January 24, 2011 | Lists
The stars do not determine your character or the course of your life – though if there were many of them out on a clear night and your parents were parked somewhere remote, they could have had an impact on your conception. However, the ludicrous notion that fate and character are determined by their position at the time of one’s birth lingers on and newspapers devote space to them, which is only slightly more wasteful than their inclusion of comic strips. (How is that old misogynistic, wife-beating drunkard Andy Capp these days, anyway?)
We have previously matched serial killers to star signs to underscore how ascribing personality traits to such massive groups of disparate people makes for strange company. At the risk of offending our China-based readership (admittedly not our strongest market, but we’re working on our guanxi mojo), we would suggest that ascribing common traits to all people born within the same year would require one’s disbelief to remain in a state of permanent suspension. But who the hell are we to question the people who gave us fun things like gun powder and mahjong.
Next month will mark the start of the Year of the Rabbit, one of the few creatures on the Chinese zodiac that can be both comfortably kept as a pet and pan-fried during lean times. (Eating rats is unsanitary, dragons are mythical and dogs can be trained to do useful things like maul intruders and serve as a lead-in for chats with pretty girls in parks, so they should be left alone). Indeed, when bunny bites it, there is no need to throw your back out digging a hole in the backyard – just whisper some vespers and wish it safe passage while the oven pre-heats.
Rabbits — and not just their severed appendages — are considered good luck in China. Presumably this is because in times of limited resources, anything that had four legs and wasn’t a table ended up between chopsticks, and rabbits were among the tastier and easier to shoot options.
To our Chinese friends and those throughout Asia, we wish that this year the rabbit is the gentle kind of bunny that sits docile and miserable in pet shop windows – not the psychopathic frightening kind like the one in Donnie Darko. And as with all important occasions, what better way to celebrate the Lunar New Year than with some some shameless, bank account emptying consumerism.
To help you get started, here is our Year of the Rabbit Shopping Guide!
7. 1001 Ways to Cook Rabbit: The Complete Domestic Rabbit Cookbook
As those of you with decent short-term memories will recall, we have already discussed how rabbits are versatile creatures — more seemly to have in one’s home than a pig but just as tasty if the whole pet thing doesn’t work out.
Here we have 1,001 ways to cook rabbit. That their could be 1,001 ways to cook anything is news to us — we stopped at six, and the last of those was throwing them into tinfoil on a hot car engine. Notable here is the disturbing cover. While the image is grainy, it would appear to show a rabbit sniffing a pan, while a child — the kind that populates nightmares — lurks over it with a doll in one hand and presumably a plank of wood in the other.
Sadly, you’ll need to hunt for this one in used book shops as it’s out of print.
6. Mason jar full of rabbit turds
Aside from ending up in really good stew, rabbits are primarily known for two main activities — shitting and screwing. They do the former with aplomb and if you’ve ever had one as a pet, you’ll know that they are master crappers and if let out of a cage, will drop some where you would never think to look. Save yourself the trouble of owning one by having a friend stop by while you’re out with a mason jar full of rabbit droppings to be scattered throughout your home. It’s as close as you need to get to rabbit ownership.
5. Vintage Volkswagen Rabbit
In the mid-70s as the oil crisis was in full swing, people figured that they might as well abandon their dreams of automotive luxury and buy a junk box with electrical problems called the Volkswagen Rabbit. The Rabbit was given the rifle treatment in 1984 to make way for another car unlikely to pull women in places other than a bingo parlor — the Golf.
The Rabbit has reappeared in recent years, however, but it lacks the charm and the feeling of sweet relief that the 80s are over of its predecessor.
As disturbing as it may seem, our great-grandparents were dry humping on dance floors long before the Lambada. But they did at least have the decency to give their dirty dances cutesy names like the Bunny Hug. Said to have originated in San Francisco in 1911, the Bunny Hug was described by one critic as an “imitation of the sex relations between male and female rabbits”. This video of that very act would suggest that some very strange scenes were played out on dance floors during the early years of the 20th century and that maybe the conservative elements who ended up banning it had a point. A non too prescient social critic at the time figured one day young people would learn to dance in a socially acceptable way (perhaps while in separate rooms):
“We hear the Two-step and an outrageously indecent display called the Bunny Hug are gaining favor with the younger element. Let them watch their steps, these young sensationalists. The time will come when they will tire of this eternal jogging and jerking, and find more surcease in the grace and restful beauty of the Valse.”
3. Diabetes tests for people who eat bunny-related products
For some reason, rabbits are typically associated with products that would rot the teeth out of your head if you consumed them exclusively. One never sees a kitten or some other adorable cuddly creature hawking products that might result in little Johnny growing up to be grotesquely Big John. Yet, Trix Cereal, Nestle Quik, Cadbury, even Kit-Kat all feature cartoon rabbits. They do this to appeal to children, who will in turn badger their long-suffering parents and weaken whatever intentions they had to feed them healthy things, thus helping dentists everywhere pay for their second homes.
Of course, no rabbit rundown would be complete without that dapper, bow-tie wearing long-ear, the Playboy Bunny.
Once limited to the pages of the magazine that initiated generations of young men into the world of unrealistic expectations of women, the Playboy bunny is now everywhere — clothing, cologne, adult diapers, spittoons (we may have made up the last two). The coolest of all of these has to be the Playboy Pinball machine. The model pictured is on Ebay and others are available for around 3K. No word on function or if a naked lady is revealed when the machine is tilted.
(And big thanks to our new friends at The Smoking Jacket for linking to Shark Guys)
Killer bunnies. Monty Python did it for laughs. The makers of this film were presumably serious. Night of the Lepus has become a cult classic among those irony-loving hipsters who enjoy movies that are utterly awful. The “plot”: Arizona folk have a problem on their hands — the coyotes are gone and the rabbits are, well, breeding like rabbits. Something needs to be done or the entire state will be overrun by them. Rather than poisoning them — which would have saved countless human lives — they instead decide to inject a single rabbit with hormones to mess up its mating cycle. This Frankenstein Bunny gets loose, spreads the mutation among his long-eared pals, and before you know it most of the town won’t need to worry about buying birthday cake ever again. Terrible on many levels, this film is remembered primarily for the fact that the rabbits in it were not even remotely frightening.
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I blame Night of Lepus for my fear of rabbits. Aside from that, I think they make crappy pets.
The Rabbit was the Golf, rebranded for the North American market. Same same, as the Thais say.
Anyway, a buddy was always pulling chicks in his Rabbit cousin, a white, Bondo-dotted beater hatchback Dasher he nicknamed “the Showpiece”.