A bleak day for journalism
Weekly World News is calling it quits.
American Media Incorporated’s other titles include the Star, National Enquirer and Men’s Fitness — which, if you ask me, is putting way too many of our precious journalistic resources in one basket. If AMI went under, what would I read in the checkout line?
And I speak for all of us when I shriek uncontrollably, WHAT ABOUT BATBOY?!
According to Wikipedia the original Bat Boy edition of Weekly World News was the second-best selling issue of all time, and then infuriatingly doesn’t reveal which one was first best, so screw Wikipedia.
Bat Boy was rendered by editor-slash-cartoonist (or editor/cartoonist, if you prefer) Dick Kulpa. Dick’s other claims to fame include drawing Star Trek and Bruce Lee comics for the LA Times Syndicate and art direction for the Testor’s corporation (where he drew the instruction sheets for the Weird-Ohs line of models). Also, he was elected to the Loves Park Illinois City Council, where he regularly appeared wearing tights and a cape as Alder-man, crusader for justice. Weasel does not make this shit up.
But I digress. More Wiki.
Bat Boy has a chaotic sense of morality. He has been known to steal cars as well as come to the aid of the needy. According to the mythos, the only person who cares about the chiropteran child is Dr. Ron Dillon, who discovered him in a West Virginia cave. At the time of capture, he was two feet tall and weighed nineteen pounds. By February 2001, he was 2′ 6″. In 2004, he was five feet tall and his weight was unknown.
He sheds his wings every three years, and regenerates a new pair.
During the 1990s Bat Boy is rumored to have tried to escape society’s gaze by enrolling in a small liberal arts college in upstate New York under the assumed name of Guy Fledermaus (German for bat). He purportedly graduated with an art degree from the college’s “Music Program Zero”.
On 27 February 2001, he allegedly attacked a fifth-grader in an Orlando, Florida park. The girl was nearly ripped to shreds. The next day, he endorsed presidential candidate Al Gore.
Worth following the link just for the geneology of the Boy family. A sad day. A sad, sad day. Also, I goofed off too much yesterday and so I’ll have to make up for it today. A sad, sad, sad day.
July 25, 2007 — 8:26 am
Comments: 24
Happy anniversary!
Thirty eight years since Ted Kennedy’s Midnight Car Wash. Howie Carr is all over it.
July 18, 2007 — 5:42 pm
Comments: 28
The Gathering o’ the Mustelids
So, why does Clan Weasel gather here every year? This is why: the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games, the largest Scottish games outside Scotland. It started in 1956, about the same time my father and grandfather built the original hunting cabin on the side of the mountain. My dad hasn’t missed the games since.
He hasn’t been to the actual games in years (and neither have I, for that matter). But he wears the tartan hat with the ribbons and deedly-ball on, and stumps around rolling his R’s and saying “wha hae!” and drinking whiskey.
The joke is, as far as anyone knows, there’s not a drop of Scots blood in my dad. He descends from a line of pasty English people who were deported to Virginia in the 18th Century for either religious nutcasery or poaching, depending on who you ask.
My mother’s family traces its origins to a Scot, however. Clan MacStoat will be there. I think our clan motto is “another wee dram won’t kill me.”
When I were a puppy, some damn fool bought me the whole suit, with the jacket and the knee socks and everything. I loved that thing. I swaggered around in it long after I’d outgrown it. By the end, I bobbled out of the seams like some obscene tartan sausage.
There will be ALL KINDS of merchandise on offer up the mountain. If you’re bored some day, pick a Scots surname and Google for the original version of the family coat of arms, and compare it to the Americanized version. The American version always has twice as much shit on it, with extra tinsel and sparklies and unicorns and orcs. Like it came out of the Society for Creative Anachronism’s prom decoration committee.
And that’s what we’re not doing Tuesday.
July 10, 2007 — 1:18 am
Comments: 49
Tulsarama 1957 Plymouth Belvedere Sport Coupe Buried Car!
We all watched the unveiling together on the live video stream last night and it was very sad and Weasel got drunk and sang 1957 Tulsarama Time Capsule Buried Car songs and everything. Then we had a stalking and a flamewar and wrote haiku about boogers. I felt better after that. “Haiku” is both singular and plural. Isn’t that interesting?
Some people cynically manipulate their Google search ranking by repeating keywords over and over, but I would never do that to my friends in the 1957 Plymouth Belvedere Buried Car community. I’m different from all the others. I bet you’re different, too. So we have that in common.
You know what else we have in common? Weasel likes cookies. And gin. Not together. Except maybe if the gin comes first because, whoa! after that I’ll eat anything. Please don’t be making Weasel prove it.
So you can see we were meant to be.
Visit again. This special 1957 Plymouth Belvedere Buried Car
bond we forged, it would be a terrible thing to break.
June 16, 2007 — 4:22 pm
Comments: 79
Tulsarama!
On June 15, 1957, a new gold and white 1957 Plymouth BelvedereSport Coupe was buried in a time capsule in downtown Tulsa, OK. The time capsule was part of Golden Jubilee Week: Tulsa’s celebration of Oklahoma’s semi-centennial. The car is buried under the sidewalk in front of the Tulsa County Courthouse, approximately 100 feet north of the intersection of Sixth Street and Denver Avenue.
