I briefly thought of doing today’s rhyme, Henry was a Worthy King, literally until I got to the finally verse and it seemed clear it was a couple of kids playing at kings and queens in the garden.
On a side note I technically failed today’s challenge as the first number I pulled was for a poem about what colors Witches wear on Halloween and when you’re working with grey pencils that’s kind of tricky.
Because I definitely needed something funny to clear my pallets from existentialist crime films and I had just seen Captain America: Civil War (which I’m bound to comment on soon) I decided to do Superhero Comedy for this week’s theme.
The first film on my list, The Specials tells the adventures of the sixth or seventh greatest superhero team in the world… well not actually the adventures, it’s a slow week and nothing is actually happening beyond the newest member of the team starting her first day, a dinner in honor of the team’s new toy line and all other sorts of mundane things that normally happens during all of those boring hours while waiting for something to happen.
This is a wonderfully done slice of life ensemble piece done on a shoestring written by James Gunn who would move on to superhero films with larger budgets like Supers and Guardians of the Galaxy.
My Super Ex Girlfriend addresses the question what happens if you find yourself dating the world’s greatest superhero and more
importantly what happens what does she do when you’re dumb enough to dump her.
I had really mixed feelings about this one. Sure it was funny but a lot of the message seemed mildly offensive to me with a lot of the plot involving pickup artists (sure a bar might be considered fair game but to do that #$@& on the subway?) then it briefly seemed to imply that all women were either militant or crazy (with the climactic battle being pretty much a superpowered catfight) and in the end it seemed to turn that into a message of empowerment and gender roles with the guys left holding the purses as the moment go save the world again.
Despite this the film had it’s moments having fun making fun of the genre with fairly good effects and solid performances from Uma Thurman, Luke Wilson and Eddie Izzard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGu9jJhevnE
By an incredible coincidence today’s rhyme “Can You Make a Horseshoe?” is the one right after yesterday’s in the Annotated Mother Goose and two before the day before… If I didn’t know any better I’d think I accidentally rigged the game.
I’m afraid, because I tweaked the angle of the bellows about five minutes in I kind of screwed up on the handle and how the apprentice would be holding it… it doesn’t help that I don’t know precisely what bellows for a seventeenth century forge would look like. (all the non automative ones I ever encountered were operated by a chain.)
Finally this is another example of how the phonetic drift of the language makes this challenge so interesting and has me wondering what “blow” and “shoe” sounded like originally.
For this week’s Rhapsody we have the Red Rhapsody by Yoshiki.
According to the annotation today’s rhyme, The Old Pudding-Pye Woman, is just the first verse of a much longer poem, which probably would make it make a lot more sense… apparently it goes into great detail about her ‘nauseous and personal habits” i.e. when you can “follow her by the smell” they are not talking about the pies.
It interests me on how I found myself falling back on visual shorthand. I have no idea just how common windmills were in 17th century England, it’s far more likely that the mill the poet is describing was something horse drawn, but for some reason if you want an image to say mill in a five second glance, windmills are the way to go.
One last note. I’ve been rereading A Song of Ice and Fire lately, getting ready for The Winds of Winter to come out (I know, I have time.) but because of this I imagined The Old Pudding-Pye Woman to be Hot Pie’s mom.
The slip of paper for today’s sketch, Robbin and Bobbin, fell from the magic tupperware container when I was giving it one final shake… If that’s not random chance that must not be questioned I don’t know what is.
This is an easier version of the better known nursery rhyme Robin, a Bobbin, the Big-Bellied Ben (which I always remembered as Ebin the Bebin) It was commonly believed to be a commentary of Henry VIII’s seizure of church properties. Though this version of it puts some question to that claim.
