3 – Sons and Daughters:
Enrichment and Extras

See the Chapter 2’s Extras page for an overview (and disclaimers) of how languages are used in Barry Anderson.

Ma belle – “my beautiful” feminine; French.

Sneewittchen – “Snow White”; German – The original title of the Grimm’s fairy tale and its main protagonist.  I’m sorry, German, but I thought it was kind of a weird name to imagine for an actual little girl in fairy history (although Justin likes to say it in an angry German accent, or like “STEELwittchen!”), so I found a likely alternative…

Gwyneira – “white snow”; Welsh – An actual female given name that means literally the same thing, isn’t it easier to imagine “Snow White” being a sweet little Welsh girl, with a name that doesn’t sound like a hag who will shiv you?

Muirias – One of four mythical island cities in Irish folklore, the hollow that is filled with water and fading light.  In Barry lore, the island of Blue magic; will be described more in Chapter 7.

Dachaigh – “Home”; Scottish Gaelic.  The name for default spells, first referenced in 2 – Lessons.

Mionn a Draíocht – “Oath of Magic”, feminine possessive; Irish (Gaeilge).  In Barry lore, the ritual a fairy godmother completes when declaring her (or occasionally his) readiness to begin serving as a Wish Maiden.

Genitive cases and lenition actually super confuse me and I frequently yell at my language learning app when h’s get involved in Irish.  But I’m fairly certain that “Mionn a Draíocht” is the feminine possessive, with “a” meaning his, hers, or theirs, but if it were “his” it would be “Mionn a Dhraíochta” instead, and “theirs” would be “Mionn a nDraíochta.” Ergo, “Mionn a Draíocht” should be equivalent to “Oath of her Magic.” Since fairy godmothers are the only fay or fairies that undergo that particular ritual, the feminine term would really be the only one in use.  So yes, it’s technically wrong for Barry, and it pleases me.  The end.

Fées marraines – “fairy godmothers”; French – exactly what Dania says it means.  Because it’s French, the singular “fée marraine” sounds exactly the same.  Pretty much the OG and most iconic title for fairy godmothers, because the French basically codified the fairy godmother trope.

Tír nAill – “The Other Land”/“The Other Place” in Irish (Gaeilge); the Fayemark, introduced in 2 – Lessons.

Aeternitas – “Eternity”; Latin – the Roman notion of eternity, personified.

Fhios ag Titania – “Titania knows”; Gaeilge (Irish) – Fairy idiom with a similar meaning to “Lord knows”.  “Fh” is silent in Irish, so that’s going to be fun for me to try to pronounce once I get to the Chapter 3 audiobook.

Moirai – fate, fateful; Greek – The Moirai were the ancient Greek personifications of fate, three sisters that spun the threads of destiny.

Chapter 3 has more references to other stories and media than previous chapters.  In fact it ended up with a bit of a running motif of TV shows, more so than any other chapter, which I didn’t particularly expect.  But it’s fitting, seeing as Barry is trying to navigate his new place amongst the roles of sons and daughters (and mothers) in society, and TV shows demonstrate how a culture feels about these core relationships.  They establish tropes, archetypes, and our collective consciousness (for better or worse), and from a young age we turn to these engaging ongoing stories to establish both what’s “normal” and what’s possible.

So I thought I’d include a list, since I have an international audience, not everyone knows all media, and there’s a few more obscure references.  Because Barry is a nerd.  Hopefully no one minds if I explain even the references most readers know.

First-Person Shooter – A genre of video game where you play from a first-person perspective, often seeing just your character’s hands and gun.  Because there’s a lot of gun, usually, thus the “shooter.”  Although these days you can usually zoom out more than that and see your entire character.  Nick’s was intended to have Call of Duty vibes, although I’ve never personally played it.  The whole scene was actually inspired by a Star Citizen video that Justin showed me with three Nick-ish goobers running around in space.

I was particularly proud of the username “Excriment80085” (it’s like poop and crime together, guys!  So edgy!  And the number looks like… ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)), and you can assume that when Nick is talking about A-Hat, there’s some omitted dollar signs happening.  These are pretty common naming conventions for games on the internet, along with random gibberish.  “RenegadeBoobies” was the real handle of a person that friends were teamed up with in League of Legends and now he is immortalized forever.

