ASTONISHING FIND: 3D Movies from the American Civil War!

AMAZING DISCOVERY: Actual motion pictures made during the American Civil War! 

Yes. . . here they are, in all their quaking glory: real movies from 1860, fully 28 years before the so-called "first motion picture",  Roundhay Garden. While Roundhay (filmed in 1888) lasts barely a second, these Civil War movies go on forever! They simply never STOP!

(Roundhay Garden, 1888, which lasts barely a second).

As if this weren't incredible enough, these remarkable historical 
artifacts are filmed in 3D!

Burn the textbooks!

Discard all known film studies!

Fie on Edison, what did HE know!

To fully understand the phenomenon of 3D Movies from the American Civil War, we must take a look at film technology. When still images are rapidly displayed in sequence, the illusion of motion is created. So it was with Roundhay Garden (5 frames). But just LOOK at these amazing Civil War images! An astounding illusion of motion is created using, in most cases, only two or three frames. And it never stops! The movement just continues. This would have driven Edison crazy! 

As is the case with all serious creative endeavours, these superb historic dramas prove the maxim "less is more".  With a mere jerk, twitch, and spasm, this remarkable gentleman transports us to another time, another place. And look closely at the details, the furniture, the clothing, as it wobbles and lurches and twists, to fully appreciate the eerie 3D effect! 

As with all major historical discoveries, disagreements and controversies have arisen, particularly about the state of mind and health of these subjects. Eager to push their own petty agendas, some historians have suggested that they may have had untreated neurological disorders.  Seismologists have a very different interpretation of the same data, as do entomologists who have suggested the possibility of a parasitic invasion. 

Few give credence to the cynical claim that these movies are dismissable because they (in the words of one ignorant critic) "have no plot". But what they admittedly lack in story line, they more than make up for in sheer mesmerizing sameness. Only the subtle shifting from one frame to the next creates that uncanny sense of motion: the vertiginous feeling that the floor under your feet is being violently shaken.

Along with thoughtful historical interpretation has come the usual  lunacy from extremists. Suggestions that this fine lady is sitting on a Hula Chair is not only disrespectful but impossible (unless she is, as one disreputable quasi-historian has hinted, a time traveller). The suggestion that she is astride one of those Victorian  medical vibrators is equally ridiculous, though it would explain why her suitor can't keep his eyes off her.

Film historians are beginning to discuss possible titles for these newly-discovered Civil War epics. A working title for this particular motion picture is, "The Man Holds Up His Hat".

"The Men Lean On The Clock."

"Shake, Rattle n' Roll."

"I Lost My Boots in San Francisco."

"Can't Stop Fiddling with This Pencil".

"I AM Sitting on a Hula Chair".

"Don't Go to My Barber, He Can't Trim a Beard"

"Yep - I Told You It Would Happen".

Blogger's explanation. OK, I hate explaining myself, but a friend of mine asked why he was seeing only flickering old photos and not movies. Well, technically he IS seeing movies, but they're only two or three frames long. These were taken for stereoscopes - your old Granny might have had one. This was a viewer with double-image cards that, when viewed as one image, "sort of" looked like 3D. The effect is kind of like those gifs from ten or fifteen years ago that everyone raved about. The effect is an optical illusion from having two slightly different perspectives shuffled back and forth. So I would assume the photographer snapped two photos from slightly different angles. This is why some of them have alarming changes in body posture, heads bobbing up and down, people disappearing and reappearing, etc. BUT, technically speaking, these ARE movies! I will post a link below written by a historian, claiming the same thing. So I'm not quite as ditzy as I seem. 

motion-pictures-from-the-civil-war

Mental health: let's NOT reduce the stigma!

Every day, and in every way, I am hearing a message. And it's not a bad message, in and of itself.

It's building, in fact, in intensity and clarity, and in some ways I like to hear it.

