orthogonal to alive @avi@computerfairi.es

He had some really wild and weird ideas about what was appropriate to say to a small child. I remember a conversation we had once about OJ Simpson marrying a white woman. This was before the murder trial. I was born in '84, so we have a window between 1988 and 1993 when this might have happened. I remember it because it was so fucking weird.

My adopted father nicknamed me Mowgli, which in retrospect should have tipped me off that he was racist; however, at the time, I was 4 and not yet "woke"

The first "Peanuts" comic strip, but instead of Charlie Brown, it's Rivers Cuomo walking by, and instead of Shermie or Patty or whatever, it's me in the last panel, saying "How I hate him!"

The top Weezer scholar on Genius is...Rivers Cuomo, with a little green checkmark next to his name so you know it's him, explaining his own damn shitty songs

I was joking, but honestly, all of the most prominent animal characters in Disney's Jungle Book are queer coded. Baloo and Bagheera are practically a married couple. Shere Khan is Scar with muscles. Kaa goes without saying. King Louis is basically the leader of a rambunctious, all-male night club.

The Jungle Book is a very relatable story because it's about a feral wolf-man being rejected by a succession of families then building a found family with a diverse crew of extremely gay animals

There is also a sequel to the book Jungle Book, called the Second Jungle Book. It's a very depressing book, not least because Kipling wrote it. It's just filled with teenage Mowgli striding around being angsty about humanity.

The cast is exactly what you would expect for 2003 -- John Goodman as Baloo the Bear, and Haley Joel Osment as Ruyard Kipling's noble savage orphaned Indian boy

Today I learned:

* There was a Jungle Book 2

* Smash Mouth did the song that played over the credits of Jungle Book 2

* That song was a cover of Mr. Louis Prima's "Wanna Be Like You"

Louie Prima is just Italian Louis Jordan.