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Football season is starting, and that means, among other things, a lot of commercials that I’ll have to mute in order to better ignore them.  Many of these commercials will be for beer and, since I am a teetotaler, will be wasted on me.  Of course, the commercials rarely show much of the drink they’re supposed to be selling.  Generally, the drink is only a background element to the key motifs of these ads, which are

  1. Women in swimsuits
  2. A bunch of “cool dudes” hanging out together.

See my post about whether advertising is a waste of money.

But the types of beer advertising are many and varied. Yesterday I discovered one that seemed calculated to attract even my attention–of course, it was almost 50 years old.  It was a book of lyrics, written to Gilbert and Sullivan tunes, in praise of Guinness beer. (The G&S Archive has it here.) To quote from the Archive’s description: “In the 1960s, Guinness produced a series of books adver5tising [sic] their products to be put in doctors’ surgeries (on the basis that ‘Guinness is good for you’)”

This makes it especially amusing to me that the first page of the book features an illustration of Jack Point, one of only two Gilbert and Sullivan characters to “die” onstage, holding a glass of Guinness.  Come to think of it, why didn’t they include the other one, John Wellington Wells?  Did they feel that the character of a dishonest seller of magical potions and diabolical brews wasn’t quite right for the ads?

I laugh at it, but the truth is that this is a far more creative and ingenious bit of advertising craft than the “get a model in a bikini and have her tell people to buy our product” method.    Still not sure about the “Guinness is good for you” business, especially the song about the Heavy Dragoon who builds muscle by drinking beer, but still, an “A” for effort.

I think the English/Irish beer advertising seems to be very creative.  There was a television ad for Whitbread Beer (which I’ve never even heard of otherwise) that featured a parody of the song “Abdul Abulbul Amir“. It’s the catchiest advertising jingle I’ve ever heard.

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Have you heard of Mothman?  Legend has it that a winged humanoid was seen flying around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in the late 1960s.  The sightings are connected with the collapse of the Silver Bridge, with folklore suggesting that the “Mothman”, if not directly responsible, is at least a harbinger of bad luck.

Mothman_statue_in_Point_Pleasant,_West_VirginiaWhat this legend reminded me of was the H.P. Lovecraft story The Whisperer in Darkness, which tells a tale of strange flying creatures in the Vermont hills.  The “Mothman” stories even tell of  buzzing noises and strange animal disappearances just like the events in Lovecraft’s short story.

What’s even more interesting is that, in the first chapter of Whisperer, the initially skeptical narrator writes of the prevalence of these kinds of legends the world over:

“It was of no use to demonstrate… that the Vermont myths differed but little in essence from those universal legends of natural personification which filled the ancient world with fauns and dryads and satyrs… When I brought up this evidence, my opponents turned it against me by claiming that it must imply some actual historicity for the ancient tales; that it must argue the real existence of some queer elder earth-race, driven to hiding after the advent and dominance of mankind, which might very conceivably have survived in reduced numbers to relatively recent times – or even to the present.”

Well, add West Virginia to the list of places that have such legends.  The description was so close to Lovecraft’s flying aliens, the Mi-Go, that it is a bit uncanny.  (Of course, the skeptic in me says that the most obvious explanation is that whoever started the legend had read the story.)

There was also movie made about the Mothman legend about ten years ago, entitled The Mothman Prophecies. I haven’t seen it, but it seems like it plays up the paranormal/conspiratorial nature of the story.

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My friend Thingy informs me of a disturbing phenomenon.  Apparently, there is a chilling statue of the television character “the Fonz” in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I mean, everybody has their own tastes, but personally I think it’s bizarre-looking.  The eyes are especially unnerving.

Wikipedia says there are also statues of Mary Tyler Moore throwing her hat in the air and Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden in Minneapolis and New York, respectively. I am not a huge fan of statues in general, but at least statues of historical figures who actually did real, important things make some sense.    But fictional characters?  From comedies?  Seems weird to me.

Maybe it’s the same reason it looks so strange to me to begin with. Statues are better suited to looking solemn, because that fits better with being unmoving.  Something that appears to be grinning manically and yet does not move seems unnatural and sinister. (The Mary Tyler Moore statue is also kind of odd looking to me, although less so because it appears not to be multicolored.)

I don’t blame the sculptors for how these look; it seems like they did as well as anyone could have. It’s just an impossible task.  What interests me more is why you would want statues of fictional comedic characters in your city.  Maybe I’m too old-fashioned, but it seems kind of like saying “we didn’t have any real famous people, so it was necessary to invent some.”

