The best of 2008 in just under 8 minutes. Watch the movie, identify the images (all titles listed at the end). Some last only a few seconds, some for a minute or so. Coming soon: Shot-by-shot commentary (or, why I chose these particular shots for my tribute to the year’s best favoritest.). And, of course, the second annual Exploding Head Awards!
Text list after jump…
Bud Uglly, circa 1998. From ’80s graphic design to the early WWW to today’s MySpace…
(For The Reeler’s Totally Unrelated Blog-a-thon.)
In the mid- to late-1990s, the heyday of Dan’s Gallery of the Grotesque and Justin’s Links From the Underground (the infamous proto-blog), one of the funniest and most distressing sites on what was then called the World Wide Web (even before the unfortunate, now-extinct phrase “trip-dub”) was Bud Uglly.
Remember when everything looked kinda like this?
It took forever to load, it was excruciatingly cumbersome in every way (the exclusive Bud-Nav System© made getting around the site not only near-impossible but meaningless, and made me laugh until I cried), jammed with a whole mess of frames, randomly flashing animated .gifs, garish backgrounds, hideous embedded audio files (MIDI), tortuous typos, spastic fonts — virtually nothing you’d want in a web site and much, much more. In other words, it anticipated the typical MySpace page by several years. In its contrived busyness and unreadability, it also captured the look of nearly every post-punk/”new wave” mag, fanzine and album cover (especially on Arista) of the 1980s — which, in retrospect, far outstrips the 1970s for sheer bud-uglliness. Indeed, Bud Uglly’s nihilistic irreverence (and/or irrelevance) virtually exemplified Postmodernist aesthetics. (Typical instructions: “WAVE your MOUSE around to activate and use this control.”)
They don’t make these colors anymore.
Best of all, it was a commercial pitch for a firm offering “the most cutting edge in webpage manegment and design,” formed by “the Manegorial team” of ex-Studio 27 artist Bud Uglly and his younger brother Berry Uglly, who “is cerently working on ‘Phil’s Carwash on the Web’ as well as a website for ‘Martha’s Stormdoor polishing service'” after “studiing at the Roosevelt grade school for the design impared…”
No caption.
Fortunately for web historians, various incarnations of Bud Uglly, v. 1.0-4.0, have been archived to remind us of that glorious time from September 1996 to October 1998, during which “the site was updated weekly and new features were constantly added until it became so bloated it finally had to be shot.” Then some more stuff happened, too.
Also included: “Scooter Ride Through Hell,” “Uranus Teenysystems 1999 Webputer” Ron’s Too Fast Homepage,” “Photobooth,” “Payne Philburns Jamaican Web-Tan,” “Ow!” and “Crazy Joe’s Internet Bungee Jump.”
David Lynch’s ad for his coffee. Starring David Lynch’s hand and a Barbie head.
(via Steven Santos)
“Pride”: Black Philadelphians can so swim.
Take this — Rush Limbaugh, Snoop “I Can’t Swim” Dogg,Tramm Hudson, Al Campanis and others who have reinforced the stereotype that African-Americans cannot swim well because they lack buoyancy. (I bet Martin Lawrence’s Big Momma could float with hardly any effort at all, though maybe that’s mostly because so much of her body mass is foam-rubber.)
Check out this coming release (March 23, 2007) called, simply, “Pride” (formerly “PDR” for Philadelphia Department of Recreation) — in the tradition of against-the-odds rag-tag underdog movies like “Lean on Me,” “Cool Runnings,” “The Bad News Bears,” “Dangerous Minds,” “The Mighty Ducks,” “Invincible” and, I don’t know, maybe “White Men Can’t Jump”? It stars Terrence Howard (“Hustle and Flow,” “Crash”), Bernie Mac (“Mr. 3000”) and Tom Arnold (“Happy Endings”) in what Lionsgate describes as a “life-affirming drama”:
Based on true events, Lionsgate’s “Pride” tells the inspiring story of Jim Ellis, a charismatic schoolteacher in the 1970s who changed lives forever when he founded an African-American swim team in one of Philadelphia’s roughest neighborhoods. […]
Recruiting troubled teens from the streets, Jim struggles to transform a motley team of novices into capable swimmers – all in time for the upcoming state championships.…
By turns comic, rousing and poignant, “Pride” is a triumphant story about team spirit and courage in the face of overwhelming odds.
