MovieMonday: Chuck Jones and Warner Bros. Cartoons

Just about everybody over the age of five has enjoyed the Warner Bros. cartoons.  The piece above notes some of the characters we remember and how a man named Chuck Jones, credited with those creations, thought seriously about how to make people laugh.

Warner's Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies offerings date to 1930, one year after Disney had launched its own, long forgotten Silly Symphonies.  The idea, at Warner, was to leverage the studio's music to illustrate animated shorts that would be shown in theaters as accompaniments to full-length movies.

But the quality of the humor, not the music, was what increased the Warner cartoon unit's audience, exponentially, over time.  Jones' contributions, starting in 1933 and continuing till he left in 1962, have been lauded ever since.  The cartoon team broke up the next year after the release of its final product, The Iceman Ducketh, which of course starred Daffy.

These classic cartoons are familiar to generations of Americans, but not in recent years, alas.  Now the latest HBO iteration, HBO Max, seems to be planning to fill that truly unfortunate void, as discussed in this article.

Even better, the article links to a few Warner Bros. classics, including Baseball Bugs, One Froggy Evening and a personal favorite, Duck Amuck.

Check it out.

Notes

Jones played on that last cartoon title for his autobiography, Chuck Amuck, which was published in 1990 and is available on Kindle and, at higher prices, in print, probably because of its author's illustrations.  Jones died at 89 in 2002.

One highlight, which has rocketed around Twitter since 2015, is Jones' list of nine rules for the Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner stories, which suggests that discipline can enhance humor in the pursuit of really fine comedy. 

MovieMonday: Monty Python and the Holy Grail

When this movie was released, Monty Python had been doing sketch comedy on British television since the mid 1960s.  The troupe launched its own show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, in 1969 and, unexpectedly, found an audience in the US starting in 1972.

The only thing for it was to make a film.  So the five-some put this movie together on a very limited budget and shot it in very damp Scotland in 1974.  In 1975, it hit the theaters and did very well.  It still is popular with fans of silly, collegiate-informed comedy with historical antecedents.

(Some call Monty Python humor "surreal," but those folks almost certainly missed the Rene Magritte exhibition I saw in San Francisco two years ago.  We are imprecise in our language, alas.)

The story in the film -- King Arthur of Camelot gathering knights to seek the Holy Grail, as he has been directed by a deliberately cartoon Lord -- is just a skeleton on which to hang humor about the muddy misery, superstitions and knightly battles of a millennium ago, plus contrasts between English and French points of view.

The grail quest sends Arthur to various castles in search of "the finest and bravest knights in the land to join my court at Camelot."

At one castle, a peasant tells him, "No one lives there (in the castle.) We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune."

When one of Arthur's knights pulls up at Castle Anthrax, he encounters dozens of unhappily chaste young women "between the ages of sixteen and nineteen and one-half," and is dragged out unwillingly by others of Team Camelot.

Some of the scenes are funnier than others.  I don't want to give away the plot, but, obviously it was not devised to show us King Arthur finding the Holy Grail.  Rather, it takes itself less seriously and butts up against the 20th century.  It is, as I have said, collegiate humor of the sort that might be expected from 1960s baccalaureates of Oxford and Cambridge.

I hadn't seen this movie before, but about 15 years ago I did see its Broadway musical version, Spamalot, which was more tightly scripted but, if anything, even more silly. Spamalot won three Tonys that year  -- best director (Mike Nichols, duh,) best musical (?) and best featured actress, (also ?) -- basically, for selling many, many tickets.  It also was popular in London's West End, and regional companies drew enthusiastic audiences for years in other American cities.

The source material in this movie is pretty good good.  True, the intro and finale are jerky.  True, some scenes are better as others.  But there are moments that will make you laugh out loud, and it is available free on Netflix and for not much more elsewhere.

In this moment, what more can be asked?


Note

The original subject of MovieMonday was intended to be Spinal Tap, the 1984 mockumentary about a heavy metal rock group whose fortunes are on a downhill slide.

Though it was made nine years later than Grail, Tap hasn't aged nearly as well.  It makes fun of the already-fading hard rock phenomenon -- neon spandex, grandiose but content-free staging, and not-too-smart band members. And while the Monty Python story does not pretend to invest itself in character development, Tap invents characters and conflicts that, worse, are there only for show.

Rethinking Face Masks

A month ago in Prague

I'm so old I can remember when Covid 19 (which recently was renamed Covid-19) was not such a big deal.

First we were told not to gather in groups of 500 or more, then in groups of 250, then 50 and then 10.  Finally, we were ordered to go home and stay there.

(Meanwhile, the amusingly named Centers for Disease Control was applying its not-invented-here mistrust of South Korea and major pharmaceutical companies and developing its very own Covid-19 test -- which didn't work and wasted weeks while the virus spread.  Great bunch, that CDC.)

Now our public health bureaucracy is in the middle of a similar evolution on the matter of face masks.

As we know, a month ago the word was:  Don't get a face mask!  First responders need them more!  Don't be selfish!

As long as we kept to ourselves, we were told, the biggest danger was touching surfaces that had been touched previously by infected persons, including ones who were not yet symptomatic.  The things to do were to stay in the house and wash our hands many, many times each day.

So I didn't even try to get a face mask.

(I even read an article about a company that proposed to make a big batch of N95 masks, the kind that first responders need and that are still in very short supply.  The apparatchiks at the CDC or FDA responded thusly:  It will take us at least 45 days -- and possibly 90 days -- to evaluate and approve your design before you can start manufacturing masks.  I remember thinking:  Are these bureaucrats too busy to put a rush order on something that seems kinda important?  Do they want more masks, or do they want to shut down their work-from-home computers at 4:30 p.m. every single day?)

