Lexicon. From Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Sometimes reworked as, “C’mon, Clark. You won’t be late. You hate being late.” Clearly a case of bad memory, since the original is really commenting on Clark’s sleeping habits. (Just for search index: Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, Superman, Batman)
I’m going to quote this in full. Mostly so I can have it in a safe place, and not disappear due to link rot, or the Brownian swirl of the internet.
“As Canadian as possible under the circumstances” is arguably one of the most famous Canadian aphorisms. But not many know its author, or how it came to be.
In 1972, Peter Gzowski, then summer host of This Country in the Morning, held a contest to complete (in the manner of “As American as apple pie”) the saying “As Canadian as …”. Heather Scott, a seventeen-year-old summer music school student at the time, heard of the contest, and immediately came up with the phrase that has since become so famous. The subsequent telephone call from Peter to Heather at her school began what was to become an on-and-off relationship with “Mr. Canada”.
Heather was a passionate Canadian, who cared deeply about her country and her fellow man. She bravely completed her University of Toronto Honours B.A. while recovering from Hodgkin’s Disease, and went on to a career as a production editor with Prentice Hall, married and miraculously (after all her radiation treatments) bore a daughter, Sarah. Her other popular claim to fame is as editor of Don Cherry’s autobiography, for which she earned a flowery dedication from Don.
Sadly, her cancer returned in 1990, and she died at home (in White Rock, B.C.) on 30 October 1994. Ironically, Peter Gzowski visited White Rock on a book tour just a few days later. They never met, until perhaps Peter’s own passing a scant eight years later.
R. W. Scott (Heather’s father)
Long Point, Ontario
18 May 2004
This can be lexicon, as I joke about five (maybe six) of my eight great-grandparents being Canadian makes me ethnically so. Sometimes rephrased as, “As well as possible…” in response to the American opening question, “How are you doing?”
(Note that Ms. Scott was a music student, and there were rules about a minimum of Canadian content on radio and television.)
I’m reading a book (for a source to a lexicon entry of the future) with the playlist Ryuichi Sakamoto curated for the (now closed) NYC vegan sushi restaurant Kajitsu in the background. It’s mostly air pudding (lexicon — see below), which I wanted.
But then this song cues up. With its distinctive three chord opening, it just… announces itself, with great power.
Absolutely remarkable.
(And while there’s no Glenn Gould-style humming, there are piano hammers and sustain bars plainly audible. This had mics in very close.)
So. In a splendid case of “verbing weirds language,” what does it mean to “Bob Watterlond {someone}.”?
Bob Watterlond was an unassuming man. Somewhat stringy brown hair. Large glasses, with thick, square frames. Perhaps a little thick around the middle. A mustache much in favor today, but not in the late ‘80s/early ’90s when I knew him.
Which was at the LA distributorship of Gallo Wine.
Bob was the Credit Manager. Among his duties, he would collect delinquent accounts.
His method was charmingly simple. Bob would call the liquor store (or restaurant) and go, “Hello, Mrs. Kim. How are things today? The children are doing well? Great, great, glad to hear it. I was calling to remind you you owe Gallo Wine $167.47, and we’re not going to ship new product to you until you pay. OK, Mrs.Kim, hope you have a nice day.”
And then he’d call the next day, sweet as could be.
And the next.
And the next.
I guess things went to a formal collection agency after 28 days. But he’d remind you if you didn’t pay before then, his hands were tied when it came to what happened afterwards.
I’m reminded of all this because I’m Bob Watterlond-ing someone right now, trying to get them to produce a document to me.
Lexicon, of course.
This comes from a sub-section of the original BBC Radio version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s a bit intricate, so here’s the whole thing:
“May (or may not)…” pops up all over in my lexicon.
“Some of you may (or may not) remember the story I told…”
Although on re-hearing it, I admit a fondness for “Representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and Other Professional Thinking Persons.” Let alone, “(W)e demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
Lexicon. You’d think it wouldn’t come up much, but there I was, watching an episode of Property Brothers on HGTV, and after the reveal they were talking about how they had so much more “space…”
This is from Creature Comforts, a short similar to Wallace and Gromit by Nick Park and his Aardman clay animation crew. As the jaguar speaks, the Brasilian accent is vital.
Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Robert A. Heinlein, time enough for love
Lexicon. Used more by Ulrika than myself. Example:
“Stop trying to use logic with these guys. They’re bureaucrats, who probably just have a script they can work from. You’re annoying the pig.”
Taco Bell used to have a whole series of commercials featuring a talking Chihuahua. This was my favorite, a movie tie-in with a US Godzilla:
I like this particular one because of the ‘tude. “I can take him… I just need a bigger box.”
This reminds me of a prank pulled by Harvey Mudd College against CalTech. The two colleges have a longstanding rivalry, both being engineering schools. (A rivalry Tech’ers insist doesn’t exist — even as they think up their next prank.)
There’s a large cannon in the middle of CalTech’s campus. A group of enterprising Mudders decided it would be fun to steal it. They consulted a recent alum on how to do this. He reportedly got a faraway look and said:
“You guys are going to need a big crane.”
Not, “No, that would be wrong.” Not, “Have you considered what the jail terms might be?” No… You guys can take ‘em. You just need a big enough box. Er, um, crane.
The spirit that builds great things.
The year: 1991
The setting: Pasadena’s Hastings Ranch theaters
The film: Hamlet, directed by Zeffirelli, starring Gibson, Close, Bates, Scofield, Holm, Bonham Carter, etc.
So, we get to the nunnery scene. Ophelia’s nearly in tears.
One grey-haired Pasadena matron turns to her companion, and says, just above a stage whisper:
“He’s going to drive that poor girl crazy!”
{blink}
Never seen this story before, have you, ma’am?
If Lucy Fell (1996) would be a mostly forgettable movie, except for the way some of the performances are plainly early versions of characters the actors would take up later. Lucy Ackerman, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, is the template from which her portrayal of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City was drawn. Bwick Elias, flower-child idiot artist, is the ur-goon of every idiot Ben Stiller has played thereafter (notably Zoolander).
But there’s also this great scene, at 0:56. Lucy and Bwick are on a date, at Bwick’s apartment:
^^^
{Bwick joins Lucy on a couch, facing a painting we’ve seen him working on previously.}
BWICK: It’s symbolic. {He gestures at the painting, which stays unseen.} Life equals love which actually equals death. Life equals death.
{We cut to see the painting}
LUCY: It’s symbolic?
BWICK: Yeah.
LUCY: Symbolic death?
BWICK: Symbols of life, and death, and love. Life equals death which is in the middle. The sub-set is love. Which is really what the symbol is. Love. Life equals love equals death. It’s symbolic.
LUCY: Wait. {She gets up off the couch, and walks over to the painting} You have a woman with “LIFE” painted on her, uh… area, and she’s stabbing to death a man with a knife that says “LOVE” on it. And then in big, bold letters it says, “LIFE=LOVE=DEATH.”
{beat}
I don’t know that it’s very symbolic, Bwick. It’s kind of spelled out.
BWICK: So… It sucks. HANS!
LUCY: No. It doesn’t suck. It’s just that it’s not really… You know, it’s… It’s a literal painting.
{As she says this, an assistant who looks like Fabio — long blonde hair, overalls, no shirt — splashes some sort of fluid onto the painting.}
LUCY: It’s not symbolic. Which is… Fine.
BWICK: Hm-hm.
LUCY: It’s literal.
BWICK: Right. It just… Literally sucks.
{We see that Hans is patiently standing next to the painting, now with a blowtorch in his hand.}
LUCY: No.
BWICK: No, you’re right. You’re right. It just symbolically sucks. HANS!
{Hans turns on the blowtorch, and sets the painting ablaze.}
BWICK: It certainly isn’t very literal any more, is it?
{Lucy turns to the painting, as it continues to burn.}
LUCY: No, it’s… It’s symbolic.
Interestingly, this morphed when we got a Mercedes wagon. When trying to figure out some arcane feature of the car, I always imagined some engineer in Stuttgart, whom I had to think like to understand: HANS!
(Although sometimes I would credit his partner, Fritz.)
This method also is required for Microsoft products, both apps and operating systems. Step back, and think like a programmer in Redmond, not like a general computer user.