Oh My Goodness

My current "nighttime book" is a Penguin paperback of the Apocryphal Gospels, translated by Simon Gathercole. I finished reading the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, in which Jesus goes to school at about age five. Anyway, the teacher starts to teach him the alphabet and Jesus isn't having it. He says (I paraphrase, sorry, Lord!), "Just tell me about the letter A. Then I'll see whether I think you can handle B." Naturally, the teacher does a terrible job explaining the letter A. So Jesus says (I'm quoting directly now) "Pay attention, sir, and understand the arrangement of the first letter. Notice here how it has diagonal lines and a stroke in the middle, and then you can see the alpha's lines pointing and straddling, joining together and parting, leading off and going up, circling and darting, tripartite and double-edged, of similar shape and thickness and kind, rectilinear, equilibrious, isometric and isomeric." All right! And here's the part I identified with: the teacher goes (quoting again) "Oh my goodness, my goodness, I am a befuddled wreck of a man!" which is exactly what I used to say every day when I was a teacher. Weirdly, you know what this reminds me of? So, when we were working on the ADVENTURE TIME episode "Diamonds and Lemons," which was a Minecraft tie-in, few of us knew enough about Minecraft. Taking myself as an example, I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that it existed. That was it for me. So we had one member of the team (I think it was Cole Sanchez) who knew everything about Minecraft, and he gave us a crash course in its intricacies. Also, we watched people playing Minecraft on YouTube. And I remember there was one guy in particular who just played Minecraft and said "Oh my goodness, oh my goodness" over and over. "Oh my goodness, oh my goodness" fifty times in a row as he played Minecraft. "Oh my goodness, oh my goodness," he said, thereby racking up millions upon millions of "views." And that's when I knew writing was dead. That was the moment! I was like "I have no future." Because you don't need to hire somebody to write down "Oh my goodness" fifty times in a row for you. Though I bet Samuel Beckett might have tried it out! We may also recall the time I read an online reviewer who was persnickety in an unintentionally amusing way, and I thought, you know, I try to write characters who talk like this all the time, but why? Here they are already existing in real life for the world to enjoy. Anyway, when Jesus is eight years old, he kills an especially mean teacher. Kills him dead! Once again, the point of contention is the alphabet. At the end of that episode, Joseph takes Jesus home and tells Mary to keep an eye on him, quote, "in case people who provoked him ended up dead." That was the first time I ever laughed out loud at any Gospel, apocryphal or otherwise. Cole teaching us about Minecraft reminds me that we had a bee expert come in and tell us all about bees on SUMMER CAMP ISLAND. But my memory is that everything we learned about bees was too depressing to use.

Innocent Merriment

I was listening to Haydn's Drumroll Symphony... yes, I was! Shut up! And I grew curious about the almost modern-sounding melody line at the very beginning, so I thought I'd see if my quaint and trusty old MILTON CROSS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS AND THEIR MUSIC had anything to say about it. Well, sorry to report that they devoted just one short paragraph to that work, containing nothing on the subject which had captured my interest. But! Underneath that paragraph was one on the Toy Symphony (now [and I use the word "now" loosely, considering the relative antiquity of the volume] attributed to Mozart's father), for which the following instrumentation was catalogued: "penny trumpet, quail call, rattle, cuckoo, screech-owl whistle, a little drum (in G), and a little triangle." This, Milton Cross and his associates conclude, makes for "innocent merriment to delight both young and old." It also makes the MILTON CROSS ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS AND THEIR MUSIC - Volume I, at least - a book with an owl in it.

Pyramid of Friends

Megan Abbott came over to watch WIFE WANTED, an extremely low-budget movie that Verdell sent me. WIFE WANTED is all about the scourge of "friendship clubs," which, according to WIFE WANTED, are where you go when you're lonely and there's a sweetheart waiting there to rip off all your money. These friendship clubs seem like a serious problem! It is a good thing there was no booze in the house or Megan and I would be dead from taking a drink every time someone in the movie said "friendship club." It is not unusual for a character to say "friendship club" twice in the same sentence! When Megan got home she looked up old newspaper articles about "friendship clubs" and found one that was like a pyramid scheme ("click" here). Apparently there was money involved, though I prefer to think of it as a way to get a pyramid of friends! And what's wrong with that? A hardboiled reporter goes undercover to crack the case of the friendship club, which is named Affiliated Friendship Club. He pretends to be a prosperous but lonely sheep farmer from Utah, but the actor doesn't try very hard to keep his "Utah sheep farmer accent" going. He slips in at out of it at his ease. He really only remembered to do it "whenever somebody mentions his ranch," as Megan observed. Greatest of all in WIFE WANTED was the bar frequented by the characters. There was a little piano in the bar, and when the man would play the piano, the piano would begin to glide around the floor as if propelled by magic! I mean, it really zoomed along through the bar, past tables, around a corner, and out of sight. No one seemed surprised. In this frame you can see a tiny bit of the magic piano, stilled for the moment. All Kay Francis wants is another drink and this crummy bartender refuses to give her one. He is like, "Wouldn't you rather talk?" He is like, "Eat this sandwich instead!" You can see the sandwich in question. What a lousy bartender.

