bafflegab.org

Just a quick note: we’re top of Google if we do this, but unfortunately not if we do this … not by a long way, I suspect. But hey, who the fuck uses bibliometrics these days, anyway?

Blogspirit gives us ways to keep track of the viewers that check us out- we seem to have a lot of unique viewers, which I take it means that most people have a ‘once bitten, twice shy’ approach to the site. (And, dear readers, if this is your first time here, please scroll down and check us out… no, don’t go, it gets better, less pleading, less self-deprication for the sake of a cheap joke… check out this, or this… hehehe… like I said, ‘popularity contest’, B-Dubya). Also, how do I know that half the unique visits aren’t just me logging in, or seeing if B-Dubya has posted something, but from a machine I don’t normally use? My PC and ‘net connection being pretty much Stone Age and all.

- Posted by Rabbit Zero

B-Dubya and I were having a good old yarn last night, and somehow got onto the topic of vampires… ahh yes, he was telling me about the stuff he was downloading now that he has a nice, quick, beefy connection, and mentioned the TV show Ultraviolet. For the uninitiated, it’s a Brit mini-show thang of a few years back: imagine, if you will, The Sweeney meets Vampire: The Masquerade. (And if that put you off, it’s a lot better than that stinker, Kindred: The Embraced.)

Anyway, he said it would be cool to be a vampire, and to have the power to charm, to dominate others, an so on and so forth (Auspex, Celerity, etc. ; ) ). I said that I thought I would not have those powers, if I was a vampire. I think that maybe there is a confirmation fallacy of some sort going on here. Older vampires wish to increase their power, in a Machiavellian rather than a mystical sense, so of course when it comes to making new vampire underlings, they’ll target those who can assist them in their schemes- the confident, the charming, the social climbers (don’t you all regret being popular at school now- huh?!). I said that I’d be the sort of vampire who ended up working night-fill at the local supermarket.

I also said that perhaps a vampire’s powers are gained simply through a sort of osmosis from what they do: go around being a social climber (albeit, an undead one) and your powers would turn out to be based on your ability to charm, dominate, etc. As a member of the working-class undead, after long exposure to the ways and means of night-fill (it’s a career!) my powers would be based around (for instance):

• Calculating exactly how long until my next break (extraordinary time-sense);
• Customer service (unbelievably surly, maybe a-”These are the peas you’re looking for”-Ben Kenobi Force suggestion thing, or just plain old invisibility to customers seeking help);
• Charting my way through the ever-changing labyrinth that is shelving (direct sense);
• Calculation by eye of how much stock is left on the shelf, or on the pallet (if my memories of The X Files serve me well-and they certainly do that-then vampires of all sorts are meant to be obsessive bean counters)

B-Dubya said that as a vampire I’d blend in with all the other staff: ‘No one will ever know!’

With powers like these, one day I might even make night-fill manager!

- Posted by Rabbit Zero

Title: Mirrormask

Actors: Jason Barry, Rob Brydon, Stephanie Leonidas, Gina McKee, Stephen Fry

Director: Dave McKean

Year: 2005

Rating: 7/10

Now, having being a fan of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean for some time I had been looking forward to this one for a while, but it just never showed up in any cinemas or vid stores I could find. I finally got to see it through the magic of the internet, and my reactions were mixed.

The visual style is amazing. Great to see Dave McKean’s signature style as moving, rather than still images. (Google him, and you’ll see the kind of stuff I mean). The bulk of the film is done entirely in CG, with minimal real actors amidst it, which actually works quite well. It’s surreal, and beautifully realised, but the story lets it down a bit, I thought. It’s a bit straightforward fairy-tale-ish; though it does have some good moments. Done on a low budget, and obviously aimed at people who loved Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal (with a direct reference to the former in the background of one scene, I noticed.)

Title: Old Boy

Actors: Min-sik Choi, Ji-tae Yu, Hye-jeong Kang, Dae-han Ji, Dal-su Oh

Director: Chan-wook Park

Year: 2003

Rating: 5/10

Stylish and with some unexpected film techniques here and there, but ultimately does not have the content to live up to this. A strange tale of revenge, which tries to build twist upon twist but ultimately ends up relying too heavily on the villain crying “Haven’t you figured it out yet! Ha ha! Here’s what’s really going on! You must be stupid not to have figured it out.” when the plot twists are really too ludicrous for the protagonist to have spotted, let alone the audience.

Extra marks for the silly over-the-top fight scene of Oh Dae-Su successfully taking on roomfulls of bad guys with clubs and knives armed with a claw hammer.

I started to write this as a comment on R0’s last post, but have decided to air it here in the broader forum of the blog proper.

The Simpsons is an odd phenomenon. For a start, it’s on TV, and it doesn’t suck, which makes it an oddity at least, but more to the point is the aforementioned tendancy to quote it, and its own appropriative nature. Up to the end of season 17, by my probably slightly off count, there have been 377 episodes. At a bit more than 20 mins a piece, that’s more than 125 hours of nothin’ but Simpsons. They are more deeply ingrained, as Rabbit0 has pointed out, than any other cultural influence I can name. A random glance over the episode list, and I could give you a plot summary of nearly every episode, and quotes from most, especially the ones that have now been repeated ad nauseum. What’s weirder, though is that the show itself spends so much time parodying other shows and events, and making sly references to such that it ends up being a strange kind of mirror of what’s going on around it.

