Est. Read Time: 2 minutes. Read Time brought to you once again by the Ashburton Energy + Hair Logistics Group, in association with the Bradley Hills Bureau of Corrections + Housing.
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SHOWS:
Move Up Mondays. Monday, June 26 @ 8:30PM, Flappers. Free tix here!
Comedy Confessional. Friday, July 7, The Crow (Santa Monica). Tix to come!
Platinum Package. Friday, July 14 @ Pauhaus. Tix to come!
!!!Julian Stern Keeps Trying. Thursday, July 27 @ 9PM, The Yard Theatre. Tickets live!!!
Julian Stern Keeps Trying @ Edinburgh Fringe! August 4-13!
Garden Comedy! September 8th. Time and tickets to come!
Helloooo Sternal Journalists!
It’s an extremely quick (but fun!) one today. Did you know that “sense of impending doom” is an actual medical symptom (as long as Wikipedia and various websites with names like SymptomFarm.edu are to be trusted)?
Here it is, per Wikipedia:
“A sense of impending doom is a medical symptom that consists of an intense feeling that something life threatening or tragic is about to occur, despite no apparent danger. Causes can be either psychological or physiological. Psychological causes can include an anxiety disorder, depression, panic disorder, or bipolar disorder. A sense of impending doom often precedes or accompanies a panic attack. Physiological cause could include a pheochromocytoma, heart attack, blood transfusion, or anaphylaxis.[1][2] A sense of impending doom can also present itself as a postoperative complication encountered after surgery.”
I get this symptom every now and then but realllllly felt it this week, partially because of the sad stories we were obsessed with this week which I will not give any more oxygen to because they made me sad, and partially because I’ve got travel coming up, which always gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Heebie-Jeebies, by the way? Not an official medical symptom per anything I can find. But what I did find is that “Heebie-jeebies” does not stand for anything, is not short for anything, is not the beginning of any sort of lexical easter egg hunt. I love words as many of you know, and I tend to love these rabbit holes one can go down as they learn the history of a word.
So I was disappointed at first to learn that “heebie-jeebies” came to us fully-formed from cartoonist Billy DeBeck via his character “Barney Google.” But then I realized that, holy shit, that was in 1923. Exactly 100 years ago! We have had one hundred years of the Heebie-Jeebies!
AND Billy DeBeck also, per that article, invented the term “horsefeathers,” meaning nonsense. Pretty cool. Less Used. But Pretty cool.
BUT clicking around a bit more, I discovered that Billy DeBeck also invented HOTSY-TOTSY.
ARE YOU-
WH-
EXCUUUUUUSE M-
The same person?!??! The same brain?!?!??! GAVE US HEEBIE-JEEBIES? AAAAND HOTSY-TOTSY????
That is enough to give this feeler of impending doom a slight break. For a future SternJourn, I will find those damn comic strips. But right now, I’m going to go sleep off the rest of this doom.
Recommendations
American Born Chinese. Show. Just finished this Disney+ show. It was charming, funny, had some great fight scenes, and was an all around good time. More light-hearted martial arts shows with thoughtful messages, please!
Asteroid City. Movie. My thoughts on the new Wes Anderson are not possibly spoiler-proof or bias-proof, so I’m going to give it a couple weeks before I say anything, but I want people to see it!
Tesco Self-Checkout Drill. Song. I was trying to write a UK Drill song about Tesco and realized there are at least ten on Spotify. This one, which I believe is just the automated self-checkout messages over a trap beat, is probably the catchiest one.
The Case For And Against Ed Sheeran. Article. If you like music and are ever like “doesn’t that song that sounds like another song owe the other song something for taking its sound???” this article explain just how and why that is complicated.
Alrighty, that’s all for this week! Much love and no doom! No heebie-jeebies and plenty of hotsy-totsies!
Love!
Julian!
Wait, also here’s a picture of the guy who first said “heebie-jeebies” engaging in some way-over-my-head depression-era social commentary:
P.S. I spend anywhere between two and twelve hours a week on the Sternal Journal. If you enjoy receiving it (and are RICH) consider becoming a paying subscriber. For just a few bucks a month, you can provide me with a bit more time to come up with fun topics, poems, and interviews; and you with probably fewer typos.
Loved a lot here including, very much, the Ed Sheeran "New Yorker" piece -- so fascinating and such a great example of how, in going super in-depth, the New Yorker can sometime clarify/give nuance to subjects that are very black-and-white (esp on the internet).