Even as a non-expert, I thought the no-masks-for-the-general-public drumbeat sounded off.  If Covid-19 afflicted the lungs, which it does, why not limit the degree to which people breathe on each other in public -- just to be careful?

Among Asian immigrants, I had noticed a practice of wearing masks occasionally in public (not N95 masks, just basic paper ones.)  When I asked a friend why, she explained that masks were worn when people didn't feel well and didn't want to make other people sick.  Seemed like a nice idea.

While Americans were being told not to hog the face mask supply, people in the Czech Republic (or Czechia; hard to keep up) also were being told to stay home and, if they had to go out, to cover their mouths and noses.  The innovative Czechs donned masks and antifa-style gaiters and head scarves.  Shockingly, this seemed to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. 

After a few weeks, Americans got wind of this strange new innovation.  The quilting community, particularly, began sewing masks by the hundreds.  If you want to make some yourself, YouTube has many patterns and ideas for how to go about it.

But then, as happened with toilet paper, the 1/4-inch elastic used to secure such masks behind the ears soon became scarce.  Perhaps it was because the stores that sell sewing accessories had been deemed non-essential and were closed for the duration.  Or perhaps some seamsters were hoarding.  I do not pretend to know.

Anyway.  Here is a perfectly satisfactory mask recipe  for those who own tee shirts, which I am pretty sure is just about all of us.   If you make one for yourself, I recommend wearing it with a hat, to cover the not entirely attractive top knot.  (OTOH, the top knot might accessorize nicely with a man bun; just saying.)

You're welcome.


Another Covid-19 Evolution

In the early days of Covid, we were told not to hug or shake hands with other persons, and also not to get too close to them.  We were given a new name for this: social distance.

Initially, social distance was defined as one meter (a tad more than three feet for those still on the English system) between persons.  Then the perimeter was pushed out to five feet, then six feet.

All fine.  Those in my household obeyed when walking on the street and when waiting on stretched-out lines to buy groceries or prescriptions.  Around here, we pride ourselves on compliance.

Then, earlier this week, an egghead at MIT said that we were Doing It All Wrong.  The appropriate social distance, said the expert, was 27 feet.  This had something to do with the potential for explosive, possibly meteoric, nose explosions.

Then Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most trustworthy source we have at this moment, said no, there was no need to adopt the new guideline.  Turns out we do not need to limit our conversations to people who live in other counties.

Here is a helpful example of the kind of sneeze Dr. Fauci regards as not requiring wary vigilance.  It comes from the comic oeuvre and involves Tom employing a pepper shaker to get himself out of a tight spot.





Note

Across the country, mayors and governors and important public health officials have begun rethinking their advice, again.  Some now are saying, maybe we should begin requiring people to cover their noses and mouths when they go out.

As usual, these chuckleheads are late to the party.  I went to a farmers market last Sunday, and just about everyone in the place had covered his or her mouth and nose with a mask or scarf.

And, of course, when this new edict is announced it will include yet another stern warning for all us stupid people:  Don't even THINK of hoarding N92 masks!

Talking about Toilet Paper

Above is an advertisement for the sort of machine that in recent weeks would make its owner popular in any American neighborhood.  One of the most puzzling responses to the coronavirus outbreak has been the hoarding of toilet paper.

As one raised in the Pacific Northwest, I am more familiar with the forest products industry than many.  And, as an avid fan of industrial plant tours, I have been privileged to observe a more advanced version of a similar machine in action.

The machine I saw has an automated feed of long "parent rolls" of rolled paper and also an automatic cutter function.  Once cut, the smaller rolls are packed in 96-unit boxes and shipped to industrial customers and government organizations like school districts.

As it happens, the machine is one among many different types in a paper factory founded by a longtime friend.   His business model is to buy large volumes of raw paper and fashion them into products sold in bulk, not in retail stores.

I called my friend recently after reading of a toilet paper heist: Thieves had shattered the rear window of an expensive automobile and made off with two 12-packs of Charmin Ultra Soft.

My friend had his own story.  One client of his, a porta-potty company, was burgled and relieved, so to speak, of its supply of toilet paper and hand sanitizers.

These are desperate times indeed.

"I don't get the tissue hoarding thing," he said, which makes sense: The Covid-19 virus doesn't seem to correlate with a need for more frequent bathroom visits.

"Honestly, I expected our hand towels to be more popular," he continued, "but maybe more people than you think do their business at work every day and now that they're home, well...."

("Doing their business" seems to be industry-speak for you-know-what.)

Perhaps I'm more cynical.  I'll bet that, till now, not many employers kept the company TP supply locked in janitors' closets.  My guess is that workers were panicked by empty tissue aisles they had seen in grocery stores and then reacted by taking employers' tissue rolls home from work.  (For the record, I do not approve of this behavior.)

Anyway, my friend's business is good.  Tissue orders have doubled, and he's turning away inquiries from potential new customers.

"I have paper when other people don't have paper.  I could sell a lot more, but I'm sticking with my regular price structure," he says.

To meet demand, he's added Saturday and Sunday overtime shifts, "but that's it. Most of our guys have families.  If one of them gets sick, I'll close for a couple weeks."

Like all my longtime friends, he's an upstanding individual.




On a Related Topic

This writer typically spends winters in a Southern California beach town; this year's visit has been extended, naturally, by the unavailability of airline flights out.

The current locale is home to a large number of homeless persons, mostly young white guys, who seem to have learned since 2019 that their confreres up north in San Francisco have been "doing their business" on local sidewalks.  The local denizens now have adopted the same practice.

I discussed this with a police officer I saw on the sidewalk last week.  "We have to observe them actually doing it to write a citation, " he said.  The expression on his face seemed to indicate a sentiment like this: I-didn't-go-to-the-police-academy-to-catch-grown-men-pooping-in-public.   But I could have got it wrong.

