When the movie Dragon Train (3-28-2020: I meant “How to train your dragon,” which i point out 10 years later because reading this now *I* wasn’t immediately sure what movie I meant then, but I am obsessive compulsive enough to toss in this long, even more confusing digression than to simply change how i referred to the film) was first being promoted my mother asked me, for a reason I have not yet deduced, if it had been available when I was larva years old I might have been similarly infatuated with it as I was with the 1973 post-Disney edition of Robin Hood. I do not think this would be the case. EVERYBODY in that movie is a dumb animal. As I opwhined a long time ago on the subject of Pokaymon and its various contemporaries, we’re never allowed to have just the monsters taking the focus. There always need to be some tiny human kids with magical powers bossing them around. The movie I saw recently thankfully depicted the pertinent tiny human kid doing it out of necessity and possibly friendship, rather than merely because he has a sick fascination with beating up every other fingerless-glove’d adversary’s own monsters.

This movie also lacks my own arbitrary childhud fixations, the green floaty diamond-shape logo and Sireaganol. The famous Sireaganol.

At one point the bear puts on a different silly costume than usual and approaches the king and introduces himself as that. I didn’t hear “Sir Reginald,” some ordinary noble figure of no import. I heard Sireaganol, one word, some great and powerful name whose significance is never explained, but it must belong to someone important, maybe just BECAUSE it isn’t explained; I really ought to know who it is already. He’s so great that he can wander out from behind some bushes like a tramp, approach a place of royalty without being accosted by guards, announce that he is Sireaganol and sit next to the king. This is particularly notable for being the only scene without swords or bows in it that I had any interest in as a small child, just because of Sireaganol. I had no idea what he was talking about to the king nor why, but Sireaganol is not bound by necessity. Sireaganol and I have much in common, although I dislike mustaches for myself and I wear my monocle on the other side, and only when watching 3d movies.

I often take issue with neologisms, because issues are what I take. Who decided that misheard bits of speech are “mondegreens?” ONE person did, and now everybody has to call it that. Why don’t we call them Sireaganols instead? Because I may decide that it is I who heard correctly, and everyone else who is wrong.

My mondegreen quarrel is similar to my tiff with tv tropes, another baffling website that doesn’t need my help (and won’t get it), in which one infallible oaf arbitrarily decides that a supporting character who wears a gauntlet is a The Quacksmash Sammy and any time somebody makes a sandwich with boomerangs instead of breaded chicken cutlets that’s called Dancing With the Hamburglar and a story about a hunt for treasure that no one gets to keep is a Big Bird Bar Mitzvah. No! I refuse to call them that! I’m also not going to read the three hundred exception-riddled examples of these occurring that all happened to be from shows aimed at five year-olds as analyzed by people two decades outside the target demographic. No spriggety, Fairy Oddlyparents is full of lame cliches because it’s not meant to be watched by people who already have a quarter century of cartoon viewing experience. Anyway, back to talking animals in a medieval England devoid of death, disease and monarchs who actually live in France.

It’s curious that even with my own spelling of Sireaganol is so close to “Sir Reginald” I didn’t quite make the connection until somewhere around twice as old as I was then or half as old as I am now. Even after that I continued to keep it in my memory. At the time when the thing I call nemitz was “Chesterfield Snapdragon McFisticuff,” I imagined that the thing I now call elpse might have been “Sireaganol Rumpole McFisticuff.” I reneged on this because I remembered that anything related to or inspired by Disney, whether they did it deliberately or otherwise was and is evil, and also that nobody liked green chesterfield anyway and thus a grand name the likes of Sireagonal would be inappropriate even if it hadn’t been invented in a Disney movie, and I’m never going to stop using Ms DOS based operating systems. You might also detect by the repetition of McFisticuff that I intended for the characters to be related. I did. I’m not sure if they still are. Possibly. I’m certain they’re not really really Scottish, however. I know they’re a bunch of uneducated bog-dwellers, but the mere thought of the annoying exaggerated accents they would need to have if I made a cartoon version forbids that.

