, we picked up a SpongeBob artifact in Canada. Somewhere we bought a couple of boxes—one for each child—of dipping-crackers-and-cream, an insidious product with crackers and cream each in separate sealed pods of a single container. Don’t know them? They’re marketed at little kids. Fun to open, fun to eat!

In this case, it was little chocolate crackers shaped like SpongeBob characters, paired with vanilla cream. On one side of the box there was an illustration of SpongeBob with text in English; the other side had the same pic, but with French. From the French side, I learned that he’s Bob L’eponge, “Bob the Sponge.” I’m not conversant in French, but my guess would be it might take a half-dozen words to render “SpongeBob SquarePants” in that language and it would still be inelegant, so they dumped the reference to his clothes. Of course, the name isn’t very elegant in English, but elegance isn’t an essential feature of the character anyway.

Our backyard faces Lilly’s elementary school, and so a variety of balls make their way over the fence. Sometimes, especially if there’s kid asking for it, we return the ball over the fence, but at other times there’s no way to know whose it is, so we keep it. Recently, a yellow volleyball-sort of ball (softer than a real volley ball) came to rest in the yard. It was beaten up and all its design except for two eyes rubbed off. And you know whose eyes those were. So did Ann. There it was, a yellow ball with two eyes and nothing else, and she said, “SpongeBob!” Gee.

Wah-Wah-Wah-Wah-What a Gal

No excuse this week for not posting on Friday. Except I was enjoying Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness here in the vast New World. Actually, I was working a lot, as I must again today, which is only indirectly related to Happiness and much more connected to “Property,” which was originally the in the “Pop” position along with the “Snap” and “Crackle” of Life and Liberty in Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration, but edited out later.

The atmosphere might be cooking up tornados and other bad winds south of here, but in northern Illinois, Winter has let it be known that wants a few more turns around the track. It was much like February on Friday, like a dry, windy day in that sour month, especially out in a suburban parking lot where I found myself yesterday, with seemingly nothing between me and Saskatchewan.

Further discussion revealed that Yuriko watched The Wacky Races as a small child in Japan, which featured a couple of the same characters as Dastardly and Muttley. The latter cartoon might have also been shown too, though she doesn’t remember. The Japanese name for The Wacky Races cartoon was Chika-chika Mashin-mo Raisu. “Chika-chika” being something like chitty-chitty or bang-bang, “mo” an intensifier of “mashin” (machine, car), and “raisu” a two-syllable version of “race.” So my idiosyncratic translation would be the “Bang-Bang Supped-up Speedster Race,” which seems fitting.

I can’t say enough good about the Red Hot Jazz Archive, which I mentioned last week but actually discovered two or three years ago. When I have time, I troll for songs I’ve never heard before by groups with great names like Red McKenzie & His Mound City Blue Blowers, who happened to record a version of “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down & Write Myself a Letter” that I like just as much as Fats Waller’s.

Here’s a lyric from 1930, sung by Ben Pollack & His Orchestra, that I haven’t been able to decode. It might have slang meaning that evaporated long ago, like “kicking the gong around” supposedly refers to opium smoking in “Minnie the Moocher.” Anyway, I like it. It’s sung with great verve:

“There’s a wah-wah gal in Agua Caliente
What a wah-wah-wah-wah-what a gal
She’s got that thing I think you’ll like her plenty
What wah-wah-wah-wah-what a gal
You can have each hula hot bamboola baby
You can have each jolly hot tamale Sal
But the wah-wah gal in Agua Caliente
What a wah-wah-wah-wah-what a gal…”

Well, maybe it doesn’t need decoding.

I Yam What I Yam

Anecdote for the day, involving cute behavior by our resident three-year-old. One of the songs Ann knows is the Popeye theme song, because of repeated viewings. The other day as she was (sort of) brushing her teeth, she was (sort of) singing it.

I chimed in and sang the version I know, along with some whistling. She looked at me and said, “That’s cool, Daddy!”

Ah, but she said the same thing when I refilled the liquid soap dispenser in the bathroom a little while later.

Felix the Surreal

As far as I can remember, Trafalgar never came up in junior high or high school—its 200th anniversary is today -- and neither did the Gunpowder Plot -- its 400th anniversary is in a couple of weeks. They were probably considered strictly British affairs by US textbook writers, and besides, the Kings & Battles pattern of teaching history was already on its way out by the 1970s. I heard of both of these events on my own, but never really looked into Trafalgar in any detail until I visited Trafalgar Square and wondered why it was important enough to have its own large plaza in crowded London.

But there’s no excuse for the omission of the Battle of Trafalgar in The Timetables of History, a reference I’ve had on my shelf for years now. It has Austerlitz and Pressburg for 1805, but not Trafalgar. Go figure.

The other day I visited a certain enormous chain store, and on impulse I bought a few $1 DVDs, that is, public domain specials. One was a Bugs Bunny collection, mostly WWII vintage, at least one of which would never be shown on TV because of racial stereotypes.

Another disc is called Felix the Cat Woos Whoopee. I looked up some of the titles on the disc -- there’s nothing on the DVD box beyond the titles -- and found out that it contains cartoons made mostly in 1929 and ’30. By then Felix had been eclipsed by Mickey Mouse, and so in “Woos Whoopee” he’s taken to drink, whooping it up at the Whoopee Club with his other black & white, pre-talkie animal cronies. Staggering home (to a cat-wife waiting with a rolling pin), Felix hallucinates. A lamppost comes alive. Vicious animals emerge from nowhere. He’s speeding along in a racecar, then falling from a tall building.

By later standards, it’s primitive cartooning. Still, Felix seems alive, the surroundings surreal, and the entire package was so different than the cartoons I’m used to seeing that I couldn’t quit watching, at least for the span of one cartoon. Into the next cartoon, my attention began to wander. That’s about right, though, since they were meant to be seen one at a time, ahead of whatever flicker was showing that week.

