If you forget everyone you know…Happy new year

So we always sing “Auld Lang Syne” on New Years, and whether it’s my bad ears and faulty imagination or the slur of sleepy singers with too much punch in them, or the fact that I don’t speak Scottish and no one told me we were switching languages,  I always heard the words different.

To my tender ears the song was called “Old Anxine”, and it went thus:

“Should all acquaintance be forgot, in days of Old Anxine…”

Difficult to interpret, no doubt, but after much thought I came to the conclusion that Anxine must be something about anxiety, some stressful condition or state of woe.  Old Anxine, then, was some pretty bad days that our forefathers went through, and then they wrote this song referring to them.  Like the Potato Famine or the 1976 Bucs.

The gist then, is that if you forget everyone you know, like you wake up and have amnesia and you forget who all your friends and family and co-workers are, so that you have no more acquaintances; and then on top of that you find yourself in days of Old Anxine, meaning either really bad days that are like the really Old Bad Days that we all remember, or else actually in those bad days themselves (whether by time travel or else the guy was living in those days when he wrote the song)…

That’s where I always got stuck, because then everyone would sing about Old Anxine over and over:  “For Old Anxine, my dear, for Old Anxiiiiiine…”  Then they would start over.  No one ever told me what to DO if all acquaintance should be forgot in days of Old Anxine.  It was like people were coming up with this horrible hypothetical situation where you wake up in terrible times and don’t know anybody, but then right when they’re going to tell you what to do about it, they are drunk and so they just start singing about those Old Anxine days over and over again to their old drunk wife.

Therefore the song could run thus in a modern way:  “Hey man, here’s some advice.  If you ever forget everyone, and you’re in some trouble like those really bad days…hey, wow, remember those bad old days, pretty mama?  They were really bad, huh?  Yeah, they were bad.  So anyway, if you ever forget…”  And on and on in meaningless repetition.

Why those depressing, frustrating lines were always just right for joyfully ringing in the New Year and kissing someone was beyond me.

I am just glad I have never yet found myself in that situation.  But if I ever am an amnesiac in times like those bad times, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do:  wow, those times really sucked.

Some observations about the X-people

So I was watching X-men for the sixth or seventh time a few nights ago, while my wife was hanging out with her chick friends in the other room.  And I may not be the world’s biggest X-men expert.  OK, I am definitely not the world’s biggest X-men expert.

But how about Wolverine’s claws?  Where do they go when they retract?  If they only go back right beneath his knuckles then there’s no way he could bend his wrists.  He would be Stiff-Wrist Logan, the Canadian Mystery Guy.  Think about all the things you couldn’t do with adamantium wrists.  Like play the fiddle or deal cards in a smooth and attractive manner, or chip.  (As in golf.)  Or hold out your hand in the universal gesture for “stop”.  He would just be giving the sign for “I punch you in the face” or “I poke you in the throat”, which would make directing traffic awkward and give him a bad reputation.  Come to think of it, how would he arrange his hair in that swirly horn pattern without some repeated circular wrist action and a lot of product?

Or if they retract all the way into his forearms, he has to make sure his wrists are straight when he extends them or they would poke through the wrong spot in his hands.  Even with instant healing powers that would get annoying over time.

And cyclops.  OK, what’s the advantage of having laser eye beams if you have to use your hand to make it fire?  That’s like just carrying around a laser gun, which any storm trooper or GI Joe cartoon character can replicate.  Or it’s more like a laser gun that is attached to your face all the time.  Gunhead McGee is what they’d call you in school, and you couldn’t do anything about it because if anyone ended up with a laser hole in their chest, you know who they’d blame every time.

And why doesn’t Rogue steal her own powers when she touches herself?  And why are Storm and the frog tongue guy just all-around lame?

Don’t get me wrong; I believe we could all use some gratuitous genetic mutation that would bestow amazing powers or double jointed-ness in our knees and elbows, or the instinctive mastery of the semi-colon.  I just think the creators could think through the implications of some of the mutants they invent.

For example, you could invent a guy named Plastic-Face Alan.  His face looks regular, but it’s genetically really plastic.  So in addition to being able to change his face into whatever he wants it to look like, he could also absorb any face-punch ever, and trap your fist in liquid face-plastic.  That’s a double payoff for a single mutation, which is exactly the kind of thing we need to be working towards here.