18 April 2015 by lalmon

Long-lost cousin?

I found this particularly interesting because it’s precisely the sort of quote I would give to the media should the occasion arise.

“Chucklehead here fell asleep on the taxi on the runway, and I guess his arm kind of brushed over to her. She just went nuts and started stabbing him with the [fountain] pen. He screamed really loud, almost like a little girl,” said Michael Sutton, Mordarski’s friend.

He also succinctly referred to the perp as a ‘psycho’, bringing this to mind:

POLONIUS
This business is well ended.
My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief: your noble son is mad:
Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,
What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go.

4 April 2015 by lalmon

Improving people’s Saturday

Cinnamon-blackberry muffins to share with friends today.

Click for a larger version

The recipe is from the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion. The variation I baked featured a teaspoon of cinnamon and three cups of blackberries added to the muffin mix, and I sprinkled the tops with a mixture of turbinado sugar and cinnamon before they went in the oven.

I like this recipe because it produces a light, cake-like muffin that’s not very sweet. Most commercially-produced muffins are so sickly sweet that the word most apt to describe them is ‘perverted’. Others agree: The woman whose hens provide my eggs – ‘Egg Lady Ann’ in my mobile contacts – said today, “I love these because they’re not too sweet.”

They already have butter and sour cream in them, but are further improved when hot by a small pat of butter. “What isn’t?” I just said to myself.

All-Star Muffins
Makes 16 large muffins

This all-purpose, basic muffin does very well with any number of garnishes (see suggestions below). The batter will keep, once mixed, for up to one week in the refrigerator. It’s nice to wake up, turn on the oven, make your morning coffe, scoop two muffins, pop them in to bake and by the time you’ve fetched the paper and let the dog back in, you’re ready to settle down for a wonderful, warm, fresh-baked treat.

3-½ cups (14-¾ ounces, 420g) unbleached all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt

8 Tbsp (1 stick, 4 ounces, 115g) butter
1 cup (7 ounces, 200g) sugar
3 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup (8 ounces, 235ml) sour cream

Preheat oven to 400F/200C and lightly grease muffin cups or use paper liners.

In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt, then set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar together with a handheld or stand mixer until light and fluffy and almost white in color. Scrape down the bowl to make sure all the butter is incorporated, add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the vanilla and sour cream and mix until incorporated.

Add the dry ingredients and mix on low speed just until the batter is smooth. Fill muffin cups and bake for 18 to 24 minutes [18 for regular muffins, 24 for jumbo muffins], until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove them from the oven, cool in the pan for 5 minutes, then remove the muffins from the pan to finish cooling on a rack. (Muffins left in the pan to cool will become tough from steaming.)

Variations:

Apple Cinnamon: Peel and grate 3 to 4 tart apples, such as Granny Smith or Jonathon. Fold into muffin batter with ¼ cup cinnamon sugar (¼ cup sugar, 1 tsp cinnamon). Top muffins with more cinnamon sugar before baking, if desired.

Apricot, cherry, cranberry, date, raisin: Soak 2 cups of any of these dried fruits in 1/3 cup orange juice, water, rum or bourbon, then fold into the muffin batter. Garnish muffin tops with chopped nuts if desired.

Apple, banana, nectarine, peach, plum: Dice 3 cups of any of these fruits and fold into batter before baking. Garnish muffin tops with granulated sugar.

Blueberry, raspberry, blackberry: Fold 3 cups berries into batter before baking; sprinkle the tops with cinnamon sugar or streusel before baking.

Carrot-Ginger-Raisin: Add 2 cups shredded carrots, 1/2 cup crystallized or minced fresh ginger, and 1-1/2 cups raisins to batter before baking.

Cherry Chocolate Chip: Add 1-¼ cups dried sweet cherries (soaked in ¾ cup liquid for 20 minutes if they’re very hard) and 1-1/4 cups chocolate chips to batter before baking.

Peanut butter chocolate chip: Add 1-½ cups creamy peanut butter (it helps to soften the peanut butter in the microwave before combining it with the batter) and 1-½ cups chocolate chips to batter before baking.

Toffee Chocolate Chip: Add a 10-ounce bag of Heath bar bits or 1½ cups of your favorite buttercrunch and 1½ cups chocolate chips to batter before baking.