“Dorks Illustrated” – Nick referencing his own comment back in Chapter 1, saying Barry was ready to be on the cover of the swimsuit issue of Dorks Illustrated, references the well-known annual issue of the magazine “Sports Illustrated,” known for attractive female models and celebrities wearing swimsuits, especially bikinis.  The Wikipedia page says: “First published in 1964, it is credited with making the bikini, invented in 1946, a legitimate piece of apparel.”  The cover model is considered an especially prestigious and sexy position in this piece of literature.

Okay, I just way over-explained that.

Wake Word – The word or phrase said to trigger a smart device reacting to what you say; “Alexa,” “Siri,” “Hey Google,” “Computer,” etc.

Princess TV Show – The show Barry flips to, with the little girl and the magical mentor, is an amalgamation of the too-many little girl TV shows I have watched, both when I was the target audience of said shows, and as an adult.  There’s a wide spectrum of quality in these shows when it comes to writing, plot, themes, and animation, most of which have vastly improved from when I was a child in the early ‘90s.

On the refined end of this spectrum are shows like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Sofia the First, and Disney’s Fairies.  On the high-medium end you get ones like Ever After High, Star Darlings, and Equestria Girls.  But then there’s plenty of media on the more cringey-but-charming end of this spectrum, and many of the little girl shows from the ‘80s and ‘90s fall into this category, including most the early generations of My Little Pony, Rainbow Brite, Lady Lovely Locks, Rose Petal Place, and the only fairy video they had at our VHS rental store, Star Fairies that you can watch in its entirety on YouTube which is particularly cringey in retrospect.  The CGI Barbie movies are spread across this spectrum.

Yes, I’ve watched all of these.  Yes, they all have doll lines based on them.  Okay, yes, I could tell you about most of their doll lines in-depth, but that’s not the point!

Watch for the “same animation repeated until it fades to black” especially on lower-budget from the ‘80s and ‘90s as animation was expensive and surely little girls didn’t care if they put a dance animation on repeat at the very end.  It’s much less common in computer-assisted animation.  The “laughing for some inexplicable reason” thing still comes up pretty often, maybe not as blatantly, but watch for it on kids’ TV shows:  The number of times they’ll end a scene on a joke, with varying degrees of humor success, and the scene will end on the whole group laughing.  Like it’s kind of a fun game to pick a random episode of a kids’ show, especially an old one, skip to the end and see what joke they end on and how the animation looks as it finishes, right before the theme song comes back on.  80’s example; modern example.

It isn’t necessarily a bad resolution to short-form media and it helps kids understand everything is okay at the end, I just think it’s a humorous trend and maybe an easy writing trick.

With little girls as the target demographic for these shows, common motifs, events, and character traits revolve around: fashion (fashion designers, models, shopping, dress-up, hair, makeup, fashion competitions); music (rock stars, singing, dancing–both ballet and pop, music and dance competitions); princesses (becoming princesses, princes, castles, tiaras, balls and ballgowns); fairies and mermaids; finding your talents and how you’re unique (which often include cooking/baking, art/design, music/dance, sports, animals, tech geekery or bookishness); wish granting/fulfillment; believing in yourself, making your dreams come true and the power of friendship.

Spoiler alert:  Literally all of these categories are motifs, details, themes or events in Barry, as he grumpily foreshadows while he watches a show like this on TV.  Oh Barry, honey, you don’t even know what’s coming for you and your fairy princess nightmares.  After all, I’ve watched a lot of little girl TV.

Classic Fairy Tales – I’m assuming people are at least somewhat familiar with Snow White (Schneewittchen) and Cinderella (Cendrillon), but here are the Wikipedia pages in any case.  And “Bibbity-Bobbity-Boo” is a reference to the fairy godmother in Disney’s Cinderella (1950).

Georgia Green – Not a real British actress, but doesn’t she sound like she could be?  I took inspiration from names like Kiera Knightly.

Samantha Stephens – The main character in the 1960s fantasy-sitcom Bewitched; a sassy witch living in suburbia with Darrin, her very normal advertising businessman husband who doesn’t get along with her catty, meddling witch mother.  Along with I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched is the genre codifier for magical-mundane sitcoms and Magical Girlfriend stories.  It’s one of the main shows referenced in the 1960s episode of WandaVision.