Big Momma, beached.
The real-life Ellis says it’s not so much that African-Americans can’t swim [right — like people with Caribbean backgrounds have to avoid the water?], but that, in America, they don’t bother to learn how:
It was my contribution to the black consciousness movement,” Ellis says. “It was doing something they said we couldn’t do. It was a way of getting kids out of the neighborhood, exposing them to other things and greater possibilities.” […]
In 1987 former Los Angeles Dodgers General Manager Al Campanis, explaining on ABC’s “Nightline” why blacks could never become baseball field managers or team executives, argued that swimming proved that blacks didn’t have what it takes to reach the top.
“The just don’t have the buoyancy,” Campanis told an astonished Ted Koppel.
“I put that one on my bulletin board,” Ellis recalls. “For motivation.”
But Ellis believes white racist attitudes aren’t solely to blame. He says many blacks are equally guilty for buying into the stereotype, dismissing swimming as a white country club activity or avoiding the water because it’s better to look good than to swim well.
“You still hear people talking about swimming, black females talking about not wanting to get their hair wet, or folks talking about not wanting to catch colds,” Ellis says with a sigh. The reluctance from within the black community and resistance among some whites within organized swimming to embrace a black swim team didn’t deter Ellis from building his program.
Ellis cites statistics that black kids between ages 5 and 19 are more than twice as likely as white kids to die from drowning. He hopes the movie will encourage more blacks to learn how to swim.
Even Snoop Doggy Dogg-Paddle performed at a pool party in “Old School.”
A boardroom speech from banker Thomas Dickson, written by Robert Ryskin, directed by Frank Capra and delivered by Walter Huston in “American Madness” (1932). Capra and Ryskin collaborated on many films, including “Lady for a Day,” “It Happened One Night,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “Lost Horizon” and “Meet John Doe.”
If you were at Comic-Con in San Diego, you could ride the unicorn from “Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay.” You could learn about upcoming projects, most of them sequels and remakes. (They’re making “Tron 2.” Really.) You could listen to the creators of some of these things talk about what they’ve been working on and what they worked on and promoted at Comic-Con before.
Comic-Con is the new Sundance, the marketing event for people who want to be the first to know about things that other people will envy them for knowing because they knew about them first. (See my earlier ruminations on “Be the first on your block…”) It’s tempting to imagine the attendees as various mutations of the stereotype embodied by Jeff Albertson, aka Comic Book Guy, from “The Simpsons.” As MSN TV Editor K.O. Pemberton writes from this year’s event:
We told our cabbie on the way over that we would be the best smelling group he would have all day and that none of us live in our mother’s basement. His deadpan comment back to us was, “Everyone is 300lbs plus. What the hell? What do they do all day?”
The Los Angeles Times — which likes to fancy itself as the “paper of record” for the entertainment industry — has officially jumped the shark. Wednesday it inaugurated a weekly column by Jay A. Fernandez called Scriptland, which is to be dedicated to “the work and professional lives of screenwriters.” What this means, evidently, is that the L.A. Times is now in the business of providing free script coverage for the studios, because the first column features a gushy mini-review of a draft of a script by Charlie Kaufman (“Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation.”). I could barely make it past this without gagging:
I have the new Charlie Kaufman screenplay on my desk.
I’ve read it — no, lived it. I’ve been moved and astounded by it. And I’m tortured by the dilemma of what I should or should not say about it here. I feel a bit like Frodo palming the One Ring. […]
But many people, beginning with Kaufman, do not want me to have the script, do not want me to read the script, and without question do not want me to write anything about the script. Words like “super-sensitive,” “invasive” and “freaked” have been cautiously leveled at me as I’ve reached out to those involved with the project to get their thoughts on it.
In other words: “Hey, I got ahold of something I’m not supposed to have and I feel kinda bad about it, and I don’t have any good reason to write about it, but I just had to tell you! Ain’t it cool?!?!”
