A Little Song, A Little Dance, A Little Wedgie in Your Pants

Happy April Fool's Day to you all. Jesters are the logos and mascots for the day.

This blog has popped a couple or two 4/1 stunts in the past. It's amazing how many April Fool's stunts have been pulled on the Internet as a whole, including:

• April Fool's Day RFC
• Fossil Fool's Day (not such an April Fool thing)
• Pigasus Award
• Edible Book Festival
• Google's Hoaxes

This day has at least one website devoted to it, though I am partial to the Museum of Hoaxes and especially to one of the best prank-busters of all time, Snopes.com. Well worth a look for your enlightenment.

I'd still like to know what April Fool's Day is like at Holiday Island High, whether a prankster or some ironic twist on the same.Only one Daria fanfic I can find is actually attuned to April Fool's Day, that being Richard Lobinske's "I Meant to Do That." I did find a nice Liliane Grenier artwork of Trent as a court jester on Outpost Daria, but no other jesters.

It's been three years to this day since all the appliances on Earth took over and enslaved humanity. You'd think someone would notice.

Would Mack Mackenzie make a good businessman? What kind of business would he be in? Add your comments to the thread!

The supervillain named Valwire has been captured... in Jim North's artwork! Excellent!

The above item appears here. An old collectible. Darn.

FF.net

• Apocalyptic Daria: Scarlett's Tale, by Doggieboy (COMPLETE!): [Previously appeared on PPMB.]
• Dying on the Inside, by Minx (COMPLETE!): [Previously appeared on PPMB.]
• Mata Dari, by Dennis (COMPLETE!): [Previously appeared on PPMB.] (OD)
  
• A Night of Bells (But No Whistles), by Doggieboy (COMPLETE!): [Previously appeared on PPMB.]
• Shieldmaiden, by RLobinske (COMPLETE!): [Previously appeared on PPMB.]
• Storytime, by Doggieboy (COMPLETE!): [Previously appeared on PPMB.]

PPMB

• NEW! Falling into College: The Clip Show, by Richard Lobnske (Part 1): "Hi, I’m your host, Karen Myerson. Right here in front of Fenderson Hall, what seems like the best place to start our show."
  
• Finn Morgendorffer 40: Higher Learning, by HolyGrail2007 (Part 4): Fantastic. Now all we need is a flat tire, Daria thought. It didn’t come to pass when she thought it, not like the TV shows. But this was bad enough on its own.
• NEW! Fragments of an Unnamed Tale, by Staticblast (Part 1): "It has been eight years now, since my family left the south to move here, and seven-and-a-half since I became fast friends with the artist, Jane Lane. My father was, and still is, considered strange by the community for having me tutored at home, and insane for doing the same for her. As you know, she has been both reviled and praised for her illustrations and paintings of the contents of the seven cryptical books of Hsan, named a genius and claimed to be in need of an alienist." [Part 2 here!]
  
• John Lane 45: Haunted by the Past, by RLobinske (COMPLETE!): "The girls of Lawndale owe you big time, Daria," Quinn said before hurrying away.
• NEW! (Semi)Permanent Reminder, by thatLONERchick (COMPLETE!): Daria awoke in a semi-dark room, the morning air cool and still. After a good stretch she moved the sheet off her legs and stood. She wore a thin white sports bra and boy shorts, which she straightened as she walked to the bathroom. On the door was a sheet of white paper, a message printed across the center of the page: LOCK THE DOOR
  

Whistling "Sweet Georgia Brown" Once Again

With one important exception, I did not like sports when I was a kid. The exception was watching the Harlem Globetrotters on TV, which was the only sports event that made you laugh. A number of websites state that today is the 82nd anniversary of the birth of the Globetrotters, though the actual situation is more complicated than that. Nevertheless, here is Jane Lane wearing an outfit very similar to the "away" uniform of the Globetrotters. Thank you, Meadowlark Lemon, wherever you are, for all the joy you gave me.

FF.net

• Pigskin Caduceus, by HolyGrail2007 (Part 9): I drifted in and out of consciousness for the next couple of hours, I couldn’t remember things too well. When I was coherent enough to think again, I was lying on the floor in my room. My head was lying next to a puddle of vomit, the carpet had quite a number of bloodstains.
• Reaped Out, Act 2: Sickle Sad World, by Pinkminx (up to Part 3).

PPMB

• Stacy Rowe, Seeker (Part III), by jtranser (continued): "Let me see if I have this right. You've gone to all the trouble of kidnapping me, bringing me to some godforsaken jungle, and now you tell me you're going to destroy the world!! And I'm going to help you!? And I thought I was nuts!!!"

Stuff with Fanfic Potential Out the Wazoo!

Let's see, let's start off with angst. Today is the 197th anniversary of the biggest earthquake ever known in the middle of the United States, the New Madrid Quake of 1812. I live rather close to this region, so if my writing gets jiggly one day, you'll know why. I'm sure someone can stick this into a story and kill and injure lots of characters.

Comedy is hard, everyone says, but today three very excellent comedians were born, and you can steal their jokes for your fanfics, or at least figure out how to make jokes like theirs. They are Emo Philips, Eddie Izzard, and Chris Rock. Now you can write a comedy fanfic and it will be easy. Start here.

