Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Monday, March 20, 2017
WATCH THIS! Incredible life hacks that will hack your life.
These incredible life hacks hacked my life, and they'll hack your life, too.
Cats who Forgot How to Cat
My cat "cats", and he does a lot of these things too, so I guess he must be. . . a cat.
Sunday, March 19, 2017
Horse yoga!
This was part of my HORSE FAIL post, but it was too good not to repeat. It's one of my infamous animations (with four or five frames, so it ain't Disney). Apparently this is a "thing", something they do down Argentina way to rehabilitate stallions:
From the Daily Mail:
The exercise of horse yoga is practiced at the Doma India School in San Luis, Argentina with the aim of taming and relaxing wild, traumatised and nervous horses.
The school was founded by father and son Oscar and Cristobal Scarpati and they live on a farm in the South American country.
If I were a stallion, this wouldn't relax me, but that's just me.
Gang life: Andy and the animals
It was only in the past week or so that I discovered the shame and disgrace that is Andy's Gang. This was a sort of grotesque Howdy Doody clone with a similar gallery of obnoxious kids, a creepy charmless host, and loud, bizarre characters running around pointlessly. That would be OK - sort of - except the drippy, creepy host is Andy Devine, the most irritating, smarmy actor ever to walk the face of the earth. He had this voice that was both whiny and abrasive, and a vacuous, my-brain-shrank-in-the-wash smile.
But the show would have been tolerable - maybe - without the animal segments. In this case the creatures were literally wired to tiny musical instruments and made to "play" them to a seemingly endless tune. In this video the song is unrecognizable, but it involves a chicken, a chihuahua, a hamster, a rabbit, and - the only one who retains his dignity through the whole thing - Midnight the Cat.
I like Midnight. Though he is probably as glazed as the rest of them from the effects of sedation, he at least keeps his eyes open. His paws are literally controlled by wires that are quite visible at times, jerking his legs up and down, and in one case as he "plays" the banjo, one front paw is rapidly yanked back and forth with wrenching force.
This is abuse, of course, and I don't offer it here as anything else. But it is SO bizarre that I had to share it. One of the many facts I didn't want to know about Andy's Gang is that there was, in fact, no studio audience, just an endlessly repeated stock-footage clip of kids stomping and screaming. (This kind of takes the piss out of the theme song: "I got a gang, you got a gang, everybody's gotta have a gang" - Gang? There's nobody here!). Andy Devine taped all the season's episodes in the space of a couple of weeks, then went off to do his real work, usually on Westerns where he played a whiny, fatuous, gravel-voiced sidekick.
When I found the clips, I was shocked and horrified at what they were doing to these creatures. This is like something out of the Twilight Zone, an animal nightmare. This sort of thing would, I hope, be outlawed today, though I'm not sure in the third world. I thank God now for shelters, the SPCA, the Humane Society, and for people willing to adopt kitties and puppies who have already been through the mill.
(Do you like my Midnight animation? I found two photos that are slightly different. And that is all it takes.)
Saturday, March 18, 2017
Friday, March 17, 2017
Thursday, March 16, 2017
The most bizarre video I have ever seen (no, I mean it)
God save me from this video (one of the worst I've ever seen). It's from a ghastly, creepy kids' show of the 1950s called Andy's Gang. I'm going to be posting more about this show - if I can stand it (must. . . write. . . post. . . ). It involves a truly shameful form of animal abuse which people found quite amusing back then. Those who have carefully analyzed this few minutes of film (and I've studied it as minutely as if it were the Zapruder footage) believe that the hamster actually dies at the 1:05 point.
Sweet surprises!
Some of my favorite Lucky Charms commercials from the 1960s. I especially like the fact that the "rainbow" colours all come out in shades of grey. This reminds me of Dorothy stepping into Oz. None of us knew that the picture turned to colour at this point, because none of us had SEEN it in colour. So he has to describe the colours to us.
Lucky Charms has steadily escalated the number of marshmallow bits over the years, until the "cereal" is now nothing but a bowl of chemicals. North Americans are puzzled, with big question marks appearing above their stupid heads, as to "why" their children are so obese. How can they become obese from a cereal that's "magically delicious"? In recent years the leprechaun has become insufferable, speaking in an obviously phony Irish accent (I mean, even more phony than this one) while he rolls out the "new" marshmallow shape/flavour. The last one was in the shape of a silver Porsche.
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
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