It's about mental illness, a state I've always thought is mis-named: yes, I guess it's "mental" (though not in the same class as the epithet, "You're totally mental"), but when you call it mental illness, it's forever and always associated with and even attached to a state of illness. You're either ill or you're well; they're mutually exclusive, aren't they? You can't be both at the same time.
We don't speak of diabetic illness. We don't speak of Parkinsonian illness. We don't speak of - you get the idea. Although these are chronic, ongoing disease conditions that a person must live with on a daily basis, we use different language to describe them that does not imply the person cannot ever be well.

Why should this matter? It's only a name, isn't - it doesn't change anything, does it?

I beg to differ. The name "mental illness" itself is problematic to me. It seems to nail people into their condition. Worse than that, nobody even notices. I have never in my life heard anyone mention it, because in the public consciousness, it does not exist. In fact, "mentally ill" is a compassionate term (so they say), if leaning towards pity and tinged with dread. But it is is definitely preferable to "psycho", "nut case", "whack job", "fucking lunatic", and the list goes on (and on, and on, as if it doesn't really matter what we call them). If these terms shock you, if you don't believe people use them often and on a daily basis, pay attention to people's reaction every time there's a news story when someone's behaviour seems over the top, whether violent or not ("Ah, he's just a whack job/nut bar/loonie" - dismiss, dismiss, dismiss). If you call them on it, they give you the standard "can't we say anything any more?" line that obliterates awareness.

There's something else going on that people think is totally positive, even wonderful, showing that they're truly "tolerant" even of people who seem to dwell on the bottom rung of society. Everywhere I look, there are signs saying, "Let's reduce the stigma about mental illness."

Note they say "reduce", not banish. It's as if society realizes that getting rid of it is just beyond the realm of possibility. Let's not hope for miracles, let's settle for feeling a bit better about ourselves (hey, we're really helping raise awareness!) for not calling them awful names and excluding them from everything.

I hate "stigma". I hate it because it's an ugly word, and if you juxtapose it with any other word, it makes that word ugly too. "Let's reduce the hopelessness" might be more honest. "Let's reduce the ostracism, the hostility, the contempt." "Stigma" isn't used very much any more, in fact I can't think of any other group of people it is so consistently attached to. Even awful conditions (supposedly) like alcoholism and drug abuse aren't "stigmatized" any more. Being gay isn't stigmatized either. Why? Compassion and understanding are beginning to dissolve that ugly archaic term, detach it and throw it away.

"Let's reduce the stigma" doesn't help because it's miserable. It's the old "you don't look fat" thing (hey, who said I looked fat? Who brought the subject up?). Much could be gained by pulling the plug on this intractibly negative term. Reducing the stigma is spiritually stingy and only calls attention to the stigma.

So what's the opposite of "stigmatized"? Accepted, welcomed, fully employed, creative, productive, loved? Would it be such a stretch to focus our energies on these things, replacing the "poor soul" attitude that prevails?

But so far, the stifling box of stigma remains, perhaps somewhat better than hatred or fear, but not much. Twenty or thirty years ago, a term used to appear on TV, in newspapers, everywhere, and it made me furious: "cancer victim". Anyone who had cancer was a victim, not just people who had "lost the battle" (and for some reason, we always resort to military terms to describe the course of the illness). It was standard, neutral, just a way to describe things, but then something happened, the tide turned, and energy began to flow the other way.

From something that was inevitably bound to stigma in the past, cancer came out of the closet in a big way, leading to all sorts of positive change that is still being felt. But first we had to lose terms like "victim", because they were unconsciously influencing people's attitudes. We had to begin to substitute words like "survivor" and even "warrior".

One reinforced the other. The movement gave rise to much more positive, life-affirming, even accurate terminology. The turning of the public tide shamed industry into coughing up some funds. That's exactly what needs to happen here. We don't just need to "reduce the stigma": we need to CAN that term, spit on it, get rid of it once and for all, and begin to see our mental health warriors for who and what they really are. They lead the way in a daring revolution of attitudes and deeply-buried, primitive ideas, a shakeup and shakedown of prejudice that is shockingly late, and desperately needed.

