Page 74: Pumpkins, sex, and urban legends

For all of Linus’ efforts in It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, belief in the Great Pumpkin never quite caught on with the Peanuts gang nor became the stuff of urban legend. Linus' confusing of Halloween with Christmas is, however, part of our pop culture vocabulary and regular Halloween TV tradition.

"There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin."
Linus, however, seems to be the only one who truly believes.
[Sally and Linus from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (©1966, CBS, dir. Bill Melendez).]

While Linus is the only one who believes in the Great Pumpkin, there is a racy Halloween-related story that a lot of people believe to be true, and insist that it appeared in the local newspaper of a friend of a friend. This urban legend comes off more like a joke, complete with a setup for the punch line. It took off on the Internet in July 1998 and, typical of urban legends, has undergone various changes of name and location. It goes something like this:

Dixon, IL. Police arrested Jon Terrence McCarter, a 27 year old white male, resident of Dixon, IL, in the Sanderson Pumpkin patch at 11:38pm Friday. McCarter will be charged with lewd and lascivious behavior, public indecency, and public intoxication at the County courthouse Monday.

The suspect allegedly stated that as he was passing a pumpkin patch, he decided to stop. "You know, a pumpkin is soft and squishy inside, and there was no one around here for miles. At least I thought there wasn't." he stated in a phone interview from the County courthouse jail.

McCarter went on to state that he pulled over to the side of the road, picked out a pumpkin that he felt was appropriate to his purposes, cut a hole in it, and proceeded to satisfy his alleged "need". "I guess I was just really into it, you know?" he commented with evident embarrassment.

In the process, McCarter apparently failed to notice the Dixon Municipal police car approaching and was unaware of his audience until officer Brenda Taylor approached him. "It was an unusual situation, that's for sure." Said officer Taylor. "I walked up to (McCarter) and he's...just working away at this pumpkin."

Taylor went on to describe what happened when she approached McCarter. "I just went up and said, 'Excuse me sir, but do you realize that you are screwing a pumpkin?' He got real surprised as you'd expect and then looked me straight in the face and said, 'A pumpkin? Damn... is it midnight already?"

Some squash are sexier than others.
This is a butt-ernut squash that I once found at my local grocer's.

I thought such a Snogworthy legend was perfect to slip in at this point in The Billionth Monkey. And it’s perfect timing for Halloween, too! Not that I’m trying to give anyone any ideas...

For Further Reading

David Emery, “Man Arrested for Having Sex with Pumpkin.” October 9, 2012. About.com.

Anonymous, “Peter Peter Pumpkin Pleaser.” February 7, 2007. Snopes.com.

“Caught in the Pumpkin Patch” in Thomas J. Craughwell, Urban Legends: 666 Absolutely True Stories that Happened to a Friend of a Friend…of a Friend. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 106–7.

Page 74: Sir Terrence Snogworthy

I’ve seen a statistic that the majority of men have a name for their junk. And not just slang terms like “schlong” or “anaconda.”* I mean actual names, like “Troy” and “Hercules.” I apparently never got this memo, and frankly find the practice to be oddly dissociative or smacking of body integrity identity disorder. Nevertheless, as a good-humored late-bloomer, I decided there’s no time like middle age to play catch-up! So in April 2012 I decided to come up with the most preposterous name possible. What reared its head and spontaneously sprang fully-formed upon my consciousness was “Sir Terrence Snogworthy.” I never meant it as anything but a joke. Then one day I needed a name for a male member that makes a surprise chat room appearance in The Billionth Monkey, so I reached for it…

The hazards of Hangouts, Chatroulette, and 4chan.

* Does anyone other than Sir Mix-a-Lot actually use “anaconda”?

Page 72: The Brady Bunch

Does anyone not know what The Brady Bunch is? Who doesn't know about Marcia being hit in the nose by a football? Or about Peter's voice changing? Does anyone not know that it's a sunshine day?

For the Millenials (once again)…it was a blended family sitcom that aired on CBS from 1969 to 1974: Mike Brady, a widowed architect with three sons, marries Carol Martin, a mother with three daughters. They and their housekeeper, Alice, work to come to terms with the new normal. The iconic split-screen opening theme song showed the cast in a 3x3 grid:

The positions are:

Marcia (oldest daughter)	Carol (mother)	Greg (oldest son)
Jan (middle daughter)		Peter (middle son)
Cindy (youngest daughter)	Mike (father)	Bobby (youngest son)

Thus in the teleconferencing/chat-room/hangout app of The Billionth Monkey, we have:

Typical Mexploitation  villain	Nicholas Young	Aviator lady
Squinty man with pipe and tattoo		Hockey mask guy
Old scarface guy	Parliamentarian	Sir Terrence Snogworthy

Page 70: Doctor Strange

As with the super-hero posters on page 67, I changed the comic books in this scene at the last minute to Doctor Strange as a thank-you to Steve Englehart for writing a blurb for the book. I was an avid comic reader and collector from age four, and never lost my love for Doctor Strange: a skilled neurosurgeon who lost his fine motor skills in a car crash and subsequently turned to the mystic arts in search of a cure, only to find a higher and nobler calling as Master of the Mystic Arts and Sorcerer Supreme.

