A smoggy day in London Town

Loving Pink: the little angels of Camay

Belong Movie Trailer

There's a very long story behind this, the story of a church meltdown and the crisis of leadership that caused it. But I can't tell it now, it's too long and harrowing, except to say that I was right in the middle of it. This was about 15 years ago, so it's truly incredible that the person at the centre of it is still posting "trailers" for a revenge movie which has gone through about four titles (including Church Bullies) and does not, in fact, exist. This in spite of the fact that it was listed with the IMDB and announced as an entry in the Sundance Film Festival.

It just goes to show how long one person can hold a grudge. 

(Later thoughts) I'm not sure why, but I watched this a couple more times, and was even more baffled. The woman playing "Mrs. Sanborga" (a name very close to the real name of someone in the church) seems almost comic, and why is it a pew is parked out in the vestibule or the lobby or whatever it is? I've never seen that before. The things hanging on the wall are also pretty incomprehensible.

This is the shortest of the half-dozen or so trailers I've seen for the non-existent movie by "Reverend Shaka", leading me to believe that his budget is now pretty lean. His first entry had stock footage of African dancers bidding him a farewell from his native country so he could serve in Canada, only to be thwarted by a bunch of insensitive, ungrateful racists.

The Reverend did start his own church after the meltdown, towing along an assortment of disaffected former members. It lasted a few months. The web site hinted at conflict that could not (or at least wasn't going to be) resolved, with resolutions nonetheless that "next year we will make a new start".

It was one of the most painful things I ever lived through, and I never even connected the dots with the physical and emotional collapse I experienced in the year after he was fired, until now. I had enough other reasons, I guess. And besides, he was gone now, and everything was going to be all right. 

All right. But out of four or five candidates, the church chose him. He did not fall from the sky, any more than bad husbands or bad jobs or bad auto mechanics fall from the sky. WE CHOOSE THEM.

I wonder why no one ever even considered that.

Life in slow motion

Frankenstein meets the Space Monster (1965) Trailer

It's better to watch just the trailers of these things, because the movies themselves are unbearably boring. They're made on a budget of about $200.00, so no wonder, but the monster effects are still gratifying to watch. They're so bad because they tried to be good. 

Do you notice the bald-headed guy looks just like Dr. Evil? 

Kitty up a tree (come rescue me!)

These rescued kitties all look alike - hugely dilated pupils, whiskers at full span, ears tensed, and they all meow in that "help me, help me!" way. 

Ringo Starr: silent movie

The original has a different format and just won't fit, but I made a couple of really handsome longer gifs of this short video. I like what he does with the flower. Watch them while you play this song:

I loved Ringo then, and I love Ringo now. From the sad-eyed mutt of the Beatles, he has become ultra-hip and cool without being obnoxious. And he still has his lovely Liverpool accent.


[Intro]
Huh-huh! Huh-huh
(Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah)
(Aye-aye-aye-aye)

[Verse 1]
A lady that I know just came from Colombia
She smiled because I did not understand
Then she held out some marijuana, ha ha!
She said it was the best in all the land

[Chorus]
And I said
"No, no, no, no, I don't smoke it no more
I'm tired of waking up on the floor
No, thank you, please, it only makes me sneeze
And then it makes it hard to find the door"

(Ah-ah-aye-aye)

[Verse 2]
A woman that I know just came from Majorca, Spain
She smiled because I did not understand (Parazzi! Parazzi!) (Olé!)
Then she held out a ten pound bag of cocaine
She said it was the finest in the land

[Chorus]
And I said
"No, no, no, no, I don't [sniff] no more
I'm tired of waking up on the floor
No, thank you, please, it only makes me sneeze
And then it makes it hard to find the door"

[Bridge]
(Aye-aye-aye-aye)
(Aye-aye-aye-aye)
(Aye-aye-aye-aye)
(Aye-aye-aye)

[Verse 3]
A man that I know just came from Nashville, Tennessee, oh (oh no!)
He smiled because I did not understand
Then he held out some moonshine whiskey, oh ho
He said it was the best in all the land (and he wasn't joking!)

[Chorus]
And I said
"No, no, no, no, I don't drink it no more
I'm tired of waking up on the floor
No, thank you, please, it only makes me sneeze
And then it makes it hard to find the door"

Well, I said
"No, no, no, no, I can't take it no more
I'm tired of waking up on the floor
No, thank you, please, it only makes me sneeze
And then it makes it hard to find the door"

[Outro]
Hey, yeah!
"I'll just have another drink, barman, have you got a large brandy?"

High School Hellcats -1958

This was a whole genre in the '50s, "bad girl" movies which showed young women in compromising situations - in other words, screwing their brains out, though it was always implied rather than shown. Usually they came to ruin, but it was fun watching them come to ruin, and also fun to sit there in judgement after being so highly entertained. Nothing more fascinating than watching someone skid out of bounds and crash, then say to yourself, "What can you expect? She had it coming." 

