For those of you who follow world news: Bwa ha ha ha

...ha ha ha ha ha haaaa (hack) (cough) haaa

oh em gee: doofus mistake disclaimer

Oopsy daisies.

If anybody caught the below post RIGHT when it came up:

I just noticed that I accidentally typed that it was leading PSYCHOLOGISTS, not leading ARCHAEOLOGISTS, who discovered the fossils. Anyway it's fixed now.

God knows why my brain did this. I should have a session with an archaeologist.

- N.

If You Don't Have This, You're Not Cool

Those of you who believe that technology in its current state produces nothing but inanity and frivolity, prepare to see shaken the very foundation on which you stand. Get ready now:

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRWHOMPAWHOMPAWHOMPAWHOMPA

Wheeeee! Ha ha ha! Boy, that was sure invigorating! I hope it was as good for you as it was for me. Anyway, Mr. or Ms. Negative Nancy or Nate as the case may be, a fat lot of good you know, because here, courtesy of the New York Times, is the ultimate beacon of technological Hope for Tomorrow:

(photo from the N.Y. Times Personal Tech blog)

She is the Barbie Video Girl Doll, of whom the Times' Warren Buckleitner writes: "[She] looks just like a regular Barbie, but a closer look reveals a camera in her pendant, and a postage-sized color screen on her back, peeking through her blouse." Which - and I do not claim to be any sort of tech expert here, but correct me if I'm wrong - essentially means you get to see the whole world from Barbie's cleavage.

I believe I may say without fear of exaggeration that this product is the key to the evolution of the human race not only technologically but also philosophically. For it provokes us to ask ourselves the seminal human question: What's it like to be Barbie's cleavage? This is a question we human types have been asking ourselves throughout the ages of civilisation. For example, leading archaeologists have found definitive fossil evidence of australopithecines playing with Australopithecine Camera Barbie, who took two AAA batteries and also made girlish grunting sounds.

But enough history for today. My point here, as I have discovered over the last two brain-racking seconds of realizing I need a point, is: you're not cool enough. Yeah. I'm really sorry* to break it to you this way, but ... well, I mean, think about it. Not only do you probably not have this Barbie; what's more, you probably don't even have the Box of Laughter, not that I am judging you, you worthless dweeb.

Perhaps I should back up here and explain a bit to those as yet unenlightened about the Box of Laughter (formally known, in verbatim capital letters, as the "EXCLUSIVE BOX OF APPLAUSE AND BOX OF LAUGHTER"). This honey is the product of (who else?) SkyMall, which I heartily believe - and you cannot convince me otherwise - to be the finest publication ever to routinely abut a barf bag. Here's how the Box is described in SkyMall Land:

"Craving a little recognition? Someone who gets your jokes? Open the Box of Applause and be greeted with the sounds of cheering and clapping from a very enthusiastic crowd. Or open the Box of Laughter to hear uproarious guffaws. Close your eyes and imagine yourself accepting that Oscar(R), Nobel, or Best Comedy Emmy(R)."

Rrrr ... gffff ... fuhhh ... okay, frankly, I don't even know how to be funny about this, so bear with me a second while I write the following business letter to the brains at SkyMall. What say, in true Hammurabian fashion, I even write it in BIG ANNOYING AND SOMETIMES EVEN ITALICIZED CAPITAL LETTERS, HUH?

Here goes:

DEAR SKYMALL PEOPLE,

RRRR ... GFFFF ... FUHHHH ...
THIS PRODUCT IS NOT COOL. OKAY? IN FACT, IT IS FRANKLY THE SADDEST AND MOST PATHETIC THING I HAVE EVER SEEN. BAR NONE. IT MAKES ME FEEL BAD JUST LOOKING AT IT. YOU FORCE ME TO RESTORE MY MOOD BY LOOKING AT PHOTOGRAPHS OF VERY ATTRACTIVE MEN. I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY. I KNOW I AM.

LOVE,
NICOLA

So, what was I saying? Hmm. Whatever. Anyhoo, I'm feeling very positive about the Technology of Tomorrow, not to mention the Technology of Thursday and of Friday. No one can say exactly what kind of changes it will bring, but this I know for sure: it will give me something better to do than what I would have done otherwise, namely sit around and imagine winning the "Nobel" for "Best Comedy," which probably already went to somebody like Kathy Griffin anyway.

