For The Record

A conversation at the grocery store this morning at 6:30:

CLERK: Okay, here's a trivia question.
MR. FOB: Um. Okay.
CLERK: What's the name of Donald Duck's fiancée?
MR. FOB: Daisy?
CLERK: (Overjoyed) No! Daisy is his cousin. His fiancée is Daffy!

I didn't argue because it was 6:30 and because I don't argue with people I don't know, at least not in person. But let it be known publicly in my passive-aggressive way that he was wrong and I was right. Daisy is Donald's girlfriend; Daffy is a male duck, which in theory would allow him to be Donald's fiancé (I didn't hear whether the clerk was pronouncing one or two e's), except that Daffy is owned by Warner Brothers and Donald by Disney. Not even Romeo and Juliet were that star-crossed.

Why I (heart) Mr. Bennett

No, not Lizzie and Jane's father, though he is a likable character.

Noah Bennett, from the series that if you haven't already seen you should run immediately to your local library (or Netflix) and put the first season on hold. When I started watching Season One this past Sunday, I found Mr. Bennett attractive, in a well-dressed-and-mysterious-secret- agent-man kind of way, even though he was apparently a bad guy. But then halfway through the season (about Tuesday afternoon my time) he became a good guy and the mild attraction turned into a full-fledged fictional character crush. It helps that I can identify with his motivations. Because believe me, I would totally lie, murder, and brainwash innocent people to protect my daughter.

(Consider that a warning.)

And he was totally crushing on me too. I saw the way he looked at me.

But alas, our short-lived romance ended Wednesday night when FoxyJ and I finished Season One (yes, I bring my wife along when I have clandestine meetings with TV lovers; there's enough of Mr. Bennett--or Noah, as he likes me to call him--to go around). Here's looking forward to Heroes Season Two on DVD.

Heath

I'm not qualified to write any kind of meaningful "Remembering Heath Ledger" post, but I will say that I was deeply moved by his performance as a heterosexually married gay man in Brokeback Mountain and have been excited for the past year or so to see him as the Joker in this summer's Dark Knight. Twenty-eight is too young to die, and two is too young to lose a father.

Remember when cows went on strike because people weren't putting milk on their Chex?

That was crazy.

It's a Small Gay Mormon World

A month or so ago I cataloged an anime movie called Akira. For some reason about half of the voice actors in the English dub of Akira use pseudonyms here that they pretty much don't use anywhere else. One of those is a guy credited as Jimmy Flinders, who IMDb says is really Cam Clarke. At the time I cataloged the video I checked the Library of Congress's Name Authority File and found no record for Jimmy Flinders and only one record with the name Cam Clarke. In the citation for that record Clarke is listed as the illustrator of a picture book adaptation of Carol Lynn Pearson's My Turn on Earth, which I thought was an interesting coincidence (because I happen to have seen that particular cornerstone of 70s Mormon pop culture), but also took as evidence that the Cam Clarke in LC's NAF was not my Cam Clarke aka Jimmy Flinders, voice actor for everything from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to He-Man: Master of the Universe.

So I set aside the info on Mr. Clarke until this week, when I finished the training that authorized me to create my own name authority records to be put into LC's file. As I did research in order to create a record for my Cam Clarke, though, I came across this Wikipedia article, which says that Clarke is best known in Latter-day Saint circles as the original "Jimmy Flinders," one of the lead characters of the other cornerstone of 70s Mormon pop culture, Saturday's Warrior. So he was Mormon, after all!

Then I came across this CD that Clarke recorded in the 90s, a collection of popular love songs recast from a gay perspective. Clarke, as it turns out, is a gay Mormon. (By which I mean that he has identified as gay for at least part of his life and he at least grew up Mormon, but I don't presume to say anything about his current identity in terms of the two things.)

He is also the stepbrother of Lex de Azevedo, popular LDS musician, which makes him the uncle of Rachel Coleman, the creator of Signing Time, a DVD series that S-Boogie watched nearly every day of the first two years of her life and of which Little Dude is now a devoted fan.