One thing I am certain of which I discovered today is that the governess hen in the movie is named Klucky. With a K. Although the obvious error in Sireaganol’s name above and

“hand her a bouquet” being transcribed as “under a bookcase” may give me reason to doubt the accuracy of the captioneer’s work, I cannot deny that I heard something very much like “Klucky,” which is reason for alarm whatever consonants are involved.



If anything that’s Miss Klucky to you. The discreetness with which you conceal your ears does not distract me from your obvious lack of discipline.

Regarding the floaty green diamond-shape thing introduction sequence, I linked to the one I did because I like how defiantly the symbol freezes on the screen for about thirteen seconds, just long enough for you to resign yourself to standing up and seeking out the fast forward button because your vcr didn’t come with a remote control object only to have it end abruptly once you initiate action, followed by the longest youtube comment quasversation about absolutely nothing and without any racism I’ve yet encountered.

The thing I remembered so fondly was an old even then, and I now realize incredibly cheap “Disney Classics” home video line logo. It is commonly referred to as the “black diamond logo,” but both of us can see it’s clearly blue, so let’s not argue about that. Despite my familiarity, I never owned a copy of Robin Hood on VHS. Although I must have made my parents rent it enough times to cover the cost, I now realize that if they had bought me a copy it could only have been of the later edition, which I would not have tolerated, and as someone with two younger siblings who had their own favorite movies that we DID own copies of, I reckon if I’d had such easy access my own older brother would have hated me a few years earlier than I actually turned retarded around 9 or so.

I couldn’t read, but the cassette itself always had a tiny version of the pertinent logo printed on its label, so I KNEW before it even went in the VCR. Dangerous times. The later version of the tape had a different opening which featured a blue speck leaving a stain in the shape of the ol’ Walter’s name, flying off from the presenting hand of an immobile Mickey Mouse dressed like a druid. I already owned tapes with that logo on it! Unsatisfactory. Of note is that the green, cheap logo’s appearance features several blatant backward ‘S’es, things that would taunt me in successive years, but I did not notice them then; I was too preoccupied with what an entertaining anecdote this all would make twenty years later. I may even mention it twice. In fact, this was such a great story I don’t even feel like transitioning into the me-not-liking-normal-people’s-music themed material I threatened you with last time. Golly!

But speaking of dragons,

I am not afraid of this one. In fact, I’m generally not impressed by any gold thing that I can buy for five dollars. You will serve ME. You will do MY bidding! And you will also deliver my seller feedback.



The wimp isn’t even as big as that dumb bird! It’s so ashamed that it wants to vomit. Hey bird, how would you like to come work for me? I’ll pay you $7.50.
The only thing that could be cheaper than golden dragon is…

OH NO, FLAPSAIL
I apologize in advance if FLAPSAIL does not attain the same cult status within my mind as Deadly Armor.

I still don’t hear a D in Sireaganol.

Speaking of backs, I will be on Monday, but for now I must go. Oh, ho ho die.

==================================

Good old Mxy “Maxwell Yezpitelok” Frebunkulus of the Bizarre Webcomic had a clever thing which he wrote posted on the website of the apparently now solvent crack’d. You may pretend some of the half million or so views on that were due to my pointing it out.

Speaking of dragons, because I was last time and just put that other note first because my leech sense tells me to mention people I sort of know who get exposure on popular websites although not that time Bridgeport Cat did it because she was writing under a pseudonym although that’s also a pseudonym and in any event AAAAACH I’VE BEEN PICKLED

speaking of dragons, I’m not, because this is at the end of the entry, but originally it was at top, and I did go on to say something about them dumb lizards, but I took too long getting there so I re positioned this at the end, where it is currently.
========================================

I’ve been awake too long.

Papitas crujientes.

99999999999999999999999999999999999

The time has come to determine the superior soup. Prepare yourself.