Why do we need to do this so badly? We're caught and hung up on a negative, limiting word that is only keeping the culture in the dark. I once read something in a memoir that had a profound effect on me: "Mental illness is an exaggeration of the human condition." This isn't a separate species. Don't treat it as such. It's you, times ten. It's me, in a magnifying mirror. Such projections of humanity at its finest and most problematic might just teach us something truly valuable. Why don't we want to look?

POST-BLOG. I've been posting this on Let's Talk Day for several years in a row now. Because it got twelve views last year, I thought I would run it again. I am not sure why I continue with this, except that it seems to satisfy some need in me. But when I try to put the message "out there", I find there is no "out there". The internet is all about numbers, totals, likes, views, and popularity, a thing I cannot bear because I thought I left the high school mentality behind a long time ago. So I do this for the only reason that matters to me: because I want to.

Meowingtons

Meowingtons.

I am your worst nightmare

The car with the anime eyes (animation)

Was fooling around with images of old cars - one of my obsessions - when I found the 1954 Buick Skylark, an automobile which made me sigh. I am working forwards in my car passions, starting with the1920s, then '30s, then. . . I am all the way up to the 1950s now, with only half a dozen decades of catching up to do.

I started thinking about how odd the big headlights looked, reminding me of the huge, luminescent eyes of anime figures. So I had to try it out. What do I know about anime? Watching Astroboy when I was a kid, I guess, though back then I didn't even know it was Japanese. Astroboy was way ahead of his time.

EXCLUSIVE: Christine Brown from Sister Wives explains her singing!

Bentley on the kitchen counter

Sometimes all you wanna do is post a cat video. Everything else seems futile. I have given up. I suppose I am happier now that I have given up. This flies in the face of everything I have ever been taught. Be an activist! BE the change you want to see in the world. But my attempts to do this brought me nothing but misery, futility, and screaming abuse from those who did not agree with me, who were always vastly in the majority. 

Bentley knows how to do it, to be the way the world ought to be, right now, and always has. As for me, as for me - I am getting older now, and I am tired of falling on my sword. Very, very rarely do I reach more than a handful of people, and this is true of my entire writing life. Looking back, it's beyond disheartening, and can even be downright depressing.

Haven't I worked harder than just about anybody I know? Yes. I poured my entire being into my work for decades. I gave it all my hope. Was I a "success" in CanLit terms? Not even remotely. I let down three different publishers, with three different books that nobody read. 

But just look at what CanLit has become. Perhaps I was protected all the time by some invisible angel.

So I have learned not to get too upset about anything, because who's going to notice it anyway? There's enough noise in the world. Too many voices, too much yelling. The world wants to go in a certain direction, perhaps moving towards some kind of clarity, and I can see that. But right now it isn't happening, and increasing awareness only leads to increasing alarm.

I do care increasingly about the world my grandkids will live in, and I honestly do not know what is going to happen there. But for that reason, I refuse to doomsay, no matter how lousy I feel. I try not to think the worst. I birdwatch. I walk. I hold my cat. 

Bock, bock, bock!

This will probably lack sound track unless you watch it full-screen, so let me fill it in for you:

Bocck, bock, bock, bock, bock, bock

Sound of tiny avian feet crunching in snow

CLUCK!

Bock, bock, bock -

When did clowns get creepy?

When I was a kid, there was no such thing as a creepy clown. ALL clowns were good, ALL clowns were funny, and they provided unquestioningly wholesome entertainment, not to mention big bucks for advertisers. When we look back at them now, we're incredulous. Just seeing Ronald McDonald in his first incarnation with the cardboard box on his head to demonstrate the Happy Meal is pretty macabre. Clarabell, the beloved clown of Howdy Doody (in itself pretty macabre), now looks like something you wouldn't want to face in your darkest nightmares. Milky I've dealt with, or at least I think so, until he comes seeping back into my post-traumatic consciousness like some eerie Renaissance shade. 

