Hercules and the Mighty WHA-hoo

Next to The Adventures of Clutch Cargo (and his pals, Spinner and Paddlefoot), The Mighty Hercules has the worst animation the world has ever known. I've been watching them on Teletoon Retro lately while knitting my grandson a Minecraft Creeper. No, really! I am, and it's turning out well. The cartoons look a lot better than they did on a grainy black-and-white TV, but they're still pretty bad.

I must have been about nine when I started watching these - slavishly, every day after school. Sure beat the hell out of Captain Jolly and Poopdeck Paul, hosts of a chintzy Detroit kids' show that everyone watched because there was bloody-well nothing else to watch, we got three channels or something, and didn't want to watch Art Linkletter, Queen for a Day or Tennessee Ernie Ford.

My favorite scenes were with Hercules and Pegasus, even though Pegasus was almost as irritating as Newton, that rotten little centaur who talked in a Mickey Mouse voice and repeated everything he said. What was irritating was his whinny, which was straight out of Sound Effects Central. There was a high-pitched sort of trilling noise, then a full-out neigh, but they kept repeating the same two sounds over, and over, and over again.

I was shocked to hear identical whinnies in a lot of old Westerns, making me realize how much of movie and cartoon sound tracks is totally fake. You can even hear it in early sitcoms: certain laughs crop up again and again, even on different shows, meaning it's a generic laugh track on a loop. My brother and I noticed this to great hilarity, first on I Love Lucy, and then on Pete and Gladys and I Married Joan. There was this one person laughing that stuck out, a sort of high-pitched "WHA-hoo!" that we would notice - in fact, it was a sort of game, to see who could collect the most WHA-hoos. It was identical on every show we watched, and cropped up at least three or four times per episode. And do you know, I still hear them today when I watch old sitcoms, and wonder just how dead that person must be after all these years.

And my teachers, certainly my grade school teachers, all dead now, and most of my high school teachers, and even the people I used to work with in the ratshit jobs I had in my twenties - probably a lot of them are dead by now too. It gives me pause. But not a lot, because I never did like them very much anyway.

Orang Pendek Paranthropus Boisei

Why do I do this to myself? Why do I like to scare the hell out of myself with things I know don't really exist? The habit goes back to childhood. There is plenty on the internet to weird/gross yourself out on, but one of the worst is "imaginary hominids", a la Bigfoot, like this guy, whatever-his-name-is.

Oh, I know it has to be a drawing or a painting or something, but doesn't it look real?  It could be a photoshop deal of some kind. Probably is.

But God it weirds me out. I've seen pictures of reconstructions of early humans, or protohumans, some of whom didn't make it to the higher levels of evolution and died off. Makes you realize the origin of the word "lowbrow". The only equivalent we have now are microcephalics, a few of whom survive infancy and literally live without a cerebral cortex.

Imagine these things grunting and walking around (because they did walk upright, all of them, so below the neck they would look creepily human). When did the first meaningful grunt occur? What were the first things to be named? Did they name themselves - each other? Why did language develop independently in ALL groups of early humans, and how did we come to be so wired for it? When did grammar begin? The rest of culture doesn't interest me nearly so much.

I sometimes put myself back in time, watching these bizarre beings that would some day be "us". Watching what they do, what they "say". Surviving. Feeling joy? We don't know. Who was the first australopithecine to experience depression?

I wish sometimes I could dial back time, I mean to a time before it was too late, and say to these guys, hey, look, you really fucked it up the first time. Next time, can you plan a little, not rape the resources of the earth and so poison everything that the world climate finally pops a mainspring and spins deliriously out of control?

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

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Ovarian cancer: teal should be the only color (and other musings on social atrocity)

This is one of those days when a lot is happening: we lost Pete Seeger at the great-grandfatherly age of 94. Without Seeger there couldn't have been a Dylan, and without Dylan there couldn't have been a Springsteen, and on and on.

