The Glass Character

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Betty Boop Cartoon Banned For Drug Use 1934

This is all a little unbelievable, like most early cartoons. Not to mention a little nightmarish. At least Betty looks like a girl: in her first couple of appearances she was a dog with long ears and a snout that popped out from time to time. The animators didn't quite know what to do with her.

After a few episodes she became a sexpot. It's interesting to watch the evolution of her costumes: here, in pre-code Hollywood, she was so scantily clad that you occasionally caught flickers of bare breasts (a wardrobe malfunction, perhaps) and, in her saucily flipped-up hemline, the delta of Venus. By the mid-30s the censors had clamped down, and by wartime she looked like a no-nonsense Army nurse with twill jackets and skirts below the knee.

These were Max Fleischer cartoons, some of the strangest things ever made, and they evolved into Popeye which ran forever but also ran out of steam around the time of the war. Then they became patriotic bullshit and propaganda, and never quite recovered. I like the fact that these characters are all a little hideous, a little smudgy, and almost psychotic in their unpredictable behaviour. By the end they all get stoned, sucking up nitrous oxide like a dentist who has fallen off the rails.

Were cartoons really made for children? I don't think so. They were shown along with movies (there'd be a newsreel, a cartoon, a short subject, and the main feature: or perhaps two), later sent overseas to bolster the morale of the troops. The studios cranked out hundreds and even thousands of them: Disney and Warner Brothers were the big guns, but then you had weirdball Fleischer and, a little later, Bob Clampett with his bizarre puppets-brought-to-animated-life, Beany and Cecil.

This just gets more unbelievable as you watch. Maybe the animators WERE on something.

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

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

"Oh my God - the pilot's going crazy!"

High Flight (an Airman's Ecstasy)

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.

Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or even eagle flew.
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

John Gillespie Magee

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

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

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

So who's flying the plane?

'We're all going down. Say your prayers': Berserk JetBlue captain has to be restrained by PASSENGERS after being ejected from cockpit in mid-flight and running up and down screaming

Unruly pilot identified as Clayton Osbon, 49, who has been a JetBlue captain for 12 years

Captain screamed 'Iraq, al-Qaeda, terrorism, we're all going down' after coming out of the toilet telling passengers 'say your prayers, say your prayers'

Passengers looked on in horror as the married captain tried to break into the cockpit after being locked out

Flight attendant urged passengers to restrain the increasingly erratic captain

Four passengers, including a retired NYPD sergeant, jumped the man

Former prison guard David Gonzalez, 50, put the captain in a choke hold until he passed out

The flight was packed with people heading to the 2012 International Security Conference in Las Vegas

Flight 191 from JFK to Las Vegas was forced to make an emergency landing in Amarillo

JetBlue said the captain had a 'medical situation' and was taken to an Amarillo hospital

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

He changed the face of music (forever!)

I don't even know who this is, but I don't care. Let's just call him Mr. Trololo. I've seen lots of other YouTube versions of this song by different artists, but they're an abomination. We don't care about them, do we? Mr. Trololo is the best.

Monday, March 26, 2012

Mangled meaning: why it infuriates me!

It's the kind of word you don't usually say, or even hear, but it shows up in print journalism a lot, and (plenty) in books.

It's a word that is so consistently defined incorrectly, no one seems to know what it means at all any more. When that happens, when the tide of popular opinion is strong enough, slowly, surely, relentlessly, even ruthlessly, the (completely erroneous) "new" meaning of the word will drill and squeak its way into the dictionary and become "correct".

This means that the wrong definition, no matter how egregious, will suddenly be right. Orwell would recognize the irony.

Nonplussed. It's an odd sort of word that people pull out and use when they want to look or sound educated or highfalutin' (another interesting word). Almost always, it's used something like this:

"She was nonplussed when her boyfriend dumped her for a more attractive woman, for after all, he was a wretched shithead and she was about to dump him anyway."

"When the police raided her apartment, found 500 pounds of cocaine and slapped her in handcuffs, she was nonplussed: not only was the chief of police her best customer, he also had a taste for the white stuff."

In other words, in the public view, in almost everyone's view, nonplussed is supposed to mean nonchalant, cool, unruffled, unworried, unbothered, calm, composed, and all those things. "Nonplussed!" You know what I mean!

No, no, noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Here is what the word nonplussed means. (By the way, this matches every other online dictionary definition I was able to find.)

non·plus(n

n-pl

)

tr.v. non·plussed also non·plused, non·plus·sing also non·plus·ing, non·plus·ses also non·plus·es

To put at a loss as to what to think, say, or do; bewilder.

n. A state of perplexity, confusion, or bewilderment

In other words, the exact opposite of the popular definition, the one everyone seems to have voted on in a secret ballot a few years ago.

Do you know what happens in cases like this? A writer will use the word nonplussed CORRECTLY in an article or (God help us) a non-fiction book or a novel, and an editor will take a big red pencil, cross the whole sentence out and write, "Wrong useage!" or "Get a dictionary!" or some-such comment in the margins. If not with a pencil, then electronically. The writer will be penalized and scolded for committing the unpardonable sin of wrong definition/useage, for what could be worse for a wordsmith than that?

Don't ask your editor to please please please look it up. They will be deeply offended by the very suggestion that they don't know their business, that in fact you know better than they do (unheard-of!), and the fragile bond between you will be frazzled, if not severed outright.

This is nasty stuff. Even if somehow-or-other your editor finds out you were right all along, he or she might say something along the lines of, "But people don't KNOW it means perplexity, confusion, or bewilderment. They think it means cool-headedness and detachment. If you use it this way you'll look like you're making a mistake and it will make us look bad." (That last part I added; they never say it out loud.)

How could people end up getting it so wrong, flipping the meaning around to its opposite? They see the prefix "non" and they think it means "not". "Plussed" somehow registers in their minds as "upset": but why? It has nothing to do with such things.

The expression comes from the Latin non plus, which literally means "no more". (And I'd be happy to see no more of this casual mangling of the English language.) No more is kind of neutral and a little hard to define, but if something is "non -" (-fat, -white, -sense), it obviously means "NOT". But if you're "not plussed", what are you? Not upset? Why does plussed mean upset? Doesn't "plus" just mean "more"? Yes. The more you look at it, the less sense it makes.

Why does this happen? How on earth can the meaning of a word flip over into its opposite? More to the point: why does this bother me so much? Because people do not think or question. They do what everyone else is doing: tribal mentality, so a sabre-tooth tiger won't eat them in the parking lot.

I can't get into all the other examples of mangled meaning because it's Monday morning and I'm already getting tired, but there's another one that irritates me so much that I must mention it here. As it turns out, it has not two but three parts, a trifecta of verbal carelessness.

I am continually hearing statements along the lines of, "The statistics on this subject simply do not jive with the facts." Yes, you heard me right.

So what does jive mean? It's a pretty cool word that refers to swing music, or the dance performed to such music (I've done it before, and it has nothing to do with statistics). Hey man, let's jive!

Jibe means to match up or line up or equal or be congruent with, which is where people get confused. Similar things do not dance together, though the image may be absurdly funny. But then there is another word that can jump into the confusing mix: gibe, meaning a nasty comment or a taunt.

So are we supposed to constantly stop what we're doing and look up words we're not sure about in an online dictionary? YES. If there is any doubt at all, DO IT. If your editor says "no, that's wrong," and you KNOW it is right, insist that he or she go to the dictionary and look it up.

Bother. Care. Take the time. Go out of your way. We're not living in caves any more and we won't be eaten if we don't follow the herd like cattle