The whole concept of a creepy clown is relatively  recent, but now that we've put on those glasses of perception, suddenly they ALL look creepy. John Wayne Gacy has nothing on these guys. Stephen King has been blamed for it, but the awareness started a long time before that. You don't need to creep them up or make them look evil. They're ALL evil, as far as I am concerned, and the farther back you go, the more horrendously creepy they are.

So I just had to make a gif compilation from my vast file. When something is this bad, it somehow morphs into its opposite and becomes sublime.

Christ, that's funny!: Portraits of the Laughing Jesus

From what we know of Jesus - which, from a historical perspective, isn't very much - he doesn't seem to have been a real good-time sort of guy. In spite of all those references to turning water into wine, officiating at weddings, last suppers and the like, and even if people claimed he DID get a little tipsy from doing so, wisecracks and one-liners do not abound in his many familiar sayings.

THIS was the Jesus I grew up with, and if ever a sobersides existed, he was it. He had this long, sombre, Anglo-Saxon face, a receding hairline, and the high forehead of aristocracy. Not exactly a laugh riot.  The only quizzical line of his that  I can think of is the camel through the eye of the needle (or was that a needle through the eye of a camel? Poor camel!), and that line about, "You see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but not the great log in your own eye." Maybe you had to be there.

We want to know what Jesus looked like. We're curious. Even non-Christians want to know. Even people like me - and in spite of years of uneasy association with the church, I now believe Jesus was a composite, the teachings and sayings and saving deeds of many itinerant prophets rolled into one - want to know. Unconventional takes are welcome, even the above, rather smarmy pose, which probably shows up more often than any of the others, and in more guises.

Sunset orange.

Pastel blue.

And this one, an obvious corruption.

I don't know why it is, but artists have a hard time portraying Jesus as a - what? A real man, or is that too homophobic? What I'm trying to say is, Jeez! He looks like someone competing in America's Got Talent or something, telling us all that his Mom ("Hi, Mom! You're my inspiration!") is completely OK with his "awesome" lifestyle. Even the hairstyle is a little too Vidal Sassoon for my liking.

But this one is just plain disrespecful. Yes! - I believe that Jesus, if there really was a Jesus, likely laughed, because practically everyone who isn't brain-damaged laughs. But like THIS? The look in his eyes is wicked - demonic. He looks to be hatching some sort of evil plot. I don't know what puts these ideas into people's heads. You'd think, if you'd go to the trouble of painting or drawing a Laughing Jesus, there'd be a little more benevolence involved. To quote a Hindu guy I know: "Holy cow."

But it gets worse! Yes - this really is supposed to be Jesus - laughing. They sure had purty teeth all those thousands of years ago.

Does he have to look like this? In all of them? Or am I thinking in stereotypes again? Raymond Burr was gay. Rock Hudson. Gomer Pyle! None of them looked like this. "Wheeeeeeeeeee!"

Howling, but more in pain than laughter.

This one, for some reason, reminds me of a picture I saw in an anthropology text that depicted an australopithecine, humanity's distant ancestor. 

Once in a while, though, I find a depiction that just sort of appeals to me. This may look nothing like the "real" Jesus, the one who may or may not have existed. But it's a nice picture. He looks just Middle Eastern enough to defy the washed-out Sunday School stereotype, without being an out-and-out Neanderthal. He's - well, he's gorgeous is what he is! Just a hint of androgyny, enough to be cool without the salon look. I think I would welcome him as my personal Saviour - if he, and I, were so inclined.

P. S. (the "kicker"): Been looking for this one for years! Though there are those who believe I am nuts, I am an avid Blingophile. I love making Blingees, as they are my only real shot at visual art, and this one, sentimental though it may be, is quite beautiful. The subtlety of the animation is quite pleasing to me. It took a reverse-search through my TinEye program to find a true animated version, as I only had a jpg on hand from a post a lo-o-o-o-o-ong time ago. By the way, my search yielded 122 results. And as I look at it now, the reflection seems almost feminine, like the face of Mary. Jesus could always depend on his Mom. 