Apricot almond: Add ½ tsp. almond extract, 1-½ cups diced apricots, and 1 cup sliced almonds to batter before baking.

Banana Coconut: Add 2 diced bananas and 1-½ cups shredded sweetened coconut to batter before baking.

Date Nut: Add 1-½ cups each dates and pecans to batter before baking.

Maple Walnut: Add ½ cup maple sugar and 1-½ to 2 cups chopped walnuts to batter before baking.

Waldorf: Add 2 tart apples, grated and peeled, ½ cup chopped dates and ½ cup chopped walnuts to batter before baking.

4 April 2015 by lalmon

Hey, cool site redesign, Sprint

After not answering an unfamiliar caller ID on my mobile just now, I found it was a survey company, so I visited the Sprint site to forever block the number and, on arrival, found they have a rather unfetching new design. I’ve had my desktop browser windows set at 1024×768 for years because that’s the way I like it. Sprint does not care for my preference, so much so that they’re willing to make their site close to indecipherable at that size to show me the error of my foolish and ignorant ways:

Click for full size

Boneheads.

I suppose I could offer offer to do everything for everybody in order to get everything done well, but I fear that might severely eat into my sleep time.

4 April 2015 by lalmon

People still need better hobbies

That’s my thought whenever I read that people have spent hours and hours scouring through someone’s online history specifically to find something to get angry about. Jon Ronson mentions in this 2 April interview that the citizen police examined over 9,000 posts by Trevor Noah. I can’t think of a reason why people – at least those who are not in possession of a genuine obsessive-compulsive disorder – would do that other than a combination of plenty of idle time and being supremely bored with their own lives. It’s easy to wonder if they were even remotely interested in the topic at hand before the possibility of a fresh new outrage, however small and inconsequential, presented itself.

These “find anything some person has ever said that might now or ever in the past or future offend someone – anyone” research projects, said goal always attainable no matter who you’re talking about, also seem like busy-work to me, akin to a boss telling an underling “Go through the customer records and prepare a listing in reverse last purchase date order, with subtotals by month and year – but only include purchases up to but not including fifty dollars” because he hasn’t any real work to give them. In the case of people who enjoy generating or fueling the internet outrage du jour, they are their own boss giving themselves ridiculous time-wasting things to do.

The first article linked above, which I noticed because I’ve just started reading Ronson’s new So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, disingenuously quotes Jim Norton out of context, but does link to his full article, which includes this key paragraph:

Being outraged and upset and feeling bullied or offended are not only things we enjoy, they’re also things we have become thoroughly addicted to. When we can’t purposefully get our feelings hurt by a comedian, we usually find another, albeit less satisfying, source of indignation. A few of the old stand-bys are sports announcers, radio hosts, Twittering athletes and paparazzi-hating actors. These are always great sources to look to when we need to purposefully upset ourselves. And make no mistake about it: Upsetting ourselves on purpose is exactly what we are doing. At least that’s what I hope we are doing. Because the other alternative is that Americans have collectively become the most hypersensitive group of whining milksops ever assembled under one flag. I find this second choice to be particularly humiliating, so I opt for the first. I choose to believe that we are addicted to the rush of being offended, the idea of it, rather than believing we have become a nation of emasculated children whose only defense against an abyss of emotional agony is a trigger warning.

I think his first choice is the correct one, but only because I, on the outside of Fnooter, Dingleface, et al and looking in with cocked eyebrow, have been saying that in one way or another for about a decade. People who have no rushes in real life can predictably and easily obtain red faces, hot tempers, and irresistible urges to join one fray or another several times every day through antisocial media. The exclamation points and the ALL CAPS and the vituperative spluttering might seem to be of a sapping nature for the soul and therefore not a good thing in the long run, true enough, but I also have no doubt that, in the short term, it’s a boatload of fun for people with nothing to look forward to in their own lives: “At last…excitement!” The popularity of such virtual Pixy Stix for the terminally bored and boring is not surprising to me, nor that most can’t stop themselves once in the habit.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

– Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

3 April 2015 by lalmon

Still going with underrun

Regarding the Air Canada “hard landing” (ahem!) at Halifax, here are some pictures that sum things up well, the first two from a Royal Canadian Mounted Police drone and the third from Google Maps. Click any of these for a larger version.

