meme Archives - Page 4 of 10 - Ramblin' with Roger

Myself in Three Fictional Characters

“That’s part of your problem: you haven’t seen enough movies. All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.”

There’s this Facebook meme of posting images of three fictional characters that define me, apparently without describing them. I find the exercise oddly unsatisfying. Whereas when Dustbury and Chuck Miller cheated and EXPLAINED why they picked their folks, THAT was interesting to me.

For instance, of the three roles here: one you probably know, one you know the actor but likely not the character, and the third is played by a guy I knew, not very well, back in college, and most of you won’t get at all. So what that give you, the reader?

Or maybe I’m wrong. Any guesses as to the CHARACTERS I’ll take for a day or two before approving the comments.

I suppose I could have picked three other characters that you should all recognize:

Now, I suppose I ought to tackle that other meme, that of coming up with my “life quote.” Except, of course, I’m stymied.

I could steal from Kenneth Rogers who sang:
You’ve got to know when to hold ’em
Know when to fold ’em
Know when to walk away
Know when to run

I was taken for a time with a line in the 1991 movie Grand Canyon, when the Steve Martin character says, “That’s part of your problem: you haven’t seen enough movies. All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.”

On my more serious days, I could try, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi

But ultimately, I’ll stick with my first hero, who said “I yam what I yam,” and that wouldn’t be wrong.

Sunshine Blogger Award!!!

Teresa Brewer knows what I mean.

Yeah, someone – OK, Jaquandor – dubbed me with the Sunshine Blogger Award, which is a “get to know the writer better” type of blogging exercise, with a couple of rules attached:

1. Answer all 11 questions asked by the blogger who nominated you.

2. Nominate eleven bloggers in return and write eleven (possibly fiendish) questions for them to answer.

As Jaquandor rightly notes:
“I’ve been blogging for so long that I remember when these types of blog-quiz awards were quite common. They’ve really fallen by the wayside with the rise of Facebook and Twitter and the like, but they’re still fun, so I’ll go ahead and answer these, pose my own, and nominate. Here we go!”

1. What do you value more in a story: dialog or plot?

The plot, in that dialogue can arguably be fixed, but a plot may have a flaw that’s fatal. I’m reminded of a story in the TV sitcom Modern Family where a couple of the characters meet their writing hero on a train, and they inadvertently let him know that his solution to the multi-book plot is in fact impossible. (The writer is devastated, but there’s a happy ending.)

2. Describe the home planet of Lin-Manuel Miranda. (Come on, that dude ain’t human.)

It is a nickelodeon. Teresa Brewer knows what I mean. I saw him interviewed on CBS News, and he knows almost all the lyrics to the vast collection of musicals his parents own. Plus his love of other forms makes him a human jukebox. (BTW, I LOVE that segment where he performs in front of the President back in 2009, which Jaquandor linked to recently.

3. If you enjoy watching any sports at all, which ones would you at least like to try just once?

Lacrosse. I would suck at it, but I find it utterly impressive. UAlbany has had a good team in recent years, even after three Native American brothers graduated.

4. Describe the most recent book to which you gave (or would have given) five stars.

The Heart of Christianity by Marcus Borg.

5. Do you finish bad books? Why or why not?

No, because life is too short.

6. How vexed are you when movies don’t match the books?

Not at all. Different media require different treatment. In fact, I’m more vexed when a book does not judiciously edit down too long prose.

7. Describe your perfect hot beverage. In detail. I’m talking roast of bean or variety of leaves, additives like spices or squirts of citrus, vessel from which the drink is sipped, where you are sitting as you sip it, who is next to you, what music is playing.

OK. it’s tea, Earl Grey, well seeped, with cream and one sugar (or a bit of honey), from a mug I got some years ago from a Mongolian couple that changes color depending on the temperature of the drink. I’m sitting the recliner that we no longer own, and I’m listening to Miles Davis’ Blue album. Or Joni Mitchell’s Blue album.

8. Do you watch cooking shows? If so, describe your favorite.

I do not. I find the chefs mean. The yelling makes me stressed. Don’t enjoy.

9. Name a place you’ve visited that you thought you’d hate but you didn’t.

Galveston, Texas, 1996 or 1997. Maybe it was an anti-Texas bias I started with, but I loved that somewhat worn-down old city. On the other hand, I hated Houston, as expected.

10. You know that hobby you had as a younger person that you miss dearly but you know you’ll never do it again? Describe it!

