The Second in a Series of Reports

In Episode 521 of DARK SHADOWS a new character pops up and he's basically the devil. Anyway, a few episodes later, he says "gazebo" twice, both times with the unusual "Ga-ZAY-Bo" pronunciation. This has been the second in a series of reports on the way characters pronounce "gazebo" in DARK SHADOWS.

The Mystery of Barry Lyndon's Fart

I had fun last night watching BARRY LYNDON with Tom Franklin. Yes, that's my idea of fun, so go to hell. Speaking of going to hell! You should check out my great new comic strip. From the creator of Frowny 'n' Smiley comes Jerky the Li'l Jerk. He's the fun-loving little boy who tells people to go to hell. "Click" here for all the action you can stand. It's Jerky the Li'l Jerk! They're presented in reverse chronological order, so scroll up from the bottom, folks. You won't want to miss a single panel of America's newest sweetheart, Jerky the Li'l Jerk. Anyway, so I was thinking of all the people I've watched BARRY LYNDON with. I watched BARRY LYNDON with Pendleton Ward! (For details, "click" here.) I watched BARRY LYNDON with Lee Durkee! (For details, "click" here!) I watched BARRY LYNDON with Megan Abbott and Kent Osborne! Simultaneously! Looking back at the "post" reporting on my viewing experience with Pen, I thought, huh! I thought, gee! Didn't Pen make me stop the movie and replay a scene because he thought Barry Lyndon farted? And I couldn't convince him that Barry Lyndon didn't fart? And didn't I write this down? I thought it was on the "blog"! But after a long, humiliating search for "barry lyndon + fart" turned up nothing on the "blog" I started scanning other examples of my voluminous output, including my many, many unpublished novels. And you know where I found it? You'll never guess. You're not even here! No one is reading this. I've made my peace with that. Well, I'll tell you anyway. I did a thing for Popula where I just babbled into a digital recorder and transcribed the results, and it was there that I related the "Pen thinking that Barry Lyndon farted" tale. "Click" here for proof. How many things have I told you to "click"? Four? How many did you "click"? Zero? I guess you're busy. So, the "Barry Lyndon farting" story was especially difficult to find because for some reason I changed everybody's name when I was babbling into that recorder. I guess that was back when I valued privacy or human dignity or whatever it was we used to value around here. So I called Pen "Tex." He's from Texas in real life, though I think it was also a salute to the anarchic spirit of animation pioneer Tex Avery. For more about Barry Lyndon's farts, ask your pastor or visit your local library.

Hammer of the Chipmunks

Well, it was too hot to walk outside yesterday, so Dr. Theresa and I headed over to the gym. Afterward, we thought we'd grab our famous favorite grilled chicken salad from Proud Larry's. But there was unexpected roadwork in our way! So we had to get back on the highway and go the long way around. Inconvenient? Maybe! But we got to drive behind this truck (pictured, above) for a while. As you can see, the company logo is a chipmunk holding a hammer. I know what you're thinking! You're thinking "That's a squirrel holding a hammer." Look, I don't blame you. I said the same thing to Dr. Theresa at the time. Perhaps you and I both have been overly influenced by the time McNeil saw a real-life squirrel brandishing a stick ("click" here for more details, or visit your local library). But when I got home, I hit the "internet" for a closer look. The back of the truck treats us only to the top half of the industrious chipmunk. (I say industrious, but he's not really holding the hammer in a useful way, in my opinion.) When you see the whole logo, it is obvious that the tail is not a squirrel's tail. But I'll tell you something else: God knows where I got the energy, but I looked at some photos of actual chipmunks, and their tails were closer to squirrel tails, if not quite as lush, than the little stub I saw on this cartoon chipmunk holding the hammer. And I said to myself, "Well," I said, "I don't think the Disney characters Chip and Dale, who are chipmunks to my way of understanding, have this kind of realistic chipmunk tail either. Maybe, then, in this way, the hammer-wielding chipmunk was influenced by great cartoon chipmunks of the past." So I scrolled through several images of Chip and Dale before I found one in which their tails were prominently displayed. I was right, at least in the sense that the tails of the unfortunate Chip and Dale appear to have been snipped off to nub length. And then I thought, "Huh, I guess the people who invented Chip and Dale were like, 'Hey, we can't give them realistic chipmunk tails. They'll look too much like rats! Besides, longer tails are harder to animate.' And so on." At this point, my spirit died inside my body and I was no longer capable of human thought.

Cheese Statement

A character on DARK SHADOWS said "I find that cheese always helps me sleep." And, you know, DARK SHADOWS was a daily soap opera, so they would often enact a little recapitulation, or "recap" as I like to call it, of what happened at the end of the previous episode to keep it fresh in the audience's memory in those days before binge-watching. So at the end of one episode they did the old "using a ring with a secret compartment to poison the sherry but then the glasses get switched" bit, during which the statement "I find that cheese always helps me sleep" was uttered. Then, at the beginning of the next episode, we got to hear the guy say "I find that cheese always helps me sleep" again!

Sentence

Here's a sentence from Charlton Heston's journals: "The pope's apparently terminal illness canceled a cocktail thing."

