By which we mean not “the mysterious poetry inherent in random events,” but rather “for no real reason, today, here’s some poetry.” The Madness of Sweeney is a landmark work of medieval Irish literature, one that has stood the test of time and inspired writers ranging from T.S. Eliot to Neil Gaiman.

Also, it is totally emo.  Observe!

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Some recent musings on the unpronouncable horror that is Cthulhu got me thinking about a similarly implacable killing machine with a similarly aitch-bedecked name:  No Country For Old Men’s Anton Chigurh.

These guys have more in common than just their names and their hairstyle. Each is a destructive force of the act-of-god variety.  The protagonists in No Country For Old Men and The Call of Cthulhu never really manage to accomplish anything:  your best chance of survival, should you be a character in one of these stories, is to hope that the monster doesn’t notice you.  In this sense, Cthulhu and Chigurh can be seen as symbols for man’s essential helplessness in the face of a random and uncaring world.  But although they’re pretty much above human agency, they are each vulnerable to the random tragedy they embody.  At the end of NCFOM, Chigurh gets hit by a car out of nowhere, while Cthulhu’s island home is dragged back into the ocean by an earthquake.

You get the feeling that Lovecraft and McCarthy are both essentially nihilists, but not of the self-congratulatory, clove-smoking, toe-cutting-off variety that we generally see out in our popular culture.  These are men who wish that they could go back and take the blue pill.  Near the beginning of The Call of Cthulhu, the narrator muses that “we live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”  Compare this imagery to Sherriff Bell’s dream at the end of No Country for Old Men:

The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night, goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and snowin, hard ridin. Hard country. He rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin goin by. He just rode on past and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down, and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. Out there up ahead. Then I woke up.”

Jean-Paul Sartre once said “Hell is other people,” but his characters were just stuck in a plain old room with some other folks and no exit.  None of them was the lone existentialist trapped in a children’s television program.

Here’s a tribute to those top five hapless souls who, though depressed, distraught, or just plain angry, are doomed to live in saccharine-filled worlds where cotton candy lines the streets and the power of friendship is always, always the answer.

5. Oscar the Grouch: Poor Oscar.  Even if he weren’t grouchy, “the Grouch” is still part of his name and his species.  He lives in a trashcan, he has no legs, and his only friend is a worm.  I’m fairly sure he became a grouch back in ‘Nam and at some point lived in a van down by the river.  To add insult to injury, the only way he can make enough money to scrape by is to teach dumb kids the letters of the alphabet.

Oscar can’t be too high on this list, however.  After all, he’s not the only one of his kind like those poor saps below.  Then again, even having kindred spirits in the wonderful land of Sesame Street isn’t too much help for Oscar.  If this clip from the Sally Messy Yuckayel show is to be believed, even other grouches hate Oscar because he once had his heart melted by an adowabul kitten.  The fellow just can’t win.

Wanna know 4, 3, 2, and 1?  Well, you’ll have to click, won’tcha?

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What is Cthulhu, really? Why are the Great Old Ones here on Earth, and what are their plans?

These are some of the great mysteries that have been haunting us since H.P. Lovecraft first introduced his Cthulhu mythos in the 1920s.

But those questions are dumb. The real question is: how the hell are you supposed to pronounce his freakin’ name?

Yes, yes. I know you all want to say, “It’s kuh-THOO-loo, obviously.”

Yes. Obviously.

But why? Tradition? Because the author said so? ‘Cause that’s how they say it in the role-playing game, Call of Cthulhu(tm)?

No. I disagree. You heard it here first, folks. “Cthulhu” should–nay, MUST–be pronounced “THOO-loo.”

Before you start yelling, hear me out, below the magic fold…

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The Harvard Classics Project is a very Overthinking It-type enterprise, in that it combines high culture and pop culture.

On the high culture side is The Harvard Classics. In the first decade of the 20^th century, Harvard President Charles Eliot claimed that a five-foot shelf of books could provide “a good substitute for a liberal education in youth to anyone who would read them with devotion, even if he could spare but fifteen minutes a day for reading.” (Which leads me to wonder, was President Eliot implying four years of Harvard was a pointless waste of time and money?)

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At one point in The Return of the King, Gandalf tells Pippin:

Sauron has yet to reveal his deadliest servant. The one who will lead Mordor’s armies in war. The one they say no living man can kill. The Witch King of Angmar. You’ve met him before. He stabbed Frodo at Weathertop. He is the lord of the Nazgul, the greatest of the Nine.

And I thought to myself, “Oh, you mean that dude they chased away with a torch?”

Everyone in these movies talks about the Nazgul like they’re Jason, the Terminator, and Anton Chigurh rolled into one. As far as I can tell, they are pretty much useless. In fact, I think Sauron would have been better off sending a labradoodle, and I’m going to prove it.

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Skyrocketing food prices cause riots on three continents. (via CNN)

I told you this was bad news. Didn’t I tell you? Yeah, I told you.

I’m not saying it’s time to start stockpiling spam and twinkies against the apocalypse… there’s time for that yet, plus, twinkies are expensive these days. Still, maybe its time for us all to dust off our long term disaster plans. After all, if civilization ever does collapse, stockpiled food will only take you so far. Eventually you would have to start farming, or master some kind of useful pre-industrial trade like woodcarving, or pottery. (Or prostitution.) But you won’t have time to learn these skills after the collapse, when you’re being chased by flesh-eating mutants, you’re starving, and there’s no electricity, roads, or oddly hypnotic pottery instruction youtube videos set to the melancholy strains of Sigur Ros. Really, by the time there’s any credible threat of apocalypse - and I don’t quite call this food situation a credible threat - it will be too late. So the time to start training for it is now. Worst comes to worst, and the world DOESN’T end? You’ll still have learned how to turn pots. (Or, you know. Tricks.) So it’s really a win-win.

For more on this line of thought, see Max Brooks’ indispensable The Zombie Survival Guide.

Many of the people reading this — and surely all of those likely to care — are already aware the wildly popular fantasist/satirist Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease last year. (Announcing the diagnosis to his fans, Pratchett wrote: “I know it’s a very human thing to say ‘Is there anything I can do’, but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.” The man knows how to turn a phrase.)

This is very sad news for his friends and family, and to a lesser extent to his legions of fans. And then there’s this passage from his 1992 novel Lords and Ladies, which makes it sadder. The following is taken from a confrontation between the witch Granny Weatherwax (the book’s heroine), and the wicked Queen of the Elves. The Queen, being an evil queen, is taunting her captive in the high villainous style. more »