Let's talk adventure. Today is also the birthday of aircraft designer Oleg Antonov, whose company (named for him) built the biggest airplane ever, the An-225, which I have been trying for years to figure out how to work into a Daria fanfic. I blew up a C-5 Galaxy in one story, but I always thought having some Daria characters as aircraft crew in a big plane that didn't blow up right away (kind of like a starship crew, get it?) would be awesome. Except I can't figure out how to do it. Damn.

Today is also the anniversary of Charles Dickens's birth, but nothing he did is worth writing about in a Daria fanfic, so I'll skip over him. Bleak House, my ass.

Any thoughts on the above three ideas? Any thoughts of your own? Do I have to do all the thinking around here? Apparently so. More later, then.

Newest DariaWiki entry: Bobby Stuart, by Disco316. Remember Bobby?


PPMB

• Falling into College 66: Christmas in White, by Richard Lobinske (COMPLETE!): "None of us want your crutches flailing around while you try to catch the bouquet. But I'll make a deal with you. If that thing comes my way, I'll swat it over toward you."
• Snuffed Animals, by Disco316 (COMPLETE!): Daria smirked at that. “Trust me, Mom; if I was pregnant, you’d have to prepare the guest room for three kings.”
• Stacy Rowe, Seeker (Part II), by jtranser (continued): "Esper Command reports have to be both pretentious and mind numbing, so I'll use correlation of forces. I'll also use i.e., e.g., ibid., op.cit. and q.v." "What about viz.?" "The idea is to numb the mind of the reader, not permanently damage it."

The Josef Stalin Comedy Hour

In the 1988 movie Punchline, Tom Hanks, playing a troubled comedian, explains to Sally Fields, a wannabe comedian, that certain things are funny and certain other things are not, even if they seem to be almost identical and maybe not particularly funny at all. Charles Manson, says Hanks, can be made funny; the Son of Sam cannot. (In the movie, he turns out to be right.)

Josef Stalin is one of those seemingly unfunny topics that can be made very funny, despite the fact that he is credited with the deaths of so many millions of people that historians groan in despair even thinking about how to go about counting them. Attila the Hun is similarly funny, as per Monty Python's Flying Circus. Adolf Hitler is a hard comic sell, but The Producers did a fine job on him anyway. Timothy McVeigh, however, is damn near impossible to make funny, proving Punchline right in the end.

Back to Josef Stalin. Stalin became a comic meme on Daria early on, starting with "The Big House."

Helen: Bureaucracy is the price we pay for impartiality.

Jake: Jefferson!

Helen: Stalin.

Did Stalin really say this? I can't prove it, but that's not the point. Merely saying that he is the source of a reasonable quote is the funny part, especially coming out of the mouth of Daria's lawyer mother. I can put "Stalin" and "quotes" into any search engine and come up with dozens of eye-opening things that he is alleged to have said. Did he really say them? Who cares? This is comedy. Make it up if you have to, it doesn't matter. If it's funny, it's funny.

The Stalin meme is picked up again, twice, in "Fire!" in the conversation Daria has with Tom.

Tom: Personally, I always had a soft spot for Stalin. Any dictator who changes his name from Dzhugashvili to "Man of Steel" has my vote, so to speak.

Daria: Come on, you and I both know he only did it so his name would fit on his luggage tags.


*


Tom: Hey, did you know Stalin had Trotsky killed with an ice pick to the skull?

Daria: Good thing they didn't put him in a glass coffin.

The Stalin-is-funny idea caught on. The following are only some of the Daria fanfics that include a Stalin joke or snide remark referencing the same. I'll let you do the word search ("Stalin") to find them. Some of them are actually pretty good.

• And When Your Heart Begins to Bleed
• Christmas Days in Lawndale, by Bacner
• Daria’s Downtown Experience, by Danielle Beach
• Darius
• Days of Expression, by Richard Lobinske
• How Deep It Goes, by Daniel Suni
• The Last Straw, by the Alchemist (nice twist on the theme)
• Lukewarm Metal, by Peter W. Guerin (Ms. Li herself brings up the Stalin meme.)
• Morgendorffer Prison Blues, by Richard Lobinske
• Past and Future Daria, by Thomas
• The Whistle, by The Ranting Klown
  

Angela Li gets tagged with Stalinism fairly often, which to be fair she deserves. A glance at her memo to the Lawndale High students and faculty in The Daria Diaries sets the matter to rest.

Lest you think Daria is the only medium that considers the real-life Big Brother humorous, be advised that Russians are known to tell Stalin jokes (which are a bit on the dark side), and the book that won the 1997 Thurber Prize for American Humor, Coyote v. Acme by Ian Frazier, includes a short piece called "Stalin's Chuckle," in which a host of comedians try to make Stalin laugh.

Why would anyone think Stalin, or any other character like him, is funny? Amy Barksdale said it best: "Hey, what's the point of a senseless tragedy if you can't find a little humor in it?" (Your mileage may vary, of course. It works for Amy and Daria, at least.)

More memes later. Need to catch up on the fanfics soon.