"RAT is an anagram of ART. Do you think that inspired them, perhaps subconsciously?"

Asks Dr Weevil.

"A weevil is any beetle from the Curculionoidea superfamily. They are usually small, less than 6 millimetres... and herbivorous." Sounds delicious!

Dr Weevil. A nice portmanteau pseudonym. Combines Dr. Evil with our theme-of-the-day: pests.

Let's listen to Tex Ritter and Mantan Moreland:



10 things I judge to be interesting:

1. The term "portmanteau" originated in "Through the Looking-Glass," as Humpty Dumpty explains "Jabberwocky," within which, for example, "slithy" combines "lithe and slimy" and "mimsy" combines "flimsy and miserable." "You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word." (The word "portmanteau" already meant suitcase.)

2. "Portmanteau" comes from French — combining words for "carry" and "coat" — but the French don't say "portmanteau" to refer to "suitcase words." They say mot-valise — which they came up with by making a literal translation of the English term "suitcase word." That makes "portmanteau" something that's called a "false friend" (a term I did not know).

3. Tex Ritter's real name was Woodward Maurice Ritter. You'd think if he needed a nickname, Woody would have popped up. Think of all the Woodys that that had to stretch to get to "Woody." Woody Allen, for example, was named Allan Stewart Konigsberg. I can't discern how he got to Woody from his Wikipedia entry, which says: "It the age of 17, he legally changed his name to Heywood Allen." That sounds like he was setting up a knock-knock joke: "Heywood who?"

4. Now Woody Guthrie got to Woody quite directly. He was named Woodrow Wilson Guthrie. Born in 1912. You might say: Woodrow Wilson! Woodrow Wilson didn't even become President of the United States until 1913. Yes, but he was Governor of New Jersey. No matter that Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma. It would be like somebody today living in some state that's not New Jersey naming their new baby Chris Christie Smith or Chris Christie Jones or whatever.

5. Back to Mantan Moreland, the other guy in the Tex Ritter "Boll Weevil" video. Looking at his Wikipedia page, I see he was in a surprising number of movies, including many movies I'd never heard of like "Freckles Comes Home" (1942) and "King of the Zombies" (1941). "He is perhaps best known for his role as chauffeur Birmingham Brown in Monogram's Charlie Chan series. (The lyrics of The Coasters' 1963 song 'Bad Detective' are sung from the first-person perspective of Birmingham Brown, Mantan Moreland's character in the Charlie Chan movie series.)" There's some very heavy racial context here. Spike Lee's movie "Bamboozled" appropriates some things about Moreland. And the Beastie Boys sampled something of his about mashed potatoes, and you can listen to the original (NSFW) here.

6. Moreland "was briefly considered as a possible addition to the Three Stooges when Shemp Howard died in 1955." And he was in the 1957 Broadway stage production of "Waiting For Godot." He played Estragon, the role played by Bert Lahr in the original production of the play.



7. In the "Waiting for Godot" with Moreland, Geoffrey Holder played the character Lucky.



8. You may remember Geoffrey Holder from 1970s-era 7-Up commercials.

9. The New York Dolls recorded "Bad Detective" — replete with the opening notes that you may well recognize as the music that was always used in the past to signify: This is Chinese.

10. Mantan Moreland was known for his "Incomplete Sentences" comic routines. They went like this (from some Charlie Chan movies):

"I am just about to go crazy today. I just can't seem to escape the 'gay caveman' story."

Oh! The tribulations of paleoanthropology blogging. UW professor John Hawks must hit the ground running when news breaks from the Stone Bronze Age. The news folk are after him for an academic opinion and he says: "Dudes! I could be wrong, but I think that to have a 'gay caveman', you need a skeleton that is both gay and a caveman. And this ain't either!"

IN THE COMMENTS: Maguro said:

So it's probably not a gay caveman after all, merely a Bronze Age Bea Arthur.

What a letdown.

EDH said:

We have rare prehistoric video!

