Entry: Boobam

The very existence of this blog, if not the individual entries themselves, imply that I'm a hopeless geek. So the setup of this entry is probably of no surprise: "I was watching an episode of Futurama* with the audio commentary on, and."

I was watching an episode of Futurama with the audio commentary on, and since composer Christopher Tyng was one of the commentators, the use of music in the series was one of the major discussions. Besides talking about the fact that Futurama was one of the few remaining shows to use an actual orchestra-- neat-- he kept mentioning the use of boobams. Since I was doing chores at the time, I was more listening than watching, and got really confused when he said, "Notice the boobams in this scene."

My immediate reaction was, "Oh wow, I didn't realize there was a director's cut of this episode!" but as it turns out, my immediate assumption was quite wrong. As opposed to being a somewhat childish euphemism for censorable anatomy, the boobam is a percussion instrument, originally made out of bamboo, that produce a hollow, wooden sound. So another viable name for them would be "knockers," I suppose. And since I originally assumed that boobams were in fact knockers, the entry comes full circle.

* For the record, I believe it was s02e15, "The Problem with Popplers."