This is not what is meant by intercepting the localiser

The A320 is at the upper middle. The two black bits in the snow are its main landing gear.

This view from the right side shows the elevation of the berm where the localiser sits…well, sat. The power lines at left were the ones it clipped.

The people on that aircraft were damned lucky that Halifax has had a huge amount of snow this year. The deep drifts at that berm softened the initial impact considerably.

“Um, you got a little schmutz on your, uh, runway there.”

29 March 2015 by lalmon

Overrun, underrun, let’s call the whole thing off

The media has a funny definition of overrun. I just checked and there’s not one story about the Air Canada Halifax crash that says ‘underrun’, which is what happened, and I think most people would come away from the initial story believing the aircraft landed normally but then skidded off the end of the runway in the midst of a snowstorm. That’s what I figured at first.

In reality, it wasn’t one of those runway excursions – isn’t that a pleasant phrase, by the way? “Oh, yes, we had a lovely off-runway journey, but the narration by the flight attendants was a bit loud, I must say.” In fact, it crashed short of the runway, much like the Asiana San Francisco accident but in bad weather at night, not a beautiful CAVU day in San Francisco – not that bad weather is a good reason for a too-low approach, mind you. The power lines it clipped, blacking out the airport, were well before the threshold of the runway, and I’ll wager a crisp new one dollar bill that all the red bits you see in this photograph are parts of the localiser antenna array that’s also before the start of the runway.

Edited to add several hours later:

The TSB says the A320 did hit the antenna array and touched down 1,100 feet short. The idea that it overran the end of the runway apparently came from Air Canada’s unslick use of antisocial media.

Because no one had anything more than minor injuries, I’m inclined to be cheeky and so will mention that 1,100 feet works out to almost three ballparks in baseball terms. I’ve also worked out on the back of the same envelope that the crew will not be receiving a cigar on this occasion.

Alas, it would be wishful thinking to hope that anyone will ever go back and correct this caption and hundreds of others in the same vein. I’m going to wager another dollar that they will live on in error forever.

Come to think of it, maybe Air Canada’s use of antisocial media was actually pretty slick, even if unintentionally so. It was probably not active preemptive misdirection, but it will likely result in most remembering that the aircraft simply slid off the runway.

28 March 2015 by lalmon

Living on the large print shelf

Current one-size-fits-all web design increasingly leans toward the smaller tablet screen – not fitting all well at all, it turns out – and much of it becomes annoyingly large on a full-size desktop screen. The font below, for example, is twice as large as it should sensibly be on my desktop, and makes me feel like I’ve inadvertently picked up a book from the Large Print selection on the bottom shelf at the library. The three screenshots here are each about 1,000 pixels wide – click on any to see that size.

Click for original size

Sometimes these “must fit an iPad mini” fonts get all bright and shouty, much worse than ALL CAPS. When I see something like the story opening below, I automatically think of Garrett Morris on Saturday Night Live. But before that, I squint, wonder if my sunglasses are still in the car, and idly imagine myself phoning the designer to ask sincerely, “Are you an idiot, or are you being intentionally evil?”

“What’s that you say, sonny? Stop whispering!”

Then there are the large print shelf sites also obviously designed by – or for – the colour-blind, in eye pain terms really only one or two steps away from the worst of the Web 0.1 of the mid-1990s:

Is there a medical term for when your eyeballs feel like they’re being squeezed, roughly?

How is it that a colour scheme like that didn’t get laughed out of the room in early design meetings? At my job some companies ago, they hired a logo design firm, or at least a company claiming to be that. One of the product logos they came up with was so inappropriate as to be unbelievable. It had made it through several meetings, and had been approved by Marketing. So what was wrong with it? Well, it did not mistakenly imply harm to our customers, no no. It actually showed harm to our customers. “What? What? Flthhhhp!” came to mind when I saw it. It was presented to a group of users of the product shortly afterward, and they did laugh it out of the room – and I mean that literally, and I assure you I’m using that word correctly. I’m happy to say that it was never seen again.