More scenes from the Tea Party...

... today in Madison:







ADDED: Welcome Instapundit readers. There are many Tea Party posts from today. Click here and scroll.

"This is how we know he is not a a New Yorker or a Jew."

David Brooks said that about Senator Jeff Sessions, "who puts on a plain old boy front but is deep down extremely sophisticated and intelligent." (Sessions is important because he's now the ranking Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and there are hearings on a new Supreme Court nominee coming up.)

So what is Brooks saying about New Yorkers and Jews?

In the long history of my people, there has never been one who was willing to appear less smart than he or she really is. We tend to go the other way.

(Why "tend to" if there has "never been one"?) That's some serious stereotyping, but presumably Brooks thinks it's perfectly fine, because he's got "my people" immunity.

ADDED: The double "a" — "a a New Yorker" — is in the original NYT text.

AND: Hey, Brooks, did you know The 3 Stooges were Jewish?

The 3 Stooges movie will have the perfect Larry.

Sean Penn!

(Jim Carrey is Curly and Benicio Del Toro is Moe.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Balfegor said:

Why would someone even think a 3 Stooges remake would be a good idea? It would be like remaking something by Buster Keaton, or Charlie Chaplin -- the pleasure isn't in the concept or the plot or witty dialogue, it's in who's doing it, and their skill at slapstick and physical comedy, no?

Well, now, wait. What about this?



The original:

Shoes, Bush.

Do we have to talk about this? Which angle?

1. Why can't the Secret Service fully protect the President? Shouldn't this threat have been anticipated?

2. Shoes are considered a terrible insult in the Iraqi culture blah blah blah....

ADDED: More video via commenter EDH:

The Farrelly brothers are making a 3 Stooges movie.

"Over the years such A-list Stoogephiles as Russell Crowe and Mel Gibson have been mentioned for the movie, but no casting has been announced."

Any ideas?

“Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives."

I'm just watching this video after watching "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives" on "Nova":



As one of the commenters over at YouTube says "Can we all agree that that is the BEST performance ever from a carrot in a music video?"

Here's a review of the documentary:

MARK OLIVER EVERETT does not deal in reassuring platitudes, whether writing bruised and barbed confessionals as the frontman for his cult rock band, Eels, or discussing the suburban Virginia upbringing that sometimes informs them. “My father was always there,” Mr. Everett said, “in the way that the furniture was always there.”

His father, Hugh Everett III, was a quantum physicist who, as a graduate student at Princeton in the ’50s, pioneered the many-worlds theory, an interpretation of quantum mechanics that proposed the existence of parallel universes. But to the younger Mr. Everett, the rock singer known to fans and friends simply as E, his father was a shirt-and-tie-clad fixture at the dining room table, an inscrutable figure who preferred chain-smoking Kents to conversation, and scrawling calculations on yellow legal pads to parenting.

“I didn’t really know he was a famous quantum physicist,” Mr. Everett, 45, said.... “It wasn’t something anyone talked about around the house. He barely spoke at all.”

I guess it's not so cool to have a genius dad. The younger Everett, we learn, couldn't understand math at all and flunked basic algebra.

IN THE COMMENTS: ElcubanitoKC said...

I really wanted to kill this whiney idiot. He can't speak in plain English ("behold my metaphor!" again), and he obviously didn't care about his father. He has no idea about science, in fact he very obviously rejected it all "because daddy didn't hug me!"...ugh. I wanted to refresh my quantum mechanics and the history of it, but this bearded fool was in the middle of it, and irritated me to no end. I had to turn the TV off.

Yes, I started watching thinking I could gain some appreciation for a theory that has always only seemed perfectly insane to me, but it turned out to be much more of a personal interest story about a mopey alternative rocker. The science part of it was therefore slow-moving. At one point, I thought the story was aimed at children. Then, I adapted and started thinking of it as a more creative documentary along the lines of "Crumb" and "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" -- two of my favorite movies -- and I thought it was kind of cool. Are you supposed to like Mark Oliver Everett -- was his father a secret 3 Stooges fan? -- or was he more of a Charles Crumb sort of character who inspires pity, mild loathing, and fearsome recognition?

