Did you know that the “@” symbol has no name?
Overcompensating just told me. And people say that comics can’t teach you anything!
It’s unnamed! There is a concept in this, the 21st Century, that has no name. Maybe it’s just because I’m auditing a linguistics class, but I find this hilarious. I mean, we name everything. There’s a whole bit in the Bible about how Man just looooooves to name stuff. There’s even a name for that little plastic thing at the end of shoelaces. We blend (brunch!) and compound (airport!) and steal (rendezvous!) words to describe the world around us with as much detail as we can, but we don’t have a word for something staring us in the face for the better part of a 40-hour work week?
“&” gets a cool name—ampersand. I love that one. Or “*.” Asterisk is a good one, too.
Generally, I think people call it the “at” symbol. Mr. Stewart, my beloved school librarian from 1990-98 and the man who introduced me to poetry, called it “Crazy A.” Which, as I just learned from Wikipedia, the Serbians do, too (лудо, for those of you keeping track).
You know when all of a sudden you realize that not everyone adheres to the same lexicon you do? Like when you get to college and have inane conversations about whether soft drinks are called “pop” or “soda” (it’s “pop,” btw).
My world has just been rocked in a very tiny and specific way. I’ve been living my life for the last 22 years thinking that “@” meant “Crazy A” universally. Turns out, all it meant was that my librarian might have been Serbian. Go figure.
I hate to sound so shallow and ridiculous, but the absolute best part of not being in school–and thereby not having homework–is the fact that I get to watch TV. And I think we all know that I love me some TV.
Tonight, I caught Reaper, a new show on the CW airing at the same time that Veronica Mars used to be on (please bow your head for a moment of silence). The premise? A guy named Sam has to work for the devil as a bounty hunter for escaped souls because his parents sold his soul to Satan before he was born. And the devil is played by none other than Ray Wise.
Whoa.
You might remember him from Twin Peaks. Or any of the innumerable other roles in which he played someone who was creepy as hell. Basically, the only other person I would have bought playing Satan in this show would be Christopher Walken, and everyone knows he’s sworn off the CW since they canceled Gilmore Girls.
It looks like it’s shaping up to be a pretty great fall line up–I may have lost Veronica Mars, but I still have Heroes, The Office, Bones, Dexter and How I Met Your Mother. And with the addition of shows like Reaper and Chuck (Televisionary has a look at the pilot episode) to round things out, I think I can stay happily sedated until Christmas.
But what’s going on, television execs? Superheroes and serial killers and geeks, oh my! Since when is geek culture so mainstream? I mean, Reaper and Chuck seem like the fun, off-beat kind of show that Buffy was back in the day (note: it was a Tuesday), but the influx of stuff that seems to be trying to tap into the sudden popularity of genre TV is pretty overwhelming.
Let’s take a look, shall we?
Fall Line-Up Dork Factor Based Entirely on First Impressions of Promos
- Chuck – Best Buy employee becomes inexplicably involved in spy stuff and explosions and hot girls. And Adam Baldwin’s there, wearing the hell out of a suit! Dork Factor: 9/10. Spoiler: there’s a ninja in the pilot.
- Reaper - I covered this already. Keep up, will you? Dork factor: 6/10. Kind of like a cross between Joan of Arcadia and PG-13 Knocked Up.
- Moonlight – It’s about vampires. A vampire who fight the good fight. Some might even say…who help the helpless. Dork factor: 10/10. Vampires. Yeah, I liked this show when it was called Angel. Or Forever Knight. Or every YA thriller I ever read in middle school. I’ll probably watch anyway since Jason Dohring plays a vampire in it and I’m wildly curious to see whether being actually evil would make Logan even hotter.
- Bionic Woman - Ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch. (That’s the sound the Bionic Woman makes when she runs or jumps, FYI). Dork factor: 10/10. CYBORGS, PEOPLE!
- Journeyman – Some guy falls asleep in cabs and assumes he can travel through time. Dork factor: 0/10. A drunk who assumes he can break the space/time continuum isn’t anything special. I went to college, man. Every frat boy believes that after a Disney Power Hour.
- The Big Bang Theory – Smart people are socially inept! Let’s laugh as two nerds try to have sex with a pretty girl! That’s HI-LARIOUS. Dork factor: 0/10. Because nothing draws real geeks into a TV show like mocking them relentlessly!
And those are just new shows! Not to mention the frenzy Heroes continues to cause. Or Lost (wait, is Lost still on?).
I’m not sure why all of a sudden being a geek (or nerd or dork!) is cool. I feel like it probably has something to do with Orlando Bloom being in Lord of the Rings, or Steve Jobs. I’ll enjoy the Cornucopia of Lame ™ while it lasts–you know, until Reaper and Chuck get inevitably axed for being too smart for their own good.
But. Let the record show, I was lame before it was cool. And I have the bought-for-full-price-as-they-were-released Buffy, Angel, and Firefly boxed sets to prove it.
If coffee was necessary to live life as a college student, then it’s utterly indispensable for a young professional making her way in the world today…it takes everything you’ve got. And taking a break from all my worries sure would help a lot…
[A Side Note: Sometimes, I feel like sitcom theme songs encroach upon my reality. Typically, it's the song from The Mary Tyler Moore Show or Friends. If I'm lucky, How I Met Your Mother. This Cheers moment has been brought to you via my clearly impending madness.]
