News You Can Bruise for 2004 March 16

If you thought The Big Lebowski was a thing not subject to SCA-ish appropriation by dressing-up fanboys then Big Lebowski night in North Little Rock should have shattered that notion. (Adam-Dude #2, where are those pictures?) But no! You chose to believe, despite all evidence, that the Coen masterwork could only be appreciated by those too cool or too stoned to make fools of themselves by dressing up like characters from the movie.

If your childish preconceptions were not so laughable, perhaps you could be an object of pity. For behold! Lebowski Fest is coming to YOUR TOWN (if you are Brendan), and its Star Trek convention-esque geekiness scatters to the wind like ashes from a Folger's can any aspirations you may have had for having your master's thesis The Dude Abides: Lebowski as a Mithras/Christ Figure in Modern Mythology taken seriously. You should have picked on Barton Fink instead. Nobody dresses up like Chet the bellboy. Well, if you do, I don't want to hear about it.

I think Brendan and I thought of this on the way to California. Here are previous theories, all of which pale in comparison to the shiny new theory.

The new theory is that the hippie Muppet is trying to communicate with the Snowths, but the only thing he can get across in their language is the phrase "Manahmanah", a context-free friendly expression that translates roughly to "Hey hey!" So the lyrics of the song, translated, go something like this:

Hey hey! (It's good to see you)
Hey hey! (I said it's good)
Hey hey! (It's good to see you, to see you, to see you, it really is a good thing that you came)

Then the hippie Muppet whips out his Advanced Snowth and starts talking about how lovely the Snowth country is, and asking where are the most beautiful landscapes, and they can't understand a word he's saying.

Another gem from Steve's Chinese Word Of The Day: "Prisoner". If I ever need to write "Concave prisoner", I'm all set.

There must be little cartoons where the lines of ideograms frolic and interact in vocabulary-building ways.

Inspired by clasic Trek, I used to make up jobs for my Lego spacemen based on the color of their spacesuits. The blue suit guys were the pilots, which I suppose makes sense in retrospect. I don't remember what the other jobs were. Maybe the red suits were the navigators, and the yellow suits made the coffee, and the black suits were space ninjas. I don't know. I never managed to acquire any white-suit Lego spacemen, so I guess those were the guys who stayed in the pressurized dome on the moon and did paperwork.

Anyway, it turns out aircraft carriers have the same kind of colorful division of labor. Lots of (official Navy) pictures on that site, including one of Daniel Green, who out-Ts Mr. T.