Pie.

(Via Drudge.)

IN THE COMMENTS: Peter Hoh said:

Soon after Drudge released this tape, Obama was quoted saying, "Well, I’m very very pleased to be cleared of saying anything about pie, any hint of any kind of references to baked goods there."

AND: If this post has you trying to remember the old "Pie in the Sky" song, you can listen to it by Michael Hurley here and read about it, including the lyrics, here.

MORE: There must be a hundred songs about pie: "American Pie," "Honey Pie"....

And there must be a million comic pie routines. For example, compare these 2 and then take a poll:

Vote:
	Monty Python
	3 Stooges
pollcode.com free polls

Hmmmm.... As a control:

Vote!
	Barack Obama
	John McCain
pollcode.com free polls

YET MORE:

Match the comedy and the politician.
	Obama prefers Monty Python and McCain the 3 Stooges
	Obama prefers the 3 Stooges and McCain Monty Python
	Both prefer Monty Python
	Both prefer the 3 Stooges
pollcode.com free polls

Steve Irwin mockery.

Were you upset by the little Steve Irwin thing on "South Park"? Satan is giving a Halloween party, and he confronts a guy who appears to be dressed as Steve Irwin. Picture at the link -- he's walking around with the stingray stuck in his bloody chest. Satan tells him it's too soon. When it turns out it really is the dead Steve Irwin, Satan throws him out for not wearing a costume.

Dressing as Steve Irwin for Halloween actually is a pretty clever idea, and it raises the interesting question why some evil/horrible things are considered good for costumes when others aren't. We all know you can't dress as Hitler, for example, even though, in general, evil imagery is encouraged.

Hitler, by the way, appears in the new "South Park." Not as a costume, as a dead guy. And he does have a costume. He's the "Can you hear me now?" guy, with a cell phone. Don't you hate that guy?

Also pushing the evil/funny envelope: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer did an extended Three Stooges routine that was quite brilliant.

Goodbye to Don Knotts.

Everyone loved the brilliant comic actor Don Knotts. He was 81.

As the bug-eyed deputy to Griffith, Knotts carried in his shirt pocket the one bullet he was allowed after shooting himself in the foot. The constant fumbling, a recurring sight gag, was typical of his self-deprecating humor.

Knotts, whose shy, soft-spoken manner was unlike his high-strung characters, once said he was most proud of the Fife character and doesn't mind being remembered that way.

His favorite episodes, he said, were "The Pickle Story," where Aunt Bea makes pickles no one can eat, and "Barney and the Choir," where no one can stop him from singing.

"I can't sing. It makes me sad that I can't sing or dance well enough to be in a musical, but I'm just not talented in that way," he lamented. "It's one of my weaknesses."

More here:

In Knotts' hands, Fife was a fully realized stooge, a hick-town Don Quixote who imagined himself braver, more sophisticated and more competent than he actually was. His utter lack of self-control led him into desperate jams that usually culminated with Fife at the end of his rope, bug-eyed and panting with anxiety. Sheriff Taylor allowed his deputy to carry just one bullet, which he was obliged to keep separate from his service revolver due to past trigger mishaps.

Asked how he developed his most famous character, Knotts replied in a 2000 interview: "Mainly, I thought of Barney as a kid. You can always look into the faces of kids and see what they're thinking, if they're happy or sad. That's what I tried to do with Barney. It's very identifiable."...

[T]he actor did not recall his childhood fondly.

"I felt like a loser," he recalled in a 1976 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "I was unhappy, I think, most of the time. We were terribly poor and I hated my size."

Thanks for making us happy, so many times!

UPDATE: The NYT runs a correction: it's "Aunt Bee, not Bea."

Audible Althouse, #20.

