Gather around ye children of the tribe of confusionaut. Gather around this fire and let the tales of ancient times and great men warm your hearts.
There was once… a man. Or… at least an animated gif of a man, that I made when I was drunk because I thought it was hilarious. And oh… he WAS hilarious. And people didst click on him, and random wikipedia pages didst appear from HIS SHEER WILL. And he looked out upon them, and he saw that they were good. So, so good.
In his first adventure, he battled seabirds and scuba divers to become the greatest Japanese kart-racer of all time. Next, he traveled with his one-eyed civil war manservant to uncharted Asia, and discovered humming birds. After racing the Duke of Albequerque from the British Isles to Mesoamerica, he watched some TV and fought the kaiser’s Jedi spies in Argentina with a sharpened sea-serpent’s bone. Triumphant in a battle of wits, a game of chess against the ghosts of Zen Vikings, he fought a horde of bats and lawyers and kung-fu tigers. He slaughtered. HE PREVAILED. And though a mysterious masquerader took up his mantle for a time, the original did return, bringing his gifts of knowledge and wonderment to mysterious ancient China, war-torn Jerusalem and death-mired Tampa Florida.
Truly, he was the greatest animated gif of Kojak playing a ukulele ever created. Truly, he was… STRUMMIN’ SAVALAS.
Click him… and feel the joy of knowledge. Shun him… and know only darkness. His randomly chosen gifts today:
Moskstraumen: There are some things that are so awesome, they can only truly be described in Norewegian. Even the language itself has an awesome name- if my school taught something called “Nynorsk”, I’d have written book reports all the goddamn time. But a huge, 18km wide horrible stretch of whirling ocean that gobbled up vikings, traders and fishermen like a beast from hell? Yeah, that’s metal as fuck. Norway that shit.
Not only is the Moskstraumen awesome in REAL history, it’s awesome in fiction too. Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville all wrote about it. It’s the waters that wrecked the Nautilus and scared mad Ahab. If somebody hasn’t already named their metal song/album/tour after this thing, they will. Oh, they will. I’m looking at you, Mastodon. You can even make it be about the Elephant Man if you want, I know you’re big into that.
Soft Drink: Holy crap this is a long page about pop. It’s fun to find train-wreck pages like this on wikipedia, where a subject is so vague that you end up with nonsensical categories of absolute trivia that link to even less useful main articles. Soda has 1.56 times as much alcohol as Kool-Aid, glass pop bottles were invented in 1899, and some people call them “fizzy drinks”. None of this is organized in any sort of meaningful way, you just sift through the facts like a kid in a ballpit. Wheeeee…
Like any sufficiently giant pile of unsifted rubble, however, the Soft Drink page has a gem in it too.
“The first marketed soft drinks (non-carbonated) in the Western world appeared in the 17th century. They were made from water and lemon juice sweetened with honey. In 1676, the Compagnie des Limonadiers Paris was granted a monopoly for the sale of lemonade soft drinks. Vendors carried tanks of lemonade on their backs and dispensed cups of the soft drink to thirsty Parisians.”
So the first lemonade stands were a battalion of guys with backpacks. The image in my mind is of stubbled, cigarette-drooping legionnaires, little chin-strap hats on their heads and scars on their cheeks, with big bronze-bolts-and-green-glass backpacks full of lemonade that they fired at people from fire hoses. Like 17th century flamethrower shock troops, blasting Parisian thirst back to hell and chucking those little paper cone cups like grenades. Nobody look up any REAL information about these guys, because I am savoring the limonadiers of my imagination. “Je Voudrais une limonade! AAAAAAAUGH *FWOOSH* SACRE LIMON!”
Apega of Nabis: Okay, bare with me here. There was this king, King Nabis, of Sparta, those crazy fuckers who were basically psychotic evil versions of the ancient Greeks and were really cool until 300 ruined them for everybody. Anyway, Nabis was an ape-shit crazy tyrant like you would expect Sparta to have, AND he was an inventor. An inventor of torture devices. Torture ROBOTS.
The Apega of Nabis was Nabis’ crowning achievement, a statue that looked like his wife, who was also crazier than a shit-house rat and even more evil than he was. The statue was designed to crush people in its arms and breasts, which were lined with iron nails, and Nabis kept the controls for it hidden so people thought that it was autonomous. He made them think he had a giant robot wife that would death-hug them into its nail-boobs, one that he would dress up in fancy clothes and parade down the street to remind people to pay their taxes. Add this to the fact that Nabis repeatedly attempted and failed to conquer a place called “Megalopolis” and it’s pretty clear he was the first real supervillain in the world. Damn.
