It was once said of Stephen Fry that he is the patron saint of Ectomo; a statement dripping with truth. When I started writing for Ectomo and Brownlee was helping me with my first few weeks he particularly emphasized tone saying — and I’m paraphrasing here — that Ectomo should read like a verbose Uncle, over-sharing. At my best, I think I sometimes nail that tone and at those times I like to imagine Mr. Fry reading them aloud.
That said, I have watched this clip, taken from the previously linkedStephen Fry in America, half a dozen times since finding it and, thus far, it has not ceased to amuse me. Truly, Dirty Harry’s famous lines have never been so lovingly delivered as they are here between Fry’s Oooos and “Ahhh mummy!” His finishing exclamation of “Holy mackerel!” is more than enough to endear him to me forever and shake my fist at the selfishness of the BBC in keeping him from us here, Stateside.
It starts off innocently enough. A sweaty, numbing summer had driven him into a rut. He kept the demons at bay with drink, snacks, and Civilization 2. Any one of us would have done the same.
I had been watching broadcast television, drinking tequila straight from the bottle, and eating chocolate chips out of the bag I kept in the freezer for just such an occasion.
But man cannot live by Civ2 alone. Our hero ventures out and is rewarded by strange beauty.
Into the McDonald’s. The air conditioning was so powerful that I was instantly chilled. There was a young black gal and a roly-poly little white guy behind the counter. The white guy was running the register and the black gal was filing her nails, leaning her hip up against the counter.
“Burp and piss! Shit and fart. Burp and piss and shit and fart. Burp and piss and shit and fart!” It was the white guy. He kind of sing-songed it, clicking out the words with a kind of syncopated beat.
“Ronald, you better cut it out! There’s a customer in the dining area!”
Is it truth? Is it fiction? Is it a dire warning against disturbing Professional Bloggers at their work?
Around the corner in the dining area was a wild haired older white guy. He had thick aviator frame eyeglasses, and his mad scientist fro was held in partial check by a red white, and blue terrycloth sweatband. He was wearing cut-off jean shorts and penny-loafers without socks. He was holed up in the far back corner, hammering away on a beat-assed old Toshiba laptop big enough I imagined it being powered by factory reconditioned lead acid motorcycle batteries. On the back of the display, where I could see it, was a bumper sticker. It read “ROSS PEROT FOR PRESIDENT.”
In the table across the aisle were three black kids – boys in their early teen years. They were giggling to themselves.
Mumbling to himself, Laptop Perot picked up his Big Mac. In unison, the three boys mimicked picking up invisible Big Macs.
Laptop hurls down his burger and growls. Three invisible burgers are hurled down and the boys growl.
“If you hooligans had been properly educated, you would know better than to stare. I have critical work to do here.” LP waves an angry finger.
My sincerest apologies, ye denizens of the wonderful, monstrous Ecto-Nation, for the deplorable lack of content over the last few days. Your outrage at the passing of a Monday unmoustachioed is, of course, understandable. Had I been able to drag myself to my computer I would have most assuredly fulfilled my duties however, due to the fact that I am a young man in possession of the body of a centenarian, I could not. No, dear readers, the past three days have been spent on my back, the muscles of my lumbar gripping the delicate nerves of my spine in a vise-like death grip. Only through sheer willpower — and 10 milligrams of Cyclobenzaprine — have a been able to lurch over to the keyboard. I pray this will serve as explanation should my normal, typo-laden musings be more…laden…than usual.
That out of the way, on to the clip. The above is an ad for Nike Women featuring Nicola Sanders, who I assume is a runner of some repute and whose organs and muscles all have mouths which they use to spit gibberish at each other. Also, her brain wears a monocle, an image which is so fitting that I dare say I will be unable to look at a brain ever again without superimposing the eyepiece upon it. The whole concept is extremely simple and the animation takes it just far enough into weird territory to work without coming off as horrifying. That’s how it strikes me at least, your unmedicated mileage may vary. Creativity has the hi-res version.
A young John and Eliza caught on film during the scant years before their respective idea afterbirths achieved serialization. As you can plainly see, Eliza was quite the fetching creature before the mange set in.
BLU’s Muto: animation on a public wall. Beautiful surely, but I couldn’t help but think about all the artwork he covered up to make it (I know, it’s a public wall, it comes with the territory.) Thanks to Ry-Tron and everyone else who sent this in!
Don’t you fucking dare post knitting patterns for Dr. Who characters. So sayeth the BBC, though most likely it was worded in a far more politely threatening manner filled with words contain superfluous “u”s. Thanks, August Moon!
The Guardian, apparently incapable of closing their yaps about the whole Max Gogarty scandal, has made another statement on the incident through their columnist, Rafael Behr.
It’s infuriating reading: Behr directly compares criticism of a banal North London boy’s column on his gap-year vacation to Communist Genocide. Then again, dismissing the mass-murder of millions by comparing it to a nineteen year old boy’s hurt feelings shouldn’t be surprising from the newspaper so clueless that it wrote: “Locked in a time warp since the 1950′s, Cuba is on the verge of change and now is the perfect time to visit before its distinctive character is eroded.” Yeah, that “distinctive character” is 60 years of violent political oppression: don’t miss it!
Anyway, Behr’s piece is worthy of a good Fisking, but I’m not going to bother. I’ve had some fun at Max’s expense here, but it’s just astonishing how the Guardian continues to avoid actually taking any responsibility for what happened, instead casting the entire scandal as an indictment of the ignorance, cowardice and blood-thirstiness of mob rule.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