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the average blogger to correlate all his links. We live on a placid island of ignorance, in the midst of black seas of Wikis, and it was not meant that we should check the references. The Wiki editors, each biased in their own direction, have hitherto harmed us little. But someday, the linking together of barely-associated articles will open up such terrifying vistas of the internet–and of our own frightful pagerank therein–that we will either go mad from the revelation, or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of icanhascheezburger.com (Many apologies, Howard–MM.)

It all started with this post from Thingy–I realized I had never found out the origin of the common phrase “it was a dark and stormy night. So, I followed the link and it turns out, it was from this guy Edward Bulwer-Lytton. He was a prolific writer who also coined the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword”.

So, I decided to read some of his books. Being a fan of horror, I chose to start off with The Haunted and the Haunters: or, The House and the Brain. It starts off as a fairly generic ghost story, but the end has some very interesting bits of philosophizing. Not a great work, but an enjoyable read, all in all.

He also wrote a book called Vril, the Power of the Coming Race. I tried to read it, but it was pretty dull. The plot did remind me a little of Arthur Machen’s later work The Novel of the Black Seal, which influenced Lovecraft greatly. But apparently, Vril inspired something of a “cult following”, and by that I mean that people actually thought it was true. The book is about a super-race that lives underground and has a powerful substance “Vril”, which allows them to do all sorts of amazing things. Some, notably the theosophists, believed that “Vril” existed.

Which is curious to me, because I know basically three things about theosophists:

  1. In the paragraph immediately after the one I parodied above in Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft mentions the theosophists briefly.
  2. The Theosophical Society was founded by Helena Blavatsky, who I know about solely because of the lines in the Warren Zevon song “Sacrificial Lambs”: “Madame Blavatsky and her friends/Changed lead into gold, and back again.”
  3. They have one weird logo. Observe:
Theosophical Society emblem, via Wikipedia

I only saw this symbol the other day, when I was reading about the lyrics to the They Might Be Giants song “I Palindrome I”, which includes the lyric “I am a snake head eating the head on the opposite side”. The technical word for this is Ouroboros. That word is also whence the name of the character Borous in the Fallout: New Vegas add-on Old World Blues is derived.

“Hold up, Mysterious Man,” cries the bemused reader. “What the Devil is the point of all this free-association?” Well, I’ll tell you: there was some philosopher I was reading about many months ago who had some sort of reasoning system of free-association, “correlating contents” and looking for subtle inter-connectivities in Nature. It was really interesting, but in recent days I have searched Wikipedia with considerable diligence, but I can’t find his page. I think his first name might have been Charles, but that’s all I can remember. Any information you can furnish me with as to who the guy was would be appreciated.

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Have you heard about this guy who says he was part of a secret government project that used time travel? I don’t know if this is a hoax or just a guy who’s got a few screws loose. (Would a sonic screwdriver fix that?) In any case, it’s sort of an… interesting story. My favorite part:

“It’s an inexpensive, environmentally friendly means of transportation,” Webre told The Huffington Post. “The Defense Department has had it for 40 years and [former Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld used it to transport troops to battle.”

Rumsfeld.

Used it.

To transport troops.

To battle.

I didn’t think Rumsfeld was a very good Defense Secretary, but somehow I think even he could have managed to win a war if he had access to time machines.

I also love the “environmentally friendly” bit. If they can travel through time; you don’t need to worry about the environment, you can just keep going back in time to when Earth was at its most pristine.

I love conspiracy theories like this. They’re just too funny.

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How did I not hear about this sooner?

Curses! They knew my one weakness! Now I’ll have no choice but to vote for Ron Paul. Even if he’s not actually running as an independent come November, I’ll still have to write his name in.

Okay, I’m just kidding. Don’t worry. But really, this is bizarre. It figures to easily surpass Deus Ex as the best video game for Ron Paul fans, I’ll say that much. I don’t know if it’s a joke or not, but in my opinion, it doesn’t really do wonders for the Paul’s image as a “serious” candidate.

Read more about it here.

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Thanks to Thingy, I’ve been reading up on the “Amityville horror“–the actual case and the book about it, not so much the movies.

Apparently, there’s quite a lot of controversy over the extent to which it is “a true story”. Without having read it, but only read about it, I’d have to say that it’s certainly a compelling and powerful story, but on the other hand, so many of the weird events that happened to the Lutz family sound kind of clichéd. For instance, quoting from Wikipedia:

“The Lutzes’ five-year-old daughter, Missy, developed an imaginary friend named ‘Jodie,’ a demonic pig-like creature with glowing red eyes.”

