Sunday, August 27, 2006

Cartoons And Egg Salad

Though I was extremely tired last night I was unable to get to sleep before 1 am.
In the time that I was awake between arriving at home and finally falling asleep I didn’t manage to do much of interest.
I watched a couple of episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, as throughout the day my mind had kept flashing back to a particular scene from an episode in which the Joker had gotten his hands on a nuclear bomb and was planning to detonate it in Gotham.
In order to try to find the Joker, Batman enlisted the aid of the Joker’s girlfriend/gun moll/former therapist, Harley Quinn.
In any case, the scene in question involved the Joker walking merrily on his way, completely oblivious to the fact that Batman is behind him and has hurled a batarang in his direction. At the last second, he notices something amiss, turns, and wham! Right between the eyes.
Despite the fact that we don’t see the actual impact, as the Fox censors were violently opposed to any depictions of people getting hit in the face, as presented it’s a pretty brutal, cringe-inducing scene, but at the same time, it’s funny.
Overall it’s a great episode, with one of the highlights being a song that Harley (voiced by Arleen Sorkin, who annoyed me in every other thing she ever did, but who was great as Harley) sings in an illegal casino in order to create a diversion.
I had always assumed that the song was written for the show, maybe as a parody of an existing song, as it’s so perfectly suited to describe the…complex relationship between Harley and her beloved “Mistah J,” but apparently it’s a real song from an old movie called Meet the People.
The title of the song is “Say That We’re Sweethearts Again,” and here are the words:

I never knew That our romance had ended. Until you poisoned my food. I thought it was a lark When you kicked me in the park. But now I think it was rude! I never knew That you and I were finished Until that bottle hit my head! An' I tried to be aloof when you Pushed me off the roof - I feel our romance is dead.
It wouldn't have been so bad If you had told me. That someone had taken my place! But no, no you didn't even scold me! Ya just tried ta disfigah mah facth! (Her voice is distorted at this point as she stretches her cheeks out)
You'll never know How this heart of mine is breaking. It seems so hopeless but then Life used to be so placid! Won't you please put down that acid? And say that we're sweethearts again!!

After watching that and a couple of other episodes I switched over to watching some episodes of Superman: The Animated Series, including two that I had never actually seen before, though one of them actually had a scene that proved to be of vital important some years later in an episode of Justice League Unlimited, and was actually an adaptation of a classic Superman story done by John Byrne back in 1986.
And that was my cartoon-filled evening.
So far today has been less exciting.
The big highlight of the day was when I made egg salad.
I can no longer make egg salad without thinking about that scene in The 40-Year Old Virgin, and I always have to laugh at how well that scene correlates with my life.
The scene in question, for those who haven’t seen the movie, involves the titular virgin having a conversation with a co-worker on Monday morning.
The co-worker talks about how over the weekend he and some friends drove down to Tijuana to watch a woman have sex with a horse, going into comically graphic detail. He then asks Andy, the virgin, what he did over the weekend, and Andy talks, in equally comic detail about how he really wanted an egg salad sandwich and had been thinking about it all day on Friday – much like the way I kept thinking about that scene from Batman – so on Saturday, he tells his co-worker, he got up and went out to get what he needed to make egg salad, and then describes the process of making it, from the boiling, to the peeling and cutting of the eggs through the mixing, and after having gone through all of that work – and the boring story about it – it turned out that he didn’t have any bread.
And that was Andy’s weekend.
So, yeah.
Last night I watched an episode of a cartoon that had been on my mind all day, and today I described it to you.
And I made egg salad.
And told you about it.
*Sigh*
At least I had bread.

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