Anyway, I had a hard time getting out of bed this morning, so I doubled up on my coffee. And seeing as though I don’t like coffee so much as I like milk and sugar, the coffee doubling led to a syndrome I like to refer to as “Coffee Mouth.”
Coffee Mouth is that wretched aftertaste that inevitably comes as a result of Coffee Drinking. Coffee Mouth leads to Coffee Face, which is that unfortunate thing everyone does when they have Coffee Mouth: a bewildered look accompanied by an icky smacking of tongue against the roof of the mouth, as if you’re wondering, “when did I fall asleep with a mouthful of pennies/sheep?”
Yeah, I had that. So I rooted around in my desk and LO AND BEHOLD: ALTOIDS!
Altoids are basically the only food that you can leave in your car or a desk drawer for months—nay, years!—at a time, only to find them and say, “Oooooh, Altoids!” I mean, try to think of another food that you’re pleasantly surprised to find after months spent in a dark, enclosed space. Hamburgers? Chocolate? Popcorn? Please.
Also, apparently the Altoid company has a really killer marketing department. Check out this ad! I’m not an expert here, but I’d hazard to say that this is the funniest mint-related promotional item since every Mentos commercial you’ve ever seen.
And incidentally, this is the second post in a row that ends on a minty note. How…fresh of me. (Ba doom chh!)
Am I the only one on the internet who is immensely saddened by the latest hairpin turn in Britney Spears’s downward spiral?*
Maybe it has something to do with endings. These past few months have featured more than a few endings for me—the end of college, the end of young adulthood, the end of Harry Potter, for God’s sake—and I think that Britney’s numerous, very public meltdowns signal another kind of end. The whole sad affair might as well be called Britney Spears and the End of Pop’s Golden Age.
Between Britney’s bloated shimmying at the VMAs and NSYNC’s Chris Kirkpatrick attempt to sweep up the shards of his shattered dignity on Man Band, I think we can safely say that the Pop Kings and Queens of ‘97 are officially all washed up.
Which, while being kind of hilarious, is sad for those of us who (whether we liked it or not) got home from a long, arduous day of high school to see Carson Daly counting down to a Backstreet Boys/NSYNC/Britney Spears/etc. video on TRL.
I’m not saying it’s terribly meaningful that this Pop Era has come to a close. I’m just acknowledging it. Much like our parents’ generation took time to pause when John Lennon was killed, we should take time to acknowledge that damn, Britney Spears is no longer hot or even mildly talented and that’s a shame.*
* Well, clearly not.
** Okay, maybe the Britney Spears : John Lennon :: bombing at the VMAs : being murdered is a stretch. The B-Spears Situation is more akin to a John Lennon look-a-like drinking a bottle of Scope and passing out in a pool of his own vomit. Disgusting with more than a dash of pitiful, while still conjuring vague feelings of protective affection. Also, minty.
Irony is a tricky thing and my boy Rilke agrees:
Irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in uncreative moments. In creative moments, try to make use of it as one more means of grasping life. Cleanly used, it too is clean, and one need not be ashamed of it; and if you feel you are getting too familiar with it, if you fear this growing intimacy with it, then turn to great and serious objects, before which it becomes small and helpless.
–Ranier Maria Rilke, Letter Two, Letters to a Young Poet
For my generation—the iGeneration, if you will—irony is the hippest thing around. Caring about stuff is just so passe as sincerity has fallen almost completely and alarmingly out of fashion.
I feel like it’s important to love certain things without irony, to section off a part of your life for pure, unadulterated enjoyment. A few unironic loves of mine include, but are far from limited to, High School Musical, Keanu Reeves, and terrible young adult thriller novels.
The biggest of these pure and dorky passions is Disney.
My love affair with Disney began at the age of three when my parents took me to see a rerelease of Cinderella on the big screen. That same year, I made the first of many 18-hour car trips to from Pittsburgh to Orlando. “Disney World is a place where all the characters in the movies are real and dreams can come true!” my mom, who grew up in the era of The Magical World of Disney, explained on the long, long drive through the Appalachian Mountains and onto the Carolina flats. Year after year, spotting the first palm tree elicited cries of joy and a sense of impending magic. Since then, I’ve been a sucker for the wildly commercialized, often ethically unsound Happiest Place on Earth™ .
Disney’s been evil (or, if you’re Walt Disney’s nephew, Roy, a “rapacious, soul-less” company) for a while now, under the rule of Michael Eisner. “We have no obligation to make history,” he famously said. “We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only obligation.”
Um, ew.
Which is why it brings me great joy that Epcot Center—which has fallen into such embarrassing disrepair that Disney has been (until recently) trying to cover it up with a big ugly Mickey arm—will once again become what Walt Disney intended it to be: EPCOT Center, an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.
EPCOT has always been my favorite. Dedicated to the spirit of innovation, communication, and imagination, EPCOT made the future seem so exciting, especially the possibility of desert farming, which just blew my mind at the tender age of 6.
Here’s to the sincere hope that the recent rumblings in EPCOT signal a return to Disney’s original sense of wonder at and celebration of the future.
Now, for the love of God, someone give me something to make fun of—I think I’m drowning in sentimentality.
