"Punky Brewster"

Image via Wikipedia

What I can tell you about "Punky Brewster": er... nothing.

It was a TV show. It was the main character in said TV show. It was on TV in the late eighties or early nineties and features a plucky young teen, or perhaps pre-teen. I should have been eating it up: I was of more or less the correct age. But for some reason, either I never saw it or I've subsequently wiped from my memory any record of having seen it.

But nomenclaturally, this is gold. This is more than gold. It's, like titanium.

I genuinely love the name 'Punky'. I have to assume that it's a nickname for the character, that her parents didn't say, "What a beautiful little girl; let's name her 'Punky'". I would guess that within the world of the TV show perhaps it's a nickname that indicates her character or personality. Shrug. But it rhymes with 'monkey', and is a-ok in my book.

In any case, it's trumped by the coolness of the name of the actor who played the role. As far as i know, it really is her real birth name: Soleil Moon Frye. I must admit that I don't know if that's "Frye, Soleil Moon" or "Moon Frye, Soleil", but I presume it's the former, and that Mr and Mrs Frye actually did name their daughter after two different heavenly bodies: day and night, French and English. Sounds nicer than "Sun Lune Frye".

Seriously, Soleil is a very pretty words and thus a very pretty name. "Moon" I'm not so keen on. But it worked for Frank Zappa, and I'm sure Moon Unit Zappa was pleased as punch when "Punky Brewster" came on TV to learn she wasn't the only moon in the night sky.

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"N!xau"

Cover via Amazon

I took an anthropology class in high school, and we had to do a project about a certain tribe or culture from somewhere in the world. There was a list, and "!Kung San" just stuck out amongst the others, and I asked for it without knowing anything about the culture. It was that exclamation point.

Turns out, the exclamation point is a click, and to say their name properly, you have to click at the same time as saying the 'k' in their name. It's tricky, but I taught myself to do it. Hey, a name is a name. Plus, it's way better than the more prosaic 'Bushmen of the Kalahari'.

Their awesome click languages, of which there are many, are a wonder to behold. They've always struck me as sounding like two people at once: one who is speaking and one who is just making different clicking noises at the same time. Human speech is so cool. I love that in Chinese, tone affects meaning. I love that Arabic uses sounds deep in the throat. And I love languages that use clicks. Just their names are brilliant: here are some Namibian 'Khoisan' languages: Gǁana, ǂHõã, Juǀʼhoan, ǃXũũ, ǂKxʼauǁʼein, Nǀu, ǁXegwi. No clue how to pronounce them, but they just look to enticingly alien.

Ah, and N!xau? He's the star of The Gods Must be Crazy, an awesome movie with a cool title. It's obviously Namibia's most successful movie, and N!xau, otherwise a farmer, Namibia's most famous actor. You might know that they made a sequal nine years after the original, adventurously titled The Gods Must be Crazy II. What you might not know is that N!xau went to Hong Kong after that to make a few more episodes in the franchise, Hong Kong-made movies entirely steeped in Chinese culture and with next to nothing to do with Namibia, except the 'fish out of water' aspect of a Namibian in Hong Kong. They have great names too, and lots of a/k/a's as well.

• While the first Cantonese movie is called The Gods Must be Crazy III, its main English name is Crazy Safari. It's also traded as Vampires Must be Crazy, and the direct translation of its Cantonese original, An African Buddhist Monk.
• The Gods Must be Crazy IV is also called Crazy Hong Kong. There's another movie called The Gods Must be Crazy IV, but it doesn't feature N!xau and has nothing to do with the other movies.
• The Gods Must be Crazy V also has the highly silly name The Gods Must be Funny, the way superior The Gods Must be Funny in China, or best of all, An African Superman.

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"O-Pee-Chee"

Image via Wikipedia

It's sometimes very strange being Canadian. When in the USA, kids of a certain inclination would get all obsessive about collecting playing cards featuring sports players on them, trading with friends, buying albums to keep them in, buying pack after pack to find elusive cards required to complete sets, eschewing the opposite sex entirely, they would do so in support of a company called "Topps". In Canada, however, while all of the above could well be true, it would be in support of a company with an altogether stranger name: "O-Pee-Chee".

Like summer camps and Boy Scout events from the 1960s,the O-Pee-Chee name feels like a vague English-friendly approximation of a native American word, and according to O-Pee-Chee themselves, it is: they claim it means "the Robin", and is an 'aboriginal word' (since there is, you know, only one Frist Nations language). Why a trading card company would name itself after a bird, I don't know. But they do also point out the more obvious fact: that it's a rough homophone for "Oh! Peachy!", which is what I presume they hoped prepubescent boys would squeal upon receiving a pack of these cards.

It now being a good forty years since anyone ever uttered the interjection 'peachy' with anything other than satirical intent, it's a name that evokes little more than (1) what a silly name, and (2) part of it is a word for urine. Yay!

Not that 'Topps' is that great a name, mind you. But at the same time, well, it's no 'O-Pee-Chee'.

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"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.

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"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.

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"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.

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"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.

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