On a number of occasions, I have experienced a new piece of more ‘legitimate’ culture (i.e. classic film, book etc.) only to find that I already had a familiarity of a sort with it, through the Simpsons’ reference. What draws you into these, though, is that if you know the reference, it’s a lot funnier. When I did lit. at high school, our teacher (props to you, Meg) showed us the episode A Streetcar Named Marge while we were studying A Streetcar Named Desire, which it well and truly takes the piss out of. Thing is, aside from the silliness of it; it is the fact that the closing number, “you can always depend on the kindness of strangers” is so totally at odds with the actual ending of the play, where Blanche depends on the kindness of the men who are taking her away to an asylum after she has been brutalised by her brother-in-law which makes it so funny.

The fact that the Simpsons parodies just about any entrenched, recognisable thing around is also part of the ‘jumping the shark’ phenomenon. I believe having run for so long, and being so entrenched themselves, the writers have had to eat their own tails and start taking the piss out of their own conventions as well.

It will be weird if it ends up as entrenched as Shakespeare.  (Who apparently invented an amazing amount of our words and phrases).  Will ‘yoink’ eventually be a word everyone uses without knowing its origin?  Not to mention d’oh… Then again, even with agonizing repitition, how long since you heard kwyjibo, or someone doing the Bart Man?

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_{Posted by BonusWavePilot}

In life, we are plagued by all sorts of questions. Some of them have answers, and some of them are probably those recurrent questions to which there will never be an answer that most people find compelling. My colleagues in the philosophy department are, I suspect, plagued by questions mostly of the latter sort: Does the past exist? What’s the deal with the Sorites paradox? Why ought I be good, and just what does that mean, anyway?

But there are many other questions that motivate and infuriate the human mind- perhaps this is why Jack Kerouac said that he had nothing to offer the world but his confusion. If any readers can answer any of the questions below, I’d very much appreciate it; if any readers have similar questions, please post away.

1. Which musicians really made ‘crossroads-at-mignight’ style deals with the Devil in order to get their musical talent? I am assuming here that Keith Richards made a deal with the Devil, but for eternal life- which, if nothing else, should remind us all to ensure that we request eternal youth. Kids, there’s a big difference.

2, How much Simpsons is too much? I realised a few years ago that my generation- and just which generation am I exactly, X or Y?- was by far more familiar with ‘The Simpsons’ than with any other piece of literature. Shakespeare, Homer, Raymond Chandler… nope, ‘The Simpsons’ is first in our cultural canon. Is this a bad thing? Suppose that we relied on literature for our morals, our worldview, our sense of other people and other peoples’ lives- and these sorts of claims are very often made- then would we be worse off for looking to Homer, Lisa, Bart, et. al. for these things? In attempting to answer this question, I reccomend that you do not turn to this book: it does contain some serious philosophy, but is more accurately, I think, a testimony of fandom on the part of people who happen to be philosophers. And the most recent addition to the line (after, ‘Buffy and Philosophy’, ‘Narnia and Philosophy’, etc.) is ‘The Atkins Diet and Philosophy. The sound you hear now is Socrates rolling in his grave…

(B-Dubya made an interesting point to me once, that it was a bit scary that Channel 10, which broadcasts ‘The Simpsons’ free to air Down Under, could cobbe together ads for other programs- ‘Hercules’, in this case- just by using snippets of ‘The Simpsons’: ‘Who the devil is Hercules?’; ‘Hercules, the Cyclops tore off my dress!’; etc.)

3. Why do the Australian tourism authorities- the tourist board?- think that their ad is particularly Australian? This is the ad I mean… you need Flash 7 to view it (whatever the hell that is). So, the punchline of the ad, the hard-sell, is that we, the hardworking and industrious people of Australia (and won’t the tourists be disappointed when they get disabused of that notion) have put all this shit together- ’shrimps on barbies, stubbies in holders, cricket on tellie, bums on seats,’ sort of stuff- so, asks Beefcake/Cheesecake, ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’

Sure, it generated a little bit of controversy. But, and admittedly I’ve only seen the Cheesecake version, the woman sounds like she went to a Swiss Finishing School. She says ‘bloody’-uncouth- but then pronounces ‘you’ correctly, the Queen’s Own English. More realistic slogans, more true to the Australian speech and temperament, that the tourism authorities obviously did not consider (or, obviously did not consider were any good) include: ‘Australia: where the fuck are yers?’; ‘Australia: cart yer arse on in’ (I think that one’s from Patrick Cook or, gulp, ‘The Simpsons’); and ‘Australia: Fuck oath!’

I asked one of the philosophers the other day whether I swore too much, and he said, ‘Don’t worry about it- you’re Australian’.

- Posted by Rabbit Zero