Three things

• So I finally got a chance to see the new Disney villainess thing that's started a little flap. Moving beyond the really obvious "gah! They did what? Does everything female in these movies have to be a pretty pretty thin young princess?" these aren't terrible designs, I don't think.
  
  There's some character design thinking going on at odds to my increasingly leftist tendencies; I'm a little uncomfy with how much I conceptualize fat as softening someone's villainy, but a physically larger villain is a dramatic silhouette and reads as more adult (which gets into the stereotype of everyone heroic being young). It seems a shame not to go anywhere with these versions, though, so I sort of wish there were prequels with these young villainesses, without all of the assets that they had in the original movies, grasping and manipulating and murdering (okay, it's Disney, so murder means pushing people off cliffs) their way to power. 'Cause man, villains make for great background stories and I really liked I Claudius.
  
  Plus with Ursula, we don't know how old she actually is. She might have been young centuries before the events of Little Mermaid. Hm... younger sea-witch... Greek epic... hey, crossover with Disney's version of Hercules? Referring to that mythological character as "Hercules" rather than Heracles makes me squirm, but I'm willing to do it for Harryhausen styled monsters.
  
  And I'm not even gonna comment about how, as an octopus, giving birth would kill Ursula so part of why she's held on for that long is that she's probably a lesbian, which completely fiddles with the Disney movie and what she's actually hoping to get out of Ariel. That way fanfic lies. Bad fanfic.
  
  
• As a kid I ran into this one really great track on a klezmer record which was just dynamite, really badass stuff, stuff that stuck in my head so much that now I can still hum it from memory. It occurs to me that the reason I liked it so much was that it basically was a surf tune. We're talking Dick Dale levels of surf tune. I can't remember the name nor which record it was on, and it's not "Der Yiddische Soldat in die Trenches" like what I thought - but that guess pointed me at proof in the form of "Ishai's Freylech" by the Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band, which is basically a surf tune. Not all traditional music would work as surf guitar, but some would.
  
  Did listening to klezmer recordings as a kid influence my love for surf guitar? Or could it be that I really liked some of those klezmer recordings as an ancestral echo of the 19th century Black Sea beach scene? (Which I'm now picturing as a horrific cross between Yidl Mitn Fidl and The Endless Summer, filmed in black and white with the requisite Eisenstein references.)
  
  
• Anyone else having problems getting anywhere from the front page of DeviantArt?

ethnic stereotyping, oh noes!

"So, tell me again, about the hash bars?"
"I should know from hash bars?"
"Hash is legal there, nebbech?"
"Hash is legal, and a hundred percent legal, but they don't want you should walk into a restaurant, order a coffee and perhaps a nice danish, and start smoking away. They want you should smoke in your home or certain designated places."
"Those are hash bars?"
"Uh-huh. It's legal to use it, it's legal to buy it, and if you're the proprietor of a hash bar, it's legal to sell it. It's illegal to carry it but, Heaven forbid, you should get stopped by the popos in Amsterdam, it's illegal they should search you."
"Gottenyu."
"You dig it the most."