The Spiderman prosthetic arm/fishing rod combo. WTF?
Culture
For Make Glorious Fun Of Eurovision Song Contest
I hadn’t bothered writing about Eurovision (this year’s winner was Serbia, watch here), a] because it’s been and gone and b] because Martin’s already done the political aspects But via Go Fug Yourself comes the news that the people behind Sasha Baron Cohen’s Borat film are to make Eurovision, The Movie:
“Borat” screenwriter Dan Mazer and History Boys producer Damian Jones have struck a deal with Working Title Films to make a comedy movie about the Eurovision Song Contest. Variety says the idea for Eurovision: The Movie was originated by Mazer and Jones, who will produce with Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner for Working Title.
OMFG, that I have to see.
Or do I? Do we really want to share Eurovision with the world, by which I mean America?
At the moment Eurovision has cult status in the US. GFY is American and Eurovision-crazy, and really, I sympathise; where else would you find such a glorious admixture of extreme camp, nationalistic fervour and political bloc voting? But I hope their campaign to bring Eurovision to US tv doesn’t gain any traction:
[…]
Just because we’re not invited to the party — just because we’re cursed with geographic undesirability — doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be allowed to press our flushed, thrilled faces against the window and gawk at the delicious theatrical, colorful, cross-dressing antics happening inside. Why, this year alone, the semi-finals featured sword-wielding backup dancers, male nudity, a rock opera called “Vampires are Alive,” and a man who started chucking his own underpants around the stage. And while many of us simply call that “Tuesday,” there are still loads of people for whom this is a glorious, intriguing novelty.
[…]
Clearly, we are missing out on this batshit marvel. CLEARLY, I need to be tireless with my campaign to bring Eurovision to our cable airwaves. It’s a giant, boozy orgy of camp — not to be confused with Orgy Camp, which is an entirely different kind of mischief — and I feel deprived that I can’t do more than view pictures or study grainy, stilted Internet video on my laptop.
So join me in my crusade, which so far consists entirely of wishing really, really hard that somebody in a position to make this dream come true would read either my blog or my mind.
While I understand the yearning of some USAnians to be allowed to view this annual sequined extravaganza, this war by other means, I hope US tv doesn’t pick it up, because that means they’ll want to join in. Please, please, please don’t let them ever join in. The bloc voting’s bad enough already.
Here’s a graphic from Waffle explaining how the Eurovision voting works:
If the USAnians joined in, we’d lose Terry Wogan and his increasingly pissed snark and gain, I dunno, Paula Abdul or someone equally vile. It would be dismal. Not only that, I think they’d misinterpret the spirit of the thing and enter a decent song, which would rather miss the point and worse still might even win.
So reluctantly, although I’d love to see what the Borat people make of Eurovision, I hope the movie doesn’t get made, or if it does it only gets an .eu release (using ‘Europe’ in its widest, most Eurovisual sense, as including Israel and Turkey).
Let USAnians boggle from afar at Europe’s greatest-ever cultural achievement and gnash their teeth in impotent envy. Eurovision is ours!
Thou shall not question Stephen Fry
Indubitably
Well, That’s Put The LOLcat Amongst The Pidgins
As any fule kno, the internet was invented as a medium for geeks to exchange amusingly-captioned pictures of cats – the rest is just bandwidth noise. This charming folk-custom has over the years burgeoned into a fully-fledged lolcat culture with customs and a language all of its own. Language blogger Anil Dash digs for the roots of lolcat grammar:
If you spend any time at all observing net culture, then you’ll have been unable to miss the recent explosion in popularity of lolcats. This relatively recent phenomenon is the convention of taking pictures of cute animals, most frequently cats, and overlaying absurdist captions on the images.
The core behavior has existed for some time; “Image macro” is a generic term for this kind of folk art, and cats have always featured heavily in these types of Internet in-jokes. But a few distinct categories have sprung up that have helped amplify and popularize the phenomenon.
- I’M IN UR X Ying your Z. This construct, based on i’m in ur base, killin ur d00ds has morphed into a catch-all structure for annotating cat pictures.
- Invisible Item. Variations on the seminal Invisible Bike, these are images of cats, usually in midair, with captions that prompt us to fill in imaginary objects or actions that complete the scene. There’s something brilliant to these images, speaking to our mind’s ability to intuitively extrapolate unseen details.
- Kitty Pidgin. And finally, the newly dominant lolcats, of the family I Can Has Cheezeburger? These seem to be spawning nearly infinite variations, and have exploded in popularity since being named “lolcats” instead of the more general “image macro” or “cat macro”.
The rise of these new subspecies of lolcats are particularly interesting to me because “I can has cheezeburger?” has a fairly consistent grammar. I wasn’t sure this was true until I realized that it’s possible to get cat-speak wrong.
Incorrect kitty pidgin jumped to my attention the first time I saw a reference to Dune being used with a lolcat image. The caption on the linked version of the image, “The spice must flow.” is fine, if not particularly cat-like. But the caption on the version I saw first was much more verbose: “I are dunecat. I controls the spice, I controls the universe.” Besides being an awkward attempt at overexplaining the punchline (I’ve never read Dune or seen the film, but the joke is obvious) this was just all wrong. The fact that we can tell no cat would talk like this shows that kitty pidgin is actually quite consistent.
I was having a conversation with Ben and Ben a few weeks ago where I suggested this consistent grammar for lolcats could be a “cweeole”. Knowing a bit more about such things now, I realize this isn’t a creole but more likely a pidgin language, used to help cats talk to humans. And since “pidgin” is already a cutesy spelling of a mispronunciation, there doesn’t seem to be any really cute way to rename it to reflect its uniqueness. “Kitty pidgin” might be the closest thing we have to a name for this new language.
Oh dear, the academics are on it now. I await the publication of the groundbreaking paper, “Towards an etiology of lol and hai – the semiotics of feline imagery and the developent of language in the floating world.” with interest.
Bloody hell, that actually sounds like quite a believable reserach topic. Anyone got a ESRC funding form handy?
The Pendulum Swings Back…
“Quick, redraw the map again, Bob, looks like Kansas may’ve finally come to its senses… ”
From CNN, via Raw Story:
TOPEKA, Kansas (AP) — The Kansas Board of Education on Tuesday repealed sex education policies enacted last year, the latest move by the moderate majority to undo efforts by conservatives when they dominated the board.
One rescinded policy recommended that schools stress abstinence until marriage, while the other urged school districts to get parental permission before students could attend human sexuality classes.
On a 6-3 vote, the board replaced the policies with one that recommends “abstinence plus” sex education programs and leaves it up to the state’s 296 school districts to decide whether to get parental permission.
The “abstinence plus” program stresses abstinence before marriage, while also urging schools to give students information about birth control and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases.
It’s not the first time the Kansas authorities have had to rescind loony legislation put forward by wingnuts:
In February, the board repealed science standards backed by social conservatives and switched to ones that treat evolution as well-supported by research. The standards, which take effect next school year, are used to develop tests to measure how well students learn science.
The old standards, endorsed by supporters of “intelligent design,” questioned the theory of evolution.
A bit of common sense at last, and about bloody time too.