When this great tree fell, the tree that will gradually compost itself into soil for succeeding generations (that is, if we don't strip it bare and pave it over instead), there was no terrible grief, because he had given more even in the first 40 years of his life than most people do in a lifetime. He was a light, a real man, both gentle and fierce. I once saw a clip of him playing Beethoven's Ode to Joy on a banjo. It seemed to sum him up, somehow.

But at the same time, other rumblings are felt. As if it's an entirely new phenomenon, as if it's a disease that women are still ashamed of and expected to bear alone, ovarian cancer is just barely beginning to come out of the closet. I've written about this before, about how "pink isn't the only color", though by the relentless pompom-waving juggernaut that is the breast cancer industry, you'd never know it.

Today Facebook was full of it, warning women not to use baby powder on themselves or they'd get ovarian cancer, without explaining just how. Like wildfire, the warning was shared and shared, kind of like the one about apple cider vinegar curing heart disease. These things remind me of the forest animals in Bambi during the fire: "Run! Run!" Why is it everyone automatically drops 30 or 40 IQ points, or else reverts to ten years old, when they go on Facebook?

But I digress. Ovarian cancer isn't cool because it isn't nearly as survivable as that other, more stylish disease. It's just not in vogue, and besides, it's terrifying. Women dread it infinitely more, knowing they won't just lose a breast or their hair, but their lives. They don't talk about it, it's still hushed, silenced, and profoundly stigmatized. It's as if you've done something irreversibly wrong to your most female, womanly parts, and they have turned irretrievably toxic. 

The ovarian cancer awareness movement had to pick teal as its color, maybe because all the others were taken. But in some ways, it's oddly appropriate. Teal isn't just one color, but is a mix of green and blue, the blue darker than in turquoise. It's a tiny bit exotic, a little outside the orbit. The disease isn't in the public consciousness yet, not in the way that the "other one" is. My feeling is that it's disgraceful to pound away at one form of cancer at the expense of others. In the rainbow of known diseases, in the spectrum of things we talk about and make banners about and run for and scream and cheer for, ovarian cancer isn't even in the running.  But teal is a new color, an original, slightly rebellious. I like it. I like surviving, and I like fairness, and I LOVE unfairly neglected causes getting their due at long last.

The thing I saw on Facebook today about talcum powder migrating up your vagina and poisoning your ovaries with cancer seemed absurd at first, but I've come to believe that it doesn't matter whether it makes sense or not. The warning has put the disease on the table for discussion. Let's keep it there for a while, shall we, until people stop gasping in horror and turning away.

Oh, and speaking of which, this is Mental Health Day, isn't it? I'm not sure what they call it now. (My brother, a schizophrenic, once made the memorable statement, "Support mental health or I'll kill you.") Anyway, it's the one day out of the year when we're allowed to think/talk about mental illness. Just the way it's approached bugs me - a sort of awkward "uhh, let's go in the other room and actually talk about this - now don't be ashamed, don't feel stigmatized, we're not stigmatizing you, in fact by talking about it, by starting a dialogue, we're hoping to break down the stigma that makes everyone think you're a raving maniac." 

It's sort of like that. It's still that bad smell that maybe can be dispelled using the same formula that worked for breast cancer (except it will never work, due to humanity's millenia-long dread and horror of mental illness). 
People in the news, stars like Catherine Zeta Jones, "admit" to having bipolar disorder, or even "confess" to having it, as you'd confess to a serious crime. These awkward public admissions are laden with guilt and culpability, but who notices? She's "brave" to unmask herself, to strip bare this jolting revelation: brave, that universal description for saying something it really would have been better to keep to yourself. 

When will this change? I think, when the last human being takes its last poisonous, gas-laden, toxic gasp of air before expiring. Maybe in twenty years or so. Nice to see the stigma dispelled that quickly.

OK, then - this piece has no theme to it at all except "things that bug me", so I might as well go steaming ahead. Facebook, my new Bible (blughhh) is now running all sorts of pieces on Woody Allen and "the scandal" (you know, the one he calls "What Scandal?"), in which he apparently abducted his own stepdaughter and married her, molesting his 7-year-old other stepdaughter in the process.