Also, I wasn’t expecting that much. I have dim memories of the late 1950s Felix series repeated in the ’70s when I was a kid, and it never did much for me even then. I didn’t know about deus ex machina, but I knew that a bag of tricks was cheating. Before this week, I’d never seen any of these earlier versions of Felix, They must have been considered too old even for after-school or Saturday TV, or maybe the copyright hadn’t expired then and they were still locked away. Anyway, the older Felix had no bag of tricks in those days, just a dollop of the surreal.

Details, Details

Dry day, but word is we might feel the residue of hurricane Dennis tonight, in the form of rain. That would be nice.

Ann likes Popeye, and readers with obsessive recall might remember that we bought a set of four Popeye DVDs some time ago (see November 16, 2004). By now, we’ve watched all the disks a good many times, and the other day I noticed an oddity.

The marvelous Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor is one of the Fleischer brothers Technicolor two-reelers, made in 1936. Early in the story, Sindbad sees Popeye’s ship and instructs his roc: “Wreck that ship! But bring me the woman.” (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.) The giant bird does Sindbad’s bidding, and soon Olive is his captive.

In 1952, King Features saved itself some money by recycling a lot of the Fleischer cartoon in a short called Big Bad Sindbad. The framing device is Popeye telling his nephews about the time he “knocked the tar out of Sindbad the Sailor.” The flashback is, of course, the truncated older cartoon.

Besides being shortened, the older cartoon was changed in one other way, at least that I noticed. When Sindbad dispatches his roc to attack Popeye’s ship, he says: “Wreck that ship! But bring me the girl.” Everything else in that scene was precisely the same, and yet someone went to the trouble to change “woman” to “girl.” Just another thing that makes you go, hm.

Watch Out, Goofy

After this holiday weekend, I know that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was a mistake. Posthumously named after the singing Congressman who championed it, the law also had a lobbying champion in Disney, who did not want to see Mickey Mouse et al. enter the public domain.

I want to see Mickey enter the public domain. He would certainly be put to better uses than The Three Musketeers, a direct-to-DVD cartoon released by Disney last year that I happened to see over the weekend. As a narrative, it’s as close to any of the other versions of the Musketeers as, say, Mercury is to Mars, but I don’t object to that so much.

Actually, I won’t bother to shoot the fish in this particular barrel. It’s enough to say that it’s awful. Just awful. Sample dialogue (from memory, but close enough):

Mickey: “Well, Goofy, then!” [Referring to his belief that Goofy will come to his rescue].

Peg-leg Pete: “Goofy’s being fitted for a halo.”

Mickey: “No, no, no.”

Pete: “Yes, yes, yes.”

The three musketeers, by the way, are Mickey, Goofy and Donald Duck, not a particularly good match. Donald, José and Ponchito might have been better, though that might have meant moving the setting from a Disney France to a Disney Spain.

There was a glimmer of interest in casting Clarabelle Cow as Pete’s evil lieutenant. As far as I know, Clarabelle isn’t a character that ever got much screen time. Her main job as Pete’s evil lieutenant is to murder Goofy by dumping him into the Seine tied to a weight, a task she cannot complete because she’s an impressionable female. Goofy manages to say enough sweet nothings to Clarabelle to avoid his fate; in fact, she then helps him save Mickey, foil Pete, etc. At the end of the movie, she’s paired up with Goofy, just as lady-in-waiting Daisy falls for Donald and Princess Minnie finds true love in Mickey (don’t ask).

Hello, Goofy? This woman was going to kill you. Sure, she likes you now, but what happens the first time you forget to take out the trash or come home stinking drunk? Just wondering.

Turning 40, Base 11

Earlier today, Lilly took to closing my home office door on Ann, and holding it shut for a while, telling Ann, “You’re going to jail!” Ann protested this treatment by hitting a fist on the carpeted floor and saying “Why, Why, Why?”

This is the first time I’ve ever heard her use that useful word. But I suspect she got it from a scene in SpongeBob SquarePants. One of the characters was thrown in jail, and may have reacted that way, but later grew to like it because she didn’t have to deal with SpongeBob any more. (I sympathize. Curiously, SpongeBob at one point actually said the jailed character had been “institutionalized.”)

We returned a SBSP disk the other day, and there aren’t any more new ones available from Netflix for now. But the hypercheerful yellow sponge is still with us, in the form of a drinking cup, a toothbrush, toothpaste and Band-Aids. Oh, for 1% of the merchandising revenue of that character. Probably even 0.1% would make my job search unnecessary.

I turned 44 this week. I don’t think I’ve meditated on my birthdays much, if ever, here. But that’s a nice repeating double-digit number. If we counted in base 11, I’d have turned 40.

I spent the day in scenic Schaumburg, Illinois, dining in the evening at a good Mexican restaurant we’d long wanted to try. Contrast with my 33rd birthday: spent it in Bangkok, in an un-air-conditioned guesthouse, eating at the little place downstairs (man, the food was good in Thailand). When I turned 22, I was in Lüneburg, West Germany -- been a while since one needed to put it that way. The best meal in that town was halb Henchen mit Pommes Frites at a greasy spoon my friends discovered.

As for 11, I’m fairly sure I was it home in San Antonio, though I did spend some time in the summer of 1972 in Ardmore, Oklahoma, with my Aunt Sue and Uncle Ken. The Democratic National Convention was on TV with I visited them, so that would have been the second week of July.

I had to Google “Democratic Convention 1972” to get the date, of course. I’d forgotten that both major party conventions were in Miami Beach that year, with the Republican one in August. Maybe it was chosen for ease of crowd control: a narrow island with a handful of streets.