David Sullivan: “British pornography entrepreneur” is the sort of title you don’t see too often. This guy owns clubs and newspapers, is worth over 500 million pounds, and started his empire selling nudie pictures through the mail while he worked at a gas station. If that doesn’t tell you how classy the 68th richest (SO CLOSE TO IRONIC) man in England is, consider this: when his first wife Mary Millington committed suicide in 1979, his next film was… an exploitation movie about her. I don’t know which is a worse tribute to your wife, casting another woman to play her in a porno after she kills herself, or making a giant robot duplicate of her to kill tax dodgers. I REALLY can’t decide.
Destroying Angel: Before I tell you how poisonous “destroying angel” mushrooms are, think for a moment. Think about that name. Do you think they’re tasty? Is that what jumps to mind? Would you drink “grave soil” brand soda, or eat “reaper’s grasp” English muffins? Do you regularly order salads with things like “nexus of pain” cheese or “Rasputin’s secret madness poison” dressing on them? Are you the dumbest thing to ever eat?
Then… they’re delicious. Go for it. And yeah, they’ll get you high. You’ll see this bright light down a long tunnel, it’s amazing.
Utilization Behavior: I love learning about different brain disorders that sound like pure science fiction. Apparently if you have this one, you can’t resist using things put in front of you. And then you… “confabulate” this, which I thought was a word Daffy Duck made up to sound smart, but apparently it means when your brain conjures false memories to explain what’s going on. Huh.
So… if somebody suffers from utilization behavior, and I put, say, put a toilet brush in front of them, they would HAVE to clean the toilet. Interesting… is there a certain way to hit a roommate in the head so they contract this disease? Or… wait, if I put a gun in front of someone with this, then they wouldn’t be able to resist firing it. Then their mind would make up a fake memory to explain to them WHY they just fired the gun. If there was a person in the room, the sufferer would feel urged to shoot them with the gun, and then have fake memories of how much they hated that person to rectify the missing logic. They’d be innocent on account of insanity, but they wouldn’t know it, and the more people they shot the more horrible their fake past would become in their own memory, with each killing adding another imagined wrongdoing that caused it… I think I just wrote a really shitty mystery novel. Or a bad episode of House. Or both. Huh.
List of Fictional Elephants: This is the most useful list ever compiled. I can seriously imagine THOUSANDS of uses for a list of… fictional elephants. I… uh… no, no, there are no uses for this information. Sorry, wikipedia. You fail.
Though I guess you could put the data into some kind of chart. You’d only use it occaisionally, though. So it’d be a periodic table of… no. No, I’m not finishing it. I apologize.
Mary Mallon: Whoah, Typhoid Mary was an actual person? I thought it was just a cool nickname to give spaceships or something. Apparently Mary Mallon was born with typhoid fever, and totally refused to believe she was doing anything wrong as she infected 53 people with a deadly illness through her cooking. They quarantined her twice, the second time for the rest of her life on a fucking island and to her death she held that she was innocent and didn’t have typhoid. I guess she just never put two and two together- “Oh, my, all these people I cook for keep dying. I better make them some soup so they get better…”.
The only thing I can think of that would explain why people kept hiring Mary was that she was a really, REALLY good cook. Her omelettes are to die for, you know. Boo.
In the end, Mary Mallon died in quarantine, after working as a lab technician… making poison soap or something, I don’t know. What kind of medical facility lets TYPHOID FUCKING MARY work in the lab!? Was she in Arkham Asylum or something? I guess that explains how she got out and went back to infecting people, which she was so virulently good at she could apparently do it by handing you a glass of water. Yeah, look at that hair and the chef’s hat and apron… SO a Batman villain.
Pigasus (politics): No, not Pigasus (chemistry). Not THAT Pigasus. The political one. The one Abbie Hoffman, American history’s goofiest rebel who never accomplished anything, announced as candidate for president at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Despite being a pig. Yeah, THAT Democratic convention, and THAT Abbie Hoffman, the “Steal this Book” guy who thought pirating radio stations would destroy capitalism or some shit. The pig’s full name was Pigasus the Immortal and he represented the “Yippie” party, which I’m guessing lent lots and lots of clout to their political movement, as did mocking judges in court and stealing cows from the government and all the other goofy shit young people did in the late sixties. And here I thought that my generation was PARTICULARLY stupid, but no- all generations are this stupid when they’re young. Good to know, I guess.
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Apparently, with his tenth outing Strummin’ Savalas wishes to teach us… how to be supervillains. I don’t see any other option here, folks, Telly’s preparing us for some nefarious n’er-do-welling. A cook with the power to control germs, a Greek tyrant with a thing for death robots, an immortal pig with an army of hippies, an evil millionaire pornographer who defies death, and let’s not forget Babar, LORD OF ELEPHANTS. That’s actually a pretty good League of Destroying Angels™. They just need some minions. An army of amnesiac legionnaires armed with poison mushroom lemonade cannons and giant nail-breasted robots, and a base in the middle of a whirling death-sea full of sunken viking ships, and they’re good to go. The world is doomed. WHAT HATH THOU WROUGHT, STRUMMIN’ SAVALAS!!!???
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