Meanwhile, the city's dog owners seem to have relaxed their standards in a similar way.  On the day before the local library closed, I looked out its window and saw a leashed schnauzer take a dump on the sidewalk outside.  Afterward, the dog and his owner walked away.  The schnauzer droppings were still there when I left.

(I haven't been back since, of course, and so it's entirely possible that some civic-minded person with a shovel and free time scooped up the feces and deposited them in the garbage can on the corner.)

Then, last week, on the grass space between my building and the beach sidewalk, one of my sneakers stepped into a human- or Labrador-sized pile of poop; my experience hasn't equipped me to discern which variety it was.  I walk with greater care now.

At this moment and in this location, the veneer of civilization seems thinner than a square of single-ply toilet tissue.


Note -- April 3  Turns out my friend's analysis was correct.

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Memories of times when people weren't afraid to gather in groups.  

If it’s not one thing, it’s another.

This year for the Super Bowl we were at my sister-in-law Dalia’s house in Glendale. Me? About football I know bubkes. Who’s playing? Don’t ask. (Ed. note:  The 49ers lost to the Chiefs.) As usual, the men were in the den with the bir and the cigars, while in the dining room, we “girls” were playing mahjong and the kids were going at it with penny poker and pisha paysha.

Later, when the men were running back and forth from the waschzimers, Benjy, (Lola’s son-in-law), yelled, “You gotta see this halftime show!” So, we did. And what did we see? We saw 50-year-old Jennifer Lopez half naked on a pole twirling her toches like a baboon in heat. As the kids say: “That’s something I can never unsee.”

And then there’s the Oscars. Who are these people? The only real movie star I recognized was Kirk Douglas, and he’s dead. Brad Pitt I know from the tabloids. Martin Scorsese I saw in the audience looking so tiny he should’ve had a booster seat.  I slept through all of the red-carpet chitchat, but I did see that schtunk Joaquin Phoenix give his speech thanking G-d and pegging the rest of us as mamzerim for “injecting cows with hormones, stealing their babies, and selling the milk to put it in our coffee.” This we need? Likewise, Rene Zellweger, who portrayed Judy Garland, droned on so long that I was able to use the kloset, load up the dishwasher, reorganize my purse, take a nap, and when I woke up, she was still kvelling away. Oy!

And then there’s Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. All over the news they are. She’s the actress nobody heard of who married the prince and invited only her mother to the wedding. Okay, so her father’s a schmuck, but no invitations she sent to her siblings? Yes, they’re half-siblings, but half-schmalf, family is family until they borrow money and don’t pay it back. Adele Luskin said maybe there weren’t enough seats in the cathedral for other relatives, (but between you and me, Adele’s been taking a medication that makes her drowsy and a bit schwindeldik).

Enough I’ve said already.



Vocabulary

Waschzimers: A variation on the German words wasch (wash) and zimmer (room.)

Pisha paysha:  Yiddish for the card game War, which remains popular among children to this day.

Mamazerim: In Jewish, a mamzer is a person born out of wedlock (aka, a bastard.) Grandma's use suggests a more general definition, one that defines mamzerim (the plural) as bad human beings.

Schwindeldik: Schwindel is a German word for dizziness.  With the addition of the dik suffix, Grandma seems to be suggesting a person who can't think straight.

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Grandma senses a decline in the quality of American celebrities.

Not too many movie stars died last year. Doris Day is at the top of the list. She was 97. She was a singer, dancer, movie star and close hawer with Rock Hudson, who’s already dead. Some of the other movie stars to go were Albert Finney, Rip Torn and Peter Fonda.

On the TV it was Tim Conway, Valerie Harper, Diahann Carroll, Luke Perry and Grumpy Cat, (which, if you ask me, was a dybbuk).

Some music people died too. Eddie Money I know from the kids. He’s from Brooklyn, a couple blocks from us, but Ginger Baker? Her I never heard of.

Old news it is that Brad Pitt’s and Angelina Jolie’s marriage went kaput years ago. He said it was because she’s a control freak, a super yenta, and she’s still at it. Long story short, Angelina’s a meshuggener. Six kids she has with their names tattooed on her arm. What? She can’t be bothered to memorize them?

 It got so bad that Jane Etta Pitt, Brad’s mother, called Angelina and demanded that she stop being mean to her son! On good authority from Tiki at the beauty parlor, I heard that Jane Pitt talked Brad into leaving that cockamamy religion, the one with outer space aliens and flying monkeys who hook you up to wires, and then you write them big checks. You know, the Tom Cruise and John Travolta Mishegoss “Church of Scientology.”

Brad is now dating Sat Hari Khalsa, a jewelry designer and holistic healer. I know, I know. Don’t hold your breath.

And then there’s this. Alissa, my great-granddaughter showed me a video of this gal who’s all the rage. Her name is Cardi B. For two minutes I watched a half-naked woman squirm around on the floor screeching like a wild banshee. This they call entertainment? She admits she used to be a kurveh, but would do it again if she needed the money. Oh, and her husband’s name is Offset. Oy vey.

 From Doris Day and Rock Hudson to Cardi B. and Offset.

This it’s come to?

Vocabulary

Cockamamy (also cockamamie):  Wacky, ridiculous.  This word was initially a New York Yiddish/Jewish translation of a French term, décalcomanie, that means the affixing of prints or engravings onto decorative objects.  Perhaps as the process fell out of fashion, the translation's meaning changed too, and that newer meaning has stuck.  The word still is most associated with Yiddish speakers, but is understood and crops up often across the Anglosphere.
              The less colorful American shorthand term for the original French one is decal. 