To me, that’s really creepy. True or no, it’s something that sticks in the reader’s mind. But the concept also sounds a lot like the idea behind “Captain Howdy” in The Exorcist. Also, the actual description of the thing reminds me a bit of the Lord of the Flies from the 1954 book of the same name.

A believer in the supernatural might make the argument that horror clichés are clichés precisely because these phenomena have haunted humanity from the beginning, and thus speak to something in our genetic memory. Or perhaps, as Charles Lamb wrote in Witches and Other Night-Fears:

“Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras—dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but they were there before. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal.” 

(As an aside, H.P. Lovecraft used that passage as the epigraph to his story The Dunwich Horror, the title of which is thought, according to Wikipedia, to have inspired the title The Amityville Horror.)

My reaction to this, as to all such “true ghost stories” is: well… maybe. I can’t say for absolute certain that it’s impossible. Who knows what weird stuff there is out there? But it seems unlikely. I mean, which is more probable, given your knowledge of the world:

  • That bizarre, fantastic supernatural phenomena occurred.
  • That some people made up a story that sounded cool for money and fame. 

I’m not saying the Lutzes were lying–I have no proof of that, and really, no one can know for sure. Their story might have been quite true. But at the same time, I think know which scenario is more plausible. It’s the same way with all these sorts of tales.

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Strange news about a so-called “Ghost city” in China. You can see pictures of it here, as well as an explanation of how the scene supposedly came to be. It’s difficult to tell exactly what is real and what is not here; I’ve seen comments on the Daily Mail site to the effect that the story is mis-translated, and the mist is all that is strange, but other stories indicate the whole thing is a reflection. I think it’s just some sort of weird refection of a much further away city. Then there’s also the possibility of it being a hoax.

I ordinarily shy away from mentioning stories like this, but in this case there is something remarkable about it to me: the image, whatever it is, looks shockingly like the image that is always conjured up in my mind’s eye when reading the lines from The King In Yellow:

“Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink beneath the lake,
The shadows lengthen
  In Carcosa.”
No particular significance to this; I pictured an otherworldly city, and this mirage was of a city given an otherworldly effect. (Which, as I think about it, the similarity makes it almost seem more likely this is a hoax.) Moreover, there’s nothing explicitly in those lines from the poems that evokes anything about a city, but nevertheless that is what I pictured. 
Anyway, it was kind of weird to see this, especially so soon after I wrote a post about that book. 

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For no reason in particular, I was thinking of the part in George Plimpton’s Mad Ducks and Bears where lineman Alex Karras explains why names matter for football players. He contrasts the greatness of Johnny Unitas with the mediocre career of Milt Plum. The name, he argued, set the stage for their respective careers.

He might have been right off the gridiron, as well. The Anthony Weiner scandal springs to mind, of course, but perhaps the oddest and most disturbing case I ever heard was of a white supremacist named Eugène Terre’Blanche. The last name is from terra–land–and blanche–white. Eugene, meanwhile, derives from the same source as the word “eugenics”. It would be amusing had he been merely a fictional character, and not a real person.

Like I said, no special reason for thinking about this subject. It’s just odd.

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Alex Pareene at Salon writes about the late President Reagan’s interest in alien life-forms and UFOs, noting:

“Ronald Reagan claimed to have seen UFOs on at least two occasions, according to reports from sources as disparate as the Wall Street Journal, Lucille Ball and the National Enquirer. He alerted the Navy to one of his sightings, and he and Nancy believed that Egyptian hieroglyphics referenced extraterrestrial flying crafts.

Pareene then goes on to contrast this with Reagan’s well-known attitude of indifference towards the AIDS epidemic. It’s rather horrible to read about, really.  But what I want to focus on in this post is the considerably less-important first bit.

Perhaps the most curious thing about this is that Reagan isn’t the only politician to have allegedly run into some UFOs in his time. His predecessor, President Carter, also filed a report that he had witnessed a UFO in 1969. And the man thought to have laid the groundwork for Reagan’s popularity, Senator Barry Goldwater, was also interested in the topic. He believed that the government was not releasing information concerning extraterrestrial life-forms.

“So what?”, you ask. Well, frankly, I assume it means nothing; Carter and Reagan probably just saw some airplanes or clouds, and Goldwater was probably willing to believe all sorts of things if they showed the government in a bad light. But it is nonetheless sort of strange, (if unimportant) in my opinion.

And if you think I can get through this subject without a passing reference to “Citizen Kang” from The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror VII, you’re wrong.