Most episode plots revolved around Samantha trying to balance her two worlds: being a witch who can make meals and historical figures appear with the twitch of her nose, and trying to be a good housewife to a husband who just wants life to be normal despite being married to a witch.  Hijinks ensue and usually magic will make something go socially and comedically haywire and has to be fixed so the status quo can be returned by the end of the episode, where Samantha and Darrin are relieved and share a TV-safe 1960s kiss.

Because of how much it parallels her own life, Dania would love it, and despite it being a really old TV show, Barry would have grown up with it.  Is it obvious from the way I write fantasy-sitcom that I did too?

Both Barry’s accidental vintage fit-and-flare petticoat dress and Nick’s husband-and-briefcase comment reference stereotypical ’50s/’60s black-and-white TV show portrayals of domesticity and gender roles, for better or worse.  They both have largely a pop cultural osmosis understanding of the era, from 1950s sitcoms and painful educational videos (this MST3K riffing of “A Date With Your Family” is gold).  But the entire kitchen scene demonstrates the layers upon layers of cultural trifle (meaning the dessert with layers, not as in “trifling,” like insignificant, although there’s an argument for that) that Barry and Nick have embedded into their subconsciousnesses, from both vintage and modern sources, about what is “normal” for the roles of sons and daughters in a domestic family group, and how terrified Barry is of being put into a girl cookie-cutter, stuck reflecting that sort of role, like a vintage paper doll.

Of note: Frank only says 26 words in the whole scene, including “Uhh,” and yet his unspoken opinions and reactions drive the entire scene, long before he even gets home.

Betty Crocker – I’ve learned from watching a lot of British cooking YouTube videos that brand names are definitely a local reference, to countries or sometimes even to regions.

Betty Crocker is an American food (especially baking) brand and advertising persona created in 1926.  The Wikipedia article says: “The name Betty was selected because it was viewed as a cheery, all-American name. It was paired with the last name Crocker, in honor of William Crocker, a Washburn Crosby Company director.”  She was intended to be a cultural icon of the American housewife and helper in the kitchen and the Betty Crocker Cookbook has become a staple in many American kitchens since the 1950s, with tons of editions.

Not Betty Crocker, but an adorable vintage cooking illustration and it’s exactly the outfit I pictured Dania giving herself to bake in, except with the apron and dress colors reversed!
No hat though, lol

Nick isn’t necessarily referencing Betty Crocker ads specifically, as part of what’s making the thirteen-year-old so uncomfortable about his big brother’s domestic goddess look is that it’s a lot more vintage-pin-up than clean-cut Betty Crocker would have gone for in its ad campaigns.

…Which now I’m realizing I might need to define “pin-up” for some readers.  (Although my first use of it was in Chapter 1.)  But “pin-ups” were sexy photos or illustrations of women, mass produced to be pinned up on guys’ walls, with a sliding scale of scandalousness based on the era and audience.  A lot of the most iconic are ‘40s and ‘50s illustrations that don’t really show anything, they just tease, especially putting cute girls into “Oopsie” type situations with skirts being compromised for panty-shots, etc.

I personally think they’re cute and hot, and enjoy what they bring out about femininity, but there are a wide variety of opinions on them and apparently when they were produced they were quite edgy.  But basically, these days, when someone talks about “pin-up” they tend to mean a vintage, particularly feminine, cheeky vibe, especially incorporating WWII and ‘50s era looks and intentionally sexy silhouettes.  (Angelle and Callous meet up on this topic and the idea of looking both classy and “eat your heart out” at the same time is one place they shake hands inside of me.  …Okay, and Ecee is super into “Oopsie”, but let’s pretend I didn’t just admit that on the internet.)

That’s the thing with all these vintage illustrations, both the pin-ups and the family ads, given the time period:  There’s an interesting air of both “squeaky clean domesticity” and “cheeky hidden secrets” at the same time in them.

But here are some actual vintage baking ads for help understanding the reference better.  This first one has exactly the girlish “Look, I’m almost a woman like mommy!  Aren’t I cute not being able to resist tasting while we’re baking?” that Barry is loath to embody.