My other “How is it…?” question today is: How is it that reviews of goofily-outsized dumbwatches, the Large Print edition for the forearm, do not all begin with the caption “Tee hee!” underneath the leading photograph? I look forward to saying that myself the first time I see in person some chowderhead wearing one of these “Look at me, all terribly modern and suchlike!” wall clocks.

Tee hee!

For reference, this is what a wristwatch looks like:

A tad anachronistic, perhaps, but does it elicit a “tee hee!”? I think not.

22 March 2015 by lalmon

“P.S. If I was on this mission, I’d let the damned thing run, too.”

Apollo 8 Saturn V stack on its way to Pad 39A

Apollo 8’s original mission was to test the Lunar Module in combination with the Command and Service Module in low Earth orbit for the first time. However, production delays meant there would be no LM spacecraft ready in time for the December 1968 flight. In August 1968, George Low, manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, proposed that they instead send the Apollo 8 Command and Service Module all the way to the moon and in the process juggle the D, E, and F mission objectives slightly. Those mission types are defined in the 20 September entry in the Q3 1967 Apollo Spacecraft Chronology.

This was just four months before Apollo 8 was due to launch, and NASA did not yet have a plan for the actual mechanics of the first circumlunar mission. In 1998, Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman gave a talk at the National Air & Space Museum on the 30th anniversary of the mission. In it, he said:

So we had a lot to do, because while everyone knew that people were going to go to the moon, all of a sudden, they were confronted with the deal: How do you get there? And this is another sign of NASA at that time. I sat in [Director of Flight Operations] Chris Kraft’s office with Bill Tindall and two or three other people, and in one afternoon, we outlined the basic parameters of that mission. I don’t know how long it would take them today, but I suspect it wouldn’t take more than six months to do that.

Borman is a refreshingly no-nonsense, funny guy, a USAF pilot who you can tell still gets a kick out of referring to his Apollo 8 crewmates as ‘sailors’. You can see his whole talk here on C-SPAN. I actually ordered a VHS videotape of it from C-SPAN after I watched its first broadcast on Christmas Day 1998, mainly because of the segment I’ve excerpted below.

Yesterday, after watching the Apollo 8 episode of “From the Earth to the Moon” once more, I recalled his fascinating and unexpectedly entertaining talk at NASM and further remembered that C-SPAN now has its entire video library online. I thought I’d see if I could find it, grab it, and therefore be able to toss the 570 feet of magnetic dinosaur that I still have on a shelf in my spare room. It’s difficult to grab videos from their site on your own, but the Video DownloadHelper Firefox add-on makes short work of it and videos on other sites.

Christmas Eve 1968

Regarding the intertial guidance system that Borman talks about in that clip: On Apollo, the Flight Director was connected to a three-axis gyroscope system – the Inertial Measurement Unit – and was therefore subject to gimbal lock, a condition which meant loss of attitude reference and a subsequent need to reorient the system through star sightings, which was a pain in the arse. This would occur if you managed to screw up and get your attitude into the red circle visible below. Borman and every other astronaut wished that Apollo had the Gemini program’s four-axis system, which was not subject to this quirk of physics.

The three gyros themselves were in the basketball-sized IMU in the second photo; for precision matching of measurements, it was mounted out of sight but on the same platform as the optical sighting telescope and sextant to the left.

Apollo Flight Director Attitude Indicator

One of the early mission rules for Apollo 8 was that the IMU was to be shut off when it wasn’t needed – which was most of the mission – but Borman objected to this. He knew that, on power-up, the thing sometimes accidentally got itself into a gimbal lock condition, plus he didn’t want to take the chance of it not coming back on at all, so he wanted to keep the gyros spun up for the entire mission. He got his wish, and the rule was changed for all the Apollo missions.

During Apollo 11, Mission Control advised the crew they were dancing close to gimbal lock at one point and suggested they tone down their movements a bit. Command Module Pilot Mike Collins – recalling the four-axis system he had in Gemini 10 – radioed back, “How about sending me a fourth gimbal for Christmas?”

15 March 2015 by lalmon

Digital film evolution

“Tampopo” Blu-ray on my TV – click for 1920×1080

Previously, I’ve compared an ancient “Tampopo” DVD release with one remastered six years later, and I can now compare those to the Blu-ray release eight years further on. The difference is eye-widening. The comparison here is not completely direct; the Blu-ray screens in this post are photos of my TV because I don’t yet have a BD drive in my PC. I colour-corrected those photos in Photoshop so they appeared identical to what I saw on my TV, then adjusted their perspective and size to 1920×1080. The older ones are unretouched frame stills done with Media Player Classic – Home Cinema. Clicking on any of these will show you the native resolution of the respective discs.

