Crossposted at
MyLeftWing:
For those of you like myself who find it too painful to deal with all of the events and goings on today very much, I dedicate this diary.
Are there any great unsolved mysteries in your life? Now I don't mean murders or anything like that, I'm talking about the everyday stuff- something you saw or read or experienced that you have been trying to find again for the rest of your life and never have? There are four things like that I can think of off the top of my head for me. I'm sure other people can come up with their own.
Here are my four GUMMs:
1) A childrens' book that my brother used to read to me and I later read myself once I learned. He doesn't remember the name or the author or the illustrator. All I remember about it was that it was very surreal and about a kid who had a lot of pets and at one point he feeds them all and each pet had a bowl shaped like its food. I'll always remember that part because the cat supposedly had a 'milk-shaped bowl' and, precocious brat that I was, rather than accept the absurdity, spent many hours trying to fathom how one could make a bowl that was milk-shaped. Like I thought there would be some shape that would have the essence of 'milk' without actually being liquid. Anyway, I have been on an eternal quest to find that book ever since.
2) A cartoon I saw as a child. I have a vivid memory of literally one single word in the cartoon and the rest is a blur. I believe it was a feature and not part of a series, but I could be wrong. It couldn't have been later than 1980 when I saw (on TV) it because I couldn't have been much more than 3.
The cartoon seemed to my 3-year-old brain to be dramatic rather than comedic and involved what, at the time, I believed to be anthropomorphic monkeys or apes. Literally the only thing I remember about the cartoon is the hero ape/monkey/thing was named Marius because I remember his love interest crying out 'Marius!' as clear as I remember my own name but I have NO idea what it could possibly be.
3) When I was in high school in the early 90s, I had a show at a 'cable radio station' (meaning you could only listen to it if you hooked your TV coax up to your stereo) called WQAX in Bloomington, Indiana where I was born and raised. The guy before me had a show that featured a lot of rap and hiphop and occasionally electronica and really broadened my taste in music. I was probably the first white Jewish kid under 15 in Bloomington to own a De La Soul album.
Anyway, one day I was in there and he was playing a song which involved a sample of what sounded like it was from a 1960s educational film about not 'going too far with a boy' or something. It is a (presumably) teenage girl saying, "you want me to take off my top?" Now at the time, I asked the person who had this show about the song and he told me then, if my memory serves me correctly, that it was called 'Take Off My Top' by 'Infantile Analysis.' Since then, I have searched in vain for that song for years but have found absolutely no trace of either it or the group/individual who did it.
4) Finally- as a precocious brat of a teenager, I spent a lot of time (probably illegally) exploring Indiana University's computer network, especially via their now long-gone but sorely missed NeXT Cluster with some fellow hacker friends. At some point, possibly on the cluster, possibly somewhere out on the internet, someone- none of us to this day can remember who- downloaded a sound file called yarhoo.au
The file was a very weird-sounding male voice speaking almost like he was someone who was highly mentally retarded and just babbling nonsense, except it sounded like it had a structure or language to it. All that remains in our memories of this sound is that it started with what sounded like 'De ban say' and at some point in the middle says, 'Yar... hoo.'
We used to spend ages trying to figure out what it meant, never did, and have never found that sound file again. It has kept me awake nights. Seriously.