And the mascot for this second one is wearing an outfit much closer in silhouette to Grape’s uniform than he’d like, wings and wand included.  “Big Sister”… I’m so sorry Nick…

Spider-Man – Teenage Marvel superhero; received spider powers when bitten by one.  Recurring theme: “With great power comes great responsibility.”  One of Barry’s favorite superheroes since he was little, and superheroes will come up a lot.

The Uncertainty Principle – Okay, this isn’t technically media and my knowledge of quantum physics is fairly limited, but here’s my best stab at the laconic version:  The physicist Heisenberg and others discovered that when you’re measuring absurdly small things, such as subatomic particles, it’s insanely hard to measure correctly where something is with any amount of accuracy, and in fact if you try to pinpoint it, you’re likely to be even more inaccurate than if you didn’t.  So acting certain about where something that small is, based on calculations, can end up screwing up the results.  Plus, the act of observing something in the first place means you’re having to interact with it, so that very act is going to alter what the thing being observed is doing.

All that is super cool and fair and actually seems like a negation of arrogance, recognizing how much you don’t know when performing experiments on these epically micro scales.  However there seems to be a common pop-science attitude, as a twisting of this principle and similar ones like it, that make the knowledge-bearer feel smart, that says that therefore everything cosmic, large or small, is unknowable and chaotic and that the universe is basically just matter and entropy in a bag.  Nihilism makes people feel smart, even if actual statistics and patterns, when examined, actually show them to be pretty stupid.

“Assimilated into the glitter hive-mind” – Group or hive-minds are a sci-fi, usually horror trope where each individual’s sense of identity is surrendered to the collective, where the entire meta-consciousness thinks and acts as one.  One of the most iconic of these hive-minds is the Star Trek villain The Borg Collective, an alien hive-mind that captures and enslaves new members through a process called “assimilation,” and afterward they have no sense of self or free will.  It’s really pretty scary, lol.  Although Barry’s mental image of being taken to the “fairy mother-ship” (a fairy godmother pun on mothership; quite pleased *chef’s kiss*), to be forced into some Barbie doll hive-mind of perky, sequin-encrusted space go-go dancers is amusing to me.

Library Poster – Libraries, at least in the US, often have posters attempting to make reading seem cooler to kids, either with celebrities holding books, or with illustrations of what the imagination looks like while reading.

Here’s a real one with Yoda from the ‘80s.  He’ll probably force-choke you if you don’t read.

Wormholes – Yeah, as far as I’ve read, wormholes are just ruffles in space.

I didn’t actually know this until I was writing how fairy portal spells work and Justin pointed out that Barry would know enough about wormholes to bring up the similarity.  My reaction was basically Dania’s.

Comic-Con – San Diego Comic-Con International is a huge convention for not only comics, but lots of genres of shows, movies, games, etc., often especially sci-fi and fantasy characters, and connecting creators with their fans.  Cosplays and costumes to these kinds of conventions can be mind-blowingly intricate.  I needed something for Terry to wish for (that would lead to Grape having an embarrassing slip-up), Googled when Comic-Con was during the year Barry is taking place, and it was literally that weekend.  (Terry summons on Wednesday, July 17th, Comic-Con was from July 18th-July 21st that year.)  Stars aligned.  Authenticity, boys and girls.

Electric Privateer: Betrayer of the Strange – Not a real anime.  The title came from me rigging together ideas from this anime title generator and trends I’d seen from looking down long lists of anime names.  The edgy animes very often seem to have titles that are basically MadLibs of [Exciting-Adjective Role: Mysterious and Edgy Subtitle that Tells You Pretty Much Nothing About The Premise].

Sparkle Yukiko the Mirage Mystic – Yeah, not a real anime Magical Girl series.  Started with this magical girl name generator but then tweaked it to maximize glitter and mystery.  I haven’t watched/read a lot of these shows/graphic novels, personally (I haven’t watched very much anime or manga personally).  Sailor Moon is the most well-known, but there’s literally thousands of these series.  But from what I gather, you take all the sparkle, glitter and bright colors from the princess shows like I talked about above, make it for a slightly older audience, throw in a lot of transformation sequences that no one is allowed to interrupt (although, you know what?  There’s a decent amount of transformation sequences in the American ones, but it’s mostly just regular clothes turning into party dresses), and then send the transformed heroines off to kick butt in all their finery!  …Or to sing in idol contests.  Because that requires magical transformation for some reason?  Japan, you’re very cute but your decisions confuse me sometimes.

