I Recently Discovered Laundry Stripping And Y’all, No Matter How Much Of A Crock Of Shit You Think

Lemony Snicket's Calendar of Unfortunate Events

Jan 12: Birthday of Jacques Snicket, as well as that of his sister.

Feb 26: Jacques Snicket “taken” and initiated into V.F.D.

Mar 18: Jacques Snicket, given his first assignment, disguises himself accordingly.

Mar 31: Alleged date the alleged Baudelaire mansion allegedly burned down.

Apr 8: Isadora Quagmire’s whereabouts unknown.

Apr 17: Jacques Snicket disguise discovered. Alternate disguise employed.

May 13: Nine cows arrested by the authorities under the suspicion of involvement with V.F.D. Jacques Snicket, disguised as the tenth cow, escapes on a stolen tractor.

Jun 26: Jacques Snicket arrives in Paltryville to continue Baudelaire investigation.

Jul 6: Jacques Snicket reports his findings to The Daily Punctilio.

Jul 7: The Daily Punctilio does not publish Jacques Snicket’s report.

Aug 9: V.F.D. declares Jacques Snicket “either missing or on vacation.”

Sep 23: Summer is dead and Jacques Snicket does not return. V.F.D. changes his status to “missing.”

Oct 10: The remaining Snicket siblings open their investigation into Jacques Snicket’s disappearance.

Nov 7: Jacques Snicket reported murdered.

Dec 2: Jacques Snicket reported ill.

Jan 4: Director and screenwriter Gustav Sebald reported missing.

Jan 10: Gustav Sebald found murdered.

Jan 27: V.F.D. declares remaining Snicket siblings “either missing or on vacation.” Very few vacations are scheduled in January.

I was getting pretty fed up with links and generators with very general and overused weapons and superpowers and what have you for characters so:

Here is a page for premodern weapons, broken down into a ton of subcategories, with the weapon’s region of origin. 

Here is a page of medieval weapons.

Here is a page of just about every conceived superpower.

Here is a page for legendary creatures and their regions of origin.

Here are some gemstones.

Here is a bunch of Greek legends, including monsters, gods, nymphs, heroes, and so on. 

Here is a website with a ton of (legally attained, don’t worry) information about the black market.

Here is a website with information about forensic science and cases of death. Discretion advised. 

Here is every religion in the world. 

Here is every language in the world.

Here are methods of torture. Discretion advised.

Here are descriptions of the various methods used for the death penalty. Discretion advised.

Here are poisonous plants.

Here are plants in general.

Feel free to add more to this!

Can’t Take My Eyes Off You by Frankie Valli and The 4 Seasons except from the jukebox of a 50s themed diner, right as you feel like time has stopped because you’ve just caught sight of the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen and already feel like you’re falling in love. Everything but you and her seem to fade away.

A photographer’s portrait in a mirror, a hundred years ago, Japan, ca. 1920. Text and image via Old Japanese Photos on Facebook

Remember this girl? This is her now, feel old yet?

Pasta is great. It’s like hey, let me take delicious things like butter,or meat, or tomatoes or basil and then let me just fuckin mix whatever the fuck i want in and combine it with some random ass noodles.  That’s basically pasta.  BUT, there’s a big difference between “basically pasta” and “holy shit food of the gods” pasta, and that is that the latter has some rules that must be followed.  10 PASTA COMMANDMENTS COMIN UP:

Always boil pasta in boiling SALTED water. Ever had a dish where you forgot to salt it before cooking it, and no matter how much seasoning you did post saute/sear, it still sort of tasted bland on the inside? Same goes for pasta. Your sauce could be fuckin on point, but if you don’t salt dat pasta water, ya fugged, bruh. 

Always have your sauce ready BEFORE the pasta. Pestos, emulsified butter sauces, bolognese sauces, they should be in their respective sauce pans, heated and ready to go (unless we’re takin pesto or carbonarashit, as those go bad with heat). The worst thing you could do is fuck up and overcook your delicious pasta bc you were too busy making or finishing up your sauce. 

Always TASTE your pasta. I don’t care if the package says it’s ready in 1 minute or an hour, taste your pasta from the boiling water at least 2 minutes in, and every 2 minutes after that. Al dente’s usually the way to go, but you’ll never know when to take it out if you’re not constantly tasting. 