The family, incredibly, is still bitter and angry, even hysterical about this. Ronan Farrow, Mia's oldest son, sent Woody a Father's Day card that read, "Happy Father's Day - or, in your case, Happy Brother-in-law's Day." Never mind, he was actually sired by Frank Sinatra anyway, and he's dead, so we can't go into Mafia ramifications. Myself, I am surprised at the rancor and even hate that Mia still feels for Woody. I'm not saying all should be comfy-cozy with him: he strikes me as fairly reptilian and a man who will pretty much take whatever he feels like, claiming, "The heart wants what it wants." But Mia strikes me as earth-motherish, having adopted a dozen or so disabled Third World children, a granola type who normally would preach forgiveness for everyone because, after all, "everything happens for a reason" and our enemies teach us the most valuable lessons in life. We shouldn't hate them, but thank them.

Mia is still a screaming banshee when it comes to all this stuff. I don't know what really happened in the Farrow/Allen household 20 years ago, but I do know that, against the odds, Woody and Soon-Yi Farrow are still married and have raised two daughters together. I doubt if Woody is the kind of Dad who goes to their ballet recitals, but he hasn't walked out on them either. 

That said, I still have problems with Allen. He made a searingly brilliant film last year called Blue Jasmine, with Cate Blanchett out-Blanching Blanche du Bois in a performance that made my scalp crackle. The only false note in it, and it was a real clanger that nobody even noticed or maybe didn't dare comment on, was the utter disconnect from any kind of technology beyond 1950. In order to get a decent job, Jasmine had to take "a computer course", something so generic it sounded like the courses my local library offered seniors in 1992. The classroom depicted a lot of twentyish students sitting at rectangular desks with antique-looking monitors in front of them. Jasmine supposedly didn't know anything about this - at all - though in another scene, she uses an iphone with impugnity. I don't think Allen knows what iphones are - he has no idea what Twitter is, and is only vaguely aware of blogging or YouTube. Somebody must have forced this change on him just to anchor the film in the present day. (Or maybe he thought she was improvising a mad scene by talking into her makeup case.)

What do you call this ranty rambling, then? Pete Seeger will turn to soil, or maybe not if he turns into pavement. Ovarian cancer as a "cause" will remain buried unless and until people care enough to bring it out of the closet. Mental health issues are still "admitted", "confessed", always "bravely", of course. The bravery isn't in enduring what can be an excruciating illness (but hey, not always! One can live with it in a state of grace and even joy!), but in having the guts to admit you've had something you should have been able to snap yourself out of yourself. Something that inspires primal shivers of dread and even repugnance, because it is associated with the walking dead. The jabbering homeless. Vivien Leigh, Blanche du Bois, receiving shock treatments in a "psycho ward". (And here's a connection. The deranged Jasmine babbles away to a couple of kids sitting there trying to comprehend what she's saying. She talks about "Edison's Medicine" - ECT treatments, presumably, a phrase that used to mean execution by electricity, "the chair".)

And on it goes.

It's been my experience that if you criticize or even comment on anything, people will expect you to be able to fix it. So if I could do one thing to set the world right, what would it be? Slap humanity on the side of the head and tell it to SMARTEN UP before it's too late! Or at least wake up. Great potential riches lie asleep, buried because we are afraid of them. Afraid of looking at them, but most of all, of looking at ourselves.

POST-BLOG THOUGHTS. As usual, I have some post-thoughts in this post. The little doohickey above is interesting. "Strong men can have depression TOO" - what does that imply, or perhaps scream from the rooftops? "Strong men can have depression, JUST LIKE WEAK MEN" (or wusses, or crybabies, or homosexuals, or whoever you happen to hate on a particular day). It's just inherent in the statement that "we" think depression only happens to men who are NOT strong, at least not strong emotionally. So we have to reassure everyone that YES! Even guys with big bulging muscles, even guys who have more brains in their dicks than their heads, even Mafia dons and Wall Street wild animals and other perceived power types, CAN HAVE DEPRESSION, though we still cannot figure out why - it's a puzzle, a real riddle that anyone with any earthly power at all, any perceived social worth, would ever have it! Must just be a quirk of the human condition. Or all those steroids I've been sucking down for the past 10 years.

