Paul Gadzikowski

Remember this LiveJournal entry when I described how, through a chain of free association, scooping the catpan makes me think of an old friend? An entry which was itself a chain of free association, having started out as a comment on the Fright Night remake, which featured a cameo from Chris Sarandon, who in the original played the Colin Firth part? And who was on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine once, in an episode that stands out in my memory ptrimarily because I missed its initial airing but secondarily because Sarandon plays the only other person we've met from Guinan's people in an episode she isn't in?

Scooping the catpan now makes me think of DS9.

We saw the Fright Night remake the last day it was in the theaters. I saw the original in the 80s. I don't usually go in for horror, but I seem to recall context of recommendation by a friend since passed away who was a film student. Then we went to see the new one because David Tennant is in it. (Also it was nice to see Anton Yelchin can pronounce a V when he wants to.)

There was a fifteen or twenty minute sequence in the second act that made me very uncomfortable. It had nothing to do with horror special effects, of which there was a not inappropriate amount. I'm speaking of the sequence when Yelchin is the only person (left) who knows that Colin Farrell is a vampire, and is either afraid to tell people or is disbelieved when he does; even when he goes to Tennant who is a Vegas stage magician whose schtick is vampire lore and who ( spoiler )

I have an aversion to stories or scenes when only the protagonist knows something fantastic and s/he is either trying to hide it or to show it and everyone around thinks s/he's not sane. I was surprised at how intensely uncomfortable I was made by those twenty minutes of that film. I'm sure it's a convention of horror films and this may be why I don't go in for them. However, it's also a trope in comedy. I think of it as "nightmare comedy".

The epitome, the acme if you will, of nightmare comedy is the Looney Tunes cartoon One Froggy Evening, in which a construction worker discovers a time capsule containing a frog that performs song and dance routines, except when anyone but the construction worker is looking.

Another example of nightmare comedy is the Tom Cruise film Risky Business. This isn't a case so much of the protagonist knowing more that everyone else than of simply everything going wrong for the protagonist that can go wrong, but it presses the same buttons for me.

The reason these two films stick in my mind as examples of the nightmare comedy trope is that they're favorites of billroper, who loves the trope. After I noticed this about him, I noticed most of the personal stories he tells are couched as this trope. The only example of that which I actually recall now (not having lived in the same city as he for a coupla decades now) is a tale of his first cat, Smudge.

He once described an occasion in which he was scooping Smudge's catpan. Smudge looked on with apparent confusion that her territory marker was being obliterated. Once he was done, the cat stepped in and, so to speak, reasserted herself. He only patiently waited till she was done and then scooped that up to discard with what he'd already collected.

And that's why to this day I think of billroper when I clean a catpan.

billroper answered the A.A. Milne writer's block question last month ("Which Winnie-the-Pooh character are you?") saying that people tell him he's Rabbit. The thesis of the following has been knocking around in my head ever since, so finally I went to look whether anyone else has ever commented with the same point, and no one had. But daisy_knotwise had noted that Rabbit is a planner, so I replied to her comment:

Remember that there's a big difference between Milne Rabbit and Disney Rabbit. Disney Rabbit is a flibbertigibbet. Milne's Rabbit is Clever, nowithstanding that the bear with only fluff and an instinctive grasp of the Tao is better at solving their problems.

(When I was a kid I only realized that Rabbit and Owl were the two with Brain. It wasn't till I rediscovered Pooh as an adolescent that I realized the difference between them: Rabbit's clever and Owl knows things. One critic I read noted that they were the only characters Milne invented, as opposed to adapting from Christopher's toys; then quoted passages from Milne's autobiography to suggest that Milne's mother had a neverending string of relatives and Milne's father sounded like he knew everything but didn't really.)

In theatrical releases Disney Rabbit is a babbling worrier, and only comes off as at all a thinker in bits adapted from Milne in which Rabbit was a thinker. I'm not familiar with the current body of tv that Disney Rabbit appears in, so I don't know which way that trends, but when someone calls Bill Rabbit they're probably thinking of Milne Rabbit.

Can't let billroper's birthday go unrecognized this year. ( 'original' Daily set about 1984 )

In the mid-80s I once roomed with philfoglio for a year or so. One day I went down to the building's basement to the storage locker for our apartment. There were a bunch of people into one of the other storage lockers at the time, so I didn't have to myself unlock the padlock on the basement door. They seemed to have finished up while I was in my locker. When I came out of my storage locker, the first thing I noticed was that all the lights were out. It wasn't pitch black, but the lights were out. I believe I made the mental journey from "the lights are out" to "the door out must now have a padlock on the other side of it" in less time than it took me to make the journey from my storage locker to the door. Sure enough, I was locked in.

Phil wasn't home at the time, which was late morning or midday on a Saturday. But we were hosting a Moebius Theatre rehearsal that evening, so I knew he'd be home at the latest in time for that. And the building's fusebox was in the basement. If I wasn't out of there by nineteen hundred I could turn off my apartment's power and draw attention to the basement. Having deduced that I was going to miss no more than one meal, I set about getting myself out.

The padlock hinge was bolted to the door. I don't remember the arrangement clearly but it was such that I decided, if I could unscrew the nuts on this side of the door, I could get out. Or maybe it was the door's hinges I needed to remove. Anyway, muttering to myself, "Right for tight, left for loose" (unlike Arthur Dent, I listened what my mother told me when I was young), I set about removing the bolt nuts.

At one point while I was working, I heard someone coming down the back stairs (there may have been a parking lot in the back of the building; I wouldn't remember since neither Phil nor I had a car). All I had to do to be released was to call out to the other resident as he or she passed by. But I didn't. I wanted too badly to see whether I could get myself out of this by myself.

(Or maybe I was embarrasssed. Whatever.)

The last of the bolt nuts was jammed, or the threads stripped or something, and the bolt itself was mangled so it was hard to get a grip on. I had to hunt up something to try to get a grip on it, I don't remember what. It was while I was occupied with that last bolt - and resigning myself to missing that meal - that I heard a guy call from the other side of the door, "Who's there?"

Not being acquainted with my neighbors or vice versa, I answered with my apartment number.

The neighbor got me out. Later, talking to a Moebian arriving for rehearsal, he said, "He was so calm!" billroper's response to hearing the story was, "I hope I'm never stranded on a desert island with Paul. When the helicopter flies over and drops the rope ladder, Paul will wave them off and say, 'No thanks, I want to see if I can get myself out of it!'"

Super Cognitive Dissonance Alan Moore's For The Man Who Has Everything was a Superman Annual twenty years ago (and more recently was made into an episode of Justice League Unlimited). It's about a plant that imbeds itself in your chest and does the same thing to you as the Nexus in Star Trek: Generations does. ( spoilers )

Remember Me, Remember My Red Herring Thinking of pocket universes reminded me of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Remember Me. I seem to recall that that was one of two times that Dr. Crusher started to make a particular confession to Captain Picard but was interrupted and never got back to it. Can anyone remind me what the other time was? (Also, if you care, do you think she was going to confess she's always loved him or do you think she was going to confess that Wesley's his son? I think I know which camp Peter David is in, and you ought to too if you've read, I can't think of the title, his novel with Trelane in it.)

That time of year Yesterday was the thirtieth anniversary of my first date. Today would've been my parents' forty-seventh wedding anniversary.

TMI I've been having difficulty for a coupla days keeping my nasal passages clear of naturally-forming solid obstructions.