The car was seen as a method of acquainting twenty-first century citizens with a suitable representation of 1957 civilization. According to event chairman Lewis Roberts Sr., the Plymouth was chosen because it was “an advanced product of American industrial ingenuity with the kind of lasting appeal that will still be in style 50 years from now.”
The contents of a women’s purse, including bobby pins, a bottle of tranquilizers, cigarettes and an unpaid parking ticket, were added to the glove compartment of the car shortly before burial.
Other items included in the time capsule were:
· 10 gallons of gasoline and 5 quarts of oil
· A Douglas Aircraft Co. aerial map of airport facilities and legend
· Statement from Tulsa council of Churches and prayer for greatest good next 50 years a recently completed history of churches in Tulsa and a directory of the present churches
· Statement from board of education – historical data related to 50 years of education in Tulsa and copies of “School Life” all-high school publication issued by Tulsa high schools each month
· Statements from Mayor and Chamber of Commerce officials
· Flags which have been flown over the national capitol, state capitol and in the county and city
· Other aerial photos of the area
· Statement from Tulsa Trades and Labor Council
· Statements from all former mayors of the city – their record of service and civic accomplishments in the city, state and nationally.As part of the “Tulsarama!” festivities, citizens of Tulsa were asked to guess what the population of Tulsa would be in the year 2007. The guesses were then recorded on microfilm and sealed in a steel container buried with the car. When the car and artifacts are excavated, the person whose guess is closest to Tulsa’s 2007 population is to be awarded the Belvedere.
1957. The peak of the Big Fin era. They’ve uncovered it (see above) and found the vault full of water, sadly. But it’s wrapped up pretty good, so hold a happy thought.
They uncork the car today at noon. Follow the action at buriedcar.com.
Great. Now I got the closing cello notes from Psycho stuck in my head.
Update: practice run at the lift, and where to pick up the stream.
With failsafes in place, the crane crew was ready for a practice lift. Many gathered around the vault to see the Belvedere rise again, and everyone held their breath that the rigging would hold. Most expected to see the car raised a few inches, but crews lifted it ten feet giving the water-logged floorboards a chance to drain. Crews say getting the car out of the rusty, muddy vault gave everyone new hope.
“It looked better today than it did yesterday for some reason,” said Taylor. “I was down in there myself and it was muddy, but it looks better today.”
Organizers say they’ll be in the clear if Friday’s lift goes as well as Thursday’s practice one did.
While the car was up in the air it gave people a chance to inspect the damage 50 years underwater could do. Hot rod builder Boyd Coddington from cable’s “American Hot Rod” came to Tulsa to take a look. He will get a chance to clean up the car between the Friday unearthing at noon, and our live special Friday night at 7.
How well did the Belvedere and the memorabilia buried with it survive underground for half a century? Find out on Friday, June 15th, at 7 p.m. on the News On 6. You can also see live streaming video of the unveiling on kotv.com.
Oklahoma…that’s Central Standard Time, I assume.
June 15, 2007 — 1:00 am
Comments: 136
Nervous? I nearly shat m’self
Okay, about those goats. I was wrong. Nervous goats (AKA fainting goats, Tennessee goats, stiff-leg goats, wooden-leg goats, Tennessee scare goats) are not epileptic and they weren’t developed at Vanderbilt.
But we really did have a small herd of them when I was a wee slip of a weasel. And I know ours came from Vanderbilt, where my parents were alums (well, my dad was. My mother dropped out when morning sickness made her upchuck on patients, a thing generally frowned upon in nursing school). The goats worked out a lot better than those experimental lab rats he brought home, that’s for sure.
The proper word for their condition is “myotonia.” They have two mutations on a gene that controls chloride ions in the skeletal muscles, whatever the fuck those are. It means their muscles lock up when they’re startled. Lasts about ten seconds.
They fall down, which really doesn’t give a sense of the thing at all. It’s like the ordinary physics of gravity do not apply. They fall down like cartoon characters fall down. They land with their legs stuck straight up in the air and slowly waving about (see the pictures above). And, because this mostly affects their legs and doesn’t affect their brains at all, they go down with a look on their faces like, “Dammit! What the hell?”
Sometimes the older ones are able to stay upright and drag themselves along, or wobble back and forth like rocking horses. And it’s instantaneous. Like BANG–thud.
See, I’m trying to explain why this was fun and not hateful and cruel. Oh, here. Here’s a YouTube video that might help.
See what I mean? Could you resist knocking ’em down like bowling pins?
Anyhow, if it makes you feel better — as I said in whatever thread I first mentioned these things — the senior billygoat got me up against the barn one day when I was nine and whaled the living shit out of me. Turns out a nine-year-old is not startling enough to flatten an enraged billygoat.
June 11, 2007 — 4:42 pm
Comments: 6
Eighteen hundred and froze to death
I’ve heard that expression all my life without realizing it was a real year. 1816. Also known as “the Year Without a Summer” and “the Poverty Year.”