This is a 46 minute podcast, covering an insulting letter, a misunderstood interaction with another blogger (my ex-husband), the concept of "The Althouse Man," how ugly the Three Stooges are, how blankly beautiful actors today are, that song about Saint Germain stuck in my head and the Supreme Court case that put it there, the problem of calling war opponents "unpatriotic," and the creepily under control Ave Maria Town.

What do you think I'm not talking about?

Yesterday, in the comments to my post on "The Apprentice," one of my regular commenters raised -- in three long comments -- a subject he thought I should be addressing. That brought these sensible remarks from another reader:

[P]erhaps you're not familiar with the concept, but there's this thing called "etiquette". The way it works is, this is Ann's blog, and she writes about what she wants to write about. So that there is some organization, she might choose to - say - talk about a silly TV show in one thread, and talk about Supreme Court nominations and the law in another. This makes it easy for the rest of us to be able to read the things we like to read, while skipping the rest.

If you have a discussion topic you'd like to propose to Ann, there's this other thing called "e-mail" that you can use. It's handy - it lets you have a private conversation without the rest of the world listening in. For example, you could suggest that she write about something that you'd like her to write about.

I suppose it is possible that you are acquainted with both of these concepts, and are simply ignoring them because you have something which you feel is so important that it must reach the Internet at once. In that case, there is an admirably simple solution: you can get yourself what is called a "blog", and write about whatever topics you wish, and people who share your interests or who find your writing interesting may join you there.

It's really a very lovely set of concepts.

He's right! But it occurs to me that some readers don't want to reveal their email addresses to me, and I don't mind taking requests, though you can't expect me to address every topic. I can't explain every point of law you want explained, and there are some topics where I don't see myself adding any value. That doesn't mean I don't think they're important. It's an attitude I'm most likely to take about things that are especially important.

Anyway, I thought it might be a good idea to put up a post where it is on-topic to raise new topics. What do you wish I would blog about or blog more about -- or podcast about?

IN THE COMMENTS: My favorite suggestion so far is from SaysMeow:

I'm hoping for a compendium post on "The Althouse Man"--you keep tantalizing us with tidbits but don't give us the full-scale doodle. So far we've learned that:

He joyfully dons his Andy Warhol wig--
Yet he does not look like a Stooge (strange, I thought Moe's haircut was quite a lot like Andy's)--
His facial hair, if any, does NOT resemble the Creepy Guy from "Joy of Sex"--
He doesn't cry in public--
He does not wear shorts, no never--
He's pro-Hadley, anti-Baxendale...or is it the other way around?

But there's so much more we want to know!

Maybe all you readers could also help me out by reminding me of various "Althouse man" elements from bygone posts.

Why women don't like The Three Stooges.

That men love The Three Stooges and women don't is one of the classic old topics in the unending discussion of the differences between men and women. Without researching the conventional theories on the subject, I'm going to assume that people are following the rule I say scientists follow when they report research on the differences between men and women: Portray whatever you find to be true of women as superior. So it would go that men are simple-minded and love violence, while women appreciate complexity and abhor violence. (I'm eschewing this digression right now.)

I was talking about The Three Stooges on Audible Althouse #19, last night, tracking the blog post of mine about that Stanford study and, as is the Audible Althouse way, digressing:

When I was a kid, there was a real tomgirl in the neighborhood who just loved The Three Stooges, loved them so much -- really thought Moe was funny. Most of the girls just thought Curly was kind of sweet and liked Curly a lot but found Moe really a little too frightening, a little too disturbing. And Larry was just ... uh ... Larry was ... kinda ugly.

This prompted Steve Donahue, in the comments here, to defend Larry Fine:

Larry is indisputably the funniest of the Stooges. Much like the Zippo you defend, Larry is reliable and funny in an understated way. If you ever get a chance to watch another Stooges Short, do nothing but watch Larry. His reactions to the physical comedy are excellent; it's easy to forget when you watch him that they're not really smacking the hell out of each other.

