Dear god, it's a five-minute-long blipvert.

INDIAN: Oh, my White Brother!
A Freak gets off the bus.
FREAK: Hey, man! Don't let him bring you down now. There's a lot of young people in this country, just like myself, who really know where the Indian's at. And don't worry. Soon we're all gonna be out here on the Reservation, livin' like Indians, an' dressin like Indians and doing all the simple, beautiful things that you Indians do. Hey-- got any peyote?

(The Firesign Theatre keeps it real in the past!)

Did they announce who the winners are, or do we not know?

The official announcement (seen here as a Flickr pool discussion topic) says the entries will be posted Monday, February 4, on the New Yorker's website.

I'm sure that I'll find the Flickr pool itself more compelling than the actual winners, since I liked looking all the interpretations, good or meh.

The Pac-Man board game was indeed a heck of a lot of fun pretty much because it involved marbles and bizarre plastic Pac-Man figures which chomped when you pressed down on 'em. I don't remember much else about the game, besides the fact that games with a lot of marbles in them didn't last very long.

The board game did get banned for a while in my elementary school (man, indoor recess was the best) because one enterprising third-grader kept singing "Pac-Man's going to the baaaath-room!" whenever he emptied out the little plastic figure. The song caught on, the teachers got irked, the game got yanked, life went on.

Wish I'd been able to see the original, complete with morality tales and all. I guess the closest I've gotten to a Grand Guignol production is Evil Dead: The Musical, where the last 20 minutes involved the most amount of stage blood I've ever seen used in a theater. Those sitting in the three rows were warned beforehand they were gonna get hit bigtime. A group of college students sat in the front row with pristine white shirts; afterwards, they hung around the lobby comparing where they got hit.

Still, it didn't involve freshly butchered carcasses or real eyeballs. But there was an evil talking moose head puppet.

I remember watching this around 2000 when I visited a friend in Florida. He taped the show just so I could watch it, as he knew I liked trainwreck local TV. The highlight of the show was watching Family Man "run the Mile of Deals", where he ran the entire length of one of his car lots, hollerin the prices and savings of each one as he passed by. He was out of breath by the third car and had so many more to go.

You didn't watch to see what cars he was selling, you watched to see if he'd drop dead of a heart attack before he reached the end (and remember this is not a competition, it is only an exhibition -- so please, no wagering.)

That is an absolutely brilliant method. But is anyone else's inner videogame OCD screaming "ROTATE THE RED BLOCK! ROTATE THE RED BLOCK" yet?

Now if we could find a movie where Vincent Price drops acid...

Say, that's not a bad idea! We'd have to rig the backs of our chairs up to deliver electric shocks every now and then, too, for dramatic effect.

SKIDOO was one of my holy grails of horrendous movies. I was so happy to get ahold of a copy of it a while ago and just goggle at it (Borscht Belt comedians and oldschool entertainers trying to pull off "turning on" like the kids? Bring it on! See also: Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr. in SALT AND PEPPER) The theme song is catchy, Carol Channing's seductive boa dance absolutely creepy, the sight of Jackie Gleason tripping balls is hilarious, and Groucho Marx in the boat at the end is actually a funny way to see the old man off (SKIDOO was his last film.)

Now all we need to do is wait until Jerry Lewis kicks it and someone gets to raid his private vault and put THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED out there for us.

("What Mother means is they're still shooting it out, but now it's in color!")

The picture set is nifty, and I especially like the shots through the scrim. No privacy around these parts, indeed.

I think my favorite thing about the "current" Carousel of Progress is radio man and novelist Jean Shepherd's narration as the father in the piece. He has quite a connection to the Carousel of Progress.

Shep toured the 1964 World's Fair for his radio show on WOR, lugging about a small reel-to-reel recorder to capture the sounds around him. There's audio of him sitting in the original Carousel of Progress. While in the show he quietly rips it apart in his friendly beatnik way, commenting on how transparent this paean to progress is and how silly it is to think that we as a civilzation have advanced solely due to the efforts of the good people at General Electric.

So I enjoy the irony that thirty years later, steeped in Americana and being so homey and nostalgic (though he always vehemently denied being a nostalgian) Shep was tapped to provide the voice of the father.

There's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow, indeed.

Two TSA people took me out of the line, a meter or two away, and proceeded to have a nice little chat to me about my trip for 5 minutes.

"Why were you here? Who were you visiting? What is your job?"... the usual sort of stuff. Towards the end it got weird... "What did you do for fun? Yeah, 'fun', you must have done something for fun? Did you eat out? What sort of restaurant is that? What topping did you have on your pizza? Was it any good?"

I had a similar experience in September, flying home from Los Angeles. I got "randomly picked" for a nice chat with two TSA guy. I got to show them the insides of my shoes and one of them got to pat me down while the other guy asked all the Good Cop questions.

"So, flying to Boston, huh? Are you going for business or pleasure?"

"Actually I'm going home," I said.

It wasn't until I was in the plane and waiting for takeoff did I realize the TSA guy had asked me why I was going to Boston when he was staring at my driver's license which clearly states my Boston address. I figured either I was being tested (which it seems now I was) or that I'd been questioned by Sid Dithers or someone equally slow on the uptake ("San Francisky? So how did you came, did you drove or did you flew?")

Just as well the sarcastic streak didn't emerge or I probably would still be hanging around LAX.

Hands up, who grew up in a small town? Who's ever been pulled over by the local constabulary just for fun? I grew up in a small New mountaintop town with a population under 2,000. We only had two police cruisers in town and not much happened except when the occasional out-of-towner sped down the main road in an attempt to make a shortcut, so I guess they figured they had to use the cars somehow.