No. It’s not. Fernandez isn’t a journalist and he isn’t a critic; he’s a leech, on the level of those self-aggrandizing amateur web trolls who think their premature, uninformed opinions about an unfinished work are “news.” If the L.A. Times is going to play by these rules, it will be publishing its writers’ opinions about leaked manuscripts of books before they are edited or revised by the authors, and unmixed rehearsal tapes of recording sessions. In the interest of fairness, the paper should also run commentary on early versions of L.A. Times stories before they appear in print, so we can see how that sausage is made. Everything needs to be pre-digested, doesn’t it? Meanwhile, expect Times employees to spend a lot of time going through showbiz garbage cans. I’m sure readers will find all this extra groundless speculation — and spoilers — terribly useful and informative.
I hope that movie critics, and actual journalists, will protest. Loudly. This really is a new ethical low, tarring the efforts of the paper’s real reporters by sticking their work with gossip and innuendo. What is newsworthy about a work-in-progress — unless (like Emilio Estevez’s “Bobby” in Toronto) its makers have decided to screen it for the press and ticket-buying public? Fernandez hasn’t seen the movie in any form. Kaufman is set to direct it himself, but hasn’t even finished casting it yet. “Meanwhile,” Fernandez concludes his item (after telling us an image that appears on “Page 1”), “I feel terribly sick to my stomach.” Yeah, he’s not the only one. What a self-serving piece of crap. I have a great idea, L.A. Times: Why don’t you go put your Calendar entertainment coverage behind a web subscription wall again?
(Tip: Hot Blog.)
Nathan Lee was doing his job. He reviewed Kirby Dick’s documentary “Outrage” for NPR.org and accurately reported that the film criticized former Idaho senator Larry Craig and Florida Governor Charlie Crist as hypocritical politicians with anti-gay voting records.
That is not news to anyone who listens to NPR, nor are the rumors about both men’s sexuality. Craig is infamous for having been arrested for soliciting an undercover officer for gay sex in an Minneapolis airport restroom. Crist has publicly faced direct questions about his sexual orientation since 2005. Both are elected officials, public figures, who have — by their own actions — made their sexuality relevant to their job performance.
Part I (before I saw “Trash Humpers”)
Google “Netflix” and “Trash Humpers” and the first result you’ll get is this: Netflix – Watch Trash Humpers. The second result (dated October 20, 2010) is an article from Filmmaker Magazine headlined: “‘Trash Humpers’ too trashy for Netflix?” Note that the head is in the form of a question, because the article/post itself consists almost entirely of a promotional announcement from Drag City, the DVD distributor of “Trash Humpers,” claiming that Netflix was refusing to carry the video, which (according to Amazon.com) was officially released September 21, 2010.
The press release was a useful publicity stunt (what do you expect for a Harmony Korine movie called “Trash Humpers”?), but how much truth it contained I haven’t been able to determine, and I haven’t been able to find any comments from anyone at Netflix. In its widely reprinted (but evidently unquestioned) October manifesto, Drag City said:
… Netflix has deemed the content of Trash Humpers to be too inappropriate for their subscribers to make it available to them. From their perspective, they may be right: they certainly know their subscribers and their tastes, and might have a better awareness of their breaking point (we thought that might have been fuckin’ Avatar). So it’s hard to fault them. But we do love a challenge! We don’t expect Netflix to carry anything they don’t want to, for whatever reason, but it reminds us that this is the price paid when we allow one entity to control the lion’s-share of content distribution.
Drag City provided a link to “actual factual mom-and-pop DVD sales-and/or-rental stores” that were carrying “Trash Humpers,” including Amazon.com, Newbury Comics and Amoeba.
“The number of people blogging television online — it’s ridiculous. They don’t know what we’re building. And by the way, that’s true for the people who say we’re great. They don’t know. It doesn’t matter whether they love it or they hate it. It doesn’t mean anything until there’s a beginning, middle and an end. […]
I do have a certain amused contempt for the number of people who walk sideways into the thing and act like they were there all along. It’s selling more DVDs now than when it was on the air. But I’m indifferent to who thinks Omar is really cool now, or that this is the best scene or this is the best season. It was conceived of as a whole, and we did it as a whole. For people to be picking it apart now like it’s a deck of cards or like they were there the whole time or they understood it the whole time — it’s wearying. Because no one was there in the beginning, or the middle, or even at the end. Our numbers continued to decline from Season 2 on.*
— David Simon, creator of “The Wire,” “Generation Kill,” “Treme”
I’ve heard some very good film critics make this argument before, too. Of course, a movie has a beginning, a middle and an end (although, as Jean-Luc Godard reminded us, not necessarily in that order). That’s the fabled “three-act structure” all the screenplay manuals talk about. Wim Wenders and other great directors have observed that they always make at least two movies: the one they set out to make and the one they discover while they’re trying to make the first one. Same goes for watching a movie or TV series: there’s always the show you watch when its destination is unknown, and the one you reconsider after you know how it ended up.