Hawer: Best guess is this is a Yiddish version of haver, the Hebrew word for "friend."  Grandma seems to be making a sly comment when she uses the term to describe the Doris Day/Rock Hudson relationship. 
              From a Haaretz "Word of the Day" report in 2014:  "If you’re a woman who’s 'just friends' with a male haver ... you might not want to call him your haver. Sure, it means 'friend,' but, Hebrew being sneaky sometimes, it also means 'boyfriend.'"
               Day and Hudson starred in several romantic comedies, but odds are good that they were never haverim/hawerim in real life.

Kurveh: Slut, whore.

Dybbuk: a malicious possessing spirit, the dislocated soul of a dead person.
         Plus this:  Banshee:  An Irish spirit (also familiar to Grandma) whose screaming foretells the death of a respected relative.  This is related to keening, a Celtic verb that describes human (typically female) sobs of sorrow after such a death and which closely resembles a Hebrew word with a nearly identical definition.
         

Note

The Idiosyncratist only learned of the late Grumpy Cat when reading Grandma's current file.  Described alternately as "him" or "her," the possibly gender-fluid feline starred in many promotions that seem to have netted beaucoup millions for its owners/dependents.  (In fact, GC seems to have been born with its distinctive look, not the implied attitude capitalized on by marketers to establish the brand that made Grumpy famous.)

In 2017, Grumpy Cat was named Forbes magazine's Top Pet Influencer, a competition of which the Id also was unaware.

"Influencer" is the cleaned-up descriptor for people -- or pets! -- who were called "famous for being famous" back in the olden days just after the turn of the century.

When I think of "influencers," I think of Lori Laughlin's daughter, who was admitted to USC after her parents paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to an academic fixer.  The former freshman had more than 1 million Instagram followers and sponsorship contracts with Sephora, Tresemme and Estee Lauder.  Another prominent influencer, Kendall Jenner, collected $250,000 for a single Instagram post promoting the doomed Fyre Festival in 2017.

The "influencer" phenomenon is further evidence of Grandma's thesis that we have a less distinguished crop of celebrities these days.

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Our popular California columnist, busy as ever, vows this will be her final 2019 post. 


That Miley Cyrus is at it again. She’s the one with the singing hillbilly father (Billy Ray Cyrus) who never taught his daughter how to act like a proper lady. She’s the one on TV “twerking” her tuchis in front of the world with that no-goodnick one hit wonder and yekl, Robin Thicke, whose father was that nice Canadian boy (Alan Thicke) a real mensch who was on the show Growing Pains, and he did the commercials for Fruit of the Loom underwear.  Robin died playing ice hockey with his other son -- the good one.

Anyway, so this Miley Cyrus has been cavorting for years with the actor Liam Hemsworth. He’s Australian or Irish or whatever and has been in movies like The Hunger Games and other schtus for kids with short attention spans. Finally, in 2018 they got a marriage license and less than a year later -- Splitsville. She’s decided he’s a shikker and she now prefers the company of women only. Already she’s been caught cavorting with a new bummerkeh. Oy veh, and so many tattoos they both have they look like they just stumbled out of Uncle Billy’s Circus Sideshow.

Bill Cosby? In the news again. He’s the one who was tossed in the hoosegow for slipping all those women mickeys and doing the nasty to them. His wife Camille filed for a get and was ready to take her half of everything, but she changed her mind and decided to remarry him in the prison chapel. She said, “I still love him, and he makes me laugh.” If you asked me, she got a good look at him, realized he could drop dead any minute, and decided to hold out for the entire estate – all the mazuma.

And speaking of farchadat celebrities, Kim Kardashian, the one with the hooties so zaftig she could use them as a flotation device, now wants her husband, Kanye West, to get breast reduction on himself. She said they’re too big and he needs a “Diddie Downsizing.” That whole pack of narrs is addicted to plastic surgery, worse even than the late great Joan Rivers.

I’ve said enough already.


Vocabulary

Bummerkeh is Yinglish (which apparently is something like Spanglish) and means a female bum. i.e., a bad person, not a derrierre.   Possibly derived from the Yiddish word for "potato," but possibly not.

 Get, or gett is the Hebrew word for divorce.  There's a longer version, gettelsheen, but the single-syllable word is more common in the Anglosphere.

Schtus, roughly translated, means "nonsense," as Grandma's context makes clear.

Yekl is an over-assimilating immigrant.  The word traces to a short 1896 novel called Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. In it, a young man named Yekl takes a different name, Jake, after getting off the boat at Ellis Island.  Grandma suggests that Canadian-born Robin Thicke has become, like Yekl, a shallow and ungrounded fellow.



Note

Billy Ray Cyrus made his fame with the 90s single, "Achy Breaky Heart," but more recently he has worked with rapper Lil Nas X, on Old Town Road, a 2018 monster hit in the new Country Rap genre.  

Haha: The incredible shrinking house

Nashville's Million-Dollar Homes Are Shrinking Fastest in U.S.

Do not fear.  If you spend a million bucks on a 5,000-square-foot house, it will not turn into a 4,000-square-foot house before you move in with your family and furniture.

Translated:  You get less home for your money in Nashville these days.

At the moment, however, expensive houses and condominiums are being developed much faster than the market can absorb them.  The article seems to be based on listing prices, not sale prices.

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Thoughts about celebrity misbehavior and its costs, or perhaps lack thereof.   Plus an Aniston family scoop.


O.J. Simpson is out of jail. This we need? Two people he murdered – his ex-wife and a nice Jewish boy. The trial, it lasted a whole year with a farchadat jury (whose members admitted afterward) that all had decided in the first month to find him not guilty because -- hoo-ha! -- he’s such a celebrity. This they call justice?

