You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Slang, preschool play, weekend, copyright

There was a discussion on Indietits about pronouncing the various internet-bourne abbreviations in real life - consensus seemed to be that "roffle" (or the expansion "roffle waffles") were moderately common, but few people said "ell oh ell". The roflcopter was something that came up in the discussion.

I remember being vaguely dismayed when I first met "woot" in conversation. (Hmm, is the internet is the woot of all evil? Sorry, I digress.) But then again, I remember assuming that, since I'd seen it written "w00+", it would mean "woo-plus", or "even more 'woo' than normal". In my defence, I'd been running the =psychoanalyse-pinhead= mode in emacs quite a bit. (BTW, if you haven't done this before, and have access to emacs, type ALT-x and then "psycho" and tab-complete. Let it run for a bit, then hit enter a couple of times - and what you'll have in your buffer is a interview between Eliza, the virtual psychiatrist, and Zippy the Pinhead, sayer of things random. "Hand me a pair of leather pants and a CASIO keyboard—I'm living for today!")

Er... anyway, that leads me to the other thought I had, which was "words and phrases that sound like they should be Cockney rhyming slang, but aren't". 'Pants' was the one that sparked this line of enquiry off, but 'dog and pony' also sounds like it should mean something else.

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There is a place that looks after preschoolers and dogs next door to work. I was outside when the kids were playing a loud game of "let's pretend" - the biggest crisis that they seemed to be able to come up with was, "Oh no! It's three o'clock, and we haven't had lunch yet!" Maybe it's just because it's in the Playing House genre - they may have felt that robotic dinosaur-riding space zombies weren't an appropriate trope, or something. Even so, am I unreasonable for feeling that they could have chosen to go somewhere more exciting than McDonald's for a Happy Meal?

Then again, if talking about McDonalds is good enough for Tarantino, who am I to argue?

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Busy Saturday (Yum Char, 48 Film planning meeting, and two parties), and extremely, satisfyingly dull Sunday, during which I watched all of Firefly. How well did whatever replaced Firefly on Fox do, does anyone know?

I wonder whether Star Trek's revival was actually a bad thing - not in terms of the movies and series that it spawned, but in terms of setting unrealistic expectations for fandom. I suspect that it was a particular set of circumstances that led to that revival, and I don't know how the situation has changed - do DVD sales outway syndication as a revenue stream yet, for example? This wouldn't surprise me, since I know of plenty of people who'll download a show as it's coming out in the States, don't bother to watch it on live TV, and then buy it when it's available on DVD - but whether they're a significant fraction of the market, I have no idea.

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As part of research for the 48-hour Film Competition, I've been investigating exactly what is out of copyright - it's 50 years after the public see it for a sound recording or video, or 50 after their death for a composer, writer, lyricist, etc. I'm not sure what the status of a song where the recording copyright has expired, but the lyrical copyright hasn't, nor whether putting a recording on CD constitutes a different recording... as NTK said, surely Fatboy Slim's "Praise You" is public domain by now...

Posted by svend at May 7, 2005 9:40 AM