The shenanigans were mostly confined to the officers' friends and really, all the officers did was to put on the red lights, pull their friend over, get out, knock on the window and say "Gotcha! Say hi to Bonnie for me." (Or, if Bonnie happened to be in the car at the time, "Gotcha! Hi, Bonnie.") It must've gotten real boring waiting in the single speed trap in town.

When I first got my license, however, I was pulled over because I was in my dad's car, and Officer Hersey knew my dad's car, but hadn't heard I'd started driving on my own. So for about 30 seconds I was considered a car thief, which would've been one of the bigger stories in town had it not turned out I was my father's son and with a legitimate license to boot. Good for me but sad for Officer Hersey, as it meant that the town paper ran the story about the sixth grade's whale watching trip on its front page that week instead of a thrilling real-life police drama story.

After Dad heard about that, he made sure I was pulled over every few months or so "just to keep me on my toes."

I realize this kind of behavior doesn't exactly scale well when you take it out of a small town and bring it into a city, and I admit that, after being in The Real World for long enough it shocked me a bit to look back and think yeah, we were pulled over all the time for no reason back then and didn't think anything of it. Nobody thought to complain about the illegality of it all because everybody just knew everybody else.

But that kinda stuff doesn't play in the big city, or indeed, any larger town. You don't know everybody else, you don't know how each driver will react to being pulled over and so you shouldn't expect the cops to do so arbitrarily. This shit is just wrong.

I mean, it's one thing for 16-year-old me to nod and smile at Officer Hersey and his walrus mustache as he tells me to give his best to my folks while the wig-wag lights are flashing behind me; it's another thing entirely for thirty-coughcough me to wonder why J. Anonymous Officer has pulled me over when I know I hadn't been doing anything wrong. Who wouldn't immediately go on the defensive in this instance?

And besides, I'd rather send Officer Hersey's regards to my family than be handed a coupon for a free latte for bein' so brave and safe-like on the roads.

I'd always known, albeit apocryphally, that Disney had lied about his age in an attempt to enlist in the military and fight in the Great War, and while the armed forces caught on to him, the Red Cross allowed him to join. It sounds like one of those finely-crafted stories that PR flacks love:Disney was such a great American that he went to great lengths in a fervor to defend his beloved country, even resorting to outright lying. Wow! Gol-lee! Hail, Columbia!

However, Walt would have been 16 in November 1918 and this passport shows he lists the Red Cross as his reason for travelling abroad, so it's really neat to see this kind of corroboration. Wow. Really neat. Thanks for throwing this out to us.

Reminds me of the Sesame Street segment which taught us WASPy suburb kids the words "abierto" and "cerrado", wherein a cartoon box keeps tempting a fellow by opening up and teasingly saying "abierto!" in a tantalizing women's voice, but then snapping shut and triumphantly cackling "cerrado!" when he approaches.

Eventually the guy gets so fed up he goes over and stomps the snot out of the box, pounding it flat, at which point it weakly moans "abierto..."

You may draw any sociopoliticalsexual parallels you'd like below.

Now cut your parallels out, put them on the fridge, or give them to a friend. (You may want to ask Mom for help with the scissors.)

Thomson asked Civil Enforcement for photographic proof of his "offence", but was told he would have to pay for a photo.

Somewhere Terry Gilliam is shaking his head with a rueful grin.

Frankly, I thought it was a malapropic version of Tag Team's '93 hit: Whoomp, There It Is! by Tag Team. Even though the name of the song is "Whoomp!", it sounds like they are saying "Whoot! There it is!" and that's what most people I know say when they hear the song.

Actually, there was a rival song called "Whoot! There It Is" by a group called 95 South. Such fierce battling between the warring Whoomp and Whoot factions has never been equalled. Not even the bloody skirmishes of the Family Guy Theme Song War of the late 1990s (between those who thought Stewie sings "Laugh and cry" and those who insisted he sings "Effin' cry") was as fierce as the 1993 war. Our urban canyons and suburban minefields echoed with whoomps and whoots until too many of our young had been lost.

Tag Team may have won, but it lost the legacy, as the term "whoot" lived on. At least, it lived on via many different MUSE/MUSH/MUCK/MUDs and text-based BBSes, where the phrase was used as a general exultation of joy from 1993 on. That's when I first encountered the term, and its first corruption was, quite unsurprisingly, "wh00t". Eventually someone decided that it took too long to type that pesky h while jumping about with glee, and "woot" fell into general usage.

Any attempts at explaining the word through backronyms are etymologically incorrect and embarrassing to read besides. "We Own the Other Team" indeed. That, M-W, would be "WOTOT", and no self-respecting Counterstrike player would be caught dead saying that. (Actually, it's probably hard to find any self-respecting Counterstrike player nowadays. Aimbots and euphemism generators lack self-respect.)

I read that sign as "Entrance For People Who Don't Need A Wheelchair But Rented One Solely To Get To The Front Of The Line."

The entrance should lead to an open pit of crocodiles, but I guess that'd only work for Peter Pan's Flight. On the other hand, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride does send you to Hell...

I completely agree that the dancing baby should've been included however obnoxious it was. I worked tech support for a dialup ISP at the time when the original .avi went flying around, and fielded many calls from 28.8 and 33.6 users who didn't know why their email downloads were suddenly taking forever. We'd check their inbox from the shell and, sure enough, it'd turn out that too many friends had sent them the high-larious dancing baby movie.

I'd call that more influential than the "Macaca" incident.

Also, no Steve Ballmer's DANCE, MONKEY BOY, DANCE? Alas. Props though for making mention of Jennicam, which was a true pioneer.