DO NOT strain your pasta, wasting your pasta water and allowing your pasta to cool. Use tongs to take pasta straight up form the boiling water (don’t dry it, nerds) and throw it in your sauce. A little pasta water gets in? no probs, and I’ll tell you why. 

If your sauce is reducing too much, or it’s too tight, add pasta water. It’s salted and hot and ready to go, it won’t dilute the flavor at all, you’re golden duude. golden. 

Finish your pasta in the sauce, allow it to become homogenous, let the sauce stick to the pasta, BECOME ONE WITH THE PASTA BRUH. 

Add cheese last, because cheese get’s weird and fucked up in hot pans, so it’s best to throw that on right before you’re ready to eat that shit up. 

4 oz is a normal serving size for pasta. If you don’t have a scale, that’s basically like the first pic above. If you hold the pasta like such, and the width of the bunch is a little smaller than an american quarter, then ur good 2 go bruh. 

Dry pastas are not better/worse than fresh pasta. They’re legit just made with different flours using different procedures. One isn’t ‘fancier’ than the other u pretentious buttrockets. 

PASTA IS NOT SCARY, IT’S DELICIOUS. These rules look tough, but honestly it’s not that bad bruh. I believe in u. 

and now, onto the recipe I used for my pasta. It’s a restaurant favorite, we always make it on the line because it’s simple, delicious and super filling. 

~

Caciopepe Pasta serves: 1 (lol like id share this with ppl lolol) -

Ingredients-

salt water for boiling (just salt some water, don’t fuckin travel to the beach in hopes of created the most bomb pasta ever)

1 bunch of pasta

2 bay leaves

1 sprig thyme

cold butter (approximately 2/3 cups cut into small pads

parmesan cheese to taste

a shit ton of black pepper to taste

-

Procedure-

Throw some pasta into some boiling water and do that thing where you constantly taste test the pasta to see if it’s ready. In the meantime, make ur sauce u lazy bumbum.

Add a little boiling pasta water to a saute pan over low heat, and whisk/mix in the butter quickly till it’s creamy and emulsified. If it’s too thick, just whisk in a teeny bit of pasta water. Add 2 bay leaves and a sprig of thyme for aroma, remove when pasta’s ready. 

Once the pasta’s ready to rock and roll, use tongs to scoop it up and place it in the sauce. Flip and mix using tongs. Add cheese and crack a lot of pepper. Add salt if it needs seasoning, add more pasta water if the sauce tightens.

and bam, ya ready to roll. 

~ I promise u if you use these pasta techniques, people will think ur literally a GOD. ur welcs. 

Chapter 6: Lullaby in Frogland

Let’s look back. Way back. Back before the dawn of animation, before the dawn of film, well before Ruby or Spears or Disney or Iwerks or either Fleischer Brother. Back to 1835, in a town named Florida in a state named Missouri when a boy named Samuel was born.

Like Ub Iwerks, Sam was raised in Missouri. And like Max Fleischer, Sam’s family took a financial hit when his father’s work stopped (this time due to a premature death rather than the decline of tailory), giving Sam a practical approach to work. He left school at age eleven to become a printer’s apprentice, then moved to his older brother’s newspaper as a typesetter and occasional columnist, writing humorous articles and drawing cartoons. But unlike Beatrix Potter or the animators we’ve covered, visual art wasn’t in the cards for Sam.

He moved to the East Coast to work for other papers, bouncing between cities before returning to the midwest to embark on a career he’d dreamed of since he was old enough to dream: piloting a steamboat. He thrived on the water, and kept writing about his work along the river, but everything stopped when the Civil War closed off the Mississippi. So Sam headed west to work for the same brother who once ran the newspaper, now a politician in Nevada (I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that this brother was for some reason named Orion). Sam tried mining, and it didn’t take, but he’d gotten pretty good at writing and set off for San Francisco to get back into his jocular brand of journalism. 

It was here that he had his first success, a short story published in his paper called Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog. But, like a certain frog we’ve covered in this series, Sam wasn’t huge on permanent names. Within a month, the story was reprinted as The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Jim Smiley’s name was changed to Jim Greeley. Until the book version came out, when it was changed back to Jim Smiley. And this whole time, within the story, it’s a mystery whether Jim’s real name is actually Leonidas (it turns out that it isn’t, but it might be). None of this should come as a surprise for Samuel Clemens, who wrote under the names of Josh, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, and most famously, Mark Twain.

