I remember the Indian music influenced 1982 British pop hit Ever So Lonely by Monsoon fairly well. It seemed very wistful with a repeated chorus of 'Ever so lonely. Ever so lonely WITH you.’ I always assumed it was about unrequited love.
Yesterday I saw a repeat of an old pop show and they were showing **Ever So Lonely.**These days I usually have on-screen text permanently on. I was actually surprised there is an extra, hidden syllable and the actual lyrics are ‘Ever so lonely. Ever so lonely WITHOUT you.’
Making the lyric completely conventional and rather trite.
I was watching Airplane! last weekend for the first time in at least a decade. It was a movie I watched a ton growing up, and I loved it because it was just so silly. However, this last weekend, I finally understood one of the jokes that I never really thought was a joke, just a bit of absurdity.
When Leslie Nielsen asks Robert Hays if he can fly and land the plane, Hayes replies “It’s a completely different type of flying (pause) altogether”, which is followed by Nielsen and the flight attendant repeating “It’s a completely different type of flying”
It hit me that they didn’t repeat “Altogether” and repeated what he said because he said “Altogether” :smack:
I was watching We Were Soldiers this morning about the Battle of Ia Drang in Vietnam. One thing I noticed that seemed extremely odd. While Col Moore (Mel Gibson) and his 7th Air Cavalry is fighting in 'Nam, the wives back home are receiving notifications of the deaths of their husbands.
The entire battle only lasted a couple of days. How are they receiving same-day casualty notifications in 1965 via telegraph while the battle is still in progress? Mrs Moore even says “the Army wasn’t ready” which is why the notifications are arriving via taxicabs instead of proper military personal. Really? Yet they are ready to process real-time casualty reports from a unit in the midst of a chaotic battle cutoff from other units, type up a bunch of form letters and telegraph them to the US? It’s just the last leg of the supply chain in delivering the letters they didn’t have staff for?
It occurred to me that maybe it was time shifted to account for the delay in processing. But that doesn’t make sense either as the first thing Col Moore would have done right after the battle is contact his wife once he got back to base. “Hey honey, you might see Walter Cronkite talking about this massive battle my unit was in yesterday. Just letting you know I’m fine…pretty much all your friend’s husbands are dead though…so…yeah”
Instead, the way it’s presented, Mrs Moore has no idea if her husband is even alive until he shows up on her doorstep, presumably at the end of his tour months later.
Having been a preteen when it first came out, I probably watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit literally 50 times before it occurred to me that the cartoons are a metaphor/stand in for black America
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I used to read a lot of Perry Mason novels, and he was always talking about subpoenas. It was years before I realized that what I’d mentally pronounced “sub-po-ENN-ah” was the “suppeena” I’d hear about on TV cop and legal shows.
I had a similar experience: As an English major, I read lots of Dickens, Brontes, Thackery, etc. novels in college. They always kept talking about “gaol”, which I realized was prison. But it was a looooong time before I realized that it was just an archaic spelling, and that it was pronounced the same as “jail” and not “gall” (as in gall bladder).
I remember reading a Little Lulu comic when I was five or six years old, and saw the word “misled.” For years afterward, I thought it was pronounced “MI-zeld,” and from context believed it meant “cheated.”
It wasn’t until I was 19 or 20 that I realized it was pronounced “mis-LED.” I wasn’t that far off on the meaning though.
I’ve been listening to the Grateful Dead song “Jack Straw” for years now, and for some reason it never occurred to me that this verse is a dialog.
I just jumped the watchman, right outside the fence.
Took his rings, four bucks in change, ain’t that Heaven sent?
Hurts my ears to listen, Shannon, burns my eyes to see;
Cut down a man in cold blood, Shannon, might as well been me.
IOW
“I just jumped the watchman,” said Shannon, “Right outside the fence.
Took his rings, four bucks in change, ain’t that Heaven sent?”
