Sometimes the ridiculous is sublime

I think a blog has to have, if not a subject, then certain core subjects that are visited again and again. Since I can't draw worth a tinker's dam (and that's dam, folks - look it up), I live vicariously through the efforts of others.

Here we have an example of early Disney, well before Mickey came on the scene and stole the show. I never liked Mickey Mouse: too bland, too ordinary, even though it could be argued that he was the Harold Lloyd of animation, just a regular mouse. Disney experimented with all sorts of strange things, including a series of Laugh-O-Grams, combinations of live-action and animation which were so bizarre that they almost worked. The star of these was a little girl named Alice, with Pickfordesque corkscrew curls.

It's interesting to see the evolution of Disney from a run-of-the-mill animator with an uninteresting character (Oswald the Rabbit) to the so-called king of animation. It's kind of fashionable to diss Disney now, maybe because of what happened with his empire, the way it evolved into a mega-corp which often seems to lack heart. But the animation goes on, including the mega-blockbuster Frozen which FINALLY provided some strong, interesting female lead characters.

I'm fascinated with the early jumpy, smudgy, quivering, flickering images, post-Gertie the Dinosaur who was supposedly the first real cartoon. I'm fascinated with Fleischer and his surreal clown Koko jumping out of the inkwell. I like the early, gritty Popeye cartoons with their gorgeous rotographic/ stereo-optical backgrounds, which my grandchildren are now fascinated with. They want me to sing that weird skeetin-scattin' Popeye song, which I can't.

(Just look at this, from 1934! A very early Popeye cartoon called King of the Mardi Gras. The background was actually built by hand and mounted on a turntable, then slowly revolved and filmed. Somehow or other the animation was layered on top of it. Who needs 3D?)

I don't know if all this goes back to my childhood, when I sat on the floor (I was probably just a toddler then) and watched the Mickey Mouse Club, which came on every day and padded the live-action clubhouse segments with Spin and Marty episodes and VERY old Disney cartoons. I sat there drooling down the front of my bib and absorbed it all. It was a little bit scary, and it still is, primitive, with a spooky magical energy. Pen-and-ink drawings come to life.

Now we have YouTube, with just about every cartoon ever made, and I drown in it sometimes. My husband growls at me to get out of my office and enjoy the day. And I should.

(Note my radically new ad campaign. I doubt if it will work any better than the old one, which I am not discarding. But at least *I* had fun with it, or some of it. Took me most of the day, in fact. Damn. When I get to the end of it all,  I guess I'll say, . . "Too late.")

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

         It took me years to write, will you take a look. . .

http://www.amazon.com/Margaret-Gunning/e/B001K7NGDA

The Ice Bucket Challenge: what went wrong?

Why the Ice Bucket Challenge is bad for you

The ALS campaign may be a great way to raise money – but it is a horrible reason to donate it

Scott Gilmore

August 24, 2014

(AP Photo)

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is bad for you.

I don’t mean you will catch a cold (you won’t), or look like a craven sheep (you will). I mean that when you are inspired by a viral fad to donate your limited dollars to a charitable cause, you ignore the diseases that genuinely threaten.

The marketing gimmick is very clever. It is short, immediately understandable, and like the most popular forms of slacktivism, it is easy to do, entertaining to watch, and narcissistically self-promoting. Every screen on our desks, on our walls, and in our hands is filled with celebrities, neighbours, porn stars, and politicians showing off their earnest compassion and occasional humour. The ice bucket’s ubiquity rivals other famous charitable stunts like Movember, Livestrong, or the infamous Kony 2012.

As a result, the ALS Association has received more than $70 million so far, compared to only $2.5 million during last year’s campaign. It is a great way to raise money — but it is a horrible reason to donate it.

We, as individuals and as a society, have finite resources to donate to medical research and other worthy causes. When we decide where to spend our charitable dollars, we need to consider three factors.

1. Where is the greatest need?

2. Where will my dollars have the greatest influence?

3. What is the most urgent problem?

The ALS challenge fails all three of these tests.

First, ALS research is not an especially great need in public health. It is classified as a rare disease and, thankfully, only about 600 people die from it every year in Canada. That sounds like a lot, but that is not even close to the top 20 most fatal diseases according to StatsCan (the top three being cancer, at 72,000 deaths per year; heart disease, at 47,000; and cerebrovascular disease, 13,000).