With Creamed Cabbage Thou Must Fill My Crown

Hey don't you want to hear about the old cookbook I was reading because I was trying to remember the word "gremolata"? (It didn't help.) Naturally I wandered over to gelatin. According to this cookbook, "Jellied Ginger Ale Cubes" make a terrific salad garnish! This cookbook also tells you how to have a party for Washington's birthday. "Fill tiny blue and silver tri-cornered hats with red gumdrops and set these at each plate." For Lincoln's birthday serve "buttered steamed rice," plum pie, and the majestic (I assume) "Crown of Frankfurters"! Ingredients: 20 frankfurters and 2 cups cooked sauerkraut. That's all! Although you can "Fill crown with stuffing, creamed cabbage, creamed cauliflower or Potato Balls instead of sauerkraut." Ha ha, Potato Balls, the capital letters make it funny. This is the CULINARY ARTS INSTITUTE ENCYCLOPEDIC COOKBOOK: DELUXE EDITION from 1976, "newly revised," though it was first published in 1948, and reads that way. I also found one of my brother's old report cards folded up (hidden?) inside!

True Fact!

The romantic triangle in CRITIC'S CHOICE consists of Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, and a young Rip Torn. At one point Rip Torn luxuriates on Bob and Lucy's silken bedspread, smoking a cigar and barking insults at the elderly Hope. Here's a fun fact to share with your friends! In the movie the bedspread is sparkling blue. On this lobby card it is pink! Think about it for hours. I guess there's nothing you can count on in this world.

Ice Head

"Bloggy" the "Blog" Mascot responds to McNeil's icy query: "I can't say I've seen any triangles (perfect or otherwise)... however I have seen some strange ice-creations in the last few days here in Wisconsin: A fountain that had been gushing forth pink water froze when the temperatures dropped, appearing like a fountain spouting cotton candy. I also saw a beer can that was shaken, opened, and so cold the foam froze as it emerged, creating a perfect sculpture of beer can ice-head."

Today's Weather: Perfect Triangles of Ice

Welcome once again to our popular regular feature "Today's Weather." Today it is snowing in Oxford, MS. Meanwhile, McNeil reports from North Carolina that he has seen a frozen birdbath with a "perfect triangle of ice" rising from it, a perfect triangle that seems too perfect to have been made by nature. "It's not in the center of the birdbath," he clarifies. "Closer to the edge. Isn't 'Bloggy' the 'Blog' Mascot [pictured] from Wisconsin?" McNeil inquires. "Could you ask her if that's a common occurrence? A perfect triangle of ice rising from a frozen birdbath?"

McNeil's "Way... Way Out"

Welcome to McNeil's popular if irregular UFO column "Way... Way Out." Today McNeil sends a couple of "links." The first is to a BBC news report about England's susceptibility to alien visitations. Next comes what McNeil calls, in his e-mail's title, "the mother lode" of aggregated sighting reports: in January alone we had "orange balls of light, triangular 'humming' objects," and so much more. Let these oranges represent the orange balls of light.

The Willeford Revival

Looks like everyone is reading Charles Willeford these days. And by everyone I mean McNeil and me. Last night I told McNeil I'm reading PICK-UP, a yellowed, pocket-sized, typo-riddled Black Lizard reprint I picked up years ago in the used mystery section at A Cappella. McNeil (inspired by the "blog," it turns out) is reading THE MACHINE IN WARD 11, a Willeford story collection, which he obtained by his preferred method of the inter-library loan. So, in PICK-UP, the narrator and the eponymous "pick-up" go to a nightclub called the Dolphin. There's a trio playing. "The trio," says the narrator, "consisted of chimes, theremin, and electric guitar." Crazy! I tried to imagine it. It's even stranger than the nightclub with the harp and bongo duet in TEACHER'S PET. Now I want to go to a nightclub! Somewhere with a bassoon, a triangle and a wind machine.