Here, have a dollmaker version of Sparkle Grape the Mirage Mystic.  I had to hand-edit the hair because they didn’t have lavender, so light pink was the closest I could get.

MegaMorph – Not a real little boys’ show (although it is a Yu-Gi-Oh trading card apparently), but it was supposed to sound like a Transformers type show with similar title appeal to Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

Space Rangers – Emily’s preschooler would probably have watched shows like Buzz Lightyear of Star Command (and if he’s lucky, Star Wars: The Clone Wars) and dreamed about being a space ranger, graduating from being a space cadet.  Barry, having grown up with Star Wars in general, would much rather be cast as a Leia-type space princess, rocking the blaster aim and not taking crap, than a damsel-in-distress Green Skinned Space Babe (tropeified in shows like Star Trek: The Original Series) ready to swoon for the first space captain that comes her way and saves her from her tiny, sheltered planet.  Although, c’mon kid, even Leia got stuck in a space bikini.

Prime Directive – A guiding principle/rule of Starfleet in the Star Trek franchise that basically says don’t interfere with planets too much, especially by giving them technology they don’t have yet.  I haven’t watched enormous amounts of Star Trek, but from what I’ve heard, they break it kinda a lot.

Mount Doom – Most people probably have at least a cursory knowledge of Lord of the Rings by this point, so I’ll just hit the referenced highlights.  Frodo, the hobbit, has to carry the Ring which is the source of power, the container of the soul of the Dark Lord Sauron, who wants to subjugate the entire world so he’s the only one who has a will.  Despite being literally tiny and not a warrior, Frodo has the inner strength to be corrupted by the Ring much slower than most, and so both his mentor, Gandalf the Grey and later the elven queen Galadriel tell him that he must be the one to carry the Ring, that despite how difficult and unprepared he feels, and how much he has to sacrifice for it, Frodo and no other needs to be the one to carry the burden of the Ring all the way to the volcano Mount Doom, to be destroyed where it was forged in the first place.

And as Justin will be quick to inform you, linguist author J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t just use the word as we do in English today, like DOOOOOM!  Instead it archaically meant something more akin to “Destiny,” similar to “Moirai”… or “Fey.”

Gandalf was known as “Gandalf Stormcrow” because he went around telling people when bad things were going to happen, so they resented him bringing bad tidings.  He was also resented by a lot of the hobbit population for nudging Frodo’s Uncle Bilbo on his adventure in The Hobbit.  Basically he messed with the status quo all the time and made people mad.  How dare he do what he was literally sent to Middle Earth to do and save the world!

“Although if Frodo repeatedly had to turn into a hobbit lass for some reason, it’d be a dumb book, he thought.”  It pleases me to write self-burns lol.

He-Man Ritual – So for He-Man, go see most the things I said about ‘80s and ‘90s cartoons in the Princess Shows section… and then add bulging muscles, swords, skeletons, and large reptiles, and you’ll get most boys’ cartoons from the ‘80s and ‘90s.  I haven’t personally watched much He-Man, although I do love the “I don’t like to feel good, I like to feel evil!” Skeletor meme, because that’s how villain motives work.  But basically to… power-up… what do they actually call it?  Just “transforming?”  In order to transform from a regular prince into a superpowered prince who looks exactly the same, Prince Adam puts his Power Sword (I didn’t make this up) straight up into the air and says “By the Power of Grayskull!!” and then he has a cool transformation with lightning, and that turns him into He-Man.

So you see where Barry’s getting the parallel.

It’s totally different than Magical Girl power-ups, guyyys!  This is like manly and stuff!!

… He still ends up scantily clad though.

Spaaaace – Just going to throw out quick explanations for several of the terms used during Grape’s Mionn a Draíocht, just in case people don’t know them:

Golden spiral and ‘Fibonacci-ing’ – Without hurting my brain trying to describe this too specifically, I’ll just say that a golden spiral is a logarithmic spiral which follows a mathematic ratio that is a pattern found throughout the cosmos, on micro, macro, and mean scales.  The ratio is an irrational number, but it follows very closely to the Fibonacci sequence, which is a pattern of each number being the sum of the two previous numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55…), so if you follow that pattern you get a very similar spiral.  But the super cool thing is that it’s found all throughout nature, from galactic arms, to rose and other plant spirals, shells, etc.  And it’s been found to be a pattern in aesthetics, what humans naturally find beautiful without trying to, in faces and image framing, architecture etc.