“I knew you were special.”

Over the Garden Wall is, among other things, a story about the importance of solid communication. After five episodes spent building up our heroes as a group of friends, all it takes is one episode of terrible communication to throw it all away. The specific issues vary, despite leading to a similar result of not verbalizing their thoughts very well: Greg’s youth stops him from articulating his rapidly changing ideas, Wirt’s anxiety leaves him too timid to speak up or too rambling to be clear, Beatrice’s true intentions make her obfuscate the truth, and Jason Funderburker straight-up can’t talk. Or so we think.

This time he’s named for American statesmen George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, which fits the continuing vintage Americana vibe of the series—while I figure it’s a coincidence, it should be noted that Mark Twain’s Jumping Frog was named after American statesman Daniel Webster. Surrounded by other frogs that walk around and wear fancy garb, our frog is more anthropomorphic than ever, standing on his hind legs and dancing along with Greg. But it’s still a shock to hear him open his mouth and sing, a shock that soon cedes to the realization that the frog playing the piano at the beginning of the series is singing the Jack Jones song in the montage that follows.

Lullaby in Frogland is Jason Funderburker’s episode through and through, so much so that it’s the first time we hear of his namesake, Jason Funderberker. This is an episode where Wirt rejects Greg’s assertion that their frog is “our frog,” a plot point that’s paid off in their last conversation in the series. This is an episode where Greg wonders aloud if he can be a hero, sees the frog set off on a diverging path immediately afterwards, and accepts it, because he’s willing to sacrifice his happiness for the good of others. And it’s an episode where the frog returns after a harrowing betrayal, showing that even when all seems lost, there’s still room for hope. Over the Garden Wall (the song) might not sound like a traditional lullaby, but it soothes us into a cold night as the sun sets on the first half of Over the Garden Wall (the show).

Adelaide’s true nature is foreshadowed by Beatrice’s sudden hesitance to bring the brothers to the pasture after several episodes of nagging, but the twist is made tragic by Wirt finally letting his guard down enough to be happy. He sings a completed Adelaide Parade with Greg and joins the dance before collapsing into the most earnest laughter I’ve ever heard in a cartoon. He’s a good enough friend to notice when Beatrice is “uncharacteristically wistful,” and takes a risk by playing the bassoon instead of just giving up. He’s still got growing to do—it’s one thing to blame Greg for getting them in trouble by throwing away the ferry fare and forcing them to sneak aboard, but another thing to literally shout “Take him, not me!” when confronted by the frog fuzz—so it’s clear that his journey isn’t over yet, but he doesn’t even get a full episode of peace before everything blows up.

The whole steamboat sequence flows between simple delights, like saluting the captain mid-chase, the revelation that the frogs love music more than they hate trespassers, and the repeated gags of three gentlemen frogs snatching up flying flies and a frog mother dropping her tadpoles. Everything just feels calm, even when antics are afoot. Wirt gets to save the day with his bassooning, Greg gets to feel rewarded in his knowledge that his frog is special, Jason gets to sing a song after being silent throughout the series, and Beatrice seems, for now, to come to a sort of peace about things after several clear attempts to sidetrack the boys. This is the only episode to feature two major stories instead of one, but the steamer segment is rich enough to feel like a full episode. If only we could’ve stopped here.

All roads lead to Twain when it comes to depictions of steamboats as a go-to American icon, which is why he preceded this discussion of Lullaby in Frogland: I’m not claiming Mickey Mouse wouldn’t have been successful if his first cartoon was about something else, but I’m certainly claiming that we wouldn’t have gotten Steamboat Willie as it was if Ub Iwerks hadn’t grown up in a Missouri whose lore was shaped by Twain’s tales of the river. But while the author’s at the root of the episode’s many influences, I think the most fascinating branch that we borrow from is The Princess and the Frog. 

2009 was a great year for animation, seeing the release of Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Secret of Kells, the surprisingly great Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and the first ten minutes of Up (also the rest of Up, if I’m feeling generous). The first two on that list are my favorite of the year, twin stop-motion masterpieces that I’m always in the mood to watch, but The Princess and the Frog is a brilliant last gasp from Disney’s 2D animation studio. It isn’t the final traditionally animated film they made (that would be 2011′s Winnie the Pooh), nor the final fully sincere princess movie they made (that would be 2010′s Tangled), but it marks the beginning of the end for both trends: for better and worse, the modern Disney animation feels the need to loudly subvert old tropes and wouldn’t be caught dead in two dimensions.