1998 Fox-Lorber DVD

2004 remastered DVD

2012 Blu-ray release (Germany) – click for 1920×1080

Some Blu-ray transfers come across as a little strange, at least at first. For me, “Patton” is a prime example where the Blu-ray release makes the film almost seem like it was shot on video even though I know it was 65mm/Dimension 150. It’s a bit hard to describe, but the transfer seems too crisp, what you might expect if you applied a skosh too much sharpening filter to the entire film. I’ll admit that it’s amazing to see, say, the minute texture of fabrics, but it’s a little off-putting when you clearly see the fronting lace underneath George Scott’s false eyebrows – viz.:

Click to see a larger size

“Ack!” said I

The problem with that particular shot from the opening is that the makeup was simply inadequate for such a close-up – “No, not ready at all, Mr. DeMille!” – but that video feel is there in much of the film. You do get used to it after a time.

I’m happy to report that the “Tampopo” Blu-ray is in the better category of transfer. Rather than turning shot-on-film into shot-on-video, the Blu-ray transfer of “Tampopo” turns it into the equivalent of being front and centre at a stage play. There’s a distinct feeling of being there which I find delightful.

1998 DVD

2004 DVD

2012 Blu-ray

What I said on seeing this in the fourth minute of the film: “Heh heh.”

2012 Blu-ray – click for 1920×1080

15 March 2015 by lalmon

An answer to a twenty-year-old question

I just watched the 90-minute “Making of Tampopo” documentary and thoroughly enjoyed seeing how thoroughly enjoyable the film was for its participants. Unsurprisingly, most of “Tampopo” was filmed on location, with one of the few sets being the interior of Tampopo’s restaurant itself. There were no subtitles for the documentary, but I understood what was going on fairly well throughout, even as Jûzô Itami explained how they edited together the final scenes outside and inside the renovated restaurant, showing four different versions.

I finally found out the answer to a twenty-year-old question I had, too, one of the reasons I eagerly anticipated seeing this documentary. Ever since I first saw “Tampopo” about ten years after its 1985 release, I’ve wondered if the spine-tingling fading in and out of the sunlight streaming through the window in the final ramen reckoning scene was tightly planned or purely serendipitous. I leaned toward the former, but only slightly. I always thought there was a chance he got extraordinarily lucky. You can find out yourself below.

One of about a dozen takes to get the naruto slice to land on Rikiya Yasuoka’s face just so

Director Jûzô Itami and Fukumi Kuroda

Kōji Yakusho and Fukumi Kuroda

The documentary – quite kindly, I thought – showed the filming of three additional food scenes in the on-location hotel room that ended up on the cutting room floor. They involved cream, strawberry jam, and what appeared to be a profiterole. Oh, and the obviously delicious Fukumi Kuroda, of course.

So the answer is: Anyone who can keep me guessing for twenty years is a damned fine director.

10 March 2015 by lalmon

It’s what’s for dinner

Click for a larger view

That’s usually said of beef by the Cattlemen’s Beef Board and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association – why there is a need for two beef-promoting organisations is beyond me – but tonight it was chicken in the form of chicken nachos. Thin, crisp tortilla chips that hold up to high heat; leftover roast chicken; cheddar, asadero, jack, and queso quesadilla cheeses; some diced jalapeno; and a sprinkling of Mexican spice blend. There are few dishes with a higher satisfaction to effort ratio. That they’re umami for the eyes is a bonus.

8 March 2015 by lalmon

Mars Zero and the first step to nowhere

Click to see the entire issue

The title here has been running through my head recently since the media have once again nearly unanimously acted as willing participants in the fraud that is Mars One, after the project – or is it performance art? – announced its third-round culled-down list of 100 candidates, precisely none of whom will go to Mars.