Here’s a music video by CHVRCHES that I just love that uses the golden spiral as imagery for “Never Ending Circles,” lined up with nature.  (I have lots of CHVRCHES music in Barry and this one is going to end up in his 22-year-old, young adult era, although I don’t have a spot for it yet.  “Here’s to just another no man” works particularly well as a lyric.)

Fun fact: “The rose-shaped spiral staircase of perpetuity, which was somehow himself,” is one of my favorite phrases that I’ve ever written.

St. Elmo’s Fire – The weather phenomenon of purple electricity, not the ’80s song, but to read about how they’re related and how I use the song in Chapter 1, read the post here.

Kelvin – Interestingly, a term I learned first in my Television Production college class and then used again in my Astronomy one, Kelvin is a temperature scale that starts at absolute zero.  It’s a really broad scale and they tend to measure the heat/energy of stars in Kelvin, so it also ends up being a measurement of the color-temperature of light, red versus blue, etc.  Like the sun is much bluer than inside light, etc.  Lower energy colors, like red, are less Kelvin than higher energy colors, with blue being at the top of the Kelvin spectrum.

“My god, it’s full of stars” – I have to credit Justin for the full extent of my knowledge of this quote, as he was a little boy who grew up starry-eyed for especially the second one of these movies.

So this is a well-known quote, associated with 2001: A Space Odyssey, a pioneering science fiction movie directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1968.  Some of the most oft-quoted lines from it are centered around HAL, the supercomputer on the spaceship, such as “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.”  “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”, and singing “Daisy, Daisy” in an increasingly slower, slurred voice.

Like I said, it was a ’60s pioneer in sci-fi movies, based on an Arthur C. Clarke novel that (according to Justin who read most of the series) was much more pioneering, especially when it came to the technology and motivation of the aliens in the story.  The movie itself is… slow.  It’s really really slow.  Seriously, it’s hard to keep track of what’s actually happening in the plot because each shot goes on for so long.  (Justin made an edit of it that’s 30 minutes shorter, while taking out no lines or plot elements, and mostly leaving in all the shots, just making them shorter.  It’s so much easier to follow which makes it much cooler!)

Super short summary: In the year 2001, Dave Bowman is an astronaut sent as crew on a space mission based on where a signal from a mysterious monolith (giant black domino implied to have caused humanity to evolve from apes by giving them intelligence) points, to investigate Jupiter.  Spoilers, sorry:  HAL, the supercomputer who controls the entire ship including the life support, trips on his own programming and kills all the scientists on board and the only other crew member.  It’s really scary and Dave barely survives to shut HAL down (which is very sad, even though HAL was really terrifying).  Handling that is the bulk of the movie (besides long shots of monkeys with rocks and space flight attendants).

But after Dave scrapes by with his life, he arrives at Jupiter and… How do I even describe this? lol  If you’d rather just watch this part to understand, here’s the video of it.  He goes through a stargate, which is shown as technicolor stars and flashing lights, flying through a tunnel of the cosmic, with intense numinous choral singing, to show this experience that is literally blowing his mind.  It’s very cool, fairly scary, and intensely ’60s, meaning super trippy.

On the other side of that, he touches a monolith himself, goes through time-skips (which freak me out) and becomes an old man really quickly, then undergoes another transformation and emerges floating in space as a space embryo.  Literally a baby in space, which is why Barry makes the “glitter baby” joke.  I’d like to tell you that it makes more sense in the context of the movie, but it really doesn’t.  I guess in the book it makes more sense and he’s starting on his next phase of evolution, like the apes did, toward becoming like the advanced alien race of benevolent aliens who placed the monolith in the first place.  But without knowing that, the movie ending on a baby floating through space feels a little weird and unsatisfying.

But, before mind-blow and space baby, Dave’s last words in a transmission back to Earth, as he goes into the stargate, is a garbled recording of “My God, it’s full of stars!” as his eyes dilate to see a whole new universe.  (That last part was quoting me, didja see what I did there?)

