Friday Bad Cartoon Trivia Bomb

So here's what happened.

I billed something like 59 hours this week.

That's billed. God knows how many hours I actually worked.

This was a hell-week, and finally Friday arrived, and I was able to get back to the shop, drop off my truck, and punch off the clock. Opened up the corporate timesheet program and started knob-dicking in my hours.

(Knob-dicking? Never heard that before? For some reason that was the term we used in the field artillery to describe typing entries into the battery fire control computer system. Knob-dicking. I have no idea.)

As you can imagine, I had a LOT of knob-dicking. Took me probably half an hour to knock all my time into the timesheet application. I was on my last line or two when...

The fucker locked up on me.

Now I'm a total devotee of the "save early/save often" school of computing. But it was late, I was in a hurry, so I didn't.

Yep. The fucker ate my fucking timesheet.

So - punctuated with a LOT of creative profanity - I re-created the vanished timesheet, and as I did for some reason I took breaks thinking about some of the bad cartoons I watched as a kid.

I was a kid in the Sixties and early Seventies, so there was a lot to go to, there. Underdog. Speed Racer. Whacky Races.

Not that there wasn't some classic comedy; you had Rocky and Bullwinkle, the old Bugs Bunny cartoons (though I had to get to adulthood before I got to see some of the really out-there stuff like Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips...).

But it got me thinking; it's kinda sad, how much useless information I know about those old Sixties and early Seventies cartoons.

And what's the use, if I don't put it to some use?

So here's your Friday Bad Cartoon Trivia Bomb.

No fair using Google unless you're REALLY stumped.

1. When Underdog says "the secret compartment of my ring I fill..." what's he got in there?

2. What sort of container does Henry Cabot Henhouse III drink his Super Sauce out of?

3. Why does Speed Racer wear a "G" on his shirt?

4. In the anime series imported to the U.S. as "Star Blazers", the spaceship "Argo" was originally the...

5. What kind of animal did George of the Jungle think his elephant pal was? (Bonus point - what was his pal's name?)

6. What was Jonny Quest's dad's first name?

7. What was the name of the explosive compound that Bullwinkle hid inside a banana? Why was it so awesome?

8. What was the actual title of the original cartoon that has recently been remade as "Mister Peabody and Sherman"?

9. Speaking of Mister Peabody, what did he call his time machine, and why?

10. What was the name of the character that Dick Dastardly and Muttley of "Whacky Races" were always chasing in the show they were later spun-off in? (Bonus point - what was the name of the spin off?)

Have fun.

I've almost got that goddamn timesheet fixed.

Hallalujah I'm a Bum

Just an addendum to the preceding Halloween post, since I was thinking about Halloween in general and my childhood memories of the night in particular.

One constant during the Halloweens of my youth was something we called "Trick or Treat for UNICEF". It was an annual fundraiser for the UN Children's Fund, and pretty much every year one or two of my friends - typically the ones whose parents were a little more crunchy granola than mine - would forego the sweeties in order to solicit coin for the poor kiddies overseas.It was ubiquitous, and most adults kept some change handy by the door for the UNICEF kids.

Several years ago my bride came across a hardbound atrocity entitled "Jack the Bum and the Halloween Handout" deep in the remaindered bin at the local Goodwill. It's a truly appalling confection of late Seventies "New Yorker"-style humor that I'd pitch back to the maw of Goodwill in a heartbeat if I could except that my daughter loves the dickens out of it. But the macguffin in this turkey is that Jack, who is looking for a "hot cup of coffee" (a short dog of wine being, apparently, unappealing to the choosy urban pioneer) finds out that if you say "Trick or Treat for UNICEF" that people will give you MONEY.Mind you, our boy Jack doesn't want to take money from hapless kiddies in India - he just wants coffee. And he's been sleeping under a bridge or something, so he has no idea what UNICEF is, or why people give you money for saying "trick or treat for UNICEF".

I have to stop now or I'll go into a catatonic state like the epileptic scientist lady in "The Andromeda Strain" when the red light flashes. But suffice to say that in the Sixties and early Seventies you couldn't swing a black cat without hitting some costumed kid with one of those little orange UNICEF boxes.

But not anymore.

And I have no idea why.

I haven't seen a UNICEF trick-or-treater for decades. Hell, I honestly don't remember the last time I had one come to the door, and I've been handing out candy on the last day of October since the middle Eighties.For some reason the little people don't come looking for Halloween handouts anymore, and that has me wondering what the heck happened to this odd little part of my childhood; it's not often that something just stops. But this tradition has, and I wonder - anyone out there know why it did?

You know you want them

I stopped at the Fred Meyer's tonight to get some milk, beer, butter, and the kiddos some cereal. And as I wandered down the cereal aisle, feeling the diabetic coma coming on from all the crystallized sugar around me, I realized that I could not find any Alpha-Bits.

Remember Alpha-Bits?

