The Glass Character

Sunday, June 5, 2016

Ding!

DING!

HIT IT!

WHACK IT!

CLICK. . . THE. . . PINK. . . LINK!

That's it. Click on those big pink letters at the top! Because if you DO, you'll be able to hear something I can't describe to anybody. Something I've been trying to find out about since some time in the late 1950s. A . . . ding.

Yes, it's a ding.

That's all it is. But it's a ding I often heard. A ding that happened during those TV station breaks, those top-of-the-hour things between shows, except I don't know what network it was. I don't think it was connected to that weird CBS aperture/eye or the NBC chimes or any of that. ABC? Who knows. A local station, something in Detroit? WJBK, perhaps?

I don't know.

But this is the ding. I recognized it at once and was amazed, because it proved to me I WASN'T crazy after all, though people had been looking at me that way for decades whenever I brought it up (maybe twice in 50 years). When I first stumbled on TV Party many, many moons ago, it was the first video site I ever found and seemed magical. I watched half-minute snippets of old TV shows, things I hadn't seen since I was ten, and wept as if I had found the Holy Grail. That was before YouTube came along and wiped the whole thing off the map.

But! This site, this TV Party which is now known as Classic TV because somebody else (TWO somebody elses, in fact) stole their name, still has this weird, almost eerie "ding" sound when you first go on the page. It's an opening salvo, or a greeting, or something like that. It's an old sound, probably a '50s sound from when I was really little and didn't understand anything, and nobody would explain it to me. So it got stored in the back of my brain along with a thousand other bits of broken information.

BUT.

The ding was never entirely forgotten. Though it lasts about a tenth of a second, somebody was able to find the ding on some tape somewhere and reproduce it, so that each time you go on the Classic TV site, you get the ding. 90% of people, even boomers like me, won't know what the hell they're listening to. I didn't either, until I got that creeping, squicked-out, time machine feeling I get when the 1950s come back to me, and once again I sit in the middle of the living room floor with my fat little legs splayed out in front of me. Three years old, and trying to figure out Ernie Kovacs.

Ding.

An exploration of the paranormal

I pared these down. No, really. There were about fifteen of them originally. I just couldn't stop.

This creepy little ad for Sugar Crisp (now called, I think, Golden Crisp) predates Sugar Bear and his cool, Dean Martinesque "can't get enough of that Sugar Crisp" ditty.

There are three bears, of course. And you don't want to know these bears. They come swarming into your living room and cover your TV screen. They look like Ewoks, or, worse, something from the TV-movie version of Communion (remember Christopher Walken's dance?) or Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

My gifs have been slow and jerky lately. These are shorter ones, so I hope they do better. For some reason the animation in this just begged to be giffed. It's the creepiness of those bears with their jerky puppetry and cold, sociopathic eyes.

The reactions of little Janie and Johnny are almost as squick-inducing as the jerky ministrations of the Sugar Crisp Bears. Note the segue here: girl eats cereal; bear figure with pitcher appears for a nanosection in the right side of the frame, looking - if you pay attention - incredibly artificial; then the bear and the pitcher and Little Janie's bowl are shown in a different shot, so that they never all have to appear together. This saves having to combine live action with animation. The continuity here sucks. It took me a long time to figure out that this is supposed to be the same bowl/bear.

Bear talking. Creepy. Its fur seems to creep and crawl, indicating that it has fleas, or perhaps has been moved around by somebody's greasy fingers as they take each picture and string them together.

It's that jittering, that nervous, diddery thing that makes them so unsettling. They almost seem to be on the wrong speed. That, and the big staring eyes.

"Faster, kids. . . eat FASTER!" That weird sparkly thing is a big chunk of sugar with paranormal powers which bends these children to the bear's evil will. These ads often bragged about how you could (and should) eat Sugar Crisp "like candy". This seems horrible until you realize that Sugar Crisp probably had a fraction of the sugar content of Lucky Charms or Obese-berry or whatever-the-hell they have today.

Like I said. I boiled these down. I could have gone on forever. This is the sort of animation where you can repeat one frame. I don't know if this was stop motion or what, but it's motion that I wish would stop.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Amazon Author Page update

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Ryan IS The Taekwondo Kid (purple belt division)!

The Taekwondo Kid: the colour purple!

The Taekwondo Kid: purple belt moves!