“[That] Hurts my ears to listen, Shannon, burns my eyes to see,” replied Jack Straw,
“[You] Cut down a man in cold blood, Shannon, might as well been me.”
The murder is why the stakes got higher, and why Jack cut his buddy (Shannon) down.
You’re wrong; it’s obvious. It’s as obvious as a pie in the face. It’s as obvious as Jessica Rabbit’s eye-shadow. It’s as obvious as the groaning noise deep in the bowels of a 'Toon giraffe who’s just been fed a big dose of prune juice. Why, it’s so obvious, it hits most people like a ton of bricks. Kudu kudu paw!
One of my favourite anime series is Yuki Yuna is a Hero. It took me several re-watchings to catch a clever bit of foreshadowing in the fifth (out of twelve) episode:
[spoiler]The series is a dark deconstruction of Sailor Moon-style “Magical Girl” series. In the fifth episode, the girls’ leader, Fu, gives a short pep talk before a big battle. Each of the other four girls responds to the pep talk, and every response foreshadows something that specific girl is about to lose:
Yuna looks forward to the big meal that Fu promises them if they win. As it turns out, using their powerful Mankai ability in battle comes at the cost of the Sange: a part of their body will be permanently crippled. In Yuna’s case, she loses her sense of taste.
Karin boasts that she’ll destroy several of the enemies herself, but ends up playing a very minor part in the battle. Karin’s entire sense of self-worth centred on her belief that she is more powerful than any of the others. Failing to make a difference in the battle takes a heavy toll on her, especial since she’s the only one who doesn’t activate Mankai in the battle and thus she is the only one to escape the Sange
Itsuki alludes to her dream of becoming a professional singer, but the Sange takes her voice away.
Togo, whose nationalism and collectivism is a running theme in the series, says that they must fight for the people. Later it’s revealed that their battles will never be over, and the girls will be forced to go Mankai endlessly. They’ll become more and more crippled due to the Sange until they’re bedridden and unable to fight. The knowledge that the greater good requires her friends will have to pay this price themselves over and over in this way is the last straw for the Togo, who decides that she’ll sacrifice anything, even the world, if it means saving them from this fate.[/spoiler]
I just started re-watching Dead Like Me, and looking at the DVD cover I just realized that’s a bubblegum bubble. I guess I never really thought about it before, but I’d just never realized it was that.
If you search for the lyrics of “Punk Rock Girl” by The Dead Milkmen, you’ll find the following:
I tapped her on the shoulder and said “Do you have a bell?”
She looked at me and smiled and said she did not know.
This doesn’t make sense or even rhyme, but I couldn’t come up with an alternative. Then it hit me. The singer’s question is “Do you have a beau?” not “Do you have a bell?”
The book and the movie are very, very, very, very different things. The author that got linked to cheats more than a little bit by mixing the two. How many people have read the book? How much input did Gary K. Wolfe have to the movie? Who’s Gary K. Wolf? He’s the author of the fucking book whose name the fucking writer of that piece didn’t bother to fucking cite. I fucking hate when idiots disrespect authors that way, if you couldn’t tell.
The toons are a metaphor for blacks in America in somewhat the same way that the X-Men are a metaphor for gays in America. They weren’t originally: the X-Men were generically any outsider group suffering prejudice. Over the years gays and others have championed the X-Men as metaphors and so they have become that. The Roger Rabbit movie offers a variety of outsider tropes in the same way. Maybe the book is more explicit; it’s been too long since I read it. But Gary K. Wolf was a science fiction genre writer and science fiction has been offering aliens, mutants, monsters, and other outsiders as generic metaphors for real world prejudice since forever. Toons are one example among a million.
I was just re-reading…for the two-dozenth time or so…Walt Kelly’s “The Pogo Papers.” In one panel, Uncle Antlers, the Moose, calls Albert Alligator a rude name.
“Frog face. Frog face. Frog face. Fog frace.”
In all the many times I’d read that collection of cartoons before, I’d never noticed “Fog frace.”