I used to love those nasty, sugary things. All lettery, crunchy, and glued all over with the finest beet-sugar product. Mr. Breakfast says that the original cereal idea was

"the brain child of an Italian-American pasta lover named Al Clausi. At the time, Clausi was the head of product development for General Food, Post's parent company. He had the idea to run cereal ingredients through a machine designed to create different-macaroni shapes. Once the cereal ingredients (primarily oat flour and corn starch) were formed into letters of the alphabet, the pieces were exposed to a flash-cooking process known as "gun-puffing".

Whoa. Now that's pretty cool.

But not tonight. There was no joy in North Portland; Daddy struck out on Alpha-Bits.

I guess they're just not hip enough, now-enough, for NoPo anymore.

While I'm talking about kid cereals, though, I should tell you this story.

In the late Sixties and early Seventies my family lived in a suburb of Chicago. My father, who made his living in the chemical business, made frequent trips throughout the Midwest to call on customers buying his water-soluble polymers like CMC and Klucel. During the summer he would often take his wife and kids along, the entire little Sixties American family stuffed in the big forest green Ford Fairlane station wagon.With kids and bags, blankets, pillows, books, and snacks all tumbled inside this Medicare sled my father bored along the small interstate roads of the upper Midwest; Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, en route to dying factory towns with dusty grain mills, paint plants, and fiberboard factories.Once there it was usually my mother's job to entertain the littles, finding parks for my sister and I to play in, reading us (or, when we were old enough, find places for us to read) books, or, most often, taking the public tours of the various business places my father was pitching his products to.

So it was on a hot afternoon in August, probably sometime in 1969 or 1970 that my little sister, my mother, and I found ourselves waiting at the bus stop outside the General Mills plant in Minneapolis, Minnesota.It was a warm day, for Minnesota, and remember that this was 1969; the notion that a young mother should drag an immense rucksack full of wherewithall for her spawn to eat, drink, play with, or wear was inconceivable. So we had no drinks, no toys, nothing to eat.

Except the complimentary box of the brand new "Kaboom!" breakfast cereal we had been handed at the end of the GM factory tour.

The bus back to our motel was late, my dad had the car, and with cell phones a distant future there was nothing to do but wait. Being poor waiters, my sister and I began to whine incessantly if not creatively. We whined for something to drink, something to do, something to eat. Finally, our (I realize now) desperate mother shoved the box of "Kaboom!" at us.

"Eat this, then, dammit, it's supposed to be for kids." she snarled.

So we ate the Kaboom!

(As an aside, am I alone in remembering when "sugary" was considered just an adjective for describing kid cereals? Hell, there was a cereal named "Sugar Pops" and another named "Sugar Smacks". Sugar; it was what's for breakfast. God; what the fuck were we thinking. But that stuff sure was good.)

For breakfast. With milk. I can't think of anything less appetizing on a sweltering summer day than harshly-sugary, brightly-colored dry cereal grain. But it was all we had. It looked just like it does on the box; crayola-hued, vacantly-grinning death masks of sugared cereal. It looked frightful and tasted worse. We choked it down, complaining bitterly all the way back to the hotel. Kaboom! remained our lead standard for awful kid food for years.

I have never eaten the stuff again, nor do I ever intend to. It was only now, researching this post, that I find that Kaboom! lasted until this very year. But no more. General Mills finally pulled the stuff from production after more than a generation.

Alas, Kaboom, we hardly knew ye.

And if you are no longer for this world...can the End of Alpha-Bits be far behind?

Every day, a little more of the world I knew when I was young disappears.

Steiner ist nicht angekommen

I spent a large part of what the easily led might describe as my "formative years" in a place called Glen Ellyn, a very wealthy, whitebread suburb of Chicago.

Glen Ellyn was a nothing; pretty, a nice place to live, but we lived every day in the shadow of the Colossus to the East. And you couldn't live in Chicago in the late 1960s without knowing Dick Daley.

Da Mare was a corrupt, rotten old bastard whose only redemptive quality was that he genuinely loved his city and did his level best to save it (and did, to a great extent, from becoming another Detroit or Cleveland or Pittsburg), but apparently his son, little Richie, is a REAL piece of work.

So when I came across this over at driftglass' place, I laughed until I cried.

Curse you, Red, Vile, Murderous, Islamofascist Scum!

Okay, from the sublimely sad to the ridiculous.

The last post made me check Facebook. I find that a friend has been going completely berserk be-fanning various bands and has even written a note asking what were the 10 albums that changed your life.

Okay, now I have to admit that for me music is pretty much background noise. I LIKE music, listen to a fair bit, played in orchestra and sang in chorus...but music has never touched me for more than a moment or two. For me it's ephemera, whether it's stirring, moving, lovely, disturbing, motivating. I can listen to "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter" or the 101st Airborne Division song or Cuban son or a bunch of monkeys playing the 5-gallon bucket drums. I get a little chill listening to Madeline Peyroux do "Dance Me To The End of Love", but I got a little chill listening to the damn marching music they used to play over the loudspeakers on Ardennes Street during PT, too. I'm a musical moron.