The character was created by artist Steve Ditko and green-lighted by editor and script writer Stan Lee. He debuted as a short feature in Strange Tales #110 (July 1963). The character subsequently introduced readers to Marvel Comics’ surreal and heady view of the cosmos: a perfect fit for the psychedelic sixties. The character became so popular that he commandeered Strange Tales (which was usually a double-feature with the continuing adventures of two characters such as the Human Torch or Nick Fury) and its title changed to Doctor Strange with issue #169 (June 1968). After a brief hiatus, the new stories written by Steve Englehart and Frank Brunner in Marvel Premiere led to a new Doctor Strange title in 1974.

Here's an excuse for me to show off cover scans taken from books in my collection: Strange Tales 115 (1963) features the origin story of Doctor Strange. With issue #169 (1968), Strange Tales changed its name to Doctor Strange: Master of the Mystic Arts. With Steve Englehart and Frank Brunner at the helm, the doctor's appearance in Marvel Premiere led to the re-launch of the title Dr. Strange: Master of the Mystic Arts #1 (1974). All images © Marvel Comics.

The first five issues of this book served as the inspiration for Universal Pictures’ TV movie, Doctor Strange. Englehart went on to plot issues 6–18 on his own.  While the TV movie was pretty forgettable, he will enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a big-screen movie in November 2016. I can’t wait!

Coming to a theater near you in 2016! Image source: the MCU Wikia.

Paage 70: Devil Games!

In this penultimate post about the small details tucked into Nicholas Young’s room, we find even more #DevilReferences in his choice of video games:

Dante’s Inferno
Not to be confused with Dante from the video game franchise Devil May Cry, Dante’s Inferno is a video game that is literally based on Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321) vision of Hell. As the poet wrote, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!”

Spring break from Dante's Inferno, © Electronic Arts. Image source: EA.com.

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock
If you play this game in single-player career mode and make it through all of the songs and all of the other bosses, then the last boss battle is playing Lou (i.e. Lou-cifer) for your soul with the notoriously difficult song, “The Devil Went down to Georgia.”

Lou from Guitar Hero III, © Activision. Image source: Wikia.

Silent Hill: Homecoming
This survival horror game involves a section of the story that is called “Hell Descent.” (As disturbing as the Silent Hill games are, I couldn't find a screenshot that shouted #DevilReference...although there is no lack of dark imagery!)

An action shot from Diablo III, © Blizzard Entertainment. Image source: Forbes.

Diablo
This classic top-down dungeon trawler, currently on its third iteration, was chosen primarily because its title is an obvious #DevilReference.

New review at "The Hidden Left Hand"

Many thanks to Vincent Piazza for his great review of The Billionth Monkey​ over at The Hidden Left Hand! I'm not sure which is more flattering: That my descriptions of New Orleans are the best he's read by a non-native in a very long time; or his comment that the book is "filled with nerd humor, dead bodies, and more pop culture references than you can shake a microwaved kitten at." Read the full review here.

Page 69: High school (with spoiler)

SPOILER AHEAD

This post isn’t an Easter egg or #Reference of any sort. Instead, it concerns a detail of this scene in The Billionth Monkey that I thought deserved an explanatory post, because I’m unsure whether its significance is clear.

To recap the scene: Belanger’s smug interrogation turns the corner when he asks where Nicholas Young attended high school. At that moment, the formerly-cowed student realizes that his professor doesn’t, in fact, know what is going on. The repeat game of “Do you know who I am?” confirms, to Young’s relief,  that Belanger hasn’t figured out his secret.

Here’s what’s going on (the spoiler is in this paragraph): Belanger has three years worth of college transcripts for Young. What was Nicholas doing before that? The answer lies is in the prologue, which is set three years ago: he emerged from the Deep Water Lemuria. Prior to that, he wasn’t in high school at all. He was in Hell.

My editor didn’t make the connection, so in my final round of revisions I made some subtle changes that hopefully make it slightly clearer. I expect it would be obvious on a second reading at the very least. Fortunately, the story works just fine if the reader hasn’t pieced this together; but I’d be curious to know if anyone picked up on it.

If Nicholas Young had bogus high school transcripts, he would likely have attended Crowley High,
as seen in the X-Files episode “Die Hand Die Verletzt” (Season 2, Episode 14, January 27, 1995 © Fox).