Mad scientist humorist!
After having a look at Hugo Araújo’s artwork, a wise old friend provided an amazing quote from the great American humorist S.J. Perelman:
Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.
And I thought, “Damn, this is just too good to be true. My friend must have just made it up.”
I mean, ve‘s good enough to pull something like that off, if he has a will to.
But what you know? The citation is genuine.
Amazing! One of the greatest of all American comic writers (did I mention that he also co-wrote the book for One Touch of Venus, thus providing a link to another Faustus-favored creator?) had his own thaumatophile leanings (albeit, possibly only in jest).
Reality often disappoints, but sometimes it really satisfies.
Department of unintended humor
The comment spammers, as always, have been keeping me busy throwing away their garbage. I have been trying to look on the bright side. The fact that they’re just bots that write comments that are effectively unresponsive to the posts or pages they’re trying to stick their comments onto means that sometimes the generate unintended humor.
Back in February I wrote a post with the title “I was inducted into a harem…,” inspired by a narration line of Bridget O’Brian, who in the course of Study Abroad had exactly that experience. The post was itself a brief foray into relevant orientalist art. The spambot attacking the post, however, had something different in mind. It attempted to post a comment asking
You have tested it and writing form your personal experience or you find some information online?
Personal experience? If only…
Update 2100 UCT: And later in the day, a spambot attempted to post on Progress in Research
This post is beyond awesome. I am always wondering what to do and what not to do so I will follow some of these tips.
And in the category of “what not to do” you include not leaving your sample of Apsinthion Protocol nanomachines in the laundry? Just askin…
Ooh look! My first clueless marketing email!
My blogfather Bacchus over at ErosBlog has a long and distinguished tradition of using his blog to make fun of clueless and otherwise problematical marketing emails he receives in his role of master of ErosBlog. So it gives me particular pleasure to be the recipient, just today, of one of the same.
Now I must confess that this one wasn’t particularly awful, at least by the hilariously-awful standards of some that Bacchus has written about, but still it left me wondering “do you folks ever look, for like five or ten seconds maybe, at the sites you’re sending mail to?”
After an introduction to “Dear EMS,” our intrepid publicity person — let’s call her Casting Lady — explains that she is the casting assistant for a new television series (guess that’s my punishment for putting up screenplays) and inquires:
Wondering if you might be able to help further broadcast our current casting search to your fans and subscriber base? Well, I’m certainly not anti-commerce or anti-entertainment, and given how hard it is to get a break in acting, I suppose that if I knew of anyone in the EroticMadScience universe who I could help hook up with a job, I would certainly want to help out, but reading on I find out that
We’re looking for women who are struggling with an intimacy addiction and are trying to maintain their “perfect image” on a daily basis.
I’m sure you have a ton of questions
A few maybe, such as
- When it comes to intimacy issues, are you interested only in women who are into intimacy only with other human beings, or do passionate relationships with with alien tentacle beasts count as well? and;
- What about women who effortlessly maintain their “perfect images” on a really permanent basis?
Unfortunately the website to which the Casting Lady directed me (sorry, I won’t link because I don’t believe in encouraging marketing cluelessness) wasn’t terribly enlightening. There I was cheekily asked
Do you have a secret addiction or obsession that’s forcing you to live a double life? We want to know your stories.
Wow! Do I ever have a manifesto for you guys to read! Oh, wait…guess you couldn’t be bothered the first time.
Imagine living your picture-perfect life. By day, you are a beautiful, talented and ambitious 20-something. But at night, everything changes— you give in to temptation, to the dark side of yourself. You keep your secret from co-workers, family and friends. You enjoy the duality and the excitement that accompanies your obsession but you do know, it’s a dangerous game.
From context I think they mean beautiful, talented, etc. 20-something women, although perhaps I’m wrong about this. I don’t think so, though, because that’s all that seems to be depicted in the pictures on their page.
Well ladies and gentlemen, I think you can pretty well infer than I’m not a 20-something woman. Intelligent and sensitive people in command of all the relevant facts can disagree in good faith about how beautiful, talented, and ambitious I am. (That I am obsessive we can all agree, yes?) But unless Vinnie Tesla manages to get that ol’ Ontological Engine all cranked up, I don’t have much prospect of becoming a 20-something Ultra Babe with a Dark Secret, not that that might not be fun.
Seriously, marketers. Have a look at the damn site before you email. Or I really will have to mock you openly…
Your favorite singer in liquid form
John Cleese remarked on an early influence: “We all loved The Goon Show in the Monty Python Team: it ignited some energy in us. It was more a spirit that was passed on, rather than any particular technique. The point is that once somebody has crossed a barrier and done something that has never been done before, it is terribly easy for everybody else to cross it.”
It sure crossed my barriers, and early on and in a way that ended up impinging on my own erotic consciousness decades later — showing up in the Apsinthion Protocol.
As it happens, The Goon Show (BBC show site here, U.S. fan site here, UK fan site here) was something which, by there merest chance, I had the good luck (?) to encounter in my own early adolescence. For no obvious reason, this 1950s absurdist British radio comedy was rebroadcast every week on a public radio station that I could just…barely…pick up, and I was hooked by it from the first time I heard an episode. Written by Spike Milligan, and acted largely by him, Peter Sellars, and Harry Secombe, it conjured up a fictional universe from which logic was ejected with such vigor that it made the Marx Brothers look like Betrand Russell.
Needless to say, they really were a central influence. I remember quite a lot of scenes, but the one that seems most apropos here was one right in the theme of “person in liquid form.”