So, being naturally a moron AND a smartass, I left a comment on the note that the only album that changed my life was The Royal Guardsmen's "Snoopy vs. The Red Baron", and that's because I was nine and it was my first vinyl. Which, of course, prompted my squirrel mind to go to Wiki and check to see if that was, in fact, the name of the album (I knew it was the name of the song). It was.But that wasn't all.

Seems that our Guardsmen have updated their oevre for the Global Phony War on Terror.

So, without further ado, and with trembling horror, I give you "Snoopy vs. Osama"

SNOOPY VS OSAMA
Key: E
Words: Francis John Burdett
Music: Barry Dean Winslow

"Out in the desert in a real bad land
Some people want to see the end of man
Al-Qaeda took over from the Taliban
Terrorizing all they can.

Now Snoopy's in the motor pool but wants to fight.
He wants to keep his friends all safe at night.
Charley drives the Bradley an' Snoopy makes her sing.
Waitin' for the orders just to go do their thing.

Chorus:
Osama Bin Laden keeps runnin' away.
Snoopy's gonna find him one of these days.
And when he does...(and when he does)...
ya know we're all gonna sing;
Good bye Bin Laden and the end of your terrorist ring.

When the orders came down, they were short one man.
So Charley asked Snoopy "would ya join the band".
It's off to the hills and follow the map.
Just get Bin Laden don't ya take any crap.

Headin' down a pathway when a bomb blew up.
The tank was out of business an' ol' Charley was hurt.
Snoopy said to Charley "you just sit tight,
I'll fix everything it's gonna be alright."

Then up ahead in a cloud of dust.
Stood ol' Bin Laden just lookin' at us.
Snoopy smiled and aimed then he fired his gun.
TAKE THIS Bin Laden now you won't have to run!

Chorus:
Osama Bin Laden won't be runnin' away.
Snoopy finally found him and this was the day.
He took him out...(he took him out)... now the world can sing;
Good bye Bin Laden and the end of your terrorist ring

Sweetbabyjesusonastick!

It makes me want to find Osama's cave and surrender to the sonovabitch to prevent the RG's from going further with this...My love's been sold...my baby is a neoconservative centerfold..!There's a CD that may just have changed my life..!

Where the Sidewalk Ends

Here's an interesting little oddity; a post from a Detroit blogger about the desolate "zoo" on Belle Isle, a vacant monument to the greed and corruption of former Mayor Kilpatrick's Boss Tweed Period.

I admit to being seduced by the title: "Where the Wild Things Aren't".

But also because I have a long-standing hate-hate relationship with zoos.

I was never a particularly zoo-ey child. My only real - and fondest - memory of the old Brookfield Zoo in Chicago (the first I was old enough to visit and recall anything of the occasion as well as where I spent my life from fifth grade through high school, i.e. prime zoo-going yers) was watching a baboon take a break from masturbating (hobby, pastime and preoccupation of the savagely bored male primate) to scoop up a fresh handful of used Monkey Chow and nail a capering high school mouthbreather right in the neck as a tribute to the hairless ape's baboon imitation. At seven the pure ThreeStoogian elegance, the primal sophistication of the poop-flinging baboon entranced me, and baboons in general have remained a special favorite of mine as a result.By the time I was old enough to really see the animals as more than live-action kids' story figures I was also savvy enough to interpret the many sad pathologies of zoo animal behavior; the pacing, weaving, obsessive grooming, and self-mutilating as strong indications that the supposedly heartwarmingly child-friendly zoo was just a goddam prison for many of the animals there.

(Curious sidebar: several years ago I read two short books by someone called Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, one on the social behavior of dogs, the other on similar activities among cats. These were more aimed at pet owners than zoo animal fanciers, but Thomas' interest in cats was heavily slanted towards lions and tigers. One thing she had researched, and noted in her book, was the behaviors of zoo cats versus circus cats. She observed that, for all the horror and obloquy directed at circus cat-trainers and cat handlers, the circus cats generally appeared much less stressed, displayed MUCH less disturbed behavior such as pacing and swaying than the zoo cats. Her conclusion? That despite the tiny cages and lack of "natural habitat" the circus cats had a more interesting life. They interacted with each other and with the circus people. They had jobs; they were working stiffs, they had a point to their lives. The zoo cats were convicts; idle, closely confined, unoccupied prisoners and typically bored out of their skulls.)

Now I have a little boy who loves the zoo. Not for the animals, really, the train and the sandbox and the treats are the real magilla - but the animals are an inseparable part of the full meal deal. He has no idea that I think the zoo is an animal prison, and I don't want to be the one to tell him.

So I grimace at the tiger, numbly pacing its cage, as we race by on the way to ride Old Smokey the train. Sorry, pal, maybe the governor'll spring yez soon. Maybe youse need to see Da Warden.

Maybe you should try flinging a big ol' tiger poop at the dummy in the plaid shorts making roaring sounds at you from over by the popcorn trolley.

It seemed to work for the baboon.

Remember this..?

I do.Always thought it was the most successful of these just because of the wierdly haunting vocals.

But then, there was always "Conjunction Junction".