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.
Various phrases that slipped into our lexicon. They had a brilliant person doing their promotional spots in the 1990s.
Example:
”Muni mula! Muni mula!” (From an island chief.)
”What’s he saying?”
”Either he’s inviting us to dinner, or it’s ‘aluminum’ backwards.”
Many jokes of where you hear a verb of the form {x}-er, and the reply comes back, “{x}-‘er? I don’t even know ‘er!” Oh, sure, this is Music Hall corny stuff, and variations of the old, “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled!” (Allegedly the best-selling postcard of all time.)
KROQ these days has had many format changes since then, and fallen from its pedestal accordingly.
Lexicon. Only me. Comes from a co-worker when I was at Gallo Wine. Maria, the woman who entered in the sales info before I could run the job that spat out the 3×5 cards that routed the delivery trucks. (And then I could go to lunch.)
Anyway… Usage: This morning I was served my breakfast, and as I was adjusting the combination of my side table, my food tray, and my napkin, I said, “Ai-chi, my-chi.” It’s just that kind of interjection. Some might say, “Aw, jeez,” or something similar.
“…I just report it.”
Lexicon. Oft-quoted by myself, originally picked up by me from Gordon Robison.
I’m racking my brain for an example of how I use it. Usually goes like this:
“This is really terrible.”
”Come on, it can’t be that bad.”
”I don’t make the news, I just report it.”
He was the news director at KSPC FM, the college radio station at Pomona College while we were both there. This is a good interview of him, from 2005. He’s been with Fox, he’s been with ABC. Lived in Cairo, Amman, Baghdad. Been a Professor. Linked-In tells me he’s an Executive Producer for Al Jazeera Media Network these days.
Back in 1997, I was in Atlanta for COMDEX, working for Toshiba, and staying at the Omni Hotel. I called up Gordon, asking if we could get together, and catch up. He was working for CNN International at the time (the flavor of CNN that the world outside the US sees), and offered to take me around the CNN facility.
My little journalist wannabe heart went pitter-pat. “I guess I could do that. If it’s easier for you,” I said, in my best poker voice.
He shows me around the place. Shows me the giant poster of CNN’s ratings, with the huge spike during Gulf War I. Walks me through a set with a wraparound desk and two empty chairs, clearly a broadcast set. Points to a glassed-in passageway, one story up from where we are:
“See that?”
”Yeah.”
”That’s where the regular tour goes.”
We make our way to what’s obviously a live production control room. All the video feeds queued up. A wall of monitors, each with something different.
“Hey, Gordon! New hire?”
I wish.
We wind things down. In retrospect, I realize we didn’t say much to each other about ourselves, and he was showing off a little to someone who knew him when… But I didn’t mind, at all.
I walked back to my hotel. Which was just across an atrium.
But it might have been across a world.
(EDITED TO ADD: Wikipedia ascribes the phrase to Mark Russell. But A) They quote him as saying it’s an “old newsman’s adage,” and B) they include the least encyclopedic phrase in the world, the dreaded, “citation needed.”)
It was back in the late 1980s, and both Ulrika and I were working (in a volunteer way) the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Agoura, CA. There was something else trying to start up, and they were… highly interested in people with experience helping their enterprise. Word came down that anyone who worked or aided in any way a, “confusingly similar Renaissance event” would be canned, banned, and called nasty things forever more.
I mention all this because that phrase entered our lexicon. “Confusingly similar {x}…” is more useful than you might think.
For example, Ted Lasso’s third season features a tall, knot-top, bicycle kicking superstar character named Zava. And it’s fairly clear he’s based on Zlatan Ibrahimović. So we call Zava , “the confusingly similar Zlatan character.”
Lexicon. Björk discusses her notebook of lyrics. “This is the lyric to a song about my best mate, Jóga. But all the other pages? There’s absolutely no way I’ll open for you, whatever you offer me. Because that’s so private it’s scary. And I’ve got a beautiful little secret code which is called ‘Icelandic,’ so you guys will never find out what it says in this.”