Lullaby in Frogland’s connection to The Princess and the Frog is certainly visible on the surface level: both feature a long sequence starring frogs on a steamboat where a lead character must pretend to be another animal and play a woodwind instrument to get out of a jam, and both involve our heroes seeking help from a wise woman far from civilization (even if only one of these women is actually helpful). But it’s the somber nostalgia factor that binds these stories closer than anything, the knowledge that this is the end of the road for this type of tale. The ferry’s gotta land somewhere, and the cold is setting in as the frogs begin hibernating for the winter, but there’s still more story to tell.

The second story of Lullaby in Frogland is scored throughout by a haunting string and piano rendition of Adelaide Parade, and Adelaide herself is immediately captivating. John Cleese returns for the second episode in a row, but as both of these episodes aired the same night, it feels like a consistent through-line: in the first half, he’s an eccentric who might be a deranged maniac but is actually harmless, and now he’s a witch who might be harmless but is actually a deranged maniac.

Adelaide gets a compelling amount of detail for someone who’s barely in the show. We don’t get any explanation about her fatal weakness to…fresh air? Coldness in general? Either way, like the Wicked Witch of the West’s lethal reaction to water, it’s absurd that someone like her has managed to live this long. She never says what she needs a child servant for, why she has scissors that seem custom-made for this specific curse, or what her spider-like deal with yarn and wool is (she has a black widow hourglass on her back, but also reminds me of the Greek Fates with her emphasis on thread). We never find out how she’s connected to the Beast, whose theme bleeds into her music as she proclaims, without much prompting, that she follows his commands; her goal of using children as zombie slaves seems counter to his goal of turning them into trees to fuel his soul lantern. But this blend of unexplained characteristics and seemingly inconsistent motives only makes her more enthralling to me, because she feels like an actual major villain of another story who we only see a glimpse of. 

What makes Adelaide even more compelling on rewatch is that her scissors, despite their gruesome method for curing the curse, actually end up working. Which means she really did mean to help Beatrice out as part of the deal. At no point does Adelaide lie, and given Beatrice knows she’s bad news as she lures the brothers in, it becomes clear that for all her villainy, Adelaide is an honest witch. I’m always down for baddies that tell the truth, but it’s of particular interest when we compare her to the Beast, whose whole deal is lying. 

The only liar in this episode is Beatrice, even if she wanted to set things straight without hurting anyone; she values her friendship with the boys so much now that she’d rather make herself a servant to Adelaide than just tell them she’s dangerous and reveal that she lied. By the time she’s willing to tell the truth, it’s too late, and not even saving Greg and Wirt by killing Adelaide is enough for Wirt to forgive her. Considering he knows in The Unknown that the scissors he uses to escape the yarn can save her family, he was also listening in on the end of the conversation before entering the house, which means he must have heard that she was willing to sacrifice herself, but that doesn’t matter either. Beatrice gave the boys hope, and no matter how badly she tried to stop it, the encounter with Adelaide transforms Wirt. Where he was once nervous and unsure, and was then briefly optimistic, he’s now sullen and untrusting.

But again, in comes Jason Funderburker, croaking and hopping on all fours once more to bring some light to the darkening series. He doesn’t do much for Wirt, but allows Greg to quickly get over whatever trauma he had about getting webbed up in yarn; he’s remarkably quiet about it, but it’s important to remember that he was betrayed, too. Whether he doesn’t understand exactly what happened or is just quicker to forgive, Greg is fine with Beatrice, allowing us to focus harder on Wirt’s reaction from now on.

It’s all rain and winter for Wirt until the end of his adventure. But the show’s not content to leave him even slightly forlorn: when it gets too dark, he has a frog to swallow a lantern to light the way, and when it gets too cold, he has a brother to cover him in leaves, and when he falls, he has Beatrice to help pull him back up. Even the Woodsman tries to save him in his own way (talk about folks who are bad at communication). Bad things happen, and people make mistakes, but the bigger mistake is allowing that to close you off to others, or to never forgive friends that are genuinely sorry. Our heroes have taken the ferry to the other side, and now the story can shift to one about the folly of abandoning all hope.