Later, to jail he went in Las Vegas for selling sports tchotchkes or some such opfal. Thirty-three years was his sentence, but him they let out after nine years. So now O.J. Simpson is on the Tweety Bird (Twitter) with 850,000 followers. But he should be so lucky. It turns out a good number of them are not fans, and they muschn him like the farseenisch that he is. Okay by me. They say he spends most of his time on the computer playing the Fantasy Football. If it were up to me, he’d be doing hard time on a Sing Sing chain gang or stamping out license plates.

John Aniston, who plays the crazy billionaire Victor Kiriakis on Days of Our Lives is leaving the show. His daughter, Jennifer Aniston, who was on Friends is going to play a part in the soap opera with her father. Mazel!

Sunday evenings I never miss the 60 Minutes, and I enjoy the current pack: Lara Logan, Lesley Stahl, Scott Pelley and Steve Kroft. Then not so long ago I noticed that Steve Kroft had gone missing.  It’s because he was caught cavorting with a floozy in a seedy hotel room while his wife of 27 years sat home knowing nothing. So, before he was fired, he quit.

And one more thing about 60 Minutes. I miss that old kvetcher Andy Rooney, but not those bushy eyebrows.  Oy, why didn’t make him trim them? Were they afraid of what they’d find in there? Dandruff? Chinch Bugs? The Lindbergh Baby?

I’ve said enough already.


Vocabulary

farchadat -- confused, distracted, dopey

farseenisch -- ???  It was difficult to find a definition for this term.
           The context suggests the word may be a synonym for  farbrecher, which means a crook or a con man.  To be fair, Yiddishisms are not always blends of Hebrew and German, but also include Hebrew-Russian and Hebrew-Lithuanian origins.  Results may vary by community.

opfal -- trash, garbage

floozy -- a woman of low character
          There are at competing claims about this word's origin.  In one case, it is said to have been derived from the English word "flossy," which seems like a bit of a stretch. 
           In the other, it is said to be Yiddish; its first recorded use dates to the early years of the 20th century, a period when Jews were fleeing pogroms for the less dangerous Anglosphere.
            I'm going with Grandma here.


Notes

Orenthal James Simpson was convicted in 2007 for participating in the holdup of a memorabilia dealer at gunpoint in a Las Vegas hotel room.  Simpson claimed the items taken had been stolen from him and that no gun was involved in their recovery.  The jury found him guilty on 12 counts.  It was his second brush with the law.

-----

Grandma is not the first person to comment on the late Andy Rooney's abundant brows.  His stock answer when people raised the matter:

"I don't know what to do. I try to look nice. I comb my hair.  I tie my tie.  
I put on a jacket. 

"But I draw the line when it comes to trimming my eyebrows. You work with what you got."

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Commentary from our columnist on news from Windsor Castle to Gotham to Los Angeles' own USC. 

Oy, feh, those Royals are at it again. All iberkern they are because Prince Harry and his pregnant soap-opera wife, Meghan Markle, have announced that the new baby's godfather will be Mark Dyer,  Harry’s real father. Of course, everybody already knew that Prince Charles was not Harry’s real foter, because he doesn’t have the family schnozz like William and the seide (Prince Philip).

Meanwhile, the Queen, who knows from nothing, waddles around the daffodils with her corgi dogs and spends the rest of the day in the castle sipping tea and counting her ducats. She should live to a hundred and twenty.

And then there’s Regis Philbin. He’s another nudnick up in years who’s older than Methuselah. For the kids who don’t know the Methuselah, think of Morey Amsterdam. Is he still alive? (Ed. note:  Mr. Amsterdam died at 88 in 1996.) Anyway, Regis has the bad heart and could drop dead any minute, and he wants to make amends for quitting his talk show without telling his cohost Kelly Ripa.  But eight years later, his calls she’s still not taking.

Two actresses were arrested in that big scam about the parents who were bribing colleges to take their narisch kids. One is Felicity Huffman. She was in the “Desperate Housewives,” the TV show about the scheming yentas who hated each other – on and off the camera. The other one was Lori Loughlin, who played the nice girl on “Full House” and the Tess Trueheart types on those Lifetime Movies. Meanwhile, she’s married to this character Mossimo Giannulli, who’s made billions of dollars selling schlock T-shirts, and nobody has the beitzim to utter the word “mafioso”?

They ought to lock up all three of them and dump them in a turme like “Orange is the New Black.”

Enough I’ve said already.


Vocabulary

Beitzim is the Hebrew word for "eggs."  In Israel, as in this column, it seems to be the  vernacular equivalent of cojones in Spanish and balls in English.

Iberkern means "upset."  Grandma is polite enough not to overgeneralize, and so we can only guess whether the Windsors' worry is bissel (a little) or zeyer (rather a lot.)

Narisch is a German word that translates roughly as "crazy."  In Yiddish, narischkeit means nonsense.  (Ed: I'd use stronger language to describe the parental behavior in the Varsity Blues matter and also the narisch daughters' explanations, which amounted to, "Gee, I'd never have done that if I thought I'd get caught.")

Nudnick is a handy word for describing a boring pest.

Turme, of course, means prison.


Note

Grandma regularly drops unusual tidbits into her posts.  In this one, she raises the possibility, perhaps known to all but me, that Prince Harry may not be Prince Charles' son.    Curious, but who knows?

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Grandma visits a live television show.

It was my friend Adele Luskin’s 89 birthday coming up, and she wanted to do something special. All her life, she wanted to go to a TV show taping. She did manage to get on the “Price is Right” with her friend Shirley Heilman from their bowling league, but that was 40 years ago, and Bob Barker never invited them to: “Come on down!”

Adele’s nephew Brandon, a nice Jewish boy despite that graubyon of a mother of his, offered to get the tickets.

Adele’s first choice was “Ellen,” but a year it would take to get tickets. That’s because Ellen DeGeneres, like Oprah, gives away everything from tchotchkes to cash money to vacation trips.