At any rate, like it or hate it, technology marches on, like the Energizer Bunny except not nearly as pink and furry. It's our responsibility to embrace it. We are, after all, the people of The Future, with the exception being surviving hosts of vintage game-shows, all of whom are unaware that they actually died in 1978. (Speaking of which, sorry to break it to you guys this way. Nothing personal, Monty Hall.) What's more, none of this is anything new. Technology has been going-and-going-and-going like this for ages! But you don't have to take my word for it**; consider this quote from the Barbie article:

"This is not the first time engineers have been given the challenge of packing Barbie's figure with technology. Michelle Chidoni, a spokeswoman for Mattel, said Barbie has been accessorized with speakers, motors, fiber optic clothing and an impeller-pump designed to push glitterized fluid through special wings."

Let this be a lesson to you, people: although at times you feel blue, disheartened, down in the dumps, and other synonyms, you must never, ever, in your moments of greatest darkness, choose to "end it all" and open the Box of Laughter. Instead, take pride in knowing that you live in a world so great, so fantastically advanced and forward-thinking, that some courageous science pioneer, somewhere,*** has already invented an impeller-pump designed to push glitterized fluid through special wings. I defy anyone to tell me, or Louis Armstrong, that this is not a wonderful world.

In the end, whatever your personal stance on technology's evolutionary path, the most important thing is simply to keep an open mind, to maintain your ability to see things - at any given moment - from another angle, from a different vantage point.

Namely, that of Barbie's cleavage.





*Okay, not really.
** And I speak for both myself and LeVar Burton on Reading Rainbow when I say this.
*** Over there.


©2010 Nicola McEldowney

San Diego Revisited, Part 3: The Puppet Theatre

Here is the Marie Hitchcock Puppet Theater, in San Diego (official tourism slogan: "28 Days Without a Commercial Airliner Landing on Someone's Head"). Specifically, the theatre is located in the heart of Balboa Park, which is near the spleen of Balboa Park, which is just around the corner from the pancreas of Balboa Park, which is where they keep the Spreckels organ.* The theatre has an interesting story behind it, which I almost never found out because I almost never went in. This was a direct result of the music playing outside, a perky canned rendition of "Sing a Song of Sixpence," sung with such ooey-gooey jollity as to make Barney the Dinosaur look like Darth Vader.

Now don't mistake me (SEGUE XING); technically, I'm all for children's entertainment. It and I go way back, in fact: I have fond memories of taking a car trip, at age two, from Nebraska to Connecticut, while listening to an audiocassette of the cheery vocal stylings of Disney singer Larry Groce, as aided by the Disneyland Children's Chorus, delivering such numbers as "It's A Small World After All."** This is all very well and good,*** until you consider that when you are two years old, your natural tendency is to listen to such tapes over and over and over and over and over and over and OVER AND OVER AND OVER, until the others in the car (because, you see, there are others in the car) are moved to turn to Satan-worship. Chances are everything will turn out okay, though, and eventually everyone will remember that car trip fondly, due to having finally been able to purge the songs from their psyches somewhere around your sophomore year of college.

But there comes a point (your sophomore year of college) when you begin to put aside such juvenile affinities and acknowledge, with affection yet maturity, that they cause you to barf. So that's why (END OF SEGUE XING) I almost didn't go into the Marie Hitchcock Puppet Theatre, but I'm so glad I ultimately did. First of all, I noticed there were puppets for sale. This was extremely dangerous for me because I would go into pretty much anywhere there were puppets for sale, including places with names like Uncle Nick's House of Unanesthetized Open-Heart Surgery and Deep-Dish Pizza.

While I was geeking out over puppets I struck up a conversation with a nice guy who turned out to be one of the theatre puppeteers, preparing for that afternoon's show. Although unfortunately I now can't recall his name, we chatted for quite some time - he was eager to introduce adult puppet theatre to the company repertoire, which I admired - and he showed me around the theatre. I had explained that I was a scholar of the puppet arts, having written a research project in France entitled L'art de la marionnette dans les années 1930 et regards sur aujourd'hui (literally, "DUDE!! There are PUPPETS FOR SALE here!!!")

The Marie Hitchcock Puppet Theatre, I learned, is the oldest continuously operating puppet theatre in the United States (they put the emphasis on "continuously"; some of the other puppet theatres have occasionally gotten up to go to the bathroom). I was shown photographs of Marie Hitchcock, who must have been a memorable figure given that she was six-foot-five ("You can tell because all her string puppets have incredibly long strings," noted the puppeteer). She died in 1994, aged in her 90s, but not before bringing the California condor back from extinction using a condor puppet. I am dead serious (no, sorry, I mean back-from-extinction serious) about this. In the 1940s, the California condor was at the brink of extinction. The condor chicks needed to be fed but couldn't be fed by a human hand, lest they become habituated to it -- at which point they couldn't be introduced to the wild. That was where Marie Hitchcock came in. She built a condor puppet with which she not only fed the chicks, but, ultimately, brought the species' numbers back up to somewhere in the two-hundreds today (which means they're off the endangered list).

