Maybe I Just Like Wax Tadpoles

The other night I watched There Will Be Blood, the 2007 film by P.T. Anderson that was up for Best Picture at the last Oscars. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis as an independent oil man and is based loosely on the 1927 book Oil! by Upton Sinclair. Very loosely. In fact, it retains practically none of the story, characters, or socialist underpinnings that would have been found in the original novel.

But if you're looking for a 3-hour film about an oil magnate and his deaf son that is wonderfully acted and beautifully shot, then accept no substitute.

Curiously, out of the entire movie, the most memorable bit comes towards the end, in which Day-Lewis's character is explaining (screaming about) how a particular piece of land has no oil left, even though it hasn't been drilled, because it has been drained via nearby operations in the surrounding lands. This culminates with the thundering delivery of the film's best-remembered line "I drink your milkshake."

This was a revelation for me, because I'd seen a number of T-shirts and other merch across the web emblazoned with that four-word phrase that, by itself, sounds rather stupid, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out what it meant. If you type "I drink your milkshake" into Wikipedia, it takes you to the There Will Be Blood page, but it makes no effort to explain why unless you are willing to read through the entire plot synopsis.

So, while not a meme, per se, "IDYM" falls neatly into the category of Bizarre Redirects. It joins Blue Harvest, which was the covert shooting title of "Return of the Jedi". Consequently, if you go to www.blueharvest.com, you wind up at the official Star Wars website, which is downright confusing if you've heard something about "Blue Harvest" and are trying to find out more about it. The Wikipedia redirect used to be just as bad, but it's better now that there's a Family Guy special called "Blue Harvest," which clears a few things up.

"Bite the Wax Tadpole" is another great one. This refers to an extremely amusing story about the Coca-Cola company, which I'm not going to tell you. But if you have heard the phrase, which shows up in weird places every now and then (I think Dave Barry used it as a chapter heading once), and are curious about it, and enter that phrase into Wikipedia, you are re-directed to Coke without so much as a hint of what one has to do with the other. And the website bitethewaxtadpole.com brings up an Irish software firm (no help).

So, yeah, have fun figuring that one out over your lunch break!