Second, it is already extremely well funded. As this chart from CDC data shows, last year ALS killed 6,849 people in the U.S., and attracted $23 million for research (a ratio of $3,382 per death). Heart disease, by contrast, killed 596,577 but only raised $54 million (a paltry sum of $90 per death). If you want your donation to make the biggest difference, fund the diseases that need the most money.

Finally, ALS research is not an urgent need. If you want to help where time is of the essence, then look to Syria (greatest international refugee crisis in a generation), Ebola(now a full blown global health emergency), or the Central Africa Republic (quietly bleeding to death unnoticed by the world).

We aren’t rational, though. Typically, you will spend more time considering where to order a pizza and what to put on it, than you will deciding where to donate your charitable dollars. As a result, the real threats, the diseases that are far more likely to kill you and your loved ones are ignored. This is why the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is bad for you, and me, and all of us. Instead of supporting what is most needed, we support what is most amusing.

But you can change this. Print the simple reminder below, fold it up, put it in your wallet. And the next time you reach for your credit card number, pause and actually think.

Good reasons to donate:

1. Need

2. Influence

3. Urgency

Bad reasons to donate:

1. Ice Buckets

2. Wristbands

3. Mustaches

Scott Gilmore is a former diplomat and the founder of Building Markets. 

Readers reply: Follow this link to a selection of their feedback. 

My thoughts. I love this piece and wish I had had the chops to write and publish it. I simply couldn't put my feelings into words. I was not allowed to say anything to people about this, unless I wanted a shocked sideways glance ("Huh?", meaning "I can't believe what I'm hearing"), a headshake ("I knew you were pretty negative, but about THIS?"), or a sense people were embarrassed for me. What a party-pooper! Such a great cause! All that money! Hey, it's just water - what are you griping about? Some people hate everything.

As with breast cancer, donation is lopsided because of public perception and a bandwagon approach. The pink ribbon juggernaut has already taken much-needed dollars away from the number one killer of both men and women: HEART DISEASE. Do you hear of heart disease runs or tshirts or any of that? It's just not a sexy disease. ALS isn't either, so I am surprised that this even got started, and I don't know how it caught fire the way it did, but I am almost certain the roots are in celebrity. If you're famous, you're the lead goose in the flock. This includes brain-damaged idiots like Miley Cyrus and her goddamn ass-shaking and disgusting tongue.

What I'm trying to say is. . . oh never mind, it will never happen because too many people don't THINK. I know from being on Facebook that most people don't, would rather not, but the thing that scares me most is that they don't even know they aren't thinking. If they did, I doubt that they would care. Just jump on the bandwagon, because it's fun! Meantime, whatever funds you may have set aside for charity are spent for the year - but never mind, if it's making all these millions, if so much attention is being paid, ALS must be our most pressing health problem, right?

Excuse me. I'm going to go have a heart attack.

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

         It took me years to write, will you take a look. . .

http://www.amazon.com/Margaret-Gunning/e/B001K7NGDA

Sheer beauty

This talking picture business will never get off the ground!

I am a serious student of strange, especially late at night when I should be sleeping. It does something to my brain, I suppose. For some reason I got on the topic of the very first sound film, knowing it had nothing to do with Al Jolson and that racist monstrosity he made in 1927. The Jazz Singer was nothing but a sampler anyway, a weak silent film with a few songs patched in.

When I get into these topics, I find clips from film archives that are heavily watermarked, or whatever you call it when there are labels covering the picture and numbers spinning all over the place. It ruins them, really, but in this case I have no choice. This is from Huntley Archives, whatever that is, and it looks like a headless mannequin standing on a stage whirling around while singing in a voice like a mosquito. The whole thing sounds like it's on the wrong speed, with the male chorus sounding like munchkins. Somebody's idea of a sound experiment.

But this one is even older and freakier - Edison's first attempt to synchronize film with a wax cylinder recording. They've recreated the cylinder in a way which is quite plausible, but naturally you can't hear it here. Suffice it to say that it's squeaky. I'm convinced the synchronization is real, however, as I used to play the violin and know what to watch for in fingering and bowing. The men dancing together tells us a bit about Edison's sexual orientation. I think it turned him on, and, let's face it, he was the boss.

My favorite part is where the guy walks into the frame on the left - hey, maybe that's Edison! - and just sort of disappears. Time traveller? You decide.