I was quite intrigued to find, upon researching the paintings of Greg Olsen (who did the Christ image at the end of my Laughing Jesus display), that he also did the face of the Blingee I like. Some of his imagery is kind of cool, bringing contemporary figures into a Biblical setting. I wish my old white vinyl-covered Bible with the zipper on it had had pictures in it by THIS guy - I might have paid more attention in Sunday School.

Another, more secular Olsen painting. I think it's quite charming and well-composed, and I like the quality of the light. I also like what it's saying: I have a couple of granddaughters like this, whose fashion sense ranges from tutus and ballet shoes to beat-up jeans. And there's not a princess in sight.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

 

Kitty shows me his butt!

When a cat shows you his butt, it's supposed to be an honour (kind of like dropping a dead bird at your feet). Here, Bentley takes it a little too far with the head-butts, flinging himself at me in a way which is highly unusual for him. He can be a tad aloof and will not receive affection unless he is in the mood. In other words, he is a cat.

This video is a tad dark, but I'm using the YouTube editing program which is a bit primitive. If you lighten things up too much, they turn orange and pixilated. 

The last time Bentley did something like this was at the vet's. He stood there on the table and rammed his head under my arm like an ostrich. He has limits. Boarding him while we went to Hawaii was downright traumatic, and he barely ate (and wouldn't even drink, being incredibly stubborn). I guess here he has forgiven me at last. 

Worst dance I've ever seen

This is a terrible dance number, not only for its inane and monotonous tune (if you could call it that) but for the dreadful camera work, which keeps focusing on the young women's chests. 

I was surprised to find there are at least a dozen versions of Pop Corn (or Popcorn, as it is sometimes known) by different "pop" groups in Europe. But this is the one that caught on. It's been called the first electronic pop song, but that discounts Dick Hyman's Moog, a classic album which I still listen to because I like how unsophisticated the electronic effects are. There is still a sense of discovery, whereas now that vein has been mined and is completely empty.

Back then, it was common to depict the Masters of Moog sitting in front of consoles that looked exactly like telephone switchboards from the 1930s. I'm not sure how they did it, but right now I don't care much because this thing is staring me in the face and I'm just about done with it. I couldn't even watch all of the video. I guess it's a period piece.

Meantime, this might be my favorite pop dance number (until I think of another one). Me and the blondie grandgirls used to dance to this, until they really began to dance and realized Nanny couldn't do it. It still kicks ass, in my books.

The beauty of obsolete language

I can never quite believe these words ever existed, but if they're in PopSugar, it must be true. I think the coming generation probably will receive all or most of its education from such sites. But is it any worse than the crap WE learned in school? No less dull, certainly. These words are not going to find their way back into common useage any time soon. They are crowded out by the acronyms that I encounter daily, and CANNOT figure out, making me feel about as obsolete as these creaky archaic terms. I'd do a post on them, but they're too depressing.

Flying kitten picture!

Imagine the horror: Civil Defense puppets

I don't know where these eerie civil defense short films were shown: probably on TV, though they're specifically geared towards a rural audience. I don't know why a rural audience would be particularly susceptible to nuclear holocaust warnings dramatized by the most hideous marionettes ever created. Perhaps the marionette cow would make more sense to them than this dead-faced, thread-trailing farmer from hell. These spots would no doubt be extremely cheap to make, as the set and main character (nameless, almost faceless) are laughably primitive. And yet. The message was being sent out daily, and I remember it. These were supposedly from 1965, which seems late for such a ludicrous production. I was eleven years old.