Words

1. Dr. Theresa and I have been watching DARK SHADOWS, the original series. Yesterday, Angelique (pictured... photo taken directly from our TV!... spoiler, she's a witch!) said the word "gazebo," only, get this: she pronounced it "Ga-ZAY-Bo." I was instantly transported to 2007, as I usually am all the time. I remembered doing a reading from my second book at A Cappella, and I was reading from a short story that had the word "gazebo" in it. Suddenly, I froze up. My brain did a thing. Foreshadowing? I was like, wait, how do I say this word? I stopped the story cold and rambled aloud to the stupefied audience about the weird thing I was experiencing. "Is it Ga-ZAY-Bo? That can't be right. But I kind of want to say Ga-ZAY-Bo." It stopped not just the story but the event - and perhaps time itself - dead. Or maybe it did the opposite. Because for once in my professional life something got people interested. They were all going, "Ga-ZEE-Bo! Ga-ZEE-Bo!" So I felt crazy. Probably the only reason I remember this so well is that I "blogged" about it at the time ("click" here. I know you won't! I hate you!). Also, this nice guy I knew back then in Atlanta, Jamie Allen, "blogged" about it too, providing more details, which selfsame details I recall, though his "link" has become a "zombie link." He found it amusing that I could think even for a split second it was pronounced "Ga-ZAY-Bo." So, yesterday, when the beauteous yet evil Angelique said it that way, I paused the show and exclaimed about it and relived the whole experience, like Proust. Dr. Theresa seemed to recall the incident as well, and speculated it might be a "Southern" way to say gazebo. (We had previously researched Angelique, or the actor Lara Parker, who played her, and found out she went to high school in Memphis.) I was thinking maybe that's just the way people said it in 1968. I was alive then! I must have heard it somewhere. Anyway, this little kid on DARK SHADOWS, David Collins, came into the room (in the same episode) and also said "gazebo" for some reason, pronouncing it just as Angelique had, with a ZAY. And he's from New Jersey. What a night! Nor had the night concluded. I went upstairs and looked in the OED, which gives both British and American pronunciations with the everyday familiar ZEE, not the mysterious and intrusive ZAY. But here's the interesting thing. Ha ha, there's not an interesting thing. Among its historical examples of usage, the OED includes the spelling "gazabo" from 1828. Now, are you trying to tell me the person who wrote down "gazabo" was pronouncing it "Ga-ZEE-Bo"? Get real! To be fair, there is the spelling "gazeebo," two e's, in a cited work from 1843. And wait, there's more! The OED provides an alternative meaning for "gazebo." It's a rude expression for a guy. An example from 1896 has some dude being called "a cheap gazabo." There's that spelling again! Oh my God. We're really uncovering some big stuff here. I'm resisting the urge to look up "gazebo" in my GREEN'S DICTIONARY OF SLANG. 2. In the past few days or weeks, I used the word "descendants" in a couple of "posts." For whatever reason, I started wondering if I had spelled it right. And I hadn't! I put an "e" where the "a" should be. And I wondered... have I been misspelling it my whole life? Further research into the "blog" revealed... yes! I have been misspelling "descendants" my whole life. I haven't corrected earlier occurrences if you want to go back and search for them and look at them and make fun of me. 3. This one is about a string of words. To be specific, "A churchyard haunter at whom the owl hoots and the ivy mocks..." A character says it in BETWEEN THE ACTS, and the context implies he is quoting from a preexisting literary work, so I poked around a little bit, wondering what he might be quoting. My flimsy research indicates it's a mash-up or scramble of quotations, or possibly a jumble, or maybe nothing. So that settles it. But while I was looking around, I came upon a wonderful "web" site in which a scholar has catalogued all of Virginia Woolf's allusions to plant life. Well, maybe not all of them. I don't know. But a lot of them! And I felt pride because it has a "blogspot" address. There are so few of us left, I assume. Her entry on ivy ("click" here) contains, incidentally, a number of asides on owls, a bird with which Woolf seems to have habitually associated ivy. Well, I think we've covered everything. Just like ivy! 4. GREEN'S DICTIONARY OF SLANG: "gazabo (also gazab, gazabe, gazaboo, gazaybo, gazeaboo, gazebo, gazebu, gazeebo, gazimbat, gazuny, gezeybo) an awkward, strange or stupid person... also any fellow." 5. Update [added May 31]: A couple of episodes later, Angelique says "gazebo" twice in quick succession, each time using the more familiar ZEE pronunciation. Who got to her?

Old Guys

The most important thing is that Sonny Rollins died. My hero! It's no exaggeration to call him my hero. At the bottom of this "post" I'll put a playlist I made based on the massive biography of Sonny Rollins by Aidan Levy, which Megan and I read for the Million Dollar Book Club. One of our most monumental undertakings. If he's not your hero already, maybe you'll read it and Sonny Rollins can be your hero too. Or just listen to him! Also valid. The playlist is not all Sonny Rollins. It's also music that is important to him or has a special place in the book. But it's somewhere to start. Now to turn to lighter matters. Remember that Virginia Woolf book I was going to read on the airplane but then I started OUTLAWS OF THE MARSH instead? Well, now Virgina Woolf's BETWEEN THE ACTS is my "nighttime book," in which last night I read "She became, of a sudden, solemn as an owl" and that is why it is going on the list I began in 2011 of books I read with owls in them, no one knows why. Well, soon I'll temporarily put aside either Virginia Woolf or - more likely, because the adventure will be easier to take up again when the time comes - my "daytime book" (the aforementioned OUTLAWS OF THE MARSH) because the Million Dollar Book Club has finally recovered from the DIARY of Witold Gombrowicz. We're going to read Charlton Heston's journals from 1956-1976, because we think that's the book Wallace Shawn talks about reading in MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, and I believe ever since the Million Dollar Book Club read Andre Gregory's autobiography some years ago we've been circling around Charlton Heston... and for whatever reason, Wallace Shawn has been calling to us more and more as the years go by. Literally! Not literally. It was Charlton Heston or a book about William Shawn (Wallace Shawn's father) by Lillian Ross, a Million Dollar Book Club favorite author. But our ways, moods, and instincts are oblique and terrifying.