#running amok

[bunnies-and-sunshine]

Zoomies!

This is the kind of running amok that we're fine with, not what happened yesterday.

[ofwings]

love to see what my sweet little kitty cat is up to while i'm out of town....... miss girl what is the damage??

[ilovemesomevincentprice]

Yeah...yeah...yeah. I know. I've shared this multiple times. Well, dammit, I'm sharing it again.

Vincent Price in a cassock.

You're welcome

Vincent Price and Gregory Peck - Keys of the Kingdom

[thepopculturearchivist]

SIR!, August 1954

[cheer-deforest-kelley]

This is so great! Here’s another rare third season blooper from the opening scene of “Requiem for Methuselah” (with effects sound).

The second video is the scene that aired (no sound), so you can see what they were supposed to do. I always thought they looked a little awkward.

It appears that De (startled by the explosion), turned to run too soon, but Bill has yet to move, so De paused and was shoved by Leonard into Bill and they all missed their mark.

Notice in the final version, Bill gives De a lot of room to move and Leonard has a hold of De’s arm (perhaps to slow him down after the previous fiasco).

I can watch Bill and De’s crack up all day long. It looks like Leonard isn’t even sure what happened. It’s all so cute.

The blooper is from a VHS tape that was dubbed from a 1984 TV show called Foul-ups, Bleeps and Blunders (taped in front of a studio audience— hence the laughter in the first video). Bill Shatner was a guest and “brought along some bloopers”, a few of which I hadn’t seen before from the third season. Alas, I only dubbed the bloopers and not Bill discussing them.

[writeforfandoms]

Here are a few pictures from my museum visit yesterday!

California Science Center and Rose Garden! I also toured the Lego special exhibit.

All in all, a very good day.

[highqueenofelfhame]

the last few days // follow me on instagram or my bookstagram

[thewordwideweb]

Running amok (or amuck)

A friend of mine recently used the term “run amok.” (Yes, as hard as it is to believe, I have friends. To protect her from the certain ridicule that would follow being outed as my friend, I will not reveal her identity here. For the sake of this narrative, however, let’s call her “Amy,” which will be convenient, because that’s her name).

Anyway, Amy wrote a play, which was selected for performance at the Strawberry One-Act Festival series in New York City. The characters in her play “Au Bois” (In the Woods) include a French Maid, a Gentleman, a Can-Can Dancer, and a Mime, among others. Because I am deucedly clever, I made some crack about how “a mime is a terrible thing to waste.” Amy told me that the mime in her play gets to “run amok.”

We all know what it means to “run amok,” right? To go crazy and act in a frenzied, unrestrained, out-of-control way. We get the “running” part, but where did “amok” come from? “Amok” is the Word of the Day.

So, where did it come from? The short answer is: Malaysia.

Here’s a longer answer: Going amok – sometimes spelled “amuck,” as in the cartoon “Duck Amuck” in which Daffy Duck is tortured by an unseen animator – was not cartoonish or funny at all. In the Malay culture, it was believed that an evil spirit would enter someone’s body and cause that person to go on a murderous rampage. The word “amok” (or amuck, amuk, or amuco) in the Southeast Asian Austronesian languages of Malaysia and Indonesia meant “attacking furiously with uncontrolled rage, making a frenzied, desperate charge.”

The “Book of Duarte Barbosa” in 1516 described people in Malaysia and Java who would “go out into the streets and kill as many persons as they meet…These are called Amuco.” British explorer Captain James Cook wrote in 1772 that “To run amock is to get drunk with opium…to sally forth from the house, kill the person or persons supposed to have injured the Amock…indiscriminately killing and maiming villagers and animals in a frenzied attack.”

It often happened that the only way to stop the Amock (the person running amok) was to kill him (and it was usually a him, not a her). If he lived, the authorities would tend not to inflict harsh punishment, because he was thought to be under the influence of an evil spirit.

So I’ll have to ask Amy whether the mime in her play runs amuck more like Daffy Duck, or more like a homicidal maniac. A mime may be a terrible thing to waste, but it’s even more terrible when a mime wastes everyone in sight.