The whole thing was astounding to me -- there's a beautiful photo in the theatre hallway of the puppet feeding little baby condors. The only thing that could have made this story better, as far as I'm concerned, would have been if we could have seen the Big Scary Raptors of Tomorrow being fed by:

Which brings me to another point: you never see celebrity puppets doing this sort of thing, now, do you? When was the last time Miss Piggy brought a species back to life? Meanwhile, the true puppet heroes of our society, like the condor, remain totally unsung. It's like how, at a conservative estimate, 103% of American magazine covers feature Entertainment Personalities with names like "Kortnee" who are famous for nothing except rubbing key regions of themselves on yet other Entertainment Personalities. This means that all 103% of these magazine covers feature headlines like "KORTNEE'S BABY JOY!" while, in the meantime, the people of real distinction remain ignored. You never see, for example, Bill Nye the Science Guy on these kinds of covers. This calls for a serious and thorough examination on our part of our deplorable national celebrity culture, which, as a scholar of the arts, I am totally willing to leave to somebody else.

*Ha ha! Organ! See what I did there? Never mind.

** In later years, I would invent a Forbidden Version of this song, but that is to be dwelt on another time.

*** Not really.

©2010 Nicola McEldowney

Minisnark: girl stuff alert

With apologies for the lapse in posting (there's still San Diego Part 3 to come! The one where I talk about puppets!), we interrupt this interruption to say: go check out weBEgirls (www.webegirls.com), where a new column of mine is up as of this afternoon. Today's hard-hitting subject matter: girly skills. Profitez-en!

San Diego Revisited, Part 2: Hero Worship at the Museum

Last week, we visited the San Diego Museum of Art (motto: "See Below for Our Motto in Mexican"), where they have an exhibit on the heroes of Greek mythology. My favorite part was the interactive bit, the bulletin board just outside the main exhibit, which asks the following question:


As you can see, there were many contributions. Here are some I liked in particular:





And, apparently from the opposing camp:





(though I am sorry to say Team Rocket got no love)

And, last but not least, my very favorite contribution of all, submitted by a young person who obviously took the Greek-hero theme to heart:

San Diego Revisited, Part 1: The ComicCon!

I've now returned from the ComicCon, where, defying predictions, I never did contact the dreaded Pony Rot. So I guess I can call it a success. And that's not the only reason: those of you who remember last year's GREAT LOOMING PIKACHU ASS OF DEATH will be pleased to know I found a worthy - if not quite equal - successor in the Great Lego Buzz and Woody:



Let me tell you, these guys were popular. More Con attendees were interested in getting their pictures taken with old B. and W. here than with, say, Angelina Jolie. Side note: curiously, despite being an American and therefore exposed daily to more Angelina Jolie images than air molecules, I would probably never recognize her in person, whereas it took me approximately .05 seconds to recognize MythBusters' Grant Imahara in the crowd outside the convention center, an anecdote I related with great enthusiasm to my sister, a loyal fan of the series:

MY SISTER: Like you even care about the show.
(Beat.)
ME (Cleverly): Shut up.

My other Celebrity Sighting occurred while my dad was doing signings, when some guy from some TV show walked by the booth. I have no idea what TV show or who the guy was, but I am assured it was awesome. So I just wanted to share the experience with you. Thank you.

Here is my father (on the left) at his signing, alongside author Alan Dean Foster:



I will of course refrain from mentioning those four Pibgorn books on the table, available respectively for $26.99, $16.99, $19.99, and $18.99 from Pib Press, pibpress@gmail.com, and not mentioned in this paragraph.

But you and I have not yet discussed the most pivotal, the most fundamental - yes, the most meaningful - part of the ComicCon: namely, finding a lot of perfectly useless products you absolutely totally desperately need NOW NOW NOW. I refer specifically to the following journal, distributed by Chronicle Books, which has cute little anthropomorphized internal organs on the cover. Every home should have one:



I don't know for a fact, but I like to think they have names, like Sally Spleen and Patrick Pancreas. (DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: If you were an anthropomorphized spleen, how would you feel? Do you think it would be difficult to be a girl spleen? Explain.) Either way, Chronicle Books has become hands down my favorite publishing company, easily eclipsing all the other publishers I pretty much never had any opinions about anyway. Not just for the internal organ diary, but for the following notecards, suitable for familial communications:



Thus it is with a heavy heart that I return to "the grind" back east, with an entire ComicCon-devoid year stretching before me, a year of no parasitic bloodsucking supervillains whatsoever, at least not unless I feel like going over to the university Career Counseling Center. So I'm a little melancholy right now, but it'll pass. After all, there's always next year. I'll be back at the ComicCon before I know it.

Who knows: I may even be moved to send you a notecard.