Fun side note: The only thing Roseleip hated more than telling the truth about his margarine consumption was women’s rights, which he boasted of voting against. He lost his 1974 re-election bid to Kathryn Morrison, Wisconsin’s first female state senator.
The Pocket Book Of Boners: One would think Wikipedia would choose better phrasing than “…contains 22 illustrations of boners, drawn by Dr. Seuss,” but that’s exactly what this book is. “Boners,” of course, in the old-fashioned sense of blunders, screw-ups, mishaps, that sort of thing, so stop all that laughing in the back of the class. There’s nothing funny about these boners! Which is basically true, given they’re mostly “humorous schoolboy mistakes” along the lines of “A man who marries twice commits bigotry.” Riotous stuff in 1931. Even Seuss himself wasn’t all that eager to show off his boner; he published the book under the pseudonym Alexander Abingdon, which is an anagram of “A banal dong indexer.” You can’t tell us that’s a coincidence.
Girl Late To School With Toast In Her Mouth: Stand-up comics have long noted the trope of TV families preparing an elaborate breakfast, then taking one bite before each member runs out the door. As is so often the case, the Japanese pop culture equivalent is much weirder and most specific. Girl Late to School…, also known as Shokupan Dash or Toast Musume, is a common trope in teen-girl-oriented shōjo manga, in which a girl is late for school, rushes out the door with a piece of toast still in her mouth, and then collides with a boy, who she eventually falls in love with.
Wikipedia being Wikipedia, we get an extended history of the trope, going back to its first known appearance in 1962 manga Sazae-san, as well as a “Toast Girl” mobile game, and a college event called the Shokupan Dash, which we couldn’t make heads or tails of.
The Fall Of Communism As Seen In Gay Pornography: Yes, we’re still on our gay porn kick. Except this is a film about gay porn, not of gay porn. William E. Jones’ 1998 short documentary didn’t have the budget to travel to Eastern Europe to chronicle life after the fall of the Iron Curtain. So Jones did what anyone else would have done, and watched a lot of gay porn. His film documents a rise in cheaply made, exploitative porn in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, as unemployment was widespread and film producers found young Eastern European men easy to exploit for the titillation of Western audiences. The documentary argues that, for those audiences, the films doubled as both actual porn and poverty porn.
Fatso The Fat-Arsed Wombat: Even following boners and gay porn, the name of this unofficial 2000 Olympics mascot seems like the crudest thing on this month’s docket. Fatso was created by Sydney cartoonist Paul Newell for sports comedy TV show The Dream. Intending to spoof actual Sydney Olympics mascots Olly, Millie, and Syd, Fatso ended up becoming so popular that he appeared with Aussie gold medalists and was commemorated by a postage stamp. As Fatso was in part intended to critique the commercialization of the official mascots, only two official Fatso plush toys were made; one for the TV show, one to be passed around Olympic village. One was auctioned for charity after the Games, and fetched over $80,000 AUS. A statue of the wombat also stands outside Sydney Olympic Stadium.
Further down the Wormhole: Fatso has enough cred that Wikipedia links him to the site’s list of Olympic Mascots, which includes three dogs, six bears, several weird robots, some sort of Pokemon–Adventure Time crossover, and one jaguar. The 1968 Mexico City Olympics’ mascot is based on the third-largest big cat species in the world, who roam an area stretching from northern Mexico to Brazil. Far from mating for life, jaguar relationships generally last less than a week, and are based on a courtship that mostly involves growling. Human courtship, of course, is more sophisticated, including such complex behaviors as swiping right, and texting “hey” and then waiting 10 minutes and texting “hey”. One aspect of modern courtship that’s become unnecessarily controversial is the appropriateness of going Dutch, whether in the sense of splitting the bill or wearing wooden shoes. Save that for the third date.
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