A little quick background: the most common plot of a Goon Show involved some plan by a pair of impoverished aristocratic grifters named Hercules Grytpype-Thinne (voiced by Sellars) and Count Jim Moriarty (voiced by Milligan) to take advantage of the good-natured but surpassingly naive Neddie Seagoon (voiced by Secombe). In the episode “The Childe Harolde Rewarde,” which first aired on December 8, 1958, 37 year-old Neddie escapes from his decrepit and infantilizing parents Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister. Henry and Minnie offer a reward for his return, priced a 4 shillings a pound for their 16-stone child (!). Hearing this, Grytpype-Thinne and Moriarity engage in a convoluted scheme that involves stuffing Neddie with vast amounts of food (paging Molly Ren!) in order to claim a larger reward.
Things don’t work out quite as planned, as the transcript (mine is a hybrid of this one and this other one) shows.
Grytpype-Thynne
Here, Auntie Min, your child Harold. 613 stone at 4 shillings a pound equals, ah, skeltonfrunderklee pounds reward.
Bannister
He’s a fake, my boy only weighs 16 stone.
Grytpype-Thynne
Well, we shall reduce him. Into the steam bath with him, Moriarty!
Moriarty
Ah!
Seagoon
Oh, please, stop [screams]
Grytpype-Thynne
Get the steam on his knees, Moriarty! [laughs] That’s it. Look at that stomach vanish, Moriarty!
Seagoon screams.
Moriarty
That’s got him down, bring him down.
Seagoon
Oh, please, stop! I’m vaporizing with the heat! You can’t do this to me, I’m, I’m the King of 23 Pond Street! I’ll have you arrested by the royal policeman! [speeds up to inaudibility] My mother keeps a duck-farm in Kent! [screams, winds down]
Moriarty
Ah, he’s vaporized now, into this bottle with him. There!
Pop!
moriarty
Now, to the Palladium!
The scene: Harry Secombe’s dressing room.
Dance hall music, knock on door.
Agent
You want an autograph?
Eccles
Yeah, autographs.
Agent
In that cue over there, sonny.
Cash register
(arriving from a distance)
…dressing room
It’s hot in here.
Eccles
Yeah, like a drink from my bottle of water?
Bluebottle
No, thanks, Eccles. I’m training to be a desert.
Eccles
Oh.
Moriarty
Hands up, everybody! Drop everything!
Grytpype-Thynne
Yes! Now, listen, Secombe fans, this bottle contains your favorite singer in liquid form!
Secombe
(muffled through rest of show)
Hello, folks, don’t let me down!
Grytpype-Thynne
(aside)
Put a cork on it, Moriarty!
Pop!
Secombe
Oh!
Grytpype-Thynne
Now, we want 1,000 pounds, or we drink him!
Secombe
Don’t let him drink me, folks, I shall hate traveling by tube!
Agent
All right, all right, I’ll pay!
Clatter of money falling.
Agent
There, 1,000 pounds in big NAAFI spoon.
Two escaping whooshes
Agent
Harry! Harry! Speak to me! Say something, Harry!
Secombe
Help!
Agent
Hold this bottle while I get a doctor.
Eccles
Okay. [hums]
Bluebottle
Eccles, don’t get them bottles mixed up, Eccles.
Eccles
Oh?
Secombe
Can you see what’s coming, folks? If so, well, don’t spoil it for me!
Bagpipes and singing Scotsmen.
Eccles
Hello, doctor
Doc
Have no fear. This is the patient here, is it, aye?
pouring sound, more Scottish noises, bagpipes.
Doc
Aye, this is a genuine vintage Secombe and it tastes very ill.
Eccles laughs
Doc
What are you laughing at, what are you laughing at there?
Eccles
Well, I was just ready to in case anybody said something funny.
The Doc mumbles.
Secombe
Hurry up, I’m catching me death of cold in here. Me shiverings have gone to the bottom!
Eccles
Oh!
Doc
We’ve got no time to waste. The only way to restore Mr. Secombe to his normal self is to bring this to the boil, add a pound of leeks…
Water boiling.
Doc
Goats milk, a touch of sospan fach, my doons a spoon a world and…
Secombe
What about some brandy?
Doc
Steady Secombe, steady Secombe, I’m just going to add this bust of Sabrina to bring you to the boil.
(I cannot resist an editorial interruption at this point, since this last joke might be a little bit obscure to anyone not a Gooniac. Sabrina (Norma Ann Sykes) was an actress and model often referenced on the Goons.
The concepts both of “bust” and “bringing to a boil” seem readily applicable here. For those of you who like this sort of thing, there’s a whole site dedicated to Sabrina here.
We now return to our regularly-scheduled transcript. Thank you.)
Doc
That’s strange, nothing’s happening.
Eccles
Oh, I, I gave you the wrong bottle!
Doc
What, what, what? The other one then, hurry, it’s the payoff! Hurry.
Eccles
I… I drank it.
Doc
Say `ah’.
Eccles
Ah.
Secombe
(screams)
He’s had onions for tea!
Doc
Bring the stomach pump.
Eccles:
Oh no! [inaudible]
Greenslade
Ladies and Gentlemen, in the interests of hygiene, we end this show. Good night, all.
Eccles
Aoooh!
We’re supposed, of course, to be laughing at all the absurdity of it all, but I confess at the time the concept of being turned into a liquid — by a deliberate and even industrial-sounding process, set off a twinge of erotic feeling. I mean, maybe it was the proximity of the “bust of Sabrina” to the concept that did it, except that I don’t think I knew back then who Sabrina was. In any event, there’s a line of influence here to what I would write decades later, I feel sure…
