Ramjet / Mouse

Ran into Jeremy from MINT at the Cambridgeside Galleria this weekend. Kind of funny, since I was remembering him earllier that day. He loved learning Perl (he was already a Java geek so soaked it up quickly), and as I today constrained a library's exported functions through the use Foo qw(bar baz); syntax, I recalled teaching him the same technique, and watching him demonstrate his understanding through a gleeful imitation of a drunken, foul-mouthed, shotgun-wielding homeowner waving those unwanted symbols out of his main namespace god dammit.

I couldn't chat with him because I was being dragged off to the Cheesecake Factory, who had paged my friend and I because our table was ready after our mandatory 40 minute wandering through the mall that still doesn't really have much to say for itself outside of the Apple Store and maybe the Borders. It was at the latter where Jeremy hailed me as I sped to the counter clutching a Roger Ramjet DVD. I didn't recognize him, despite everything, but I did give him a card and told him to mail me. (Which he did, while I was washing the dishes just now.)

Ah, yes, Roger Ramjet. I have seen a bunch of these when I was in high school, where they'd sneak one of the five-minute episodes in either before or after Batman every weekday on the Family Channel. I just watched four of them... good stuff, even taking into account some humor that was OK in 1965 but would fail to pass even the most cynical political-correctness measures today. (Really just one unfortunate bit so far, and at least it was a joke you could see coming. Someone falls through a hole that the main character accidentally dug through the planet, and you know a regretful portrayal of our Chinese friends is going to appear, and lo.) (Enh, there were those revolutionaries who all dressed and talked like Speedy Gonzales, too. Dubious, but their ringleader was named Tequila Mockingbird, and, gosh darnit, that's still funny.)

The cartoon is of the same school as Rocky & Bullwinkle (though I dunno if they shared any common talent) with very crude art (which looks like the early 1960s, even so) and almost entirely verbal humor, usually brilliant and often huh?!-enabling. In a good way, I mean. The music is by some happy yahoo at a clavichord.

Gary Owens (Roger Ramjet's voice (point of reference: he was the Blue Falcon's voice 15 years after that, and Powdered Toast Man's voice 12 years after that)) has some commentary on the disc, but it's him reading from a script (not to say he didn't write the script, which he may have, but it still sounds kind of canned) about his career, and talking over the opening title of each cartoon. Blessedly, there is an option for watching the cartoons with the titles and closing credits snipped out (taken together they're practically the length of the cartoon they surround), and when you choose it, Roger/Gary pops up and berates you. Yes, good stuff.

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In other news, we caught a mouse yesterday. I discovered it while nobody else was home. Very unnerving. I announced its passing by drawing a little grave stone in the kitchen whiteboard. M added a little winged mouse skull motif to it.

My parents predict that there are more mice to catch, given the amount of dirt we find. I dunno if any fresh evidence has turned up since yesterday, though. The trap's been replaced. If you're visiting, don't eat that. Not for humans.