scary toy clown

Fortean Times is my favorite magazine and I can’t imagine why it’s not everyone’s. Every month they serve up weird news, unsettling pictures, unlikely occurrences and semi-fictional animals. It’s a little bit of everything one needs to be reminded of the world’s inherent strangeness. I’ve been subscribing for more than ten years now and I can’t imagine a world without it. Even as the internet pushes print periodicals to the edge of extinction, Fortean Times demonstrates the power of a well crafted and curated magazine. I’ll keep throwing money at them as long as they’re there to catch it.

And this month, as you might have noticed, it’s a hard hitting look at the grim side of clowns. From broad psychological strokes in the vein of “clowns have obscured identities and access to children” to specific instances of evil clown media (Looking at you, Tim Curry) it tosses around theories as to why that which amuses can also terrify.

And if you’re a Fortean type who happens to run a website named Scary Toy Clown and you get this in your mailslot it’s further evidence that the machinery of the universe is humming along just fine.

-s

This is an odd turn of events. The live action Bratz movie, which is itself a puzzling development, features our giant headed dolls turned real life girls in High School. And not just any High School. Carry Nation High. Older readers might remember Carry Nation as the axe wielding sobriety enthusiast from 19th century Kansas. Her “hatchetations” were a mix of street theater, political statement, and religious fervor ending in splintered saloons. She’s most often pictured with a hatchet in one hand and a bible in the other. What she has to do with selling dolls or the public education system is beyond me. But they’ve got a cartoon version of her on the school emblem and they built a statue as well.

I don’t know if it’s some kind of counterpoint to young Hollywood’s drinking problem or if the film is filled with institutions named for prominent historical feminists. For all I know, they just got out of Elizabeth Cady Stanton Junior High, hang out at the Harriet Beecher Stowe mall and spend the entirety of the movie purchasing trendy items with Susan B. Anthony dollars.

-s

You may have noticed a lot of E3 coverage this week, you may not have. Me? I go out of my way for it. Out of all the noise and splendor of the show, Sony’s quiet little Rubik’s Cube by way of M.C. Escher game was the most refreshing looking bit.

-s

I lived right outside Kenmore Square in my college days and Mr. Butch was as much a part of the geography as the now defunct establishments he leaned against. Like the Rat, Pizza Pad, DeliHaus, and Charlie’s before him, Mr. Butch has passed on.

To me, he was a sign post that I was almost home. In the early 90s we spent a good portion of our free time seeing shows at the Paradise and had to walk home down Comm Ave and through Kenmore. By the time we got to the Rat, Mr. Butch would be there chatting it up with the hardcore kids and you knew that things were right in Kenmore Square.

Boston.com has a good writeup about him and it’s amazing that you can live on the streets, in Boston, for more than 30 years. But why not? He never hurt anybody besides himself and for the 4 years I spent as his subject, he was a fitting king for Kenmore Square.

-s

There’s a new fish and sub place opening around the corner from me and they’ve kicked off their advertising by taping a menu in the window. Among the regular offerings of cheese steak and chowders, there’s a questionable side dish. Perhaps in efforts to woo the local aging hippie population they’re offering a Mescaline Salad instead of the presumably more healthy but decidedly less adventurous Mesclun Salad. I’m going in on opening day and ordering a plate of that and a baked peyote.

-s

I’m no fish expert, but when I look into the fish bowl and see the little guy floating at the top of the tank on his side, I know something’s amiss. Roy’s more than a year old and he’s a goldfish, so I figured the jig was up. He didn’t look slimy or sick otherwise, just out of balance. He’d push off the surface and swim upside down a little before struggling to right himself, eventually tiring himself out and floating back to the top on his side. I went reading up on such behavior online because I don’t know that there’s a fish neurologist nearby and it turns out he had gas.

Part of my lack of expertise regarding fish is that I’m unfamiliar with their organs. Turns out the little guy has a “swim bladder” which regulates his buoyancy and keeps him upright. He’d either gotten too zealous in his feedings or he’s been sneaking out to go drinking when I’m asleep, but his swim bladder went out of whack and pulled him up to the surface. The internet was also full of advice to remedy such a condition. Peas were the answer. I checked a couple of forums and cooking, shelling and mushing up a couple green peas was a constant thread of advice. Dutiful fish owner that I try to be, I cooked up some peas and fed him those. 10 minutes later he was swimming around like normal again, picking up rocks and spitting them at the side of his bowl in the constant tap tap tap that serves as either an attention getting device or protest at his imprisonment.

-s

I’ve been branching out from my video game podcast niche recently. My new, enjoyable walk to the T stop for my commute leaves me with some extra wandering around time and I wanted something new to listen to. I decided to see what the big names in science had to say for themselves on these airwaves of the internet. I listened to Science Magazine’s podcast for about 5 minutes before kind of nodding off. The science news was ok, but the soft jazz background music and general NPRness of the whole thing was a little too “easy listening” for me. Scientific American’s show, was more to my liking and while it’s still too laid back (c’mon people show some emotion) it had funnier content, which is always appreciated.