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

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

Ducklings on a roll

The thing about finding a great site like Gifsforum is that you CAN'T STOP MAKING GIFS. I was                 bad enough before. This site has all the features I ever wanted, and every time I go on it, they add some more. Now I can compress them and change the color and the speed and lots of other things.

The "ducklings in a windstorm" video is a classic, and one of the first things I saw on YouTube. In fact, it may even predate YouTube, when I used to scrounge around the internet to try to find videos. (That, and Gay Boy Friend, still a classic and, happily, still on-line.) My favorite part of this gif is the mother duck skidding along and landing in a puddle (where, though you can't see it here, she splashes around reflexively as ducks always do in water). Before that she makes a brave attempt to herd her young ones together (ducks are really wonderful mothers, better than many humans) before they go flying off in every direction.

When you first watch this, you want to say: oh, nooooooo - they're all going to die! They roll around like little fuzzy golf balls, flipping and flapping every-which-way. But, amazingly, they right themselves easily, as if nothing had happened.

. . . And they just keep strollin' along.

http://gifsforum.com/make-a-gif-from-youtube/

A classic video (can't see it too many times!)

Year of the Wood Horse 2

Year of the Wood Horse, 2014

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Countdown

We went down in the basement, see. . . all us kids. . . it was a real old building. . . it was dark and the steps were so worn there were hollows in them from all those feet. . .

. . . and the teacher would say Now Boys and Girls, today we will be watching a Fillum. We were all so happy to be out of class and watching a Fillum that we didn't care what was in it. The projector made a very loud clattery noise and there was always this ring-y jingly sound in the background. It was called Bell & Howell, but my brother secretly called it Hell and Bowel. It was very dark in the basement and a bit scary, but not too bad because we had each other and could hold hands in the dark. We loved to watch the countdown at the beginning of the Fillum, it was like a rocket going off and we wanted to count, but nobody said it out loud because it was a really strict old school and you didn't say anything. But we all noticed there was never a 2 or a 1.

The Fillums were all in black and white, so no way could we be seeing colors. We didn't see colors on TV either. The Fillums were about hygiene and Arctic explorers and Getting Along with your Parents. We only saw colors at the movies and that wasn't very often. Later when we went to the newer school, there were movies we went to, the Capitol Theatre or the Centre, with a girl friend named Kim. We saw Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion and The Trouble with Angels and Zebra in the Kitchen. We bought Mackintosh's toffee and sucked on it during the show. When people talked about each other's dreams, they always asked, "Do you dream in color?" If somebody dreamed in color, it was a very big deal.

Time goes very fast now. Very fast. Very fast. And there's no getting it back. You can't run the movie backwards any more, and if you did, I mean, if you kept on doing that, eventually you would just disappear.

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

All squirrelly

 

When you find a new way to make gifs, it's cause to celebrate. But what will our subject be? Rob Ford is just about crapped out.

This creature beating his knee with that strange pink cylindrical object looks even cooler with most of the color taken out. Gives it a sort of artsy look.

Can you read his furry little lips? What might he be saying, do you think?

Uhhhhhh. . . freaky.

The many faces of Rob Ford

Rob Ford, Rob Ford, our friend Rob Ford

If you didn't pull this shit, we'd soon get bored.

A drunken rant in a takeout joint?

Let's face it, he's crazy, we get the point.

Here RoFo moves at a faster pace.

The takeout customers think he's a a disgrace.

A guy in the bathroom is taking this video,

Until Ford hollers at him, "I want to get rid-e-o."

And now our boy is really shakin'

As he rants and shouts bad things in Jamaican.

Clearly this fellow is very upset;

More clearly, someone should go grab a net.

Here Rob Ford looks all artistic,

Though these gif settings don't make him any less sadistic.

He looks kind of cool though, all grainy and stuff,

Though the next day, he's gonna feel pretty rough.

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

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