Weekly Weird: July 9th-15th (Dorks, Tom Kenny, Teddy Bears, and Green Jellö)

July 9th

Today we start the week with the third food holiday in a row, it's Sugar Cookie Day. Sugar Cookies feel kinda underrated to me. My favorite kind of sugar cookie is the brown sugar, chewy, and topped with rainbow sprinkles variety. Something you can usually find at the store or make yourself if you are feeling festive.

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July 10th

Today is Teddy Bears' Picnic Day. This holiday celebrates the classic children's song of the same name. The song was originally just a melody written in 1907 with the lyrics being written in 1932, so only half of the song is in the public domain until 2028. That being said, it's a cute and whimsical song. So do keep an eye out for any local happenings among stuffed animals if you do find yourself in a wooded area. And you should probably keep an eye out for real bears too.

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July 11th

Today is the anniversary of 2008's Journey to the Center of the Earth. Out of all the family action adventure films that came out in its era, this is the one I remember enjoying the most. It's a loose Jules Verne adaptation, and Rotten Tomatoes sums it up perfectly as "Modern visuals and an old fashioned storyline…" but I think this kinda works in the films favor.

It feels like the late 00's equivalent of an older sci-fi film you watch because it's on TV, and while you didn't catch the first 30 minutes and everything is objectively kinda bad, you objectively enjoy it until there's sudden casual bigotry, usually anti-native, and the movie quickly gets really hard to watch. The only thing this one has is minor casual sexism from a teenage boy acting annoying. You should watch this movie because it has Brendan Frasier in it.

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July 12th

Today is "National Eat Your Jello Day", a holiday that feels more "some marketing guy made this one up" than most holidays I talk about, but I decided to talk about it because I can loosely use it as an excuse to talk about a legal incident involving a weird band.

Green Jellÿ is an odd comedy metal band known for wearing really stupid outfits and having music videos where puppets beat eachother up, so really tremendous stuff. Their best known song is a raunchy modern retelling of the three little pigs with a actually quite well animated stop motion music video. They are also known because half the band's early lineup went on to form the band Tool.

Anyway, the band was originally known as Green Jellö; Named because nobody in the band liked the green lime flavor of the dessert we are celebrating today. Kraft thought their metal band name was infringing on their Jell-O trademark and took them to court where they agreed to change it as long as they didn't have to face industrial food lawyers. They had to face industrial food lawyers anyway because a lot of their puppets that fight each other were parodying cereal mascots. Go figure.

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July 13th

Today is Tom Kenny's birthday. Tom Kenny is a voice actor known for playing:

SpongeBob SquarePants, The Ice King from Adventure Time, The Narrator and Mayor from The Powerpuff Girls, Spyro the Dragon, Dog from Catdog, Edwardo from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Heffer from Rocko's Modern Life, Scoutmaster Lumpus from Camp Lazlo, Carl from Johnny Bravo, Peepers from Wander over Yonder, Val Hallen from Dexter's Lab, And Plasticman, to name a dozen of his over 2000 credited roles.

[ASSOCIATE NOTE: The man has the range]

But what you probably didn't know is that he also has a band. Tom Kenny and The Hi Seas is a 13 piece group headed by Kenny and specializing in "rock and roll soul dance party music". Personally I think their stuff is incredible. They don't have any studio stuff at this point, but I've been jamming out to a live recording I found online. Thank goodness for bootlegs.

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July 14th

Today I'm talking about a cartoon I actually mentioned yesterday. Johnny Bravo, created by Van Partible, is a cartoon about the surreal adventures of a guy who dresses like James Dean, talks like Elvis, has half a brain, and is constantly getting rejected by women. The show is definitely on the silly side, and it ran for 4 seasons on Cartoon Network.

One interesting thing about Johnny Bravo is that it had an unusual spinoff show that just recently stopped being lost media, as of writing. JBVO was an animation block hosted by the animated Bravo where viewers would call in and request certain shows in the 7-11 minute range. That is, except for the one time someone asked for Dragon Ball Z, and they played it sped up while Johnny is explaining what Goku is up to. And this footage was unavailable for years but now everyone can watch it. I love it when a lost media hunt has a good ending.

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July 15th

Today is "Be a Dork Day", and boy do I have that one covered. I will admit I consider myself a dork, geek, nerd, freakazod, and dweeb. Computers are my life, I love computers more than most things. I am also very on the spectrum but that's neither here nor there. I'm also not saying anyone on the spectrum is immediately a dork, but there's definitely a healthy overlap in my experience.

Anyway I'm going to say the dorkiest thing I can think of. I'm still a bit peeved about something from a few months ago: Adobe is still using Homestar Runner as a symbol of their achievements when they didn't make it, the creators never liked any version of flash past 3, and they didn't have any issue with the prospect of the original site being lost with their abandonment of Flash. If it wasn't for Ruffle, one of the most important sites to the culture of the internet would have been lost, and Virus still isn't what it used to be. Adobe could have fixed the security and mobile issues with Flash, but those cheap chuckleheads couldn't be bothered after monopolizing web development. And I should stop here before I get too embarrassingly nerd-angry.