I collected postage stamps. My great aunt Deana had a book of old stamps from all over the world, which I still have, somewhere. So when my parents would get mail, I’d ask to take the stamps off. The hobby didn’t last more than a year, but I love looking at postage.

11. On January 20, 2017, the newly inaugurated President of the United States signs a law requiring all Americans to display a coffee-table book prominently in their home. Which one do you put out?

It has to be a Beatles book downstairs that I’m too lazy to get the citation.

Oh, tagging. I always hated tagging, because it felt as though I were obliging people. But I realize they could do a Nancy Reagan and Just Say No.

Arthur@AmeriNZ
Jason from DC
Lisa
Shooting Parrots
fillyjonk
Dustbury
Eddie, the Renaissance Geek
Chuck Miller
Leslie in Vancouver
Albany Weblog

Hey, don’t have 11. So be it. Which rhymes with Soviet.

The questions, borrowing heavily from the questions Jaquandor was asked, plus questions I asked SamuraiFrog:

1. What is your favorite song? Do you have a significant memory attached to a time you listened to it?

2. Where do you love to blog/write the most?

3. What can you hear right now? What would you prefer to be listening to?

4. What do you do when you feel you should be writing but are lacking in inspiration?

5. What is your greatest achievement?

6. If you could only eat one meal for the rest of your life what would it be?

7. Who is your favorite author and why?

8. What are your favorite (10? 50? 100?) songs of the 21st century?

9. What do you believe these days, spiritually/theologically?

10. What are some of the worst awards winners, where you wonder, “How did THAT happen?? (Movies, music, TV, whatever)

11. Will Donald Trump be President? And if so, why?

“Bye, Felicia” and why it bugs me

“Felicia” makes an appearance at a raunchy post-performance party with the rappers at their hotel suite, which suddenly gets interrupted by two armed men knocking on the door.

Someone I know personally used the phrase “Bye, Felicia” in his blog. I’d seen the phrase before, and while I had no idea about its derivation – the cutting edge of recent pop culture phrases I’m not – I’d glommed on to the fact that it was a dismissive response.

One use might be to say it after US Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) lost the Florida GOP Presidential primary and was forced to give up his Oval Office aspirations. Or about any of other more than a dozen candidates who’ve dropped out of the race.

“Bye, Felicia” bugged me to an irrational degree, and I was curious to find out why.

Part of it, I suppose, was that it had become one of those cute “in the know” phrases that might have been clever, once upon a time, but had become irritating from groupspeak overuse. The NOT phenomenon from Saturday Night Live – “You’re very intelligent – NOT!” – for instance.

More than this, though, is The Daughter’s reporting that she hears it “every day” at school, usually as a taunt to shut down someone else’s conversation. Not exactly bullying, I guess, but definitely snark. I’m not big on snark, as I feel that it lowers the bar on an intelligent conversation, especially online. (“Intelligent online conversation”, I’m told, is an oxymoron.)

What IS the origin of “Bye, Felicia” anyway? From Know Your Meme:

“Bye, Felicia” is a memorable quote from the 1995 comedy film Friday [which I’ve never seen] which is often used online as a dismissive farewell.

Origin

On April 26th, 1995, the comedy film Friday was released, starring the characters Craig Jones (played by Ice Cube) and Smokey (played by Chris Tucker) as a pair of unemployed stoners who must find a way to pay a drug dealer $200 within 24 hours. In the film, a character named Felicia attempts to borrow a car and a marijuana cigarette from Smokey and Jones, causing Jones to say “Bye, Felicia.” On March 11th, 2007, YouTuber HyFlyer988 uploaded a clip of the scene, gathering over 870,000 views and 290 comments in the first eight years.

And it spread:

On December 7th, 2008, Urban Dictionary user pimpin’817 submitted an entry for “Bye, Felicia,” describing the phrase as a way to bid farewell to someone who is deemed unimportant. On October 27th, 2011, YouTuber Mamclol uploaded a video titled “Bye Felicia,” featuring the clip from Friday with an accompanying hip hop track about the character.

I asked The Wife if she had seen/heard the term. She had guessed that perhaps it was a sexual reference. Well, no. And yes.

In August 2015, online discussions about “Bye, Felicia” saw another notable resurgence after its inclusion in a scene from Straight Outta Compton, an American biopic film about the ’90s hip hop group N.W.A directed by F. Gary Gray, the same filmmaker behind the 1995 urban comedy movie and origin of the quote, Friday.