Where have we come, and where shall we end?

On top of Jason Funderberker, who’s set up as a major rival to make his eventual reveal one of the show’s best jokes, Wirt gives Beatrice a general summary of Into the Unknown three episodes before we see it play out.

This got me dying

The Jewish Monster Hunter's Toolkit

Have you ever seen The Fearless Vampire Killers, in which an unfortunate barmaid learns what happens when you use a cross against a stereotypically Jewish vampire?  Of course you have.  Or if you’ve haven’t, perhaps you’ve read ‘Salem’s Lot, where the cross fails to work when the human holding it loses their faith.

Don’t let this happen to you!

Whether it’s about your own religion or the undead’s, vampire-hunting heroines and heroes may wish to come prepared with holy tools besides those of Christianity.  Fortunately for our purposes, my father is a Rabbi who has taught classes on folklore, golems, and demons (and who owns a large poster of a dybbuk which scared the living daylights out of me as a child.)  And so I turned to him for advice as to what should be in the toolkit of Jewish monster hunters or hunters of Jewish monsters.

“There are written amulets,” he says, “sometimes involving God’s name in various spellings and permutations along with kabbalistic passages (I remember seeing one, to protect against Lilith, over the head of a baby boy in a stroller in Jerusalem).”  As far as amulets go, I personally would recommend the hamsa, traditionally used to protect against witchcraft and the evil eye.  It’s much more likely to help you than the star of david, which has no such symbolism.

If you can get your hands on them, my father also suggests looking into books as talismans, specifically the Sefer Raziel, which is said to protect against fire.  You can also go the route of getting a secular coin or amulet blessed by a Rabbi, which may then take on holy powers.

Golems are the most famous “Jewish monster” but don’t entirely fit the bill as one; they are created to protect Jewish communities, though there are stories of them going insane or following orders far too literally and making a mess of things.  The traditional way to deactivate one is to erase the first letter of the word on its forhead, changing the word from emet (truth) to met (death.)  There is also a story of a Rabbi who destroyed one by speaking the words Hadar l'afreikh - return to your dust.  Good luck pulling any of this off if you’re not incredibly holy and blessed by God, though.

“I’ve seen a hasidic story about a werewolf,” adds my father, “but as I recall that took some serious praying on the part of the rebbe to kill it.”

There is also some amount of folk belief attributed to the mezuzah, a holy fixture upon the doorframes of observant Jews (my family included.)  In addition to its religious significance, Meir of Rothenburg wrote “If Jews knew how serviceable the mezuzah is, they would not lightly disregard it. They may be assured that no demon can have power over a house upon which the mezuzah is properly affixed.”  This is one I would not advise non-Jews using, since it posesses genuine religious relevence and would be disrespectful to misuse, but if you’re Jewish and your home already has one, such things are good to keep in mind.

My point in all of this isn’t to reduce my religion to superstitions, but to demonstrate the wide range of tools heroines (and writers, for that matter!) have to represent the forces of light.  If any of my readers know of monster-hunting tips from their own culture, please share- we can never be too educated!

Things I need more of in my life: Midwestern gothic/horror stories.

Barns with no doors that almost seem to breathe, their walls bending inward and outward every few seconds.

That one diner at the edge of town where the people you see through the windows on the outside are not the same as the ones inside.

That late night train that travels slowly across the tracks, steam leaking out of the closed doors of the cars. If you listen closely you can hear skittering inside them.

In the park there is a circle of dead grass right behind the swings and if you get close enough you can hear it whispering.

Fields of corn that rustle in the wind and anyone foolish enough to wander into them are never heard from again. Sometimes the farmers will find their shoes during the harvest.

Back roads that don’t make geographical sense. Sometimes you just get stuck in a curve for an hour only to find yourself a mile away from the nearest town afterwards.

Passing the same farm house five times in a row.

Never listen to the crows. Their secrets will alter you in terrible ways.

The scarecrows are always wearing new clothes whenever you see them, even when you take your eyes off them for only a moment.

Don’t ever mention the man who waves to you on your way to work every morning. Don’t mention that he’s been dead for ten years.

Never buy flowers from the flower shop on Main Street. You know the one: the doors are always open, even in winter, and you can smell the sweet scent of roses mixed with something rotting.