“People should look straight at a film… That’s the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates. And film culture is not analysis, it is agitation of the mind. Movies come from the country fair and circus, not from art and academicism.”
— Werner Herzog, 1978 interview quoted in
John Sandford’s book, “The New German Cinema” (1980)
We knew it was going to be interesting. Seeing “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972) for the first time in 25 years (even though I’d seen it many times before) with Werner Herzog, Ramin Bahrani, Roger Ebert and a Conference on World Affairs Cinema Interruptus audience in Boulder, CO, last week reconfirmed that not only is Herzog a magnificent, instinctive director, but a first-class showman in the carnival tradition, a compelling speaker and storyteller, and a wonderful actor. Some of the wild tales he related to the audience in Macky Hall are, I’m told, also on the director’s commentary track of the American DVD of “Aguirre” — and some I’ve heard him tell many times over the years, but there’s nothing quite like hearing Herzog spin his spiels in the flesh — even (or maybe especially) when he’s a booming voice in the dark.
No comment necessary. (See previous.) The coincidences are too great. Many thanks to whoever created this. It will soon be everywhere, if it isn’t already.
UPDATE: From Republican conservative pundit and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan: “I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about ‘narratives.’ Every time Republicans do that, because that’s not where they live and it’s not what they’re good at, they blow it.”
Go back and skim Neal Gabler’s book “Life: The Movie.” This “plot development” is funnier than Spiro Agner, funnier than Dan Quayle. This may be even beyond Billy “Beer” Carter-level funny…
Armin Mueller-Stahl at the head of the table, head of the family
You are going to hear a lot about this, so I may as well begin with it: There’s a fight scene in David Cronenberg’s Russian mob thriller “Eastern Promises” that is sure to go down as a raw, brutal and pulse-pounding landmark in the history of fight scenes. It takes place in one room, with no props except for a couple knives. People in the audience at the Toronto screening I attended were flinching and gasping as if they were being punched in the face. Which, of course, is the idea. If a fight scene doesn’t make you feel like you’re part of it, so that it quickens your heartbeat and your breathing, then it’s a failure. And Cronenberg’s makes you realize how many movie fights are flops — and how really hard it is to kill or immobilize a human being with your arms, legs, feet and hands.
Literally and figuratively, “Eastern Promises” has balls.
And in this sense, it reminds me of both the excruciatingly protracted struggle between Paul Newman and the Russian agent in “Torn Curtain,” and the knock-down, drag-out fist-fest between Keith David and Rowdy Roddy Piper in John Carpenter’s “They Live!
Lamppost-spined Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts.
Directed in a bold, graphic style similar to that of his previous film, “A History of Violence,” “Eastern Promises” is shockingly gorgeous, for all the ugliness it portrays. The film is set in London, and the colors are dark and heavy: gray skies, slick black streets, brandy, absinthe, venous blood. A hospital midwife (Naomi Watts) finds a patient’s diary that gets her involved with Russian gangsters — in particular, a shrewd and ambitious chauffeur played by “History of Violence” star Viggo Mortensen, looking sharper and more angular and cooly abstract than ever. (Watch the way he props himself against a lamppost so that they become extensions of each other. How does he do that?)
It begins like a Cronenbergian horror movie, and becomes… a Cronenberg gangster movie — an elemental struggle between good and evil, life and death, east and west, blood and money, trust and betrayal, commerce and morality, mind and body. Remember, that’s “elemental,” not “simplistic.” There are… complications.
More when the movie opens.
NOTE: Watts’ proud, abrasive, vodka-swilling Russian uncle is played by the great Polish director, Jerzy Skolimowski (“Deep End,” “The Shout,” “Moonlighting”).