Where do I get this stuff? I found lots of film shorts, mostly of singers, which were made years in advance of Jolson's notorious "first sound film". Here we have another strange Jewish singer, Eddie Cantor, also known as Old Banjo Eyes. He had a strange manner on-stage, a sort of skipping around that wasn't quite dancing. The film and sound seemed perfectly synchronized to me.

Some weird German thing. Here the sound was on a phonograph record, I suppose recorded at the same time that they filmed this poor cuss wailing his brains out.  I don't know how they got it all to come out at the same time. I also don't know who watched it, as it was 56 seconds long. I mean. . . you'd go to the theatre; you'd pay your money. . . you hired a babysitter and everything. . . and it's all over before you have a chance to sit down and get comfortable!

I love logos and headers and countdowns and intertitles and even end credits, when they're done stylishly. I like the wobbliness, unsteadiness of this, the flickering (for some reason the flickering really turns me on). This was a Bing Crosby short, and the fact that it was Mack Sennett tends to say it's late 1920s. Crosby looks shockingly young and his voice has not yet reached full bloom. I've lost track of the YouTube video, but if I find it, I'll giff him for sure.

This is from another film, but it will have to do. He sang very slowly in those days.

POST-POST POST: It struck me this morning as a bit weird that I was posting silent gifs about early sound film. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I keep finding them, however - this one was made in the early '20s and represents a man reading a monologue by Dickens, but to me it looks like we're watching the old guy die.

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Footlight Parade Redux: I can't wait to see it again!

And here are a few delicious gifs I made LAST time I saw it:

Taxidermy gone horribly wrong

This is a cheap sort of post, but I'll do it anyway. There are thousands of these pictures on the net, on hundreds of sites, and most of them are now examples of people TRYING to botch taxidermy and make it look funny. My personal favorites are motheaten, threadbare, cheaply-made-with-corners-cut, and perhaps sincere attempts to represent the spirit of the flyblown dead carcass of something.

Not everyone knows how to match the teeth to the animal. Maybe a set of human dentures was cheaper to find than actual polar bear teeth. Break out the Polident.

An awful lot of these, the ones I favor I mean, depict cats of various sorts, domestic or wild. I don't know what this one is. It's someone's idea of what a cat's face looks like. The measuring tape is a mystery to me.

I don't know exactly what it is about this one, but it creeps the bejeezus out of me. Some taxidermists, at least in the bad old days, liked to anthro - anthropo- anthropomorph- oh hell, they liked to give human traits to animals, so maybe that's what's going on here. Reminds me of Snagglepuss, or Snaggletooth, or whatever his name was. A definite Hanna-Barbera look.

Wrong size eyes.

Some of these, due to faulty or non-existent technique, perhaps from following a You, Too Can Be a Taxidermist! ad in the back of a comic book from 1940, may have shrunk with time, or with being shoved in the back of some nightmare closet to get it the hell away from you. A nice gift from Uncle Edgar who has a nice little hobby on the side, so he'll keep his hands to himself. My, how lifelike!

Meow, meow, meow.

I don't often favor the "deliberately cute" school of taxidermy, but there's something about this one. I think it's the zipper, combined with the Burt Lancaster facial expression.

This is a member of the Royal Family who stuck its paw in a lightsocket and became electrified. Obviously it used to be a corgi. Too bad we had to put it down, its eyes were too close together.

A good example of a "What-Is-It".

.

What scares me so much is that I think this guy really tried. Maybe it was even his dog. The fact you can see through its ear creeps me out even more. (Note the nose, or rather the absence of one.)

We can't possibly include them all, but this is a classic not to be missed. Either the donkey was in a bad way and had to run around on its hind legs, or the taxidermist lost the front legs, or lost interest, or else he just ran out of embalming fluid.

This isn't a replica of the subject of that great children's story, Misty of Chincoteague. This IS Misty of Chincoteague. I think I'm going to be sick.

For reasons unknown, this is my favorite. The tubular head, seamlike mouth and drainpipe neck are iconic, as is the stuffing pouring out of its nostrils.

Never was this a moose. Ever.

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

         It took me years to write, will you take a look. . .

http://www.amazon.com/Margaret-Gunning/e/B001K7NGDA

Babycakes (a photo essay)

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

         It took me years to write, will you take a look. . .

http://www.amazon.com/Margaret-Gunning/e/B001K7NGDA