I respond to Steve over there in the comments:

Steve: That was a vague memory of what young girls (other than the tomgirl) thought of the 3 Stooges in the late 50s/early 60s. I think we were distracted by Moe and Curly, who called more attention to themselves. I'm willing to believe what you say about Larry is true. In fact, I'd rather completely concede it than watch the 3 Stooges. I do think guys who love the 3 Stooges and comment on the fact that women don't are failing to take adequate account of how physically ugly these men were.

So, yeah, I wanted to front-page this point. Maybe if The Three Stooges were physically attractive -- at least to The Marx Brothers level -- women might be willing to watch them. The assumption is that women want more language-based humor, while men are more visual, but maybe a big part of the problem is that the humor is visual and the men are ugly.

Think about it! Which comediennes do men respond to? (Sorry for being so heteronormative here!) Who are the comediennes men don't like so much? There's a physical attraction element here!

And you know how women are always saying the number one thing they want in a man is a sense of humor? You know they aren't picturing Larry Fine coming into their lives.

UPDATE: "You know they are picturing Larry Fine" was a typo, now corrected. And believe me, it wasn't a Freudian slip. I am not longing for Larry!

Audible Althouse, #19.

The new podcast is an hour long. Topics: male and female brains, 3 Stooges comedy, 3 Stooges sex, the Marx Bothers, some Halloweenish thoughts about the new Supreme Court, heteronormativity, military memoirs, lawprof bloggers, good and bad commentary about Samuel Alito, why so many Catholics have been nominated to the Supreme Court, the affinity between physicists and religionists, the politics of Intelligent Design, and the demand for nuanced reporting on the riots in France.

Scientists: remember to portray whatever you find to be true of women as superior.

I've said it before, and I must to repeat, the rule is: If you do scientific research into the differences between men and women, you must portray whatever you find to be true of women as superior. And when you read reports about scientific research into the differences between men and women, use the hypothesis that the scientists are following that rule. It makes reading the reports quite humorous.

Take this one, for example, which happens to be about humor. Some Stanford University scientists wired up men and women, showed them a bunch of cartoons, and watched the way their brains lit up:

But some brain regions were activated more in women, including both the left prefrontal cortex and the mesolimbic reward centre.

The researchers say their findings suggest women place a greater emphasis on the language of humour, possibly employing a more analytical approach.

They also believe that the women in the study were less likely to expect the cartoons to be funny - so when they were, their pleasure centre lit up with greater intensity than their male counterparts.

Professor Reiss said: "Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon.

"So when they got to the joke's punch line, they were more pleased about it."

The researchers also found that the funnier the cartoon, the more the reward centre was activated in women.

That was not the case in men who seemed to "expect" the cartoons to be funny from the start.

Professor Reiss said the finding that women's reward centres might be more sensitive to emotional stimuli, if confirmed by follow-up studies, might explain why they appear to be more vulnerable to depression....

However, he told the BBC News website: "I would agree that women are much more analytical in terms of humour, but to extrapolate from this study, and draw conclusions about clinical depression is probably a step too far."

To test my theory about whether scientists are following my rule, try rewriting their conclusions as if they were following the opposite rule. That is, take the same basic data, and write their statements as if they were leaning exactly as much toward portraying what is true of the male as superior.

I remember the days when people would routinely and openly characterize whatever was true of the male as superior, and I'm glad those days are over (at least in the U.S.). But leaning in the other direction isn't the answer. It's patronizing. And it's unscientific! I understand the motivation of the scientists, though. I think they have reason to be afraid not to couch their findings this way.

UPDATE: I like the title on the AP version of the story: "Women May Enjoy Humor More, if It's Funny." I can't help jumping ahead to the news: Women may enjoy sex more than men too -- if it's good. Ah, and that's the big problem -- isn't it? -- for both humor and sex: Men are perfectly happy with a lower quality experience, and as a result there is less available that works for women. It's a life of "Three Stooges" comedy and "Three Stooges" sex.