The mystery of "Himmmm"

It's that time of year again, when I brag about my costuming exploits. I was in Flagstaff for about a decade, and in that time, I ended up sort of the de factor designer for Halloween outfits -- various and sundry people helped with the manufacturing, but since for some reason I can apparently think in floppy wireframe, I was almost always the one who headed the charge around JoAnn Fabrics for patterns and textiles and notions.

One of my really terrible urges that I probably shouldn't confess to in public is the one where I keep wanting to use other people as walking dressforms. Moggie puts up with it, from time to time; she's fun to design for because she's built almost exactly like Agatha Heterodyne and gets happier and happier the more buttons and zippers and pockets you add. She also has endless patience for the part where we sit around drinking and talking about stupid things, and she wanders back and forth to the sewing machine whenever I finish pinning something, because the design is inevitably all in my head and I can only describe the appropriate methods of construction by snipping out pieces of scratch paper and waving my hands around like a lunatic.

I'm casting around for permissions so I can show off some of the other designs I've contributed to, but the answer that came back firstest and fastest was from the Golf Samurai himself! As depicted below:

Golf Samurai is ADHD The First, from an earlier post -- the one who had to be prodded down to the pharmacy to replace the amphetamines he couldn't find without having his amphetamines handy. Golf Samurai, the concept, was apparently the product of way too much Red Bull and many late nights with ADHD The Second, a cheerfully strange fella who is also the source of quotes like, "It burns with the power of SHARK." (I don't know how he got there, and I'm not sure I want to.) I found out about it when I was taking an A/V production class and I had to record a 60-second promo for credit. The instructor didn't care what it was a promo for -- which was probably a mistake on his part -- so I turned to my weirdest friends and said, "I've booked an edit bay for the afternoon about a week from now. Go write a minute of whatever you want, rated PG at most, and you can have a proper recording of it, with popper-stoppers on the mic and everything."

The result was that a week later, when I'd finished herding cats and actually gotten Moggie and the Samurai and the Hobo into the edit bay with me, was a one-minute radio promo for a movie they called Golf Samurai. This exciting action-packed martial-arts golf-related picture follows the quest of the titular character as he takes revenge for his family, who were slaughtered by the evil Football Ninjas. I'll post it if I can find a copy -- I am crap at mixing, as it turns out, but the piece incorporates such classic bits as Moggie, in her role as the matriarch of the Football Ninja Clan, exclaiming with utmost seriousness, "Stop  him! He must not be allowed to perpetuate his plaid lineage!" which I feel certain is a sentence that has not been uttered in the English language at any point before or since, and the Hobo's surprisingly good "movie trailer announcer" voice the whole way through.

Golf Samurai: The Movie is also the source of a running joke that plagued my A/V production instructor for the rest of the semester, as the promo mentions that the soundtrack to the film contains "the hit single, 'Neko wo Kakeru', by the band Metallic Squirrel". Neko wo Kakeru, in Japanese, means "to wear a cat (as eyeglasses)", and no, it doesn't make sense in that language either. (There is a phrase that translates to "to wear a cat on one's head", which means to pretend to be something you're not, but if that's what the Hobo was aiming for, he got the wrong verb.) I did the rest of my assignments that semester in the form of a music video and some interviews with the fictional band, primarily because the instructor failed to tell me that I couldn't. They're probably all long gone now, but I roped the same group of friends into helping me every time, and it was hilarious. As a token of appreciation, at the end of the semester I gave out some random musical bits and bobs with actual metallic squirrels painted on them -- mostly guitar picks and some sets of be-glittered and varnished drumsticks. Moggie got a tambourine with a big gold squirrel on the drumhead, for agreeing to get in front of the camera for once in order to play the band's "tambourine slut", whose main job was to jump up and down in excitement a lot, and fail to zip any of her shirts up all the way.

The Samurai's ensemble above was fashioned in, I think, two hours on Halloween one year, three if you count the shopping trip to Target and the craft store. GS, while a bright guy, has no sense of time whatsoever and decided the day of that he wanted to go to a costume thing of some sort, and of course he came to me and Moggie for help, because we're magic. The base layer is his own martial arts gi and a pair of dark sweatpants, over which are a pair of pleated hakama and a kesa made of red plaid pajama flannel. I don't know where he got the belt, and with GS I have learned not to ask, but we bought him a $10 hat and a puffball to match. Rather than the traditional gourd of sake, the Golf Samurai carries on his belt a simulated-chrome cocktail shaker, for a more country club ambiance, and the brown overgarment is one of my real vintage haori coats, currently draped on a hanger in my closet.

Golf club is the model's own. He only owns the one. He found it in a shrub. As I said, I've learned not to ask.

GS says he would like the word of Golf Samurai to be spread far and wide, so if you snorted your beverage all over the keyboard at any point, please feel free to inflict this on all of your friends. The Football Ninjas must not be allowed to triumph.