The Sneeze Animations

OK, so this might just look like a whole lot of jerky animations of a guy sneezing. And it is. But if you look at each of them, they're not the same: the frames are combined and recombined in slightly different ways. 

It started off as something like this - a contact sheet, with five frames per row endlessly repeating.

These are still frames from a very short (like, three seconds) film that Edison made in 1894. It's sometimes called Fred Ott's Sneeze, maybe because it depicts Fred Ott sneezing. Stuck a feather up his nose, or huffed that sneezing powder the fetishists use on YouTube. 

When I see something like this, I have a mad desire to make it move again, to resuscitate the guy who's been dead for a hundred years, and turn his frame-frozen sneeze back into motion. To do that, I had to cut the frames in the contact sheet into little squares, re-assemble them into some semblance of film, then run them through my gif program.

As you can see, it worked fairly well. Blown up like this, Fred looks eerily realistic, even though I was working with only five frames:

Meanwhile, I found a Library of Congress video of the original, three-seconds-long masterpiece of cinema. Frankly, I think my animations look better.

Smoke SAFELY in your car!

Old ads for products that now, somehow, don't seem like such a good idea are a staple of this blog. This one just jumped out at me as wrong on so many levels, I can't even count them all. Those vape things, e-cigarettes (the gadgets that are supposed to help you stop smoking) keep exploding in people's pockets, reminding me of that classic rhyme which begins, "Liar, liar. . . ". But the potential for disaster here seems infinitely magnified. 

I can't begin to transcribe all the flyspeck type on this thing, but the bottom sums it up: 

Delivers A Lighted Cigarette - - Instantly. Every smoker wants this new magic invention. Look what happens at the touch of the magic button. A cigarette slips out automatically toward your lips - you hear a click - and there's a flame burning right at the end  of the cigarette. A touch - a puff - and that's enough! A life saver to car drivers. You puff, and with the lighted cigarette between your lips, you draw it from the case. Then there is another click. The magic case is closed, the flame is out, and the next cigarette automatically jumps into position for the next smoke. Think of getting such amazing results. 

I can just make out the part about A Life Saver To Car Drivers.

You don't have to take your eyes off the road any more, and both hands off the wheel, to light a cigarette. Avoid the danger of life and property loss by using a Magic Case. Travel 60 miles an hour if you wish and light a cigarette withiout removing your vision from the road for an instant, or both hands from the wheel. All it takes is a touch, a puff. . . and you're smoking. . . SAFELY! The Magic Case is INDISPENSIBLE to car drivers.

I'm still trying to figure out the sequence of events here, involving clicks, puffs, lighted cigarettes and steering wheels, not to mention the potential danger of driving an incredible 60 miles per hour (the origin of the dusty phrase, "going like sixty").  But if you dropped this sucker while it was incendiary, might it not burn a hole in your pants, if not your scrotum? If there were some papers rustling around at your feet, or - oh, say, an oily rag or two - . But this is mere conjecture. Going on and on about "smoking safely" feels like an oxymoron in itself. Open flames, that close to your face - and just what is it that fuels these flames? At what sort of Lilliputian service station would you refill this thing?  And the flint - or whatever - the sulphur - it doesn't bear thinking about.

Looking on Google images, I see hundreds of cigarette cases, and to me it's like looking at Star Trek phasers or remote controls for Doomsday. It just does not apply, it has nothing to do with me. So they all look exotic and deadly. Do some of them automatically ignite your cigarette before it even touches your lips? I have no idea. It's possible, I guess. The world of smoking repulses me more than I can say. But in this ad, it's a given, just something everybody does, and having your cigarette lighted for you is seen as the ultimate in convenience.

It would have changed so much. Now, Voyager would have been ruined, because Paul Henreid wouldn't have done that business with lighting the two cigarettes and giving one to Bette Davis. Ernie Kovacs might have survived, however, if they had made a Magic Case for cigars. He was barrelling along a tortuous, unfamiliar road at midnight, in torrential rain, in a defective and unfamiliar car, when he decided that now might be a nice time to enjoy a cigar. He could light cigars with one hand, cleverly igniting the match with his thumbnail, but in this case he took his hand off the wheel at exactly the wrong time and ended up in twisted, smoking wreckage. 

