Hornswaggler | The culture, the humor, a bit of the sports, not so much the politics, and the workplace distraction
Hornswaggle is an alternate spelling of
hornswoggle, an archaic word that means to bamboozle or hoodwink. I take my
pronunciation from the late Harvey Korman in "Blazing Saddles" --
"I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers,
bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits,
vipers, snipers, conmen, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers,
buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train
robbers, bank robbers, ass kickers, shit kickers and Methodists!"
Couple final thoughts on Mike Myers. I love Mike Myers, but he is, alas, proving himself to be limited as an artist. I wish he would do more movies like "So I Married an Axe Murderer" (which he is apparently not fond of), where he plays a normal guy and not Austin Powers. As a fan, I want more of Mike Myers than a new Austin Powers flick every two years. He was going to do a Sprockets movie, then backed out. I'm glad. If there's one thing worse than Mike Myers devoting himself exclusively to Austin Powers sequels, it's Mike Myers using what little free time he has to make an adaptation of an SNL skit that I never found to be all that funny.
In the deluge of (mostly product advertising) promotion for "Goldmember," I saw Myers say he thought "The Spy Who Shagged Me" was better than the first Austin Powers, which is a bad sign, because it wasn't. I hope Myers was merely pushing the movie and he doesn't actually believe that. The sequel was an uneven movie that was, at time, nothing more than an amalgamation of unrelated skits. And Heather Graham was deeply annoying. I'll see "Goldmember" soon enough, but I hope it's better than "The Spy Who Shagged Me."
The advertising for this movie is, incidentally, disturbing. Myers is hawking Pepsi, Taco Bell and Motorola. This is the first time I've seen full-length TV trailers where the movie promotion is interspliced with a product ad. And all this is coming from the guy who, in "Wayne's World," does the whole ironic bit where Wayne is saying things along the lines of "We will not bow to commercial demands" while he and Garth are engaging in blatant product placements such as the Nuprin "little, yellow, different" joke. It seems there's a contradiction in there somewhere.
