Day: August 12, 2009

I scream, you scream

In the fall of 2003, the Penn State Creamery announced that it would debut a new ice cream the following summer, “as part of a yearlong series of events and celebrations commemorating Penn State’s establishment in 1855.” I left Pennsylvania in July of 2004, the very month the new flavor was to be announced, so I never did find out what it was, nor how the new flavor was received by the hungry masses.

However, I recently learned that some librarians are petitioning for their own ice cream flavor from Ben & Jerry’s. (Or at least, somebody’s started a Facebook group around that idea.) And, in the rush to make up silly names for it like “the Dewey Caramel System,” it occured to me that the Penn State Monty Python Society had once spent way too much time thinking up silly ice cream flavor names of its own. Then this afternoon at work, we had an “ice cream social” — one of those office events they trot out now and then to force people to mingle with coworkers — and so I thought I’d look through the list the Society came up with six years ago and maybe post them here.

In 2003, I printed nearly 100 of the best names in the club’s weekly newsletter — which I edited as a labor of deranged love for several years — but in retrospect most of the names aren’t very funny. Like a lot of the newsletter’s content, in retrospect it’s mostly just filler. Some of the suggested flavors were local inside jokes — like CATA Bus Crunch, Sproul Hall Elevator, Nittany Nutz, and We Don’t Know the Goddamn Flavor — and some were just vaguely college-related — like Freshman 15, Student ID Number, Tüition Increase, and Condom Co-op Mint. Some were even more specific to the club — like Free the Hole, FROH, or Wimpy (“it’s gerbilrific!”) — while others just defy understanding half a decade later — like Skrinchie, OMG!!!!!1!!!1!!one!B-P, or Contains No Potatoes. (That said, I would totally order a scoop of Contains No Potatoes, if just to try it.) Most of the rest are just juvenile and/or sex-related — like Syphilicious! and Delicious Wang. And those are the best of them.

In fact, looking over the list now, there’s only a few I find genuinely amusing, like No Means Nougat!, or Soylent Cream (“Good people, good ice cream!”), or even the bizarre Explode! (“the Russian Roulette of ice cream: every 15 cones has a bomb!”) There were some nice meta ones, like The Creamery is Now Closed, or simply Ice Cream. And there’s a weird over-abundance of umlauts — which actually makes me nostalgic for a time when I got to hang out with people who were way too amused by umlauts every week.

But I think my personal favorite — in a list to which I’m no longer entirely sure how I directly contributed, and which nowadays just strikes me as kind of dumb — is the no-doubt sinfully delicious You Can Take Our Ice Cream, But You’ll Never Take Our Freedom.

Okay, that or Squirrel Nuts. It’s kind of a toss-up.

Wednesday various

  • Molly Ringwald remembers John Hughes:

    Eventually, though, I felt that I needed to work with other people as well. I wanted to grow up, something I felt (rightly or wrongly) I couldn’t do while working with John. Sometimes I wonder if that was what he found so unforgivable. We were like the Darling children when they made the decision to leave Neverland. And John was Peter Pan, warning us that if we left we could never come back. And, true to his word, not only were we unable to return, but he went one step further. He did away with Neverland itself.

  • The Daily Show Is Now Hiring Real Reporters. I think this has less to do with a desire for verisimilitude at The Daily Show, or a blurring of the lines between real and fake news, and more to do with somebody over at the show just finding Radosh smart and funny. The piece he says first caught their interest, after all, is amusing, and it does a good job of laying out the absurdity of the political situation. The Daily Show is best at providing commentary and context. Millions of Americans may get their news from John Stewart, but I don’t think this signals their intention of doing independent, investigative reporting. I could be wrong, though. [via]

  • The first rule of Write Club… John C. Wright’s rules for writers are as good as any I’ve ever read. [via]

  • I love these lesser-known editing and proofreading marks and plan to use them at every opportunity I get. [via]

  • And finally, while everybody’s making a big deal about this upcoming Sesame Street Mad Men parody, it really hasn’t struck me as so far outside their norm. After all, if Sesame Street can parody Desperate Housewives and Law & Order, why not this?No, what I found oddly compelling was a bit from this report on the parody plans:

    The panel was introduced with a clip with President Barack Obama, saying, “This video is brought to you by the number 40.” Along with TBS’ George Lopez talk show, this is the second program featured at press tour that’s nabbed an intro clip from the president leading some critics to say, “enough already.”

    I can see the President introducing Sesame Street — it’s an educational institution — but George Lopez’s talk show? Surely the Commander in Chief has better things to do with his time.

    What I do find interesting about the Sesame Street parodies, overall, is that the show has increasingly skewed younger, aiming more squarely at pre-schoolers than in its earlier days. (One could argue this started with Elmo, but it was all but inevitable as more edutainment options became available outside Seasame Street.) Yet these parodies skew way beyond pre-school. The show is courting two very different audiences, while increasingly widening the gap between them.