Lexicon. Derived from this bit in Steve Martin’s 1991 movie, L.A. Story:
L’Idiot is the hot restaurant of the moment, and pronounced as if French (as one might expect from the apostrophe). The phrase is generally used when someone is being a dick.
“I see Congress has cut Medicaid spending.”
“Part of the New Cruelty?”
Interestingly, the New Cruelty also shows up with lightning speed in this deleted scene that featured John Lithgow:
“And that’s what’s wrong with publishing today.”
Lexicon. Mild reworking of a bit William Goldman has in his foreword to Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride:
WHEN I WAS twenty-six, my first novel, The Temple of Gold, was published by Alfred A. Knopf. (Which is now part of Random House which is now part of R.C.A. which is just part of what’s wrong with publishing in America today which is not part of this story.)
Usually used to illustrate something being overly intricate:
”That restaurant is run by Fussmucker, but it’s owned by Muckenfuss, which is really a part of Gilded Octopus, LLC.”
”And that’s what’s wrong with publishing today.”
It’s somewhat amazing what one can find in the Archive.org site these days. Lately I’ve been stumbling on full movies. Here are some examples (subject to changes and additions):
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927
Man With a Movie Camera, 1929
Harvey, 1950
The Grand Budapest Hotel, 2014
Akira Kurosawa:
Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai), 1954
The Bad Sleep Well (Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru), 1960
(Tony Zhou, “The Bad Sleep Well (1960) – The Geometry of a Scene”)
(Tony Zhou, “Akira Kurosawa – Composing Movement”)
(Tony Zhou’s “Every Frame a Painting” account on YouTube)
Lexicon. Usually used affectionately. From Steel Magnolias. A mild re-working: “You are evil. And you must be destroyed.”
From Denis Leary’s 1997 comedic routine/record/video Lock ‘N Load. Lexicon. Re-worked from the original (“You took the donut, you dunked it in coffee. Thus the fucking title of the place!”), as he explains why Dunkin Donuts is called that.
Used when it can explain a tautology:
“Turns out Hal’s Tavern is owned by a guy named Hal.”
”Hence the fucking name.”
(YouTube isn’t letting me embed any of the many videos with his Lock ‘N Load “Coffee” segment. Hence the fucking link. [see?] Not sure why the curly quote algorithm is broken in that line above, but I’m out of spoons for what I thought would be a quick entry.)
Lexicon. Also Galaxy Quest. An expression of exasperation. Kids today say FML, but that’s not a cute reference to a (today) 24 year old movie, so it’s clearly inferior.
Lexicon. From Galaxy Quest. Sometimes re-worked to, “Does the {x} help?” where x is something odd.
TIL: When an ambassador presents their diplomatic credentials to Japan, they take a horse-drawn carriage to the Imperial Palace. Fiji did that today, in the first horsey ride since it was suspended by reaction to the pandemic.
From Blake Edwards’ other great movie, The Great Race. Lexicon, obvs.
This is a nighttime photograph, by Nancy Matoba, of the soon-to-open Little Tokyo subway station in LA. It’s of the above-ground plaza used by the station at 1st & Alameda, the approximate location of where the Atomic Cafe was, and shows the very large mural commemorating it on a stainless steel building that has a staircase and an elevator. (Compare the mural to the elevator doors for size.) The image of the Cafe at night used for the top two-thirds of the mural was made by me; the bottom third is explanatory text. You won’t even need to go underground to the rest of the station to see it. I’m proud to join the landscape of LA, and humbled to pay tribute to the place and the Matoba family this way.
(All praise and thanks to Nancy’s daughter, Zen Sekizawa, for finding my photo online in the first place, and her tireless efforts seeing this project through with Metro. Zen first mentioned this idea to me in March, 2018, showing how the wheels of government grind slowly, and exceedingly fine.)
And the original image, from my photo portfolio site:
