Sunday, July 30, 2017
It takes a train to cry
Inexplicably, after nearly giving up my Harold Lloyd Facebook page (in fact, after nearly giving up, period: ever feel kinda suicidal?), I find myself back in a Harold phase. This IS a blog about Harold Lloyd, after all. Which is why it is called The Glass Character: Harold's eccentric name for his bespectacled alter ego. If it branches in a few other directions (old ads, old cars, weird videos, masses of gifs, and MANY handmade animations), it always homes back in on him eventually.
Harold's specialty was panic. Barely-controlled panic, or not controlled at all. Here he panics with a train. The movie is called Now or Never, and I haven't seen it in a while, but it's funny. I had only three frames to work with here, so the action isn't too smooth. I seldom have more than two photos with the same background. He runs away from trains, he runs on top of trains, he hangs on to the sides of trains. All very good stuff.
I find this insanely beautiful!
Saturday, July 29, 2017
Friday, July 28, 2017
FAKE BIRD NEWS! The Korean Crow-Tit
This Is The Korean Crow-Tit - The World's Cutest Bird!
This little birdy is a Korean crow-tit and it looks like a fluffy cotton ball with tiny wings.
It's a little poof ball!
LOOK AT ITS TINY WINGS!
The above rhapsody is from a site called Sunny Skyz, which posts mostly, I believe, sunny, funny, adorable things, which these bird pictures definitely are.
I looked up the fluffball birdie elsewhere, and it appeared on a few other bouncy, flouncy, good-news sites, along with (groannn, inevitably) Pinterest.
I quickly became enamored of this poofball, compared (on one page) with "something a little kid would make out of a cotton ball". I even made a little animation with it (somewhere below).
But then I began to have my doubts.
I began to have my doubts when I looked for information about this bird, and hit a complete and total dead end.
Wikipedia, which has entries on just about every species of bird, bee, animal and plant, had nothing at all on it, in spite of a massive entry on Korean bird species that ran into the hundreds.
It got worse. My beloved Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology (which I refer to almost daily now that I have become a Bird Nerd) had nothing on it either. Tits, yes! There are many kinds of tits, and I have heard all the jokes. But no Korean crow-tit.
I had a growing suspicion, one I've had many times before. Somebody was having me on.
After googling around fruitlessly and only finding endless replications of the cute little fluff-balls, with no information about them at all, I came across a startling entry from a site,about a Korean "boy band" called BTS. Once I read it, I was more confused than ever:
Now the video I linked says, "They call me a try-hard", but I think it's more accurate to leave the word 'baepsae', or 'crow-tit'. This hinges on the fact that this song utilizes a well-known phrase in Korea: "If a crow-tit walks like a stork, it will tear its legs". A crow-tit is a bird with a small stride because it has short legs, and when we compare this with a stork who has much taller legs, we see that the stork would easily be able to travel farther with less effort.
(Video removed by YouTube)
The song itself mentions the stork and the crow-tit multiple times, the "crow-tits" being the generation from which BTS members come, whereas the "storks" are the generation prior. The stork generation is comprised of parents, teachers, employees- people the younger generation is meant to be able to look up to and to learn from.
So somebody probably extracted the name from that song and attached it to pictures of a very cute bird which nobody can readily identify. How many people know about the old Korean legend of the crow-tit, and how it might tear its little legs if it walks like a stork? Fans of BTS, perhaps, though this strikes me as a little obscure.
My question is, how many people accepted this fluffy little hoax without question? Quite a few, it seems. The white birdie has been around since some time last year, and I haven't seen it challenged (until now!).
BLOGGER'S P. S. I just emailed the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, which has never failed me yet in providing information about all things bird. That's what I love about them. There is always a human being there, and one that loves and knows about birds. Usually they get back to you post-haste.
So if and when I get an answer about the real identity of this tiny little poofball, I'll update you immediately. Myself, I can hardly wait!
UPDATE: MUCH later, and the comments are still coming! Rosy Novelist posted these remarks, but the links weren't live, so here they are with links.
Rosy Novelist has left a new comment on the post "FAKE BIRD NEWS! The Korean Crow-Tit":
Hi! I'm a South Korean currently studying in the U.S. I came across this blog post and couldn't help but leave a message.
So the white fluffy bird is actually a Long-tailed tit. In Korean, it's "오목눈이." This Korean YouTuber uploaded a video about how the Korean baepsae is commonly mistakened with it.
Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
The long tailed tit is a common bird found throughout Europe and the Palearctic. Here is the distribution map from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
So, it is a lovely bird that is found throughout Eurasia. Koreans have seen it throughout its history and called it "오목눈이" while in different cultures, they are called something else.
So I think the "Korean crow tit" is not the right name for the fluffy bird because 1) Birds don't have nationalities 2) it's a long tailed tit.
The notion that it's a Japanese bird or a Korean bird or any other nationality bird is pretty ridiculous. Birds are birds and they are lovely! :)
Rosy Novelist has left a new comment on the post "FAKE BIRD NEWS! The Korean Crow-Tit":
Exactly! Baepsaes are parrotbills - brownish fluffs found in Korea as well as elsewhere. The white fluffs are long tailed tits that are migratory birds that stay from Europe to Asia.
I think this post also explains well: https://aminoapps.com/c/
Exactly! Baepsaes are parrotbills - brownish fluffs found in Korea as well as elsewhere. The white fluffs are long tailed tits that are migratory birds that stay from Europe to Asia.
I think this post also explains well: https://aminoapps.com/c/
Thursday, July 27, 2017
Wednesday, July 26, 2017
"I could feel his eyes accusing me!"
Ladies! Would you like a permanent solution to the inexplicable fatigue which makes you want to leave social events before anyone else? COULD IT BE that your fatigue is due to. . . vaginal odor?
According to "science", Lysol provides a "simple protection" for health and youthfulness (for nothing is more of a drag than an old, worn-out vagina). "Sane habits of living, sane habits of diet and the proper practice of feminine hygiene" will undoubtedly turn you into a cartwheeling party girl who doesn't want to go home until at least 5:00 a.m.
Remember! "Only a poison can kill germs". Stop using Lysol to disinfect toilets and get rid of cockroaches in the cellar! Send for our plain brown envelope TODAY.
BLOGGER'S P. S. I picked this ad out of the bundle I posted last time, because it seemed unusually cryptic. Of course it's a well-known fact by now that Lysol wasn't used as a feminine hygiene product at all, but as a form of birth control. You have to read very carefully between the lines of text to see how the pharmaceutical companies tiptoed around illegality, for advertising birth control was almost as illegal as using it.
This one may be one of the more bizarre entries, though many of these ads claim that marriages often end simply because the wife's genitals stink. No kidding, that's what they actually say. So she's supposed to use this carbolic substance (known to cause a number of deaths by ulcerating the inside of the uterus) to get rid of the horrendous stink and replace it with - you all know what Lysol smells like, right? And back then, it was 100 times more powerful and used a different active ingredient, because there were no regulations.
So this one. . . it's strange, but I can only figure out that the wife is exhausted and can't enjoy the evening because she's pregnant. Well, she's done it again! Now she can't "stay young with her husband", which I assume means keeping up with his sexual demands. The reference to staying young hints at midlife pregnancy, which was dreaded more than anything due to the possibility of Down syndrome and other late-birth calamities. Not to mention the heavy stigma that attended those births. It just wasn't seemly that people that old were still having sex.
These ads almost always talked about "germs" and "mucus matter" and other things that come perilously close to describing semen. The word "protection" always appeared somewhere. The sad thing is, though many women very likely fell for this and depended on Lysol, it just didn't work. Douches are likely to propel those little swimmers right up into the promised land. Better stick with Coca-Cola, which at least would be more pleasant a taste for hubby than a mouthful of chemicals.
(I just had an awful thought about the Pepsi Challenge, but I will keep it to myself.)
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