🎅BADLY-ANIMATED (but pretty!) CHRISTMAS CARD🎄

This started out life as a gif, got filed away, and has been resurrected on YouTube. It's incredibly cheesy, but that's part of its charm. The horses appearing and disappearing is both lame and magical. 

Creepy Santa compilation

What's better (or worse) than one creepy Santa? A bunch of creepy Santas! I put this together from a whole lot of gifs, from a whole lot of videos of my favorite Santa Smackdowns. I couldn't quite get them all onto one gif, so had to split them. With a hey, and a ho, and a - creep out!

Cats for Christmas

Christmas cat gifs? Oh my, yes. Always, but especially when the season and the ridiculousness of the human condition makes me owly and disillusioned.  Our first cat Murphy pulled the tree over - that was before we had video, sorry - but it must have looked something like this.

Short takes. I would imagine if you had a multiple-cat household, nothing would stay decorated for long. The cat is a creature of chaos. It's what we love about them. They rip apart the tinsel and gaudiness and expose it for what it is (tinsel and gaudiness). Now give me my fish.

Here is where it really heats up. 

Ni-i-i-i-ice.

Videos of  kids getting kittens are totally different from videos of  kids getting puppies. In the puppy ones, the kid ALWAYS cries, usually hysterically. I've never seen a cat one where anyone cries. Just an observation. But no one ever talks about a "faithful cat", do they? Cats are anarchists, they're subversives and never "obey". They allow you to dwell in their presence. You can't cry over that.

You can go "eeek! Eeek! Eeeeeeeeek!", however.

How to wrap a cat. I'm going to try this with Bentley. I am. He loves his carrying case, so who knows. This may be a ragdoll cat however, and you can do anything you want to a ragdoll cat. The gif logo says "Flippycat.com", which may be significant.

NOT how to wrap a cat.

Taken from an ad, so cheating a little, but still pretty cool. Since no one has ever trained a cat, the camera must have waited for them.

The Jingle Cats are very stupid, and I have the original CD and play it every Christmas. To date, no one has liked it.

Ginger terror!

Meowy Christmas.

The Twelve Gifs of. . . whatever. . .

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my Giphy gave to me. . .

Twelve drummers drumming

Eleven pipers piping

Ten lords a-leaping

Nine ladies dancing

Eight maids a-milking

Seven swans a-swimming

Six geese a-laying

FIVE GOLDEN RINGS

Four calling birds

Three French hens

Two turtle doves

And a hm hm-mm in a hm hmm.

EXPLANATION. You know that I explain myself far too often. Or I just think of something else and tack it on, in non-linear fashion. I started off by testing out my "new" (to me) Giphy program. It's really quite good and dead-easy to use, fast, and lets you use tenths of a second. They're also clearer and much larger, so you can post them original size. Big drawback, they're only half the length, but isn't it better to have a system that actually WORKS?

In testing it out, I must have been in a Freudian free-associating festive mood or something, as I wanted to see what a real turtle dove looked like. Then TWO turtle doves, and then, oh God. I was giffing them all over the place. And one thing led to another.

In most cases I have free-associated, and in nearly all cases I've been free with the numbers. I hate math anyway and am no good at it, still count by shooting my fingers and get lost after seven. My IQ is 143, which is not too shabby, though I guess it could be higher. It's just curious I can't count, is all.

So twelve drummers drumming get collapsed down into one. That's close enough, isn't it? I was going to try to get an image of Ringo at his drum kit, but then thought: Jesus, that's dumb and unimaginitive. So I ended up with one raw turkey drumstick, which is pretty festive when you think about it, especially when being rinsed under the tap.

Eleven pipers piping was at first going to be someone filling a hash pipe or a bong or something, but there were THOUSANDS of pot videos to choose from, all of them made by people who were extremely stoned. So it ended up being a piping bag, which is every bit as nice, don't you think?

Ten lords a-leaping. I cannot explain this one, except that "lords a-leaping" reminded me of Stephen Fry. I don't know if he leaps or not, but here he's getting jiggy while sitting in a chair. I love the psychedelic lighting, a nice touch.

Nine ladies dancing. The tango scene from the movie Frida seemed like a natural. Pretend there are nine of them if you're a stickler. I especially love Alfred Molina as Diego Rivera. He's perfect, and believable. Without him the whole movie would collapse under its own pretentions.

Eight, seven, six, five. . . 

Four calling birds might be a bit confusing. Forget the four, for one thing. Forget the calling. This is a BIRD, as in British bird, as in Twiggy. I was sick of birds anyway. In this whole song there are twenty-three birds, which is like twenty-two too many.

And the rest takes care of itself.

Joys of the season: creepy old Santa cartoons

As everyone is aware, now is the season of love, laughter and creepy old cartoons. The best ones come from the 1930s, early '30s if possible: there are examples from the '20s, but to my taste they're a bit primitive. Who knows whether this one, Toyland Premier (a direct ripoff of Disney's Mickey's Premier, full of moving celebrity caricatures) was in color originally, or if someone filled in this gory and somehow voluptuous red.