The Stop and Shop super-market features two distinct generic store brand soups with the same flavors.

Even the hypey promotional copy on the can posteriors that’s suppossed to make me super excited about eating out of a can is essentially the same, and you’d know that if I’d taken a better picture of it.

So which is better?

Select, the left soup, obviously, for while Homestyle boasts the more appetizing image of actual soup, only Select comes in a GOLD can.

It was my assumption that I had merely acquired generic soup on both ends of a needlessly overdone packaging change; select’s food photography gives the impression of a thing that’s been hanging around since the 1980s; either just from label decay or because it was more feasible to find a depiction of a containers’ actual contents, rather than an idealized color-enhanced mockup, printed on one back then. The reality only becomes clear in the context of the store from which it takes its name:

The two leading / only evident to exist brands of canned soup come in red & gold and blue & grey cans. In its natural habitat a store brand’s survival instinct leads it to disguise itself as best as is legally permissable as a major multinational company’s brand, despite few competent people likely to be fooled by this for long enough to actually make a purchase. In a situation where there is no unquestionably dominant producer of a thing, and that there is no longterm risk in producing an excess amount of, it makes perfect sense to imitate them both. If Stop & Shop sells just as much soup as before, only with sales divided between its two colors, it won’t have been a total waste of effort because they can keep that stuff on the shelves for essentially ever. For as long as it takes for Progresso or Campbell to significantly alter their own label colors and layouts, which probably won’t happen. You might have noticed that the red cans shown are not “Select” but “Chunky,” which is apparently a word that makes people think of things other than vomit. That is because Stop and Shop actually has three identical generic soup brands.

Select is paired with, sure enough, Campbell’s “Select Harvest,” and while that comes in a primarily white, rather than red, container, the somewhat sickly depictions of the regular Select cans’ contents creates a whitish impression at a great enough distance.
I do not intend to criticize stop and shop for its curious multiplicity; I can’t tell the difference between Campbell’s identical soup brands, either. I merely wish these sorts of label shenanigans weren’t necessary to get people to buy less overpriced soup. Some years ago I would never have considered purchasing Stop & Shop anything. But it had really ugly, bland labels then. The sort that make you question the standards of the overall production. The labels are better now. I just don’t like that they’re playing along with the myth that there are three distinct styles of soup being peddled here, each worth being imitated individually.

Mmmm, yes… fascinating…

Oh, I know. Also of great potential interest: I wrote most of this entry while eating about 1/3 of a can of raisins. I had become aware of the 82% sodium rate in a full can of soup, any one of those, and thought I should eat something boring as punishment. No cereal, though; too much iron. I’m worried I’ll be walking past a junkyard, because I got lost in a cartoon from the 80s, and I’ll get stuck to one of those big car magnets. So I ate a lot of raisins. And then I felt diabetic for a bit. It can be hard coming to terms with the fact that eating fruit can make you just as sick as cookies. You might not get as fat, but you’ll feel like you ought to be. So if I’ve conquered dehydrated grapes and passed the test of soup, what, then, remains to be addressed by my can agenda?

GRAPE SOUP.

Fortunately, I remembered that I had this character hate puns in time to save myself from a remotely satisfying resolution to the script alteration I felt it necessary to make.

\/\/\/\gyk/\//\/\/\\\.\\/\/\/\/\\/\/\\/\/\\/.,,./

So that Pope today is ordering a recently recommunicated bishop, Richard Williamson, to hurry up and acknowledge that the world war II natsees did indeed employ gas chambers.

