NOOZLES OH MY FUCKING GOD NOOZLES

NOOZLES

For the last several years I intermittently have tried to remember the name of an animated show I greatly enjoyed as a child. It had something to do with koalas and Australia and children and Uluru/Ayers Rock functioning as a place of great mystical power.

Today the mystery is solved. Today I put the search string "children's animated 'ayers rock'" into Google and I was brought to happiness and joy here, which lead me again to here. (Apparently it aired back to back with another koala-themed show, because the programs were created in Japan which was had recently gone, as seems unsurprisingly likely for the Japanese, absolutely fucking nuts for koalas. It seems quite possible that I have also in part conflated elements of these two programs if they did indeed air consecutively on Nickelodeon.)

NOOZLES

It has to be this; there can only have been one children's program in the late 80s/early 90s that centered on koalas AND ALSO had the mystical properties of Uluru/Ayers Rock as a recurring plot point, right? RIGHT?

And so we come to Youtube. Here. It is important now to observe that absolutely nothing appears to be as I remembered it. The show I remember was much cooler. But it must be this.

It must be, right?

(Noozles?)

Yeah I Got Links

In general I'm the sort of person who is simultaneously flabbergasted by women who remain in abusive relationships but also who thinks endlessly interrogating them as to why they don't/didn't leave (sooner) is unlikely to be productive or helpful to the woman abused, because I don't think rationality plays into it very much, and I also believe that as the abuse goes on for longer periods of time, psychological conditioning subverts what other people would consider to be normal reasonable behavior and response to that kind of treatment.

Anyway, I found this, from the estimable Hilzoy, to be an excellent consideration of a difficult topic. (So did, apparently, everyone else in the blogosphere.)

In less serious territory, I'm going to humbly suggest that you check out - I will provide the links at the end - the most recent week of Penny Arcade, the online comic that's ostensibly "about" gaming. Despite being roughly a decade out of date with their supposed subject matter (they deviate a *lot*, and the jokes are almost always gettable even if you're not a gamer, I think), I usually love this strip, because I have an affinity for their sense of humor and I also enjoy the writing style of Tycho, the writing-alter-ego of the comic's creative duo. However, one of the most interesting things about Penny Arcade is the evolution of the art, provided by Gabe. The first strip, from (wow) over ten years ago, looks like this. (It also isn't really funny.) A few years later it looked like this. (I'm not selling you on the funniness of the strip, I know; it's gotten better writing-wise as well. I picked this one because I stumbled across it accidentally and it conveniently introduced the Cardboard Tube, which will be relevant later.) Which eventually evolved into this, which is more or less what it looks like today. Except for when they take advantage of Gabe's vastly improved artistic skills to deviate from their normal format and stretch their legs and do things like:

This, and

This. That's from the middle of one of the adventures of the Cardboard Tube Samurai, which is a silly joke they've used to present some surprisingly lovely art and elliptical storytelling. Which brings us to:

(And, yeah, I'm aware that I'm lavishing many more words on a webcomic than I am on domestic abuse.)

The most recent three-part tale of the Carboard Tube Samurai, which is like the one I linked above completely wordless but offers up an unexpected punch at the end. As Tycho said in the accompanying blog post, it's apparently about fatherhood. Shit.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

So.

And Then One Day A Mighty Oak

Other stuff to say, but just for the sake of evading the day's real significance for me, I offer you what I've come to believe, over the last few weeks, is an accurate representation of the current preoccupations of that segment (not so small, really, and yet) of the American population that currently thinks President Obama is doing an affirmatively bad job (and btw, Blogger's spellcheck suggests Obama isn't a valid word; might want to get on that, dudes):

ACORN ACORN ACORN ACORN ACORN ACORN ACORN ACORNACORNACORNACORNACORNACORN

ACORN.

Ahem.

Buhfuckwhat?

Also I've been trying to figure out whether the people around Representative Michele Bachmann (again, a name Blogger wants me to correct) who agree with her general outlook on the world (a) don't know that she's incredibly incorrect*, in the "you made a category error and are not talking about what you thought you were talking about" sense, or (b) don't care, because it's meat for the ignorant anyway.

More interestingly: are the people she interacts with - members of the press, fellow congresspeople, witnesses before her committee - who don't agree with her general outlook on the world not disabusing her of these essential misconceptions because (a) they don't care, or (b) it amuses them?

* In case you don't know, I'm talking about Rep. Bachmann not understanding that when the idea of creating an international reserve currency was floated as a hypothetical by the sorts of people who float hypotheticals about international commerce (as part of a broader discussion in which we discuss the possibility of the Chinese getting out of the game of holding the dollar as their primary reserve currency, which is a concept I like to call "Holy Fucking Shit Day"**), what was NOT under discussion was the establishment of an international currency, which is a totally different thing.

** Alternatively: "No: Now We're Fucked Day".

PLUS

If you have the opportunity to look out a window which is directly several stories above a streetlight when it's snowing after sunset, I recommend it; it's quite something. Normally this is where I'd quote lyrics from the Prince song "Sometimes it Snows in April," except that (in my opinion of course) the lyrics aren't that good and don't make a great deal of sense and are sort of maudlin when they're not sort of clunky. I hope U 4give me.

Closer Than We Remember

One of the women I work with - about the same age as my boss, which is to say old enough to have been a teenager during Jim Crow - told me that she has two signs she acquired (I'm not sure where) in her house, one in the living room and one in the kitchen, which say "Colored Only". She says people, including her own kids, always ask her why she has those signs; I didn't need to ask (apparently her mind and mine are more in sync than I would've guessed) but she told me: "I won't forget. We can't forget." Given the unfathomable wickedness to which black people in America were subjected in living memory of millions of people alive today, I can't comprehend how fatuous some (white) people (and often by people I mean "fuckwits who are more or less in the media") are when they say things like "slavery ended almost 150 years ago". Yeah, but the Tuskegee experiment only ended 37 years ago.

Random fact to lighten the mood: Laurence Fishburne starred both in the 1997 HBO film Miss Evers' Boys (about the Tuskegee experiments) and the 1995 HBO film The Tuskegee Airmen (about the Tuskegee airmen).