A musing meandering of my mind...

"Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,

—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!"

(Image from Wikipedia)

Last night, for the first time, I saw Lady and the Tramp.

In fact, growing up in my small Ozark town with no cinema and only one TV channel but often no television set anyway except for when somebody gave us a black-and-white hand-me-down, I missed nearly all of the films for children.

Now, with children of my own and all the technological wonders wrought by the communications revolution, I get to see everything that I missed, and often find it ... appropriately enough ... wonderful.

I have to admit, however, that Lady and the Tramp disappointed me. Perhaps, based the previews that I'd seen on TV as a child, I was expecting too much from the movie:

"What a dog!"

Words uttered by a hip-swaying Peg, that Schweinhund whose every hypnotic tail-swish kept my eyes ... well, pegged.

I now wonder what my little-kid brain was thinking, and the attraction may have been merely the fever-evoking voice of the great Peggy Lee, but whatever subterranean urges were at work in and on me then, I only knew consciously that I just had to see that film.

Last evening, I did, to my disappointment, but my kids and I enjoyed laughing at the dogs' names, especially "Pidge" and "Peg."

"Why's he calling her a pig?" I loudly inquired when the Tramp called the Lady "Pidge."

My kids giggled.

Later, when Peg was doing her hoosegow sing-and-swing-thing, the other impounded dogs called her "Peg," which inspired En-Uk to say "Another pig!"

Again, we all laughed.

Not the reaction that Disney expected at those moments, I'll wager ... but he might not have minded.

Speaking of laughter and the comic, I recently discovered an online comic artist who teaches English somewhere here in Korea. His goes by the name "The William G," calls his blog The William G Blog, and has several comics websites of his "stuff" that he's linked to. Currently, he's posting a new, after-the-apocalypse comic series titled Bang Barstal that's full of the dark, early Heavy Metal brand of humor and features a trailer-trash Byronic hero who looks like Quentin Tarantino, acknowledges responsibility for the end of the world, and has a special baseball bat that'll set things right.

The most-recent episode has Bang rescuing a goddess and "Racing Towards Home" in pursuit of 'Christian' sanctuary in a cemetary as a gigantic evil alien god comes thundering after him. The Christology is rather low, and Bang says that he's not a believer, but Jesus shows up at Bang's bat-tap on the wood of one 'untrue' cross and kicks alien-god butt. Or as Bang explains:

"Said I don't believe in Jesus no more. And that's true.... That's just because I KNOW he's there."

[Strikes bat against cross: Whung!]

"Just gotta get his attention sometimes. Was taught in Sunday School that he didn't like it when false gods showed up."

[Jesus appears in power as false god dissolves while crying out: "Grahhhhhhhh!"]

"Hoped some of that Old Testament wrath would take care of my problems for me, and did it ever, boy.

Unfortunately for Bang, the beautiful and good alien goddess whom he was befriending also dissolves, leaving only a tiny Schweinhund behind. That's part of the dark humor, I guess.

Speaking of dark humor -- and I'll stop here -- the best one liner that I've recently heard comes from Noam Scheiber, who writes for The New Republic and says of the potentially disgraced, possibly priggish pig-dog Ted Haggard:

Haggard, of course, is the Colorado mega-church pastor who resigned as president of the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals today because he didn't have a three-year relationship with a male prostitute.

Now, that's a long whiplash of a sentence whose ending makes the sound barrier crack.