Day: June 8, 2008

We’re in the wrong band

Ken Jennings posted a link to this great quiz, which posts song lyrics in alphabetical order and challenges you to guess them anyway. I haven’t completed the quiz yet — there are 50 questions in all — but it’s amazing how readily some of them spring to mind.

Anyway, I thought that was as good an excuse as any to repost my own “Monty Python Character or Band Name” quiz:

Gwen Dibley
Lady Chatterley’s Hamster
Flying Fox of the Yard
Bullwinkel Gandhi
Mystico and Janet
Neville Shunt		 Toad the Wet Sprocket
Uncle Mingo
Ned’s Atomic Dustbin
Johann Gambolputty
Ewan McTeagle
Attila The Stockbroker		 Mr. Pither
Mrs. Grundy
Three Monkeys Named Bob
Ximinez
Timmy Williams
Screaming Iguanas of Love

Without cheating, how well do you know your Python characters or obscure band names? As before, I’ll give you a hint: one of them is a trick.

And Harry Truman inspired Ghost Whisperer!

The AV Club’s Commentary Tracks of the Damned running feature includes the category “inevitable dash of pretension.” Which is what I immediately thought of when I read this:

The creators of NBC’s horror anthology series Fear Itself told reporters that they think president Franklin D. Roosevelt would have liked the title, drawn from his first inaugural address.

Mick Garris, the filmmaker who created the show, came up with it, producers said. (Speaking about the world’s various threats, Roosevelt famously said: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”)

“It was Mick Garris’ idea,” producer Keith Addis said in a conference call with reporters. “There was a lot of enthusiasm about the idea as soon as he mentioned it in one of the first meetings.”

Addis said of the late president, “One hopes he’d have a rich and wonderful sense of humor about it.”

It’s not as if it’s an obscure quote or anything, and it’s not like it hasn’t been used plenty of times before. I haven’t seen or heard much about the series, but I hope the rest of it is more original and less pretentious.

Snuffed out

Gee, Lucy Ellmann, tell us how you really feel.

Chuck Palahniuk’s new novel Snuff might be as awful as she says. I’m not terrifically interested in it. I’ve only ever read his Lullaby, which I found interesting but overly fond of the info-dump as a stylistic device. (Tasha Robinson wrote in her review that Palahniuk had “started to write in paragraphs instead of catchphrases,” which makes me very nervous about tackling any of his earlier books.)

But it’s the wholesale dismissal of American culture and heavy-handed approach that bugs me most about Ellmann’s review. She starts with:

So not only has America tried to ruin the rest of the world with its wars, its financial meltdown and its stupid stupid food, it has allowed its own literary culture to implode. Jazz and patchwork quilts are still doing O.K., but books have descended into kitsch. I blame capitalism, Puritanism, philistinism, television and the computer.

Oh, and you kids? Get off her lawn!

She’s much more interested, it seems, in the subject matter of the novel — and what it supposedly has to say about the depravity and lack of depth of American popular culture — than in what the book itself has to say, and how well or poorly it says it. As I said, I’m not here to defend Palahniuk from criticism; I’m just wishing that’s what Ellmann’s article was.

Oh, and seriously, those puns — “running gag/gag and run” and “Palahniuk chucks” — reek of too clever by half, if you ask me.