The chief problem with Mars One is that it’s the product of a fantasist without money, without plans, without industry cooperation, and without the sense God gave a goose. As I read between the lines of recent interviews, many of their volunteers appear to me to be lonely souls with little to look forward to in their lives who seem happy to latch onto even the most vaporous of schemes just for the tiny glimmer of hope it gives them, even if death happens to be the end game.

The media’s almost unfailing neutrality in regard to the non-project, in which they basically rewrite press releases – in effect, becoming cheerleaders – is a particularly regrettable example of the creeping hyper-objectivity of news organisations that increasingly concentrate more on page impressions than truth. Too many stories are presented without questioning anything about them, never mind the in-depth critical analysis that some of them cry out for. The continuing rise of one-sided news written by public relations people – not really ‘people’ in the traditional sense, but I use the term for the sake of convenience – is welcomed by news organisations ever tightly focused on the bottom line, because it’s much cheaper to hire kids just out of J-School to rewrite PR hogwash than it is to actually look into things – you know, see if they’re true or whatnot.

So, on to serious projects instead. What about NASA? Orion seems like a good ship so far, but I’ve been ignoring the chorus saying it’s the first step to Mars. It is the first step to getting past the low Earth orbit we’ve been stuck in for forty-three years¹, but no more than that. Development of the Space Launch System (SLS) is underway, but that’s where current plans end. The budget money ends there, too.

Many problems challenging a manned Mars mission, such as too-heavy but essential radiation shielding, a known 1-2% bone density loss per month in microgravity, and the new and worrying possibility of permanent vision impairment or loss, remain insurmountable. They may be resolved in the course of time, but I don’t think this is the decade, and the next one is doubtful, too. Half-century? Maybe. With current capabilities and limitations, humans would first be incapacitated and then almost surely killed along the way to Mars. Those who weren’t by some miracle dead by landing wouldn’t be able to move due to pesky skeletons with the tensile strength of a handful of matchsticks.

“Oh, details, details”, some freer spirits than me will no doubt think as they strive to come up with a pithy one-sentence retort involving the word ‘haters’. And that’s fine; this is just my annoyingly science-based opinion, after all. But what about actual space travellers? How do NASA astronauts – the ones who remain, anyway – feel about Mars? Joyous anticipation? Unconcealed excitement? Not exactly.

Lori Garver, who had advised Obama and then become NASA’s deputy administrator, was visiting Johnson Space Center. After “rah-rah” remarks, Garver polled the roughly four dozen astronauts in attendance where they wanted to go. An asteroid? No hands. Mars? Three hands. The moon? All the rest of the hands.

I agree.

—

¹If the Earth were the size of a ping pong ball, the farthest humans have ventured away from it since Apollo 17 in December 1972 would be about 2 millimetres. The Space Shuttle’s operating limit was a bit shy of 400 miles altitude, or about 1/10th the radius of Earth. For terrestrial reference, that’s about the distance from Edinburgh to London or Boston to Washington, DC.

7 March 2015 by lalmon

The genius of Preston Blair

Tonight, I pulled out my French DVD box set of the complete Tex Avery cartoons – one of the many reasons I require all-region disc players with PAL to NTSC conversion – and cued up “Swing Shift Cinderella” to marvel at. To me, it’s one of the most astonishing of the old school cartoons, especially considering that Preston Blair, who invented and animated the Red Hot Riding Hood character, produced Red’s dancing entirely from his artistic imagination – no rotoscoping, where an actor is filmed and then key frames are traced…no model…no nothing. And, hey, it was August 1945, so no CGI. You can change the quality here from the default of 360 to 480.

Red appeared in several Avery productions, always with Wolfie and sometimes with Droopy the dog as Wolfie’s foil, but I think this one’s the best. (The full cartoon is over seven minutes, but I uploaded just this portion in the hope that it won’t be summarily removed at the behest of MGM. You know, the ones who won’t release the Avery library on DVD or Blu-ray in the US.) I don’t believe I’ve seen finer free-hand animation of the female figure. For a treat, watch again and follow just her hands. I think their complex and varied natural movements push the cartoon into extraordinary territory.

It’s no surprise that cels of Red dancing were once stolen from an animation stand where they had been left unattended overnight before filming. Blair had to re-do the work, but considered the theft high praise.