Why do people doubt quote unquote The Holocaust? Nobody doubts The Alamo or the Bay of Pigs, unfortunate war events of lesser scale but with names which would presumably be more easily denied. There aren’t people in Japan who doubt there was an attack on Pearl Harbor. And this guy is British and born in 1940; he doesn’t even have a disgraced relative or mortally wounded national identity to cover for. He’s just a racist anti-semitic conspiracy frootlooper. Even if he suddenly and inexplicably changes one belief he’s held for over twenty years it won’t change the others. Williamson claims he is not anti-Semitic because he is open to the possibility of Jews who render themselves worth not hating by giving up being Jews, and besides, he attacks communists and Freemasons, too. No, no, you don’t understand. I hate lots of people. He believes there were concentration camps and that mass amounts of people were murdered in them but by his scholarly reckoning it was in the hundreds of thousands rather than millions. Oh, okay. I can understand stickin’ to your guns for moral reasons or because somebody stashed their used gum in your holster, but who does it possibly help for you to be speaking up about that topic? Unless you’re defending yourself from Jason Vorhees, if you kill one person at a camp entirely on the basis of being eligible for the camp, you’re probably an evil so and so not worth questioning historical records in favor of.

Bishop Williamson was intially excommunicated for being, along with some buddies, made bishop by an arch-bishop, Marcel Lefebvre who, in essence, disagreed with what the newer Popes were saying, just in regards to church stuff. His new club, the Society of Saint Pius X (which I initially mistook for an algebraic equation), was of the opinion that The Church just wasn’t being churchy enough. It wasn’t angry enough at non-Catholics, its new mass services weren’t arcane and redundant enough, it was no longer strictly asserting that every passage of The Bible was an absolutely historically accurate account of a thing that really happened (unlike the “Holocaust”). The Second Vatican Council members were just a gang of easy-going liberal hippies. And this was in 1970. The Holy Seedoo we know today is a decadent, prancing, umbrella-drink sipping version of that.

I will spare you the usual jokes about the current pontiff’s ruby slippers and red cowboy hats. Because it’s easier to just say that.

But the real trouble was only after eighteen or so years of disagreeing with The Pope, doing things without The Pope’s permission and not apologizing to The Pope, this Lefebvre person ordered some new Bishops in June instead of May. That’s all it was! (ehhh, as far as I can tell) Which might just prove his point about the challenge level, I suppose.

So then, despite all this, Mr. New Pope Benedict Ixvy un-ex-communicated the bastard bishops, without checking to see what sort of nutty things some may have been up to since not stopping in 1988. Things which I would not be surprised to discover included writing website urls next to toilets.

So was Cats.

I have lost my concept of weird.
I’ve just had a look for the first time in about a year and it turns out that writing two full pages about the marsupwhatever video game is something I should be incredibly ashamed by. Also that every thing I’ve written since that has had a link to it at the right. That is no good. That is not right. My feet stick out of bed all night. And when I pull them in — oh dear! My head sticks out of bed up here. Some of it is funny, thankfully, but not nearly as much as I thought, and it’s mostly the image “title” comments, which most people never see.
So how has it happened that the page I put before you today lacks those comments entirely* but is an improvement content-wise, and deals with pastel colored equidae yet is less embarrassing? The answer may shock you. And so I shall not tell.

*that was yesterday. The one I put before you today is fully equipped.

Maybe modern times and issues have made me needlessly paranoid, but I still think there’s something a bit unsettling about a large hatted, mustachioed man with an incomplete name leading any expedition labelled FOR KIDS ONLY. He surely does this a lot, too, if he went and had the stamp made. Even my standard monocle bonus cannot completely cancel the residue of such behavior. To think that an embodiment of colonialist values would sink to such lows! I must obtain an official statement on the matter.

Oh. Well, that’s perfectly acceptable. Please forgive my suspicions.

It does strike me as just a bit odd that a man so dressed made his fortune selling sun-block lotion. He has a tie on, for frog’s sake. He’s probably wearing gloves, too. If he hasn’t seen fit to employ long pants, –excuse me, trousers– then undoubtedly knee-high socks complement his jungle boots.

It is worth at this point acknowledging that I choose to keep my own skin adorned with fabric through the summer months, but I’ll not be seen sinisterly lurking at beach clubs attended primarily by swim-attired children. That’s what the cameras are for.