Second choice was Judge Judy. In Hollywood she tapes, but no tickets are available because all her courtroom audiences are now paid actors.

And then there’s Dr. Phil. He’s here in L.A., but Adele thinks he’s a dybbuk who’ll give her the evil eye and make her confess she stuffed Kleenex in her bra at her wedding.  Go figure.

Finally, Brandon talked us into “The Jimmy Kimmel Live Show.” Oy vey, what a greis. Brandon, Adele and I went to the show in an Uber car driven by a zokn who smelled like Old Spice and falafels. This is how the kids get around nowadays? Feh!

Way back in the nosebleed section of the theater they dumped us, behind a crowd of shrieking schmendricks who stood up every time the Kimmel kid cracked wise with his Mexican sidekick Guillermo, who looked like he’d been into the schnapps. This we need?

By the time the first guest came out, two hours it was past my bedtime. A lovely actress (Regina King), dressed to the nines, kvelled about a movie she’s in (“If Beale Street Could Talk”.)

Next came a zombie actor, who kvetched on and on about breaking his hand in a fight (Jon Bernthal of “The Walking Dead”.)

Me? Enough already. Take me home.


Vocabulary 

Graubyon:  Vulgar, ill-mannered person

Greis, Zokn:  Old man

Schmendrick: A nobody

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Our popular California columnist dishes on the three Jennifers and more.

Grandma

Jennifer Lopez is cavorting with Alex Rodriguez, the baseball player who has more nafkes than Doris Day has freckles.  You know they're getting serious now that he wants the ex-wife to slash the alimony payments from $115,000 a month to bubkes and some change.  JLo herself has more mazuma than monkeys have fleas, but she's 50 now, and wants a rich gonif to foot he bill for all the nips and tucks she'll need.

Jennifer Garner, who finally split from her shikker of a husband, Ben Affleck, is now running around with John Miller, a gonster macher who owns the CalifBurger restaurant, which is what?  It's nothing but a fancy-schmancy McDonald's without the clown but with prices up the wazoo.  

Me?  I go for the hot pastrami French dip at Langer's Deli.  It's to die for.  The best fast-food place is now long gone. It's Feltman's of Coney Island, home of the original hotdog.  They even spoke the mama-loshen there.

The other Jennifer, Jennifer Aniston, who was married to Brad Pitt for two minutes, long enough to dump her for Angelina Jolie, the queen of meshuggenehs, has now split from her other husband, Justin Theroux.  About him I know gornit.  None of his movies have I ever seen, and now they say the poor mensch is now seeing a psychoanalyst, which everyone knows is a Jewish doctor who hates the sight of blood.

And then there's Alec Baldwin.  Him I never liked.  He's so full of himself he looks gassy.  Now he's proven to the world that he's a k'nocker and a bulvan when he beat up an old man for taking his parking spot. (Editor's note:  Parking in Manhattan is a blood sport.)  His talk show they canceled -- the one where he was interviewing the Kardashians, as if they needed more exposure. 

Me?  I did like that Baldwin movie about the funny dybbuk ("Beetlejuice") with the tall girl (Geena Davis) who drove off the cliff with the other one (Susan Sarandon) in "Thelma and Louise."

Okay, enough already.

Vocabulary

This report is particularly rich in Yiddishisms, including several that are new to The Id.  Definitions follow.

Bulvan: a loud mouth or know-it-all

Dybbuk:  a malicious possessing spirit, the dislocated soul of a dead person.

Gonster macher:  a prominent man, typically wealthy.  Sometimes said gantse macher.

Gornit:  nothing.

K'nocker:  a showoff.

Mama-loshen:  Yiddish, the mother tongue.

Mazuma:  money.

Nafkes:  women of casual morals.

Shikker:  a drunk.

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

After a restorative hiatus, our popular California columnist returns to praise Aretha Franklin and Della Reese and compare them with their successors.

Grandma

So sad I was when I heard that Aretha Franklin had died. One of the greats she was -- a real mechaieh. Once on TV I saw her sing a quiet little love song that stirred my soul and made me think of my Sidney and how I miss him. Beautiful. There will never be another Aretha Franklin.

I never got to see Aretha perform in person, but Sid and I almost managed to see Della Reese’s show at a nightclub in Harlem. That was before she was somebody. We went with Sid’s cousin, Leon Schmidlapp, a real nudnik. A wooden leg he had, and he did what for a living? What didn’t he do? He played the flugelhorn in a mariachi band. He sold 8-track tapes under the boardwalk in Atlantic City. He repaired TVs so bad that afterwards you got cross-eyed from looking at them. Oy, gevalt!

So, a nice table they gave us in front. The house lights go down, the spotlight comes up, and Della glides onto the stage. It’s at that moment when Leon reaches down and pulls a bottle of Schnapps (or who knows what!) out of his dummy leg, and out they toss us for bringing our own booze. So much for seeing Della Reese.  Oy, gevalt again!

Adele Luskin thinks Beyonce will be the next Aretha. Hoo-hah! She’s got no voice, that Beyonce. All she can do is wiggle her ample toches.

And then Madonna, who’s got some chutzpah going on TV to eulogize Aretha Franklin, and instead kvell about herself, and her own sordid career. She’s another one who can’t sing without the auto-lube (Auto-Tune.) Most of her public life she’s spent cavorting half-naked with shikkers like Sean Penn and Dennis Rodman, making movies nobody wants to see, and studying the Cabala. And did anybody see her on “Live with Kelly and Ryan?” So frumpy-looking she was in a shlock house-dress, I thought she was Ethel Mertz.

Madonna, bubeleh, you’re 60. Do us all a favor and get yourself to a rocking chair.

I’ve said enough already.



Editor's Note

Below is a photo of the dress Madonna wore for the Kelly and Ryan interview.

