First, let me begin with a few personal notes:
Many thanks to my wonderful teaching assistant Kip, who was a big help during my physical and emotional convalescence, especially when administering his world-class perineal massages, for covering this weblog for me while I was, you know, convalescing and getting my perineum tenderly knuckled.1
Many thanks to everyone who left a comment or thought about leaving a comment (I know who you are, you kind souls!) on that last post that Kip left. I have been soaking up your healing mindthoughts like some sort of extra-large psychic Zorbeez™.2
Many thanks to Mr. Sween who has kindly given “Sween Week” his holy blessing.3
Thank you for indulging an old man’s fancies.
SWEEN WEEK, MFERS
So I’m kicking off Sween Week4 with this gem of a “tweet”. Let us pick this “tweet” apart like the glorious odoriferous onionoid it appears to be.
This “tweet” exemplifies Sween’s (perhaps fictional) existence as a tortured man-child5. In this “tweet”, Sween lies awake at night pondering horrificalities until he spirals downward into a mental pit of anguish inside which no light can exist and where sleep is impotent to save one from the madness that grows in ones own brain, which is a common theme he returns to often in his “tweets”. This is why so many people think he is so funny, unlike sad clowns or every other Canadian. In this case he is abusing his imagination privileges by considering the Omega Supervillain.
The humor of this “tweet” derives from the fact that everyone knows that the Omega Supervillain is in fact 1983 Soviet Russia. Sween subverts this universal expectation and instead creates humor through a surprising amalgam of several supervillains from popular works of fiction:
- “Lord” clearly refers to Jesus;
- “Adolf” is a pointed reference to Austrian footballer Adolf Hütter against whom Sween appears to be harboring some sort of hateful grudge because he, unlike Jesus, is clearly non-fictional;
- and “Skeletortron” which is a clever portmanteau of He-Man nemesis6Skeletor and the optical scanning systems created by the Scantron corporation for recording pencil marks on specially formatted sheets of paper.
It is the third of these that holds the most promise for further study, for obvious reasons.
Does Sween hate the Scantron corporation itself or its product? After all, such bubble-sheet multiple-choice apparati appear in several places:
- In schools, for standardized testing, which I assume they have in Canada but I wouldn’t know because they wouldn’t let me in;
- In many voting districts in the United States during federal, state and local elections;
- And for communicating with deaf-mute people over great distances.
It is difficult to know what Sween intends with this “tweet”, then. Does he mean to disparage the very few communication methods available to the deaf-mute? Does he hate the processes by which he was able to excel in school, which I have been told by many reliable sources7 he most certainly did? Is he unhappy with the recent election returns in Canada, where I assume some sort of duck or moose has been elected to office?8 I leave this to the reader. I personally suspect that he was passed over for a job at Scantron, probably as one of their sophisticated sheet-readers, and he is now greatly embittered by this. Adolf Hütter probably works there, too.
(source)
1 He’s very versatile.
2 That’s right, I said Zorbeez™. Look ‘em up.a ShamWOWs are for suckers and dilettantes.
3 He replied to my email! I’m never washing this computer again!
4 Which by the way will not just be one week and will not happen every day unless for some reason it is and it does.
5 Much like Michael Jackson! Can you believe it! I referenced both of the dead people! (See footnote a)
6 And occasional reluctant swing dance partner
7 Classmates.com
8 Just kidding. Lighten up, Canada.
aRIP Billy Mays, whom you might be surprised to learn was a quite a significant supporter of my research. I don’t know what I’d do if he had not generously doubled that offer of Mighty Putty™. (FOR FREE! Not including a reasonable shipping and handlement surcharge. Mighty Putty™ is a class 2 explosive and is very difficult to ship.)
IMPORTANT NOTE: Sween week graphics are courtesy of girlmonkey, whom you should follow on twitter.