So I still don't know that voice actor/singer/gay Mormon Cam Clarke is the same as picture book illustrator Cam Clarke, but I do know that the former is related to Lex de Azevedo, who wrote the score for My Turn on Earth, and it's not unlikely that gay Mormon Clarke has some connection to Carol Lynn Pearson, the matron saint of gay Mormons everywhere. So I suspect the two are one and the same. I've emailed Mr. Clarke to ask him to clarify the issue, so hopefully he'll be kind enough to respond.

What I do know that I didn't know yesterday morning is this:

1. Leonardo is a gay Mormon.

2. He-Man is a gay Mormon.

(Apologies to L for the provocative pictures.)

I can't imagine anyone being very surprised about He-Man being gay. I mean really, all the man wears is furry underwear. Leonardo is a bit of surprise, as I would have suspected it first of his brother Donatello, but hey, for all I know, all four of them are. But it certainly never occurred to me that either He-Man or Leonardo might be Mormon. I'll tell you one thing for sure: neither of them went to BYU dressed like that.

An Open Letter to the Mindless Masses

Dear Masses,

I had an idea tonight.

What if, instead of everyone in America being football fans, we varied things up a bit? You know, some people could be into football and others could be into lacrosse and others could be into scuba diving and others could be into Parcheesi? Then maybe, just maybe, every time there's a stupid football game at stupid Husky Stadium they wouldn't have to close all the stupid streets I need to get to my stupid home! (Wait, scratch that last stupid.) And then, while we're at it, maybe we could get some funding at our universities for programs besides football--maybe, I don't know, something remotely related to education?

I dunno. Just an idea.

Love,

Mr. Fob

Drug of the Nation

One of the many ridiculous things that FoxyJ and I have been known to be proud of is the fact that we don't have cable and therefore we and our children are not corrupted by the evils of television. "S-Boogie doesn't even know who that is," we say smugly when other parents talk about annoying children's television characters.

Well, no more.

Last Monday night I finished watching Smallville Season Six (Tom Welling=nice to look at but not a great actor=the perfect Clark Kent), which I had checked out from the library, and then realized that Season Seven was premiering on Thursday night. So Tuesday morning I somewhat impulsively went online and made arrangements to have the Comcast guy stop by on Thursday afternoon.

It's only twelve bucks a month (plus horrendous taxes and fees) for the most basic thirty channels. I decided it was worth twelve bucks a month to be able to watch Smallville, Legion of Superheroes, and The Batman (can you spot a trend?), plus the occasional new episode of The Simpsons (which I would care more about watching regularly if the new ones were nearly as good as the old ones). The irony in all this is that it ends up the former three shows are all on one of the two channels we get clearly without cable. Oh well. Now we have other options.

Like this afternoon, S-Boogie watched two hours of PBS instead of two hours of Dora the Explorer on DVD. Which isn't that bad, I guess. PBS has good kids' shows. On Saturday I let her watch Legion of Superheroes and The Batman with me. Both are a little more violent than I'd ideally like my four-year-old watching, but they're no worse than the Justice League and Teen Titans DVDs I often let her watch with me. It's a compromise I make to be able to watch the shows I like while she's awake, and to spend some time doing something with her that we both enjoy (because, I'll be honest, I was sick of Dora the Explorer months ago). What I realized on Saturday, though, is that the worst part about letting kids watch TV is not the programs themselves; it's the commercials. If I keep letting her watch those, she's going to start asking me to buy her things and getting opinions on what brand of cereal she has to have RIGHT NOW!!! I'm not sure I'm ready for that.

But then I guess it's the price I pay to have my direct link to the united states of unconsciousness. And really, what kind of parent would I be if I deprived my daughter of her weekly dose of animated superheroes?

Would This Make Sense If I Had Cable?

S-Boogie got a Happy Meal last week that came with this Squirrel Boy (?) toy and a colored pencil. The color of the pencil, according to its label, is Vietnam. Were they all out of North Korea?