However, that epic quote, that so many people know is Dave Bowman about to blow his frickin’ mind, isn’t actually in 2001: A Space Odyssey at all!  The movie anyway.  It’s in the novel, but it’s also in 2010: The Year We Make Contact, the sequel movie, made in 1984!  Where they play it back as Dave’s transmission several times.  It’s a good movie; much better pacing and very classically Cold War Era.  Justin loved it growing up.

So yes, after his Mionn a Draíocht, Barry is feeling very “eeeeEeeeeEeeeeEeEEeeEEEEeEEEEEEEEEEE!” and like a naked baby shot out into space.

Arthur C. Clarke also penned the awesome quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  Considering Barry’s relationship with both science and magic, I like to keep this in mind.  Maybe there’s quite a bit of magic in the universe already, which we may not be aware of, that there’s an inherent science to, we just need to develop the technology to see and understand it, to not be so uncertain.

“Part of him wanted to talk to it like Lassie: “What is it, girl?  Did Timmy fall down the well and get boobs?” – Lassie was a “children’s adventure series” on TV from the ‘50s to the ‘70s, about a heroic dog named Lassie and how she was always helping the family she lived with, including the boy “Timmy,” whom apparently she saved on countless occasions.  I guess not only was the dog much more capable than all the humans on the show at saving their little boy, but they seemed really good at miraculously being able to interpret her simple barks of distress?  I’ve actually never seen an episode of Lassie, it’s just permeated the public consciousness, especially in the oft referenced and parodied, “What is it girl?  Did Timmy fall down the well?”

Well {rimshot}, apparently in the original show, across the many seasons, Timmy never actually fell down a well!  Nor did his predecessor, Jeff.  Here’s an article talking about it, and it says:

“The joke mocks the way that Lassie was able to so accurately communicate with the adults on the show to let them know of the trouble Timmy got into, and boy did Timmy get into a lot of trouble!

“The website Lassie Web once detailed a bunch of the problems Timmy got into. Here is a sampling…
…let a rabid dog out of a cage (“Graduation”)
…ate deadly nightshade berries (“Berrypickers”)
…threatened by an escaped female circus elephant (“The Elephant”)
…hides out in the treehouse when he has pneumonia (“Spartan”)
…threatened by a mother wolf (“The Wolf Cub”)
…falls into the lake (“Transition” and “The House Guest”)
…develops a high fever from the measles (“The Crisis”)
…is almost shot by Paul (“Hungry Deer”)
…ignores severe stomach pains; he’s diagnosed with appendicitis (“Hospital”)
…is trapped in an abandoned house with Boomer (“Trapped”)
…wanders into a live mine field (“Junior GIs”)
…is menaced by a bear (“Campout” and “The Renegade”)
…is trapped in a mine (“Old Henry”)
…gets a black eye playing football (“Growing Pains”)
…nearly flies a home-made glider off a cliff (“Flying Machine”)
…runs into a burning house to save a neighbor lady and passes out (“The Whopper”)
…is endangered by dynamite picked up by an escaped lab chimp (“The Man from Mars”)

“And that is truly just a sampling of the problems he got into over the seven seasons he was the lead character on the show.  You’ll notice what is NOT on that list.”

Apparently Lassie herself was the only one who ever actually fell down a well.  Go figure.

I assume this Lassie trope is what this Toy Story 2 joke is parodying:

But anyway, I love Barry attempting to figure out the twinkle-squeaks of his animal-companion wand.  (If he’s a fairy princess he needs an animal companion right?!  Although Nick is also in the running for this role.  Maybe Nick is more of the villain’s animal companion, like Iago or Meowth)  And I love the absurdity of Barry’s mind juxtaposing this stock joke from the buttoned-up squeaky-clean scripts of a black and white 1960s family show, with the idea that the trouble the little boy has gotten himself into is falling down and well and getting stuck with breasts–as Barry feels is the well-falling scenario he can’t seem to extricate himself from.  And his wand-companion is no help.

Anyway, most of my humor tries to shove absurdity onto the mundane, which brings out previously unappreciated contrast.  And if you don’t come here for me to over-explain why my jokes are hilarious then what do you come here for?