Marilyn Chambers, star of “Behind the Green Door,” “Insatiable,” “The Resurrection of Eve,” David Cronenberg’s “Rabid” (opposite Christopher Walken) and millions of Ivory Snow detergent boxes has died at age 56.
At Salon.com, Mary Elizabeth Williams writes:
As an aspiring model in San Francisco in 1972, she answered an advertisement for a role in a new film being made by strip club owners Jim and Artie Mitchell. The movie was “Behind the Green Door,” a hardcore odyssey involving the abduction and ultimate sexual transformation of a young woman.
It was the same era that “Deep Throat” (1972) and “The Devil in Miss Jones” (1973) were radically reinventing the culture of adult entertainment. Porn was no longer just for creepy guys in seedy theaters — it was something grownups could admit to watching, enjoying and, later, discussing. “Behind the Green Door,” with its taboo-shattering interracial cast, was a benchmark, but it was the revelation that Chambers had appeared on the Ivory detergent box, clutching a baby in a beatific, 99.44 percent pure tableau, that cemented her fame. That such a wholesome, smiling girl could be the assured, adept centerpiece of all manner of exotic acts was fascinating. The ultimate madonna/whore of her era, she represented a dichotomy that perplexes, intrigues and infuriates still.
This introduction to Odienator’s Fourth Annual Black History Mumf, a celebration of what we used to call African-American Popular Culture, needs no introduction. Especially to Scanners readers, who’ve been following it since he challenged Miss Ross’s fashion designs in 2008. Of those early days, Odienator (think Odie N. Ator, as in Frank N. Furter, or possibly Meatloaf Aday) now writes:
When I started this series in 2008, I made fun of the Black History Month curriculum we were fed every February in grammar school. I wanted to make my own version of that curriculum, using movies and TV and events from my life to fill in all the holes where public school was lacking. All they told us, in a nutshell, was that we were slaves, we were freed by Abraham Lincoln, and then Martin Luther King showed up. This happened every year, usually sponsored by Budweiser. Boy was I snarky about the lack of depth and detail back then! But now I’ve been humbled, because as anemic as it may have been, at least they told us the truth and didn’t try to change it.
It’s the “Number One Movie in America!” Again. Who wrote it? The “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” screenplay is credited to its star Kevin James and Nick Bakay, who also wrote and co-starred in some episodes of James’ TV series, “King of Queens.” Meanwhile, an anonymous tipster (“Nomen Nescio”) who claims to have worked on the film has sent me a link to an award-winning, undated (but pre-2004) script named “Mall Cop” by a self-described ghostwriter named Alfred Thomas Catalfo, whose IMDb credits include the shorts “The Norman Rockwell Code” (2006) and “The Stag Hunt” (2008).
So, would you believe that “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” is based on an award-winning screenplay by an uncredited writer? What’s the story? Or is there one? Surely more than two scripts have been written involving mall cops in “Die Hard” parodies. And maybe it’s a coincidence that the movie was shot in New England, where Catalfo is also based….
UPDATE (2/5/09): Catalfo now tells The Boston Herald that he got a rejection letter from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison productions saying they prefer to develop their projects “in house.”
Thierry Ehrmann: “‘In your resistance,’ I tell them, ‘you are contributing to this work. This work is encapsulating you, absorbing you.'”
It’s a place, it’s a sculpture, it’s an installation, it’s a performance piece, it’s a movie, it’s a house, it’s a home. It’s La Demeure du Chaos, the Abode of Chaos, outside the French town of Lyon. This headline in The Australian caught my eye: “Town outraged over chaos house”:
Crashed aircraft, fire-blackened walls, a swimming pool of blood and portraits of Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden adorn a sprawling “shrine to chaos” which is at the centre of a dispute in a village on the outskirts of Lyon in France. […]
Thierry Ehrmann, 44, the owner and creator, was fined E200,000 ($A336,000) for failing to seek planning permission to turn his 17th-century coaching inn and its grounds in the village of Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d’Or into a theatre of war. The appeal judges annulled a lower court order to have the site, developed by 45 European artists, restored to its original state.