The centerpiece of the most recent show is a letter/essay from Scientific American from 1903 by one Mark Twain. Apparently his sister owned a quarry and he spent a summer discovering fossils in her backyard and getting interested in paleontology. Also around this time, Alfred Russell Wallace once known for conspiring with Darwin in regards to the Law of Natural Selection had turned spiritualist and decided that all this evolving was done expressly to prepare the planet for Man. Twain, having seen both the fossil record and the folly of man took exception to this and penned the article “WAS THE WORLD MADE FOR MAN?” , a Swiftian attack on human-centric creationists with a glancing blow towards the scientific establishment’s tendency towards jargon.

It’s funny, it’s pithy, it says things about man and nature and all that. He’s Mark Twain, you know? Some examples:

“According to Kelvin’s figures it took 99,968,000 years to prepare the world for man, impatient as the Creator doubtless was to see him and admire him.”

“It was foreseen that man would have to have the oyster. Therefore the first preparation was made for the oyster. Very well, you cannot make an oyster out of whole cloth, you must make the oyster’s ancestor first.”

and the capper:

“That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for.”

Funny, right? You don’t need a Twain scholar to explain the humor of it to you, do you? Well, this podcast did. After the Twain guy gave a good background talk about Mr. Clemens’ scientific leanings, they went on to point out specific jabs and indicate that not only was this funny, but VERY FUNNY and that Mark Twain was also very very funny. I appreciate their scientific rigor in dissecting the thing in front of them, but casting science’s bright light on Twain’s mastery of the language washes some of the color from it.

-s

I’ve been on a real spring cleaning jag around the house. In digging around hidden corners of a cabinet, I found my old VCR and the time has come to part company. I know, big deal, a VCR, right? But it’s my VCR, and I’ve had it since 1984. I haven’t used it for years, as movies have moved from clunky tapes to slim discs and finally the more ethereal transports of the internet, but this machine holds a special place in my heart and I’m sad to see it go.

For two years my mother and I lived with her parents and in that time I developed a powerful addiction to renting horror movies with my grandmother. My mom’s a hairdresser and works all day Saturdays, so my grandma and I would rent movies every weekend and watch them during my grandfather’s nap. We bonded over our collective love of horror movies, the more gruesome the better. She had been a big Hitchcock fan when he was still making movies, but by the early 80s suspense had turned to slasher movies and that was fine by her. I had spent the early bits of my childhood watching Creature Double Feature and while I enjoyed the cheap thrills of giant monsters and teenage werewolves, I was ready to graduate into some more visceral thrills. The local video store was happy to oblige. We spent two years of gory Saturdays, watching a parade of troubled psychos eviscerate teenagers.

Then Mom and I got our own place and I was left VCR-less. We rented one for special occasions in a “VCR and 3 movies for the weekend” deal. The first of my own rentals were The Octagon, The Road Warrior and Faces of Death. My mother’s patience with my questionable movie choices was much appreciated.
(Continued)

I like Pac-Man well enough and I’ve expressed my love for his wife in the past. I’ve tried to love the Xbox Live Arcade versions of Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, but could not. They were ancient arcade games shoved into the Xbox without care for form or function. Controlling either of them with the joypad was a frustrating, imprecise affair. Cornering was hit or miss, the aspect ratio problem was a mess, and the old time game in the new time box just seemed out of place. The limitations of the dot eating, maze running genre became apparent when displayed on a device of the 21st century.

But now, in celebration of the Pac-Man world championship its holding, Microsoft has commissioned a new and improved version called Pac-Man Championship Edition that bumps the aspect ratio out to a stylish 16:9, drops in some block rocking beats and turns the speed up to insane. I can’t get enough of it. The presentation is modernized and the controls are built with the Xbox’s joypad in mind. In addition to fixing what was wrong, they’ve distilled everything wonderful about Pac-Man and shaved off the boring bits. The maze is set up in such a way that it regenerates dots and alters the maze shape as you play the game. The important thing about this addition is that the level never ends and (more importantly) you can string together your power pellets, so that you can eat 6-8 ghosts in one well timed chase, pushing your score higher and satisfying your terrible hunger.

-s

The MPAA’s slide into complete irrelevance took a big step last week when they announced that smoking cigarettes in a movie will now factor into its rating. Movies that “glamorize smoking” or feature “pervasive smoking” could garner an R rating, while films with “historic or other mitigating context” might be spared the same fate. What good is this going to do? Nobody’s under the impression that smoking is good for you. Sorry, cancer society and watchdog groups but smoking looks cool, especially on film. Is the film noir section relegated behind the beaded curtain now? Does Casablanca come in a plain brown wrapper from Netflix?

It’s a nonsensical descent into sub categorization. A quick look at ratings issued recently at Boxoffice Mojo shows that Fido contains “zombie related violence” while A Mighty Heart contains “horror violence” and Hostel 2 contains “bloody violence”. Even more baffling are “thematic elements” defined by the MPAA like so:

Thematic elements are those elements of a film that do not necessarily fit into the traditional categories such as violence, sex, drug use and language, but may be of particular concern to parents.

What?

Anyway, the ratings board is getting to the point where it doesn’t mean anything, so all this rating segmentation is just a love letter (or suicide note) to themselves. Ratings only matter during the theatrical run of your movie and that’s what? A month if you’re lucky? After that the unrated DVD is on sale at Target to anybody with 20 bucks. And if the kids don’t have the money, there’s always the internet. Or Turner Classic Movies where you can watch all the glamorized, pervasive smoking you want. And it probably won’t even kill you.

-s