“February, according to old records, was rather warm and spring-like, but cold and storms held away in March. Vegetation had gotten well underway in April when the real cold weather set in. Snow and sleet fell on 17 different days in May.
In June there was either frost or snow every day but three. July was cold and frosty. In August there was an ice storm, the formation being nearly an inch thick, killing every green thing in the United States. In the spring of 1817, corn kept over from 1815, sold from $5 to $10 a bushel for seed only.”
That was in New England. It wasn’t relentlessly cold; there were terrible temperature shifts, from normal or above to far below. From nearly 100 degrees to nearly freezing in hours.
In hindsight, climatologists think it was down to three things. Volcanic activity, especially one particular eruption in Indonesia in 1815. The “Dalton Minimum” — a time of low sunspot activity that lasted from 1795 to 1823. And the peculiar dance the sun does around the center of the solar system, thanks mostly to the gravitational pull of Jupiter and Saturn.
It hit worst in the US Northeast, Northern Europe and China. There was widespread famine. Europe, still smarting from the Napoleonic wars, had food riots. Americans hitched their wagons and moved West.
It snowed brown in Hungary. It snowed red in Italy. It rained so much, Mary Shelley couldn’t go out to play, so she stayed in and wrote Frankenstein. Joseph Smith had crop failures, moved to New York and turned religious, leading inevitably to the Book of Mormon. There were vivid sunsets, leading inevitably to Turner.
Oh, it was a terrible thing.
June 1, 2007 — 4:57 am
Comments: 33
Steam-powered Britannia
Once and sometimes twice a year, on Hope Farm in Sellindge, Kent, Britain comes out to play. The old Britain. The steam powered one.
There are vintage cars and motorcycles and tractors and musical automatons and, older still, shire horses pulling the plough. There are people selling old screwdrivers and thumbplanes and tires (or tyres, if you prefer) and cakes and teacups and books. There was a Magic Accordeola playing Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
And there are steam engines. Steam tractors, steam motorcycles, steam rollers.
We ate a good Dutch cheeseburger and listened to a bad garage band. Mostly, though, we looked at, listened to, smelled the bitumenous exhalations of and otherwise enjoyed keeping company with steam engines.
It was a happy end to a happy two weeks. And then the rains came. And the weather, which had been sunny and fine the whole time, turned mizzly and cold and entirely appropriate to my mood. London tonight in the drizzle, Boston tomorrow night in the…whatever.
Oh, well. That’s tomorrow.
May 28, 2007 — 6:44 pm
Comments: 6
Up in flames
The Cutty Sark.
Which is not my charming way of telling you I’ve killed a bottle of cheap hootch this morning. The great ship Cutty Sark caught fire today. She was in the process of major renovations so much of the planking was off-site, but most of it was there and is very severely damaged.
The Cutty Sark was the most famous tea clipper ever built and the only one still afloat. Well, afloat in a special dry dock built for the convenience of 13 million tourists and one weasel. We went to see the Cutty Sark on my very first trip to London in 1997. I’ll never forget it, because…well. London! Greenwich! Cutty Sark!
She was launched in 1870 and traded tea with China. Then wine, spirits and beer. She plied the wool trade to and from Australia from 1885 to 1895, setting speed records from Sydney to London every year. She began losing money and was sold to the Portuguese, where she ran between Rio and Lisbon. She was in London for a sprucing up in 1922 when an Englishman saw her and bought her back. She finally retired after WWII and was towed Greenwich, where the dry dock was built.
The name Cutty Sark comes from Burns’ poem, Tam O’ Shanter. There’s a beatiful witch in it wearing a short (or cut) shirt — “cutty sark” (the Portuguese crews called her “Pequina Camisola”). That’s the witch, up there on the figurehead, though why she’s clutching a horse’s tail or a hunk of hair or whatever, I do not know.
I haven’t heard whether she survived the fire.
May 21, 2007 — 6:55 am
Comments: 17
Hey, Pups. Let me buy you a drink!
Drink it fast or drink it slow,
But your lips have gotta touch the toe.
I can’t remember where I first read about the Sour Toe Cocktail, the liquorous specialty of Dawson’s Hotel in the Yukon. The original toe belonged to a rumrunner, Otto Liken, who got frostbite fleeing the Mounties with a load of merchandise. He and his brother holed up in a moonshine shack and Otto got blotto so Louie could amputate the frozen digit before it went gangrenous.
They put the toe in a jar of rum and let it mellow in the shack for, like, fifty years until the building was bought by “Captain” Dick Stevenson, a local fleecer of tourists. The cocktail was his idea. He loaned the toe to a local bar and dared tourists to drink from a glass filled with booze (of their choice) and The Toe as a way of proving themselves worthy of the Yukon. He was repaid in drinks.
About 30,000 suckers have “done the toe.”
The original toe — and several subsequent ones — was accidentally swallowed. But such is the generosity of the human spirit that surgically amputated toes are forever offered as replacements.
I consider it no accident that an article about doing the toe should surface in the Toronto Star just in time for Pupster’s 40th birthday.
Dude. Lemme buya drink. It was meant to be.
April 16, 2007 — 8:00 am
Comments: 14