Ehrmann’s celebration of the apocalypse, inspired by his experiences in the Middle East and by the events of September 11, 2001, has enraged residents who are offended by its charred walls, twisted metal, burnt-out cars and battlefield debris. A mock oil platform sits on one roof amid camouflage netting. The garden includes a sculpture recreating the remains of the World Trade Centre. […]
Hi folks:
Our software just deleted a handful of recent comments when I approved them. I’m trying to find out if there’s a way to retrieve them (they’re not in the spam filter), but if you’ve made a comment in the last 24 hours or so that still isn’t showing up, please re-submit. Thanks!
“What an asshole.”
I don’t read Slate much anymore since David Edelstein, a real film critic, departed for New York Magazine, and the once-sentient Christopher Hitchens ceased being capable of writing about anything but his own old opinions, circa 2002 and 2003. (Unlike Billy Pilgrim, Hitchens has become stuck in time — and inside his own head, and nothing beyond what he has previously stated or believed can be processed, mainly because he doesn’t seem to think it possible that anything else, like reality, could possibly matter.) A reader reminds me again of why I’m less inclined to visit Slate these days, sending me (with a warning) an inexcusably stupid essay by Stephen Metcalf, of the site’s aptly named “dilettante” column, about a classic John Ford Western, called The Worst Best Movie: Why on earth did ‘The Searchers’ get canonized?”
Clive James, meet Stephen Metcalf.
A better question might be: “Why on earth did Stephen Metcalf think he was capable of writing anything worth reading about ‘The Searchers’?” Here’s how Metcalf begins:
“The Searchers,” John Ford’s epic 1956 Western, is a film geek’s paradise: It is preposterous in its plotting, spasmodic in its pacing, unfunny in its hijinks, bipolar in its politics, alternately sodden and convulsive in its acting, not to mention boring. Impossible to enjoy, and yet not as obviously medicinal as, say, “The Spirit of the Beehive,” “The Searchers” segregates the initiated from the uninitiated; and so it is widely considered, by the initiated, at least, to be among the four or five best movies of all time. At his maiden screening, a young Cahiers du Cinema critic named Jean-Luc Godard wept, later adding, “How can I hate John Wayne … and yet love him tenderly … in the last reel of ‘The Searchers’?” Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader routinely name “The Searchers” as one of their favorite films…Yes indeed, those qualities Metcalf describes sure do make the movie sound like a “film geek’s paradise,” don’t they? I mean, where is the film geek who does not just crrraaave the spasmodic, the unfunny, the sodden and the boring? Surely, those attributes constitute the very essence of what we — and Godard and Scorsese and Schrader and countless other crix ‘n’ geeks — value in “The Searchers.”
By this point in Metcalf’s embarrassingly self-revealing scalping (three giveaway words that neutralize the stance of anyone pretending to offer critical insight: “impossible to enjoy”), I found myself thinking not so much of John Wayne or John Ford or Jean-Luc Godard, but of Joey Nichols, the boorish friend of Alvy Singer’s father in “Annie Hall,” who thought he was so clever to stick nickels on his forehead and his cufflinks as a gimmick to help people remember his name. And my response to Metcalf suddenly formed itself in the words of young Alvy: “What an asshole.”
And what a dilettante. Is it worth responding to an ad hominem attack on a movie by someone who has no idea what he’s looking at? Probably not. But earlier today I got a (quite good) Opening Shots submission from someone who began by writing: “Originally I wanted to propose an older film to impress the crowd that demands such esotericness from cinephiles…”
Since when are “old movies” — especially all those Hollywood pictures that millions went to see each week — considered “esoteric”? What is the difference between an “old movie” and a “new movie” when they both unspool in the immediate present, at 24 frames per second, the way they always have and always will? A movie is always happening right now as you watch it (a film prof of mine used to call this the “eternal present tense”). There’s nothing “esoteric” (or, as Metcalf would have it, “medicinal”) about it — unless, of course, you’re simply determined to make it so with a blinkered hankering for the new, or a knee-jerk anti-intellectualism (very trendy now) that insists anything valued by smart or talented or passionate people must be beneath one’s dignity to appreciate or enjoy.
More on “The Searchers” (and Metcalf’s mindless potshots) later. But as for Stephen Metcalf’s critical aptitude, here’s another apt phrase: Damn him and the horse (or ass) he rode in on. May he (continue to) wander forever between the winds…
(Thanks to Casey Tourangeau… I think.)
UPDATE (07/07/06): This post is continued here.