Did you ever have a crumb of memory - a corona, just the edge - a whisper, some fragment of a whole - and find that it led all the way back to your early childhood? My childhood was full of terror, for some reason, although the big reason was the Iron Curtain and Walter Cronkite and Civil Defense announcements ("This is only a test") and that godawful BOOOOOOOOOOP that seemed to go on forever. 

I've been thinking lately about the Emergency Broadcasting System. IS there such a thing, and if there ever were an emergency, an earthquake or a - God, we won't say it! - would it really kick in? How COULD it kick in, if there was no electricity and everyone were buried under rubble? Is it one of those things created just to give us the illusion of security?

And how would we find it? What frequency on the radio, what channel on the TV, what app (for surely the Emergency Broadcasting System has an app)? Maybe, as in a dream I had once, it would just start playing on ALL the channels, ALL the time, all over the world.

Hi, folks. It's the end of the world. Nice knowing you.

I must have been really small when I became terrified of certain ads. I didn't understand them. One of them seemed to be about poison ivy and how you could die from it. It was one of those smudgy, dreamlike, black-and-white animated things, the characters made up of sticks and circles, and it had a child (who had already been sternly warned!)getting mixed up with poison ivy - or was it something else? Radioactive material? - then growing sick, and sicker, then lying in bed, then lying in a grave with a mound and a cross on top. And x's for eyes.

I was terrified of this thing.

Another one - I may have been all of three years old, certainly no older than four - showed a man behind prison bars, clasping the bars in his hands and sort of slowly sliding down them with a horrible sagging expression, as if he was melting. Terrified me. I now put some pieces together and realize it may have been about drunk driving. But that is the adult me, jumping in with an interpretation. I really don't know.

This one really scared me, and I had no idea what it meant: a TV announcer was reading the news in a crisp, authoritative voice. Suddenly from the right-hand side of the screen, a man with his face obscured jumped out and clapped his hand over the announcer's mouth. He tried frantically to keep talking but couldn't make a sound. I had no idea  what had happened, why it had happened, and I had no power to ask.

Again, my adult mind jumps in now and fills in the pieces. This was likely another Cold War drama depicting the gagging and muzzling of freedom of speech by the insidious forces of Communism. Of course! It's creepy, a creepy way of illustrating it, but I am fairly certain now that's what it was. 

Now that I see it, though, the man in jail may also have lost his precious freedom due to the forces of Communism. This was the McCarthy era. Drunk driving was standard, along with smoking. So it's a safe bet that ALL these ads or dramas or announcements, or whatever they were, were actually about Cold War terrors and the threat of ideological suffocation, loss of freedom and ultimate annihilation.

So THAT'S all it was? 

Bad wedding

A terrified woman marries a murderer.

Won't you spread your tail

I never expected to hear this again. It was on Captain Kangaroo back in about 1962. My brother and I made relentless fun of it, singing it over and over. What it is, is Mr. Green Jeans trying to get the resident peacock (it was white, as I recall) to spread its tail by singing this ridiculous song. Someone (oh, who knows who?) used it as the sound track for a clip from an old exercise show, and it ended up on one of those "1950s TV blooper reel" things. 

Sunset through a fence in Port Coquitlam

We so seldom get a red sunset where we live, I had to go racing out to the back yard to try to capture this one. It wasn't easy. Our whole neighborhood is densely treed, which I love, but which gets in the way of natural phenomena. I was also shooting through the wooden lattice of the back fence. 

One evening I trotted all over the neighborhood looking for a harvest moon. I wasn't even sure what I was looking for, but I sure didn't find it, and felt like an idiot. At one point I was sure I had found it and went racing toward it with a camera, only to find it was a street light. And don't get me started on the eclipse (though that was my fault, not the sun's).

This is a pretty long video for me. Originally it had a lot of jabbering in the background, but I substituted music. For the most part it's unedited, so there are dark stretches. In fact, I appear in parts of it, but am apparently invisible. At the end I was trying to show how we have green grass all year round here, but I'm not sure it showed up. At any rate, this was pinker and lasted longer than any sunset I can remember around here.