Though the '50s are thought of as a dull, Eisenhower-stifled time, they actually weren't. This type of low-budget, girls-going-wild movie was immensely popular, though few of them became mainstream (except the male-dominated Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild One). The Beat Generation was making itself known and heard. Elvis burst on the scene, a white man singing like a black man, and obscenely thrusting his pelvis so that Ed Sullivan had to show him only from the waist up. Civil rights suddenly became crucial, whereas in the 1940s people couldn't understand why black folks were so "uppity" and unappreciative of all they were allowed to do now that they were out of chains. Cultural metamorphosis was already unfolding, though after the '60s we looked back and saw it differently. The truth is, hippies represented a tiny fraction of the culture then, and the rest of us were paisley-coloured, bead-wearing wanna-be's.

I wonder how many prudish young women watched movies like these and then just decided to burst their chains and become High School Hellcats. Doesn't seem too likely, but maybe somebody did.

Mothra: THE RETURN!

I was going to post old Mothra gifs/videos with these, but why? They are so sublime the way they are. Moths are spookier than butterflies, dustier, furrier, with thicker bodies and legs like one of those exotic, plushy Amazon spiders. I believe these are both cecropia moths, which I had never heard of, though for some reason I was aware of the cecropia beetle. Metamorphosis is a strange thing, and I don't know why anything in nature happens the way it does. Is there a God? Too early in the morning to contemplate such a question (even though it isn't early at all), but it knows how to happen, which sorrows me all the more that we seem to be systematically destroying the natural world. The puzzlement over how this can possibly be, as if it too is just happening all by itself and can't be stopped, dismays me most of all. But the internet asks only that we enjoy these images, even marvel at them, and then get on with our day.

The ruins of happiness

Now I know why some places are considered "haunted" - not just because they look creepy, but because past joy and vibrant life have fled. People see shapes moving about in these places, feel creepiness and cold spots where normal physics has caved in. This does not happen by itself. People leave for all kinds of reasons, but a lot of it (like those abandoned malls popping up everywhere) is financial. These places just don't pay any more, or are out of date or too expensive to keep up. So people move on to some other playground, which in turn will also be abandoned. The human race gobbles through pleasure and resources until it all collapses, wonders what could have happened, then moves on to some newer, finer place to exploit. 

"Why? Why did you leave me?"

I must admit I've never heard of MaraNatha almond butter (and in fact, I thought Maranatha was some sort of religious reference) until last night, when I saw this ad while watching Dateline. 

I thought it was pretty cool, and wanted to make a gif of it and then reanimate it. This involves shifting the order of the frames, subtracting frames and duplicating others, changing the speed, and going forwards and backwards. 

Below is the gif from the original ad, and then the reanimated version I made from it.

P. S. I was right about Maranatha:

maranatha [mar-uh-nath-uh]

Word Origin

interjection

O Lord, come: used as an invocation in I Cor. 16:22.

Another translation:

Word Origin and History for maranatha

Expand

Maranatha

late 14c., a Bible word, from Greek maranatha, untranslated Semitic word in Cor. xvi:22, where it follows Greek anathema, and therefore has been taken as part of a phrase and used as "a curse." Usually assumed to be from Aramaic maran atha "Our Lord has come," which would make the common usage erroneous (see OED entry), but possibly it is a falsetransliteration of Hebrew mohoram atta "you are put under the ban,"which would make more sense in the context. [Klein]

. . . So what does all this have to do with almond butter?

Giant Cat Japanese Commercial (2014)

The only thing better than a giant cat head is a giant cat. For some reason, ads from Japan are so much more clever and imaginitive than anything we produce here. I guess this is an ad for gum, but who cares? It could be an ad for anything.

My cat attacked me tonight, and I'm worried about it. He's usually so gentle and sweet. He kept jumping up into my new office chair every time I got up to do anything. When I tried to pick him up to turf him out of it, the way his claws all shot out at once reminded me alarmingly of the shark's teeth in Jaws. He had taken such possession of my arm that I had to pull it back out of my sweater sleeve for self-protection.

Bentley!! 

Is it the fact it's a new chair and therefore foreign to him, weird-smelling? An intruder in the familiar territory of my office? Is he trying to protect me from it? I think it's more likely he's trying to own it. It got so bad tonight that Bill had to tip the chair almost upside-down to get him out of there. I was even afraid to go in the room.

We have since made up, but it was a reminder once more that no matter how sweet and loving, a cat's a cat. For a' that.

Books I haven't forgotten

This, my friends, is the whole reason I began this blog. The Glass Character, in case you haven't heard, is the name Harold Lloyd gave to his glasses-wearing screen persona (and why he said glass instead of glasses, nobody knows, but it was a hell of a lot more poetical). It is also the title of my third novel, which practically no one has read. I gave up on posting links to Amazon, my author's page, etc. because it made no difference whatsoever. I sold, like, three copies last year. Nevertheless, it IS a good novel, even my daughter liked it (and like Mikey, she hates everything), and though it quickly disappeared into oblivion, and the Lloyd family treated it like some sort of poison, I am still proud of it because I am basically out of touch with reality. 