In one of his books, Blair explains one sequence in a chart:

Click to see a larger version

Red’s singing voice was provided by the silken notes of Imogene Lynn, perhaps best known for her lead in the most popular recording of “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive” with Artie Shaw, and shown here performing “Big Boy”.

My best mate also loves the Red Hot Riding Hood cartoons and recently got a new mobile, so I customised this skin for the back of her phone on Skinit.com and gave it to her at Christmas – to her great delight.

Here are a few of the variants of Red that appeared in Tex Avery cartoons:

Click to see a larger version

5 March 2015 by lalmon

My Kickstarter project will be an invisible & completely silent horse potato detector

Because people really will believe anything:

As the Bio Ceramics collect odors, dirt and waste from your laundry, they need to be ‘recharged’ in order to make sure the pH levels of the laundry water continue to be raised. To recharge Crystal Wash you simply put them in the sun for an afternoon.

I’m pretty sure they’ve optimistically infused sunlight with a power it does not actually possess. The reason I sigh a lot some days is that it seems there’s no collective memory, none whatsoever, past two or maybe three years ago.

On the bright side, it appears people are cottoning onto their scheme – in a negative and non-wallet-opening way, I mean. Since I first viewed that Kickstarter page several hours ago, they’ve at least removed the claim in one graphic that their device would “re-structure” water, a pretty good baby step toward what I hope will be an embarrassingly drunken series of stumbles that end in the scrapping, or maybe even the crashing and burning, of the whole thing. Unfortunately, their project wasn’t in the Wayback Machine, so I can’t include that image here, but comments on Kickstarter verify it was there. I’ve added their current version to Wayback so I can, if I wish, note further changes as they make them.

In any case, consider the fact that when people of a commoner sense started examining their claims, they immediately got rid of the most blatant quackery that had been on their Story page for months, and then did not mention this deletion, or the reason behind the edit. This should tell you everything you need to know vis-à-vis the “Honest but perhaps a bit naive, or criminally fraudulent?” question that may have been floating around in your head.

I’m reminded of a relevant letter by Mark Twain:

Nov. 20. 1905

J. H. Todd
1212 Webster St.
San Francisco, Cal.

Dear Sir,

Your letter is an insoluble puzzle to me. The handwriting is good and exhibits considerable character, and there are even traces of intelligence in what you say, yet the letter and the accompanying advertisements profess to be the work of the same hand. The person who wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on the planet; also without doubt he is an idiot, an idiot of the 33rd degree, and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots stretching back to the Missing Link. It puzzles me to make out how the same hand could have constructed your letter and your advertisements. Puzzles fret me, puzzles annoy me, puzzles exasperate me; and always, for a moment, they arouse in me an unkind state of mind toward the person who has puzzled me. A few moments from now my resentment will have faded and passed and I shall probably even be praying for you; but while there is yet time I hasten to wish that you may take a dose of your own poison by mistake, and enter swiftly into the damnation which you and all other patent medicine assassins have so remorselessly earned and do so richly deserve.

Adieu, adieu, adieu!

Mark Twain

On a tangentially related note – gullibility the common thread – here’s a fun quote regarding the Keurig K-Cup ‘coffee’ system:

I don’t have one. They’re kind of expensive to use. Plus it’s not like drip coffee is tough to make.
– John Sylvan, inventor of the K-Cup (now with DRM!)

As to my horse potato detector, invisible and silent it may be, but I’ve been hearing it incessantly today inside my head. This post and this picture I just pasted together may quiet it a bit.

Horse Potato Wash

1 March 2015 by lalmon

Latest blizzard: 1 April 1997, 2-3 feet

That date is something I keep in mind whenever I read the seasonal totals that the National Weather Service releases on the 1st of March each year, this year’s shown below. Temperatures are in F and snowfall totals in inches. As a perfect example of the temporary nature of their winter ‘in review’, I’ll mention that it’s snowing right now, with an expected 3″ tonight. Also, I believe my area has had around a foot more snow than Boston proper, which is what’s covered by this summary. That’s not a boast – it’s a lament.

The day before that 1997 blizzard occurred here, the temperature had reached 64F/18C.

On Saturday night, the people in the Taunton, Mass. NWS office were obviously torn about what would happen tonight, and had a different Massachusetts-related headline on their minds. From the forecast discussion they pushed out: