Weird dream follies

This one's a three-parter, what I remember of it.

Part one: I was driving down to the southern US to visit my folks, who were apparently on vacation there. Following the directions down a lovely back road, I ended up on a dirt trail across a hilly field with tall radar towers disguised, at the top, as palm trees. I figured, whoops, must be on an army base. I guess I turned back.

Part two: With my folks, and some of their friends, at a small restaurant. At some point, I decided I needed a drink, and just stood up and went to the liquor store next door. But as I stood there, I decided I didn't need it and changed my mind.

Part three: This is the interesting one. Cut to the sunlit lobby of a fancy hotel somewhere. Feels like I'm in a movie. I'm part of a band, trying to make a decision with our manager, who is Tom Hanks. The manager has decided our band needs a second bass player, though I'm doubtful, and manager Tom is telling me that a second bass player will liberate the guitars and free them up artistically (whatever that means). So we're rehearsing guys, and some scraggly 20-something in a Lollapalooza-style t-shirt covered with band names (including the one he's currently in) is there trying out for the gig, and manager Tom tells me we should give this guy a break, because (pointing at the guy's shirt), he says, "Who in their right mind would fuck a band called 'GET CHUCK'?" And at that point, I swear to you, I woke up laughing, and I had to scribble that line down on the pad in my night table in the dark. I kid you not.

Pearls before cats

A couple of months ago I decided to surprise my two cats with a few cat toys. One was a catnip mouse, which seems to have disappeared, probably under some furniture. That was sort of an afterthought. The two stars of the show have switched top billing, though.

One is a little robot mouse. It was about fifteen bucks. It can "hear", it can sense when it's touched, and in either case, it launches into this elaborate spiel of wiggling, taunting the cat, flashing lights, and giggling. I thought it was pretty clever and felt sorry for cats in centuries past that such technology was unavailable to them. But my cats aren't impressed. They barely bother with it. I hear it go off every now and then, and I sometimes see them watch it, but they don't engage with it. This is not to say I think no cat would; I'm sure some cats go nuts for it... just not mine. It's silly, but I feel sorry for the little robot mouse, who only "wants" to do his job and entertain the cats. I'm reminded of the robot nanny in the Twilight Zone episode, "I Sing the Body Electric".

On the other hand, there's the feather boa on the stick — which was probably retro when Fred Flintstone was trying to entertain his sabretooth. This is a yard-long string of feathers with a big, birdlike blob of feathers at the end, all on a resin baton. It gives you surprising control over how the thing moves; it's like conducting an orchestra. Well, the cats absolutely love this thing. They'd chase it and clap the air at it and hug it to their bellies for half an hour at a shot if I had the stamina for that. They'll both play with it at the same time, with me waving it back and forth between them. I think the thing was seven dollars, and it's the belle of the ball. It's a bigger hit than the red dot from the pen laser. You just never know.

Like all those kids who ignore the hundred-dollar toy and make a fort out of the box it came in... it must be a mammal thing.

Colour me resentful

I was in a line at the store today behind a woman buying school supplies for her kid, and I was suddenly reminded of the first time in my (then) young life I came to realize that parents were not to be counted on 100% of the time, either to be infallible or sympathetic.

It happened when I started kindergarten. This was at the very butt end of the Psychedelic Sixties, carried over into the early 70s. In keeping with the times, Crayola had released a little carton of eight "fluorescent" crayons (for the record, and to aid your imagination, these were: Chartreuse, Ultra Blue, Ultra Orange, Ultra Red, Hot Magenta, Ultra Green, Ultra Pink, and Ultra Yellow). They were in a package that was easily mistaken for the traditional pack of eight average, boring, WASP crayons... the ones on the list of required supplies I brought home from school that first week. My mother picked up the fluorescent variety.

Making new friends, on my own for the first time, trying to fit in, and there I was, the only kid in 25 with the wrong crayons (that, and plaid pants, which my mother assures me were in style at the time). And this was when having the right equipment mattered: there were no flights of fancy. Colours were regimented! "Colour the sun yellow." No problem; I had a yellow crayon that whose brilliance would bore though the back of your skull if you beheld it too long. I had an orange crayon that looked like it could be used to coat pills; a blue one that could have been used to paint the line they want half-dead people to be able to follow in hospital corridors. But "colour the wood brown" presented me with an insurmountable problem: there was no such thing as day-glo brown. I had no analog, no matter how psychedelic, and little drug experience (beyond pilfered morning-after beer) to fall back on for alternative suggestions. Such obstacles would set me to tears until the teacher would let me off the hook and allow me to do the next best thing: colour the wood radioactive blood "Ultra" red. Other kids had landscapes of glorious blandness and breathtaking conventionality that I could only dream of. Mine looked like Puff, the Magic Dragon frolicked in the autumn mist a little too much and blew lunch all over Honahlee. You should have seen the angels I had to colour for our Christmas decorations. There was no mistaking mine. It was a vision, alright. One that would send you to Lourdes.

So parents weren't infallible. Okay. But what about sympathetic?

Our school actually ordered in supplies. You would take the class's order to the office, where you could buy pencils, erasers, pens (though we weren't allowed to use ink yet), notebooks (the paper kind; the computerized sort were as yet still Twilight Zonesque visions of the future), and crayons. Yes, the officially-approved, politically correct, does-not-cause-retinal-cancer-in-laboratory-rats, guaranteed not to make baby Jesus cry (not to mention me) set of eight traditional colours. As memory serves me... and it's been a while... they were 15¢... which, tangentially, never made sense to me before fractions. Why were seven crayons worth 2¢ each, but one was worth only 1¢? And which one? I decided it was black, because some know-it-all in class with an older sibling insisted that black wasn't really a colour, it was "no colour"... another great philosophical conundrum. So conforming to the demands of my society, such as they were when I was five, merely required the donation of a nickel and a dime from my parents. Could I get the 15¢? Could I, hell. I had perfectly good crayons, I was told, and I was to use them. Perfectly good? For what? Triggering seizures in epileptics? I cried, I begged repeatedly over the months as one yech-nicolor humiliation piled on top of another... but no use. I forget now just how it happened, but I eventually did wind up with a set of the right crayons before the end of the year, and I remember how relieved I felt to have colouring projects that looked just like everyone else's. (By the way, are you getting the impression that, well over a quarter of a century later, I still vaguely resent my parents for this? Yeah, me too.) I have the vague impression, though, that I got them by agency of an older friend who took pity on me, because I seem to recall hiding them, and anything I coloured with them, from my folks. So if they ever had cause to consider me a devious little shit growing up, clearly, they had only themselves to blame.

Fun with Foster's

Are you old enough -- are you Canadian enough -- to remember The Spoons' 1984 hit Romantic Traffic? Well... I am. :)

Much as I love cats,...

This morning a friend emailed me a link to the funniest thing I've seen in months. It's called Garfield Minus Garfield, and it is, as you might guess, the Garfield comic strip shorn of its eponymous character. The revised strip focuses exclusively on Jon Arbuckle, Garfield's human caregiver... except he has no one to care for. The strips are, of course, cherry-picked for their applicability, but even so, it's a revelation just how well the strips work, and on so many levels, without Garfield in them. Garfield is revealed as the ultimate Jar-Jar Binks of the "first" (fourth, actually, thank you very much) Star Wars movie... even more so than Jar-Jar. After all, the movie wasn't called Jar-Jar Wars, so he can be forgiven for being a superfluous, tacked-on element. That a character for whom a strip is actually named is proven likewise is more startling, and funnier in the extreme.

The guy who does the strip sets it up this way: "Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb." (Apparently Jim Davis himself is okay with this, and even supportive of it; if that's true, it's certainly a feather in his cap. One's left to wonder if he's recognized the gold in his own strip that he keeps insisting on debasing by adding the iron pyrite of that lump of a cat who has to get in the last word and grind the joke into the dust... After all, he created these, and then buried them under Garfield's kitty litter. The site's author has merely revealed for us what was already there, underneath the dross.)

Trying not to laugh out loud at some of these is a real challenge. Check out these examples. They seem to come in about three varieties... the ones that are hilariously absurd...

...the ones that are oddly, hauntingly poignant...

...and the ones that are like spending the afternoon visiting your senile grampa in the home...

Strolling through the heightened dementia of Garfield Minus Garfield makes for a fun afternoon. Go treat yourself. :)

What does it take you hours to do?

Have fun with this. I did. :)

Music by Joe Walsh from an episode of Duckman.

Behind the Scenes, 1949

Brad Neely is a genius

For me, this is where humour kicks into 4WD... bitter, sardonic, cynical, and slightly demented. Enjoy. Live free or die. :)

US to resume nuke testing — guess where?

WASHINGTON — On the heels of a recent announcement from Tokyo that the Japanese whaling fleet would resume killing humpback whales "for scientific purposes" since their numbers have recovered in recent years, the Pentagon today announced that, since Japanese numbers have nicely recovered since the Second World War, the United States will resume the atomic bombing of Japanese cities.

"Obviously the Japanese have recovered to the point where blasting three or four of their cities a year will be sustainable," said USAF General Howie Friezum. "We're doing this for scientific purposes, of course. We got some great data in 1945, after all, and our studies have really suffered as a result of the moratorium."

The General went on to outline what his team hoped to accomplish. "Our researchers want to know how many Japanese cities have to be vaporized before they own up to Pearl Harbor, the Rape of Nanking, the brutal occupation of Manchuria, the abomination of Korean "comfort women", modern Japan's near refusal to accept refugees, and so on. We've been utterly fascinated by these ongoing displays of the complete and utter inability to demonstrate either empathy with or sympathy for others, all the while inserting self-pitying references to the nuclear devastation of Japanese cities into every movie, book, anime, and cat food commercial produced in Japan in the last sixty years. So, I guess time will tell."

When asked which city would be experimented upon first, the General said, "To reveal that would be to risk affecting the outcome of the experiment. Besides, why ruin the surprise?"

First attempts

A couple of years ago, when I started working on editing videos myself, I was backing up my copy of Jungle Book II and I used that, arbitrarily, as a source to work from. I'd recently gotten a copy of Leaving New York by REM, and that become my guinea pig track. All I was after was matching a sound to an image stream, but I was struck by just how stunningly they worked together...




I showed it to a friend of mine in New England, and he replied by suggesting the following... which is funnier. :)

Artsy-fartsy video time

This is the kind of college-crap project I would have LIKED to have done... if the technology had existed when I was in college 15 years ago. :) Photos by me; music by a friend of mine tapping a marble pillar in the lobby of my building (yes... I'm serious).

Max in space

moar funny pictures

I want a divorce!

NAMES, Larisa! I want NAAAAAMES!!!

Anime "translation" effort...

The perils of photography :)

Caution: strong language and weak mind. :)