A friend of mine wondered why I was so hurt when he wrote an article about The Glass Character in a feature called Friday's Forgotten Novels. He simply could not understand it, and thought I should appreciate the attention and publicity. Hey, no one remembers this book at all! I'm sure that would make you rush out to buy it.

But never mind all that, it WOULD make a good feature film, because it's about Harold Lloyd, and no one has ever made a feature film about Harold Lloyd, or ANY sort of film. Eventually, someone will, and if it is ripped off of my novel, which it might be, there is really nothing I can do about it.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Calendar girl

Hilda: all wet

Friday on my mind

This squirrel needs Dr. Now

Fattest squirrel I have ever seen. They're never exactly thin, but in the fall they begin to fatten up for a winter that never really arrives. Oh, sometimes we get a dump or two of snow, but to call that "winter" in Canada is an insult. But it's hardwired into these creatures to squirrel away food, to gather it and leap around with it in their mouths for a while, to look industrious, then scrabble away in the dirt and bury it, almost immediately forgetting where it is, then digging up some other squirrel's plunder and eating it on the spot. They don't hibernate around here, any more than the geese migrate, so they just keep on eating all winter and getting fatter. I don't hear all the swearing and scolding now that I did in September-October, but I'm not sure what that means. (Most bizarre moment: hearing a sound kind of like a squirrel scolding, then turning around and realizing it was a Steller's jay imitating a squirrel). I also haven't heard that nasty little red squirrel for a while (click on bottom to watch it on YouTube):

This guy was just furious for a couple of months, though at first I was sure it was some territorial bird. The red squirrel appeared to own the clump of bushes in the corner of the yard, though once I saw THREE black squirrels in there, thumbing their little black noses at the red squirrel, who went absolutely insane. Squirrels do this on purpose, just to be annoying.

I hear a lot less chattering and squeaking and swearing now, but I see a whole lot more eating.

Cats do nothing

                                               Cats do nothing.

Hercules: NOT the Disney version!

Is this the worst animation in recorded history?

I have a certain fascination with "worsts", though it's often a matter of personal opinion just what constitutes a worst. But this must be one of them.

I mean.

I found this animated Italian version of Hercules several years go, then promptly forgot all about it. I think I featured it in my Festival of Bad Animation at some point, but it was only a snippet. This is an attempt to make three 45-second gifs from it (nine full-length ones in all, a real spectacle) representing the "highlights" of the story, which isn't really a story at all but a series of vignettes vaguely based on some kind of Greek myth about somebody. (Don't worry about sound, or the lack of it, because the soundtrack is completely unintelligible anyway). This thing makes the old Trans-Lux TV series The Mighty Hercules look like high art.

Though I had a few excerpts, I wasn't able to track down the whole movie for the longest time, because I kept searching under Hercules and getting that wretched Disney version. I finally took a screenshot of one of the videos, put it through Google reverse image, and matched it to another video I didn't know about, and found the magic word in the description that unlocked the mystery.

DINGO!

No, not "bingo". Dingo is the name of the animation studio which turned out this baffling thing, and many others which are almost worse. Armed with that information, I found the whole movie in Italian, without subtitles (for don't the characters tell the story? Sort of), plus another version dubbed in Finnish! 

This is an international production, obviously, for Dingo Pictures isn't Italian OR Finnish.  After a lot of digging around, I was able to find this snippet on an animation fan site:

Dingo Pictures is a German animation company, consisting of the husband and wife team Ludwig Ickert and Simone Greiss. The studio is infamous for creating traditionally-animated cartoons based on fairy tales and concepts plagiarizing the works of Disney, Pixar, Don Bluth, and DreamWorks. These cartoons are highly regarded as some of the worst animated films ever, with extremely low-budget animation,  disjointed plot lines that almost always go nowhere, repetitive dialogue, reuse of music and sound effects, lack of dub actors (usually two voice actors, one male and one female, in some cases only one), and shoddy character design, often looking as if it were traced from another cartoon.They have gained a cult following over time.

One of the most bizarre Disney ripoff appearances in this movie is Pongo, the leading dog of 101 Dalmatians. No kidding, right in the middle of Greek mythology we have this handsome spotted dog sitting there, totally out of place, and - yes - looking very much like he has been traced. I was also to discover - oh, this just gets worse and worse - that they DID do a ripoff of that movie, called Dalmatians, a pastiche of every dog movie ever made, including Lady and the Tramp, Rin Tin Tin, and Lassie Come Home. 

Though it does not quite sink to the rock-bottom level of Paddy the Pelican, which looks like a pencil test for something which was never actually made, Hercules is still pretty bad, with lots of laughs to get you over the boring parts. And there ARE boring parts. Believe me.