Here's a link to the event itself.  The Id cultural team believes Grandma's point merits consideration.  

Turned Into Absurdity

A couple years ago, I read this unintentionally amusing sentence in a newspaper.

The 25-year-old turned himself into the Hudson County Regional Fatal Collision Unit 

at about 3:45 p.m. on Monday, Suarez said.

Wow, I thought to myself.  That would be something to see.

The problem was the word into.

We do know that people are capable of changing themselves. 

With plastic surgery and flexible ethics, a woman can turn herself into a big-bosomed porn actress.  

With talent and hard work, high school drop-outs can turn themselves into famous overachievers like Quentin Tarantino and Aretha Franklin.

But, as for turning oneself into a Fatal Collision Unit?  Never heard of it.


Into and In To

It is not difficult to see how the confusion arose.

In and to are both prepositions, and each requires a noun or pronoun as its object.  And the word into is also a preposition.

But in is flexible.  Sometimes it is a descriptive word, an adverb.

Some examples:

Harvey dropped his test into his teacher's in-box. (Preposition)

Harvey turned his test in to his teacher.  (Descriptor and preposition)

Harvey turned his test into his teacher.   (Ha ha ha)

You can see where I'm going here.
    
Harvey Weinstein

Just over two weeks ago, the recently notorious film executive began his legal journey as a criminal defendant.  Some of the headlines:  
     

Harvey Weinstein charged with rape after turning himself into police

Harvey Weinstein turns himself into police

LIVE: Harvey Weinstein turns himself into police

Disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein has turned himself into police. 

Harvey Weinstein turns himself into New York police

JUST IN: Weinstein turns himself into police

And here is the lede from a news story published by an outfit  that I know for a fact employs trained journalists.

Embattled film mogul Harvey Weinstein was seen carrying two books 
with him when he turned himself into police on Friday morning 
in New York City on charges of rape and sexual assault.

I could go on -- and on and on -- but I believe I have made my point.  

We all have seen television dramas in which an officer of the law describes herself or himself as "a police."  But when Weinstein appeared in the courtroom for his arraignment, he wasn't a police; he was just the same old Harvey.

Conor McGregor

The into malaprop also figured prominently in April reports after UFC fighter Conor McGregor got his Irish up outside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.  The first seconds of the cellphone video below show McGregor lobbing a hand truck at an innocent bus.

McGregor probably regards such behavior as necessary to maintain his credibility in the mixed martial arts community.  But officials took a different view.  And so, afterward, we got the following headline, among others:  

Conor McGregor turns himself into police after attack on bus at UFC 223 Media Day 

And language from two mainstream publications:

UFC star Conor McGregor has turned himself into police in the wake 

of a backstage melee he instigated that has forced the removal of 

three fights off UFC's biggest card of the year. 

Conor McGregor turned himself into the New York City Police Department 

after he was wanted for questioning after he attacked 

a UFC bus containing fighters on Thursday and injuring one person. 

(This sentence is a textbook-ready example of bad newswriting, BTW.)

The into misuse appeared also on various MMA websites, but it didn't originate there.  It seems that either the Associated Press or CBSSports, or possibly both, led with the into construction and that the smaller outfits picked up the error and neglected to correct it.

My considered opinion is that if McGregor wanted to change after that unfortunate incident, he should have turned himself into a bus, instead.

Note

What is it with New York and prominent criminal prosecutions?  Harvey Weinstein spent the majority of his career in Los Angeles, where most of the ingenues and starlets are, but the NYPD was first out of the chute investigating and charging him.  

       Now there seems to be a battle afoot between the Manhattan district attorney's office and the state attorney general over which gets to lead the very prurient and very newsworthy court case.  Even the governor has voiced a point of view.

Grooved Pavement, on the Road and in Music

I passed the sign below one day last year as I drove down a rural highway in New Jersey.  

Then I passed a similar sign on the other side of the same road on my way home.

At first I thought the local highway department had messed up its sign order.  But then I slowed down and looked more closely.  I saw that the "Y" didn't quite fit with the other letters.  

It seemed that someone who saw those signs had a flash of inspiration and decided to act on it.  He or she used yellow paint to cover the original "D" and then black paint to replace the letter with a "Y."  "Grooved" had become "Groovey."

Yes, the new word is misspelled, and, yes, the free-lance sign doctor defaced public property in a technical sense.  But it was silly and fun.  I enjoyed seeing those signs.

In fact, the word "groove" and the term "grooved pavement" have sparked other ideas over the last century.  Here's what happened.

Word Origin

"Groove," the noun, comes from groeve, a 14th century Middle Dutch-to-Germanic word for a furrow or ditch.  The term seems to have been mashed up with the Old English word grave, which came from the Latin word, grava, which meant an excavation for corpse or coffin.  Both words indicated a break in the surface of the ground.  

Long before highway engineers started specifying grooves in pavement for safety reasons, the word had another meaning.

Thomas Alva Edison

Historians might trace it to 1888, the year Thomas Alva Edison produced the first gramophone, a machine that played music or speech.  Originally, the music was described as "engraved" (again from the Latin) on soft wax cylinders and revealed when a needle read the engraving and a horn amplified the sound.

Edison refined his machine, first substituting harder wax on the cylinders and then, in 1912, engraving the music on discs made of shellac. (Vinyl came later, in the midcentury.) 

Sometime during this period the engravings came to be called "grooves."  A phonograph's needle was said to read a record's grooves.  (Also the disc came to be described not as a "recording" but a "record.")

Perhaps it is not surprising that public works officials found the word "groove" handy when describing the new highway innovation.  Can you imagine a highway sign that said "Engraved Pavement Ahead"?   Of course not.  "Engraved" sounds refined.  Paving is just paving.

So "Grooved Pavement" it became.