Friday, June 3, 2016

Here comes your ghost again

Well I'll be damned
Here comes your ghost again

But that's not unusual

It's just that the moon is full

And you happened to call

And here I sit
Hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I'd known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall

As I remember your eyes
Were bluer than robin's eggs
My poetry was lousy you said
Where are you calling from?
A booth in the midwest

Ten years ago

I bought you some cufflinks

You brought me something

We both know what memories can bring

They bring diamonds and rust

Well you burst on the scene

Already a legend

The unwashed phenomenon

The original vagabond

You strayed into my arms

And there you stayed

Temporarily lost at sea

The Madonna was yours for free

Yes the girl on the half-shell Would keep you

unharmed

Now I see you standing

With brown leaves falling around
And snow in your hair
Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square

Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there

Now you're telling me You're not nostalgic Then give me

another word for it You who are so good with words And at keeping things

vague

Because I need some of that vagueness now

It's all come back too clearly yes I loved you dearly

And if you're offering me diamonds and rust

I've already paid

I was shadowboxing earlier in the day

I was shadow-boxing earlier in the day
I figured I was ready for Cassius Clay
I said “Fee, fie, fo, fum, Cassius Clay, here I come
26, 27, 28, 29, I’m gonna make your face look just like mine
Five, four, three, two, one, Cassius Clay you’d better run
99, 100, 101, 102, your ma won’t even recognize you
14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, gonna knock him clean right out of his spleen”

Smoking lady

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Muybridge animation: more late-night madness

Worked on these, and worked on them, oh boy. To give you an idea of what I started with, here are the original images:

These had to be individually cropped apart, made exactly the same size, worked on to enhance to definition, then put through my gif program in correct order. Did it take a long time? Was it fiddly and difficult? What's good about all this is how completely absorbing it is. Donald Trump and climate change and jihad don't scare me any more than a package of Hostess Twinkies.

Is that good? I'm still trying to figure that out.

I'm crazy, right? Why am I doing this so late at night?

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Pure magic: gifs from Piper Spit

I love making gifs, in full knowledge that they don't always run so well. They can be slow or jerky for the first thirty seconds or so when you open a post, but normally they resolve - or at least, they do for me. For you, they may not be jerky at all, I hope.

Lately I've been able to make some really beautiful ones from our Burnaby Lake visits. I've found a new program - Imgur - well, until IT stops working too, as they all do. Imgur works well and makes some huge gifs, but is very very slow and it's hard to save them. I'm not sure why that is. I use another one called Giphy that takes about thirteen seconds to make a beautiful gif, but it can only be from a short video, and a maximum of ten seconds long. Imgur is more like fifteen. But then, that's not important - is it? All that matters is getting them up here, a few seconds of magic time seen over and over again.

Some people say they hate gifs, and I do too, the two-second ones that are supposed to be funny. They are awful. People with the right equipment can make one-minute ones, but why don't I see them anywhere?

That gorgeous alpha male red-winged blackbird just swooped down on me unbidden, but after he finally left, THIS gorgeous creature came along. Looking it up, I found out it was a female red-winged blackbird, explaining her boldness. It's hard to describe her beauty, as her feathers were shot through with gold.

Now here's a nice little sequence! Though if you watch carefully, the male actually waited until the female flew away. Or so it appears - unless she saw him coming - but that's not likely, because he flew up behind her. May I say once more - I have NEVER fed wild birds, and don't believe in feeding wildlife, but in my old age I have become weak, and there is a dire shortage of magic in my life now that my backyard birds have fled. An excuse, no doubt.

These sandhill cranes are mystical creatures, and they love to hang around the docks, hoping to be fed like all these birds. We usually see a mated pair, but this looks to be a smaller bachelor male (note the red mask). I just keep waiting for the pair to return with a fuzzy crane chick. If that happens, oh God, the gifs, the GIFS!!

POST-IT NOTE: Sometimes I think the gifs have to go through one entire (in this case, 15-second) cycle to run properly. But how do I know? All I know is that they DO run properly eventually, but if they're slow and jerky it takes forever to run through that first cycle. Just keep watching, they'll move. These are some of the nicest gifs I've ever made. Just little packages of magic.

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

A bird in the hand: mystery songbird at Piper Spit

Later identified as a tree swallow, but can't they come up with a more lyrical name than that?! This guy's song was intoxicating. Like all the birds at Piper Spit, he's too tame for his own good, and I know I'm not helping matters with my handfuls of seeds. But what can I say? I'm weak, and short on magic moments in my life. I have NO birds in my back yard all, and barely any squirrels, though last year it was just teeming out there. Don't know why. Even took down the new bird house in case they thought it was a predator (like those plastic owls you see). And our former favourite haunt, the "duck park" at Lafarge Lake, is being bulldozed to make way for a Nazi-like cement amphitheatre (just the name has Third Reich connotations to me - like something from Hitler's proposed monstrous empire, Germania). We may never get that lake back, but now we have this.

Blackbird singing. . . on Piper Spit

I can't describe to you the feeling of having this handsome devil fly right down to me without any prompting. I know I shouldn't be feeding him, but I am. I'm tired of feeling like an evil human being. I need my moments of utter magic, and I find so many of them in this magical place.