In the film, a minor female character named “Felicia” makes an appearance at a raunchy post-performance party with the rappers at their hotel suite, which suddenly gets interrupted by two armed men knocking on the door and looking for their friend by the same name. After a brief moment of confrontation, members of the group find Felicia giving oral sex to Eazy-E, who eventually proceeds to push her out of the hotel room by the head. As the door slams behind, Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.) drops the line “Bye Felicia” in a direct nod to the now-famous quote from Friday.

While the film was generally met with critical acclaims upon its release, both the scene and the line were brought up by several film critics and hip hop bloggers for its abashedly misogynistic, slut-shaming undertone.

Is the character sexist, or is the movie? A conversation for another day.

You won’t see me using “Bye, Felicia”. Since my antipathy predated my knowledge of the origin, it must be the flippant, offhand disdain of its use. Its derivation has merely solidified my irritation.

Money or mitigating mistakes?

Would I have to relive parts of my twenties? OH, God, please, NO.

One finds these on Facebook all the time. Would you rather have this large sum of money, or do something that would be perceived as nobler?

I look at these options, and the choice was surprisingly easy; I’d take the cash. This does not come from either greed or shallowness. Rather it is from the recognition that the mistakes I made – and to quote Sinatra, “I’ve made a few” – are what makes me, ME. This is NOT to say that there aren’t choices I’ve regretted, only that undoing them would mean I would presumably unlearn the lesson of my errors.

To play the scenario out, there’s no guarantee that fixing the mistakes would lead to a good result. I was struck by the fact, in the Stephen King novel 11/22/63, that the protagonist has to make several different attempts going back in time to try to thwart the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. More prosaically, there’s an irritating newish Disney show called Best Friends Whenever, about time-traveling teens, and they too find going back to fix things not so easy.

Would I have to relive parts of my twenties? OH, God, please, NO.

Sometimes mistakes are good. I was giving a presentation at the Friends of the Albany Public book review on The Gospel According to the Beatles. Some of the group’s greatest creativity came from “mistakes,” such as the line “two-foot small” in You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away, instead of “two-foot-tall.” Moreover, there is a philosophy that one should embrace errors as part of the serendipity of life. Many inventions were “mistakes,” someone trying to make something else.

Hey, maybe the mistake was not saving enough for retirement, or for The Daughter’s college fund. Taking the money would SOLVE the error.

Online, someone fretted that having lots of money would be too likely to change his life, a legitimate concern, giving the history of some lottery winners. I wrote:
Think of the things
You can do with that money
Choose any charity
Give to the poor
This reference to Caiaphas singing in Jesus Christ Superstar – Damned For All Time/ Blood Money – was totally lost on the participants, alas.

But what say YOU?

An A-to-Z Thing

Y’all are tagged.

A lazy blogger thing, via Jaquandor and Ken Levine.

• A-Available/Single? I’m PRETTY sure I’m not, but The Wife will let me know otherwise.

• B-Best Friend? Probably my friends Karen and Carol, who I have only known since 1958, our first day of kindergarten. That Carol, BTW, is NOT The Wife, who was not even born in 1958.

• C-Cake or Pie? Pie. It is the more versatile food, available both as a main course or dessert.

• D-Drink Of Choice? White wine. Or a combo of orange juice and cranberry juice.

• E-Essential Item You Use Everyday? My computer tablet, the electric toothbrush.

• F-Favorite Color? GREEN. Or blue.

• G-Gummy Bears Or Worms? Not so much.

• H-Hometown? Binghamton, NY.

• I-Indulgence? Oh, so many. Strawberry ice cream.

• January Or February? February. Closer to March, which is my birthday.

• K-Kids & Their Names? The Lydster.

• L-Life Is Incomplete Without? Joy.

• M-Marriage Date? May 15.

• N-Number Of Siblings? Two.

• O-Oranges Or Apples? Apples. Especially Macintosh.

• P-Phobias/Fears? Snakes, dogs.

• Q-Favorite Quote? “That’s part of your problem: you haven’t seen enough movies. All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.” – Grand Canyon (1991)

• R-Reason to Smile? the counter in our kitchen cleaned off.

• S-Season? Spring.

• T-Tag Three or Four People? Y’all are tagged.

• U-Unknown Fact About Me? I received a standing ovation for playing a comb. Also, when I remove eggs from the carton, I take the top left first, then the bottom right, then the other corners, working inward towards the center.

• V-Vegetable you don’t like? Cauliflower.

• W-Worst Habit? Eating too many sweets.

• X-X-rays You’ve Had? Broke a rib in 2009. Plus the usual dental ones, and various falls.

• Y-Your Favorite Food? Spinach lasagna.

• Z-Zodiac Sign? Pisces.