Grooves of Music

For music lovers, the phonograph was life-changing. In all previous ages, if you wanted music around the house, you had to play your own instrument. Now you could listen to anything you wanted, whenever you wanted it.

Records -- and then radio -- expanded the American music diet, which before had consisted mostly of church hymns, regional music and classics from the European canon.  

The music genre that came into its own in this period was jazz.   It had its origins in music made by African slaves in the American south, and was refined and improved in the African American isolation of the post-Civil War period.  By the 1920s, jazz music anchored the Harlem Renaissance and exploded into an international phenomenon.

One indication of the significance of jazz and recognition of its origins was "The Jazz Singer," a 1927 movie that was one of the first talkies.  The plot involved a young Jewish guy who rebelled against his father's wishes to perform popular music in blackface.  The idea is cringe-inducing to post-millennial sensibilities, but most likely was regarded as an homage at the time.

Dizzy Gillespie

Jazz musicians were early adopters of the word "groove," which came from the surfaces of records and which they used to describe their music.  

In 1945, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie composed and released "Groovin' High," a bebop standard that for many years was part of Miles Davis' regular repertoire.   

Further evidence of the g-word's association with a cool musical style came in an Oxford English Dictionary definition that included this example of its proper usage as a verb:  "the rhythm section grooves in true (Count) Basie manner."


Then the beats, those hep cats of the 1950s, took up the word.  In Richard Gray's history of American poetry, he wrote that, to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his ilk, "...the word 'beat' suggests keeping the beat, being in the groove.  More specifically, it implies the jazz beat, bebop and swing." 

Then came rock and roll, which also was influenced by jazz, but which caused somewhat inapt white applications/appropriations of the groove concept.  There was a 1960s pop song called "A Groovy Kind of Love" that you possibly can find online even now if you have the stomach for it.

All was not lost, however.  African American musicians kept the word alive with R&B, soul and funk inflections, including King Floyd's "Groove Me" and Earth Wind and Fire's "Let's Groove." 

Through it all, jazz artists and bands kept releasing music that was true to the groove aesthetic.  Here is "The Groove Merchant," which was composed by Jerome Richards and was a big hit in 1969.




This recording seems to have been made to promote the sale of the song's sheet music, at an affordable price, for middle school and high school jazz bands.  Turns out there are lot of kids who like to groove.

While African American popular music has been caught up with hip hop for the last 20 years or so, jazz has maintained its worldwide audience.  The music sells well.  The clubs are crowded. The annual festivals in Monterey and Montreaux attract many thousands of fans.  



Back to Grooved Pavement

Those engineers who put up "Grooved Pavement" highway signs may not have anticipated this, but their verbiage inspired some music.

Here is a song titled "Grooved Pavement," which appears to have been written after the turn of the millennium.  It's funky and has a good back beat.  It offers solo riffs and unison sections for horn groups. It's a genuine groove.



Jimmy Kimmel, the late-night television host who seems to care about music, posted this arrangement on his Youtube channel.  

The composer is Victor López, a now-retired music teacher/school principal in Miami who who wrote the piece with student jazz groups in mind. 

If you look on Youtube, you will find dozens of school bands' renditions of "Grooved Pavement," starting around 2005. There's a lot of enthusiasm in those performances, but the sound quality is not so distinguished, alas.  

I tried to get in touch with López because I was impressed with his output.  He wrote lots of music for student bands, he wrote charts (arrangements) of other composers' music for student performances, he played trombone and he conducted music for groups of all ages.  He's officially retired now, but he's lived his life in music and in the process promoted the enjoyment of music for many, many people.  The people who made "The Jazz Singer" movie would call him a mensch.

-----

Here's another song with a similar title, "Grooved Pavement Ahead," as performed by a pretty good high school band.





This piece was written by Brad Ciechomski, a New Englander who also teaches music in schools.

I got him on the phone and asked him the question I would have liked to ask López:  How did you come up with that title?

Here's his answer:

"I was driving down a road one day and came to a sign that said Grooved Pavement Ahead: Next 4 Miles.  I thought to myself, 'Let's groove for the next four minutes.' " 

After a little back-and-forth with his music publisher, he had the title. 

Ciechomski also gave some context.  Most sheet music sales these days, he said, are to schools.  The price of charts for commercial hits is too high for school budgets, and so a certain small number of music teachers, including him, write their own material and rescore music to suit the talents of students in their bands and orchestras.  Like López, his range of activities is pretty impressive, which to me indicates not just energy but gusto.

He added that pieces like his "Grooved Pavement Ahead" appeal to students who have been raised hearing rock music in their homes.  

For them, he explained, "The groove is easy to grab onto." 

-----

And there's more.

--For six years, starting in 2010, "Grooved Pavement" was the name of a weekly world music show at WMUA, the student radio station at the University of Massachusetts.  The timing suggests that the show may have been given its name by a student who played the López song in a high school band.  (I'm just guessing, of course.) You still can find the show's eclectic weekly playlists on its Facebook page.

-- Scot Sax, a Philadelphia/Nashville/Los Angeles songwriter and performer released an album titled "Grooved Pavement" last year.   Sax, who also identifies as Mr. Chocolate, works in various musical genres.  He too seems to have been inspired by street signs. Here's the album cover.

--There's also a techno song called "Grooved Pavement" that has nothing to do with jazz but has a thrumming open that perhaps aims to evoke the experience of driving on actual grooved pavement.

-----

The point is that words wander and beget new concepts.  What started as a new name for a technical innovation was adopted by musicians to describe a new kind of music and then picked up by highway engineers to describe a new kind of road surface; that latter inspired another subset of music titles and, finally, a jokester in New Jersey. 

If you think a "Grooved Pavement" sign might promote some creativity in your household, you can buy one online for less than $100.