He never would have used one of these anyway because they are so goddamn stupid. And I can't find anything more about them anywhere, so probably they didn't even catch on. 

World's Most Primitive Record Player

Things of beauty come in many forms, and are usually the works of a mind that can leap over conventional beliefs, such as, "Youcan'tdothatyousonofabitchitain'tpossibleitcan'tbedone". 

Somebody decided to make a record player out of a chopstick, a plastic cup and a pin. The result sounds a bit freaky, but what can you expect when the recording is the sound of canaries singing? 

This is technology pared down so far that it barely exists any more. We should pay attention. It could come back, once the power grid shuts down forever when the whole earth melts down and comes apart because WE HUMANS are so evil and have put so much plastic into the water. When that happens, you won't just have anarchists with tattoos and rags around their heads like in Revolution. It will also be a resurgence of all the geeks who could never get anywhere while the computers were still running. 

I guess I'd better go to bed. . . I don't know, I shouldn't write when I'm in this state. But I just love these things, have waited all my life to have a blog so I can celebrate them. I'll never be that clever.

This is not in HD

Every day brings a new discovery! Or at least it should, if you're sitting glued to your chair doing "whatever", when you really should be doing something else. Like getting out of the house. Like getting things done.

But we won't worry about that now. I seem to have a one-thing-leads-to-another kind of curiosity. I've been watching a Discovery Channel series called Inventions that Changed the World (or something - Rocked the World? No, it couldn't have been that.) Last night it focused on the 1920s, and I learned something kind of astonishing: a man named John Logie Baird invented the principals of television in the 1920s.

It looked sort of like this, and was made out of hat boxes and knitting needles and a slab of wood from a coffin. Baird had no money, see, and scavenged his materials from anywhere. Everybody thought he was crazy, of course. He worked on this thing in his basement for years and years.

Then it evolved into something like this. A telephone-dial-looking thing with a human head on a stick (or maybe it was a puppet: they come cheaper and have no ego).

He was getting closer, but everyone still thought he was crazy.

Is this the first TV studio? I'm not certain.  To me it looks like an evil medical experiment

I don't think this is Baird.  He looks too young. And what about all those lights?  Early TV stars must have fried under them.

This, now. I think the designer got carried away. It looks like a combination radio, toaster oven, barometer, cheese grater and cue ball. I'm not sure where you looked to watch TV.

Oy.

I'm fairly certain these are among the first fully human TV stars. (This is not in HD.) The man looks a little like Dylan Thomas after a bender.

Whatisit? A kind of cuckoo clock, maybe? Not sure, but you could buy one in the 1930s. Possibly hand-cranked.

This isn't an ultrasound. It's a very early, primitive broadcast of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, probably from the Depression era when images began to come into a kind of focus.

I've saved the best 'til last. We don't appreciate the sense of awe people must have felt when a TV set first entered their living rooms. Little kids thought the people were actually running around inside the box (and no doubt some adults agreed with them). Jessie Wiley Voils of Kansas was knocked out of her chair with disbelief back in 1937: a viable prototype had been constructed, but it would be another 10 years before a TV was made that had a screen larger than a slice of bread, and another 10 years before people actually began to buy them.

What happened to television? Is it still the "vast wasteland" proclaimed by social critic Newton Minnow in the '50s? 

I am beginning to feel  Ernie Kovacs was correct when he said, "Television is a a medium, so-called because it is neither rare nor well-done."

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

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

BOOM!

Ye gods, this looks terrible! Who knows if it will run. It looks worse than the National Film Board personal hygiene movies (which my teacher called "fillums") we watched in the basement of McKeough School in Chatham. It looks worse than the nature films they showed in the rec room at Bondi when it rained in the summer. It looks worse than anything. But if it plays, it'll blow yuz away! It's so goldern funny.