Pun Salad

According to IMDB, this little movie managed to gross $222,011 in the US earlier this year, safely in the "bomb" category. But the critics pronounced it decent, and the Netflix algorithm thought I would like it, and so to Pun Salad Manor it came. And, lo, it was very entertaining. Movie audiences don't know everything.

The setup is Standard Grisly Horror Plot 7b: A group of pretty college kids are off to the remote Appalachian back country for a camping trip. But—oh oh—they run into a couple of native hillbillies (Tucker and Dale) who seem to be menacing. But never mind, they're off to their campsite. Which just happens to be adjacent to a derelict shack in which our hillbillies reside.

But the thing is: Tucker and Dale are really pretty good guys. Uneducated and naïve, maybe. And Tucker is a little dim; Dale, on the other hand, is kind of smart. Nevertheless, some merry mixups serve to escalate the tensions between the kids and the hillbillies; it doesn't help that (a) the kids are the clumsiest screwups I've seen in a movie this year; (b) one of the kids is kind of a violence-prone psycho. Bodies start piling up.

It's all played for laughs, and it worked for me. The MPAA rated it R for "bloody horror violence, language and brief nudity", but the "bloody horror violence" has a strong slapstick component.

It's a real change of pace for the actor playing Tucker: Alan Tudyk is probably best known for his intrepid spaceship piloting in Firefly.

• At McSweeney's, Greg and Teddy Wayne present their New Year's Resolutions:

  640 x 480

  800 x 600

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  Get into jazz

  Usually I don't quote entire articles, but…

• Darnit, I really thought Russell and Katy had a shot at lifetime bliss. Looks as if it was more like 400 days.

• My new hope: Zooey and Joseph:

  Hey, they're good! One of my Christmas gifts was a various-artists collection of Buddy Holly covers, Listen To Me. Ms. Deschanel sings "It's So Easy" and does a fine job.

• At Language Log, Mark Liberman discourses on Hashtags' mission creep. An interesting topic, because I believe I saw Hashtag Mission Creep open for Big Audio Dynamite in '87.

• A new attempt at calendar reform is the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar. 364 days per year, 52 weeks of seven days each. 12 months of 30 or 31 days each. Every five or six years an "Extra" week is celebrated, not part of any month.

  Since 364 == 52 x 7, a given date falls on the same day-of-week every year. January 1 is always Sunday.

  Kids with birthdays in the Extra week? They would age very slowly, even slower than people born on February 29 do now. Easter, since it's based on a lunar calendar, would still bounce around.

  Hanke and Henry also propose doing away with time zones and Daylight Saving Time. Everyone's on UTC, Zulu, Greenwich Mean Time. This is something Pun Salad has advocated before, and it's nice to see it getting attention.