Things With Awesome* Names: May 2010

Thursday, May 27, 2010

"Living with Crazy Buttocks"

I've seen this one around in a few places, and so even though it's reading oddee.com that jogs my memory now, I'm not really giving them credit for tipping me off - mainly because I hope to crib from oddee on many an occasion in the future, and thus want to save my crediting-goodwill. If you understand what I mean.

Anyway, at least I'm not just paraphrasing Wikipedia.

So anyway, there are books with unknowingly ridiculous titles and books with intentionally ridiculous titles. Though obviously the unknowing absurdity beats out the sly-wink, I have to give Kaz Cooke, the author of this particular tome, credit for coming up with a truly inspired title, nudge-nudge-wink-wink though it might be.

It is a book about crazy buttocks. Or rather, it seems to be a humorous book about body image. Which, of course, includes crazy buttocks. Buttocks are, after all,a part of the body. As the petticoat-wearing, butt-massaging-machine-using woman on the cover can surely attest.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

"Bapsybanoo Pavry"

And here we are back at Wikipedia, a site I use so often that I think search engines are starting to think it's the subject of this blog. But where else, I ask you, will you find out about people like Bapsybanoo Pavry?

The article in particular is written with that entire lack of an encyclopedic style that you come across when reading rarely-read articles on the famed on-line encyclopedia. In prose becoming of People Magazine, the article talks about how this particular lady was born in Bombay to a Parsi priest, before marrying a 90-year-old British marquess ('marquess' is British English for the heraldric title that I've always known as 'marquis', for example the famed nobleman Marquis Mark of the Funkybunch) and living a life oddly devoid of healty sexual relations.

The rest of the article prattles on about stuff that doesn't matter really much, before crapping out spectacularly with the final sentence, 'few details are known about her life'.

Why thank you, my dear Wikipedia. Unsurprisingly, they're no good for a picture, and I snag the above picture from www.winchestermuseumcollections.org.uk, where she's described by her grand-poobah title 'Marchioness of Winchester'. But the name her mam gave her is way more impressive.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

"When the Pawn..."

So Fiona Apple, an American musician not named after Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow's child (and there's a future entry for sure), released her début album in 1996 and gave it the not-insane title Tidal. It sold a few copies, and she was perhaps thinking that she wasn't properly eccentric enough. So she released her follow-up album, and called it, ahem, When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He'll Win the Whole Thing Fore He Enters the Ring There's No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand and Remember That Depth Is the Greatest of Heights and If You Know Where You Stand, Then You'll Know Where to Land and If You Fall It Won't Matter, Cuz You Know That You're Right. This is, then, a title so ridiculous that I've reproduced it here and have still never bothered to read it from beginning till end. It is apparently a poem she wrote after being dissed in SPIN Magazine. She wrote it in order to express her frustration at having to admit that she'd been reading SPIN Magazine.

Since then, of course, Soulwax and Chumbawumba have both, in a sense, 'beaten' this title for 'longest title in the world', with albums entitled Most of the remixes we've made for other people over the years except for the one for Einstürzende Neubauten because we lost it and a few we didn't think sounded good enough or just didn't fit in length-wise, but including some that are hard to find because either people forgot about them or simply because they haven't been released yet, a few we really love, one we think is just ok, some we did for free, some we did for money, some for ourselves without permission and some for friends as swaps but never on time and always at our studio in Ghent and The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether from Lack of Ideas or From Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle That Culture. Take Your Older Brother's Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style It, Re-Fashion It to the Point Where It Becomes Your Own. But Don't Just Regurgitate Creative History, or Hold Art and Music and Literature as Fixed, Untouchable and Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try to 'Guard' Any Particular Form of Music Are, Like the Copyists and Manufactured Bands, Doing It the Worst Disservice, Because the Only Thing That You Can Do to Music That Will Damage It Is Not Change It, Not Make It Your Own. Because Then It Dies, Then It's Over, Then It's Done, and the Boy Bands Have Won, respectively. The two main reasons I'm including the Fiona Apple album over the others is (1) the others have rather more obvious stand-alone short-forms (and in the case of the one that anyone in their right mind would call "The Boy Bands Have Won", an album cover suggestive of that short-form), and (2) the others aren't cheesy attempts at poetry.

Yay Fiona Apple. You won the contest.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

"Pigbutt worm" a/k/a "flying buttocks"

Have you ever heard of a 'flying buttress'? It's something to do with architecture, something to do with support. Blah blah blah, boring boring boring. Anyway, it's got a cool name. I was looking it up on Wikipedia, as I'm prone to doing, thinking I might add it here. But since Wikipedia has auto-complete, like Google does, this way-cooler alternate came up instead: 'flying buttocks'.

Whatever 'flying buttocks' could possibly be, how could it be anything but awesome? Well, on the one hand it's a worm. A newly discovered one, as it turns out, that lives under the sea, with Ariel and Sebastian. More to the point, and I quote, "the worms have... been observed floating with their mouths surrounded by a cloud of mucus." Charming, eh? Gotta love those worms.

Anyway, Wikipedia ramps up the awesome by saying it resembles a pair of disembodied buttocks. Thus the name - and even better, said buttocks are apparently porcine in nature, leading to the coining of the Latin name 'Chaetopterus pugaporcinus' and the English alias 'pigbutt worm'.

No words can describe how awesome a name 'pigbutt worm' is. It makes up for the unawesomeness of it being an underwater worm.