Vacation 2008: Day 3 - Give me fyah

Look what I got in the mail last Saturday!

The 25th anniversary edition of Barbecue, the G.I. Joe team's resident firefighter! Or more accurately, the G.I. Joe team's rezahdint fy-ah-fy-tah and token Bostonian.

Lady Jaye's file card states she was born in the Vineyard, but it's safe to assume that she was a high holiday baby with a permanent address in Manhattan's Upper West Side. Gabriel "Bahbahcue" Kelly, on the other hand, was the real fictional deal, a seventh generation Beantown jake presumably well versed in the local culture of fradulent disability reports and lack of independent oversight.

"I'd love tah help ya fight Cobra Cammandah, Duke, but my back's been actin' up. Union rules. Maybe when I get back from rock climbin' I can do somethin'."

While the general wisdom regarding special forces operatives stresses cross-training (so that the units can function effectively despite loss of individual members), the Joes were hyper-specialized to a fault, with full-time team members dedicated solely to covering even the most narrow of disciplines. In practice, this meant that many of the less well-rounded members of the team either spent most of their time warming the benches back at the Joes' HQ or got dragged along on missions outside their areas of expertise, leading to absurd scenarios like Snow Job, an arctic warfare expert, fighting in full cold weather gear in the tropics. Call it the "licensed merchandise theory of warfare."

For poor Barbecue -- armed with a hi-tech supersoaker and a fire axe -- the time not spent inspecting the base's smoke detectors and spinkler systems went something like this...


An important function, to be sure, but it doesn't dull the gnawing feelings of inadequacy when the other guys and gals on the team are doing some post-op boasting about how many Rattlers they shot down or how they kicked Destro in the 'nads while leaping from an exploding A.W.E. Striker.

In the overfondly remembered G.I. Joe cartoon series, Barbecue's great shining moment came in "The Viper Is Coming," a episode revolving around the title's ominous warning and culminating, as these things usually do, with an Eastern European gentleman arriving to "vipe the vindows."

Yes, for real. So fuck your rose-tinted childhood nostalgia, fanboys. All the perfumes in Araby can't mask the pungent stink of 80's toy cartoons.

The episode did treat the public, however, to another interesting popcult attempt to duplicate the Bay State's distinctive regional accent. It goes about as well as you'd expect, as demonstrated by this fan-edited trip into the poorly-synched mouth of madness...

Now while there are certain Snagglepussean overtones in the Charlestown variant of the Boston accent (which I suspect is the real reason behind the Townies' famous "Code of Silence"), I can state with a reasonable degree of authority that we do not speak like the "confirmed bachelor" character actor lovechild of Phil Silvers and Jack Haley. (Haley, along with Ray Bolger, did happen to hail from Beantown, but even so...)

(Also, I don't want to read too much into things, but the personality profile on Barbecue's file card states, and I quote, "He can...wrap his lips completely around the bottom of a quart Coke bottle." Fancy that.)

Dude, I know you're tired of "pahk the cah" jokes, but the white boy ebonics thing is not the answer.
For the musical portion of today's post, I decided to keep things nice and local...

The Cars - It's All I Can Do (from Candy-O, 1979) - As long as it's done well, I won't complain.

The Pixies - Dig for Fire (from Bossanova, 1990) - This is Boston, not Centralia. I still haven't warmed up to The Pixies, as the psychic scars inflicted by the various fans of the band are still tender after almost twenty years, though I can appreciate the music...in small doses...in the rare proper context.