The point is, my favorite YouTube-to-gif site, Y2gif, has gone bust, or at least catawampus. It won't do anything for me. If you enter the info, the web page code, as you're supposed to, this little thingie swirls and swirls forever, until it "times out". The fault is theirs, so the page tells us. So fuck 'em. I CANNOT wait any longer to make holiday gifs!

The search was on for an alternate, and fortunately there were several, because the first one I tried was so shitty it made me want to scream. The videos could be barely 5 minutes, the gifs were no more than 5 seconds, and it took at least 10 minutes for your poorly-made gif to be finished. So it was with a great gasp of astonishment that I found Gifsforum.com: not only did it take much longer videos, upwards of 15 minutes or maybe longer, it would also produce a large, high-quality video of UP TO 15 SECONDS  in a very short space of time.

Thus the dancing clowns, moving in a seemingly endless loop. I'm wondering now whether to remake all of my Harold gifs, but the thought of it is exhausting. Harold makes my heart ache these days, like a lost love or someone who has gone overseas to fight. You don't know if you'll ever see him again, and you never did get as close to him as you wanted. You got close enough to notice he always smelled good, and that's a rare trait in a man. Nothing special or fancy, just a tinge of tweed or saddle leather or even fresh hay.

I yearn because even though the hard part is supposed to be over, it ain't. If no one is interested in my work-of-the-heart, something is going to die inside me forever, and I know it. So I keep the home fires burning.

And just look at these gifs! Juicy, long gifs. I compare here the same logo on 2 different programs:

I think Gifsforum does something to these pictures, sharpens or crops them or something, because they lack that muddy black-barred quality. My favorite Harold reaction, the incredible 15 seconds while sitting in a chair 20 stories high, giffed up beautifully with no problems. Gifsforum also has a lot of alternate settings for size, speed and even color effects, though I have no idea what they mean. (They'll also run backwards.) Y2gif had only one real advantage: a feature that made them much harder to set up, but often produced the best effect. You could literally set the video for hundredths of a second, so that there would be no extraneous material to mar the little gems, the micro-videos these things truly are.

I've never been a filmmaker before, and this is likely as close as I will get. But goddamn it! These things are fun. I can spend hours doodling and diddling with them. I know some people can't stand them, and most of them seem to last less than a second so that the effect is stupid and jerky. Now that they're getting longer, who knows. All that needs to happen now is that someone will post Why Worry? in parts, so I can take Part 3 and excerpt the final, sizzling-hot kiss at the end, the only truly passionate Harold Lloyd kiss  in his repertoire (and rare in the entire silent comedy ouevre). Given that Harold had just started his first serious extramarital affair with his co-star, I think this kiss speaks volumes about where both of them were emotionally and sexually. Imagine having to take and retake, over and over, the way he seizes on her, catlike, like a great lion grasping a lioness by the back of her neck while they mate.

Enough of this, I've got to go trim the eggnog or whatever. I have seriously mixed feelings about this time of year, can be as fatuous as a puppy-dog when the lights start to ring-ting-tingle (or is that the bells?). Then I just sag into this morose mood that seems to have no end. My dreams seem to be slowly washing downhill, eroding like a sand cliff eaten by waves.

Never mind, everybody,  Santa's coming, let's all cheer up!

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm 

Giphy is down!

My giffinator is down. That means I can't gif, not now anyway. Could it be too heavily trafficked, might it have crashed? Who knows. I have all sorts of vintage Santa cartoons, you know the kind I mean, that I want to excerpt in gifs, but I can't. So I am left to trawl web sites, such as a bizarre collection called giphy. Most of these I already have in some form or another, except for the multitude of titled Safety Last ones (and I still haven't found all of those).

These I have seen, but they pair up nicely, expressing my feelings about this time of year. If only it were possible to die temporarily, which is perhaps what drugs and alcohol are supposed to do.

Christmas gifs: cookies that fly!

Let's forget the headlines: cute Xmas gifs!

 

 

 

 

 

This is kind of the condensed version of that Rudolph show we all watch(ed: I think it still comes on). I want to be a child again, except happy! There were some moments, there HAD to be. Maybe we imagined ourselves into being happy. Like every other kids' story, this one is about the underdog winning. I don't remember too many other underdogs around, so why was this so popular? And at the end of MY story, why didn't I win?

 

 

 

 

What happened to his red nose? Did that only happen at puberty?

 

 

 

Not too funny, but I have a weakness for flashing colored lights. They do something magical to my retinas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now c'mon, guys. . . admit this is cute!

 

We've saved the best 'til last: a holiday tradition. Don't think too hard about what Santa is doing.

Ride 'em reindeer

Can't find good Christmas gifs no-how: I have a whole file of Mad Men, another of Anthony Perkins (the good kind like a small video), and I think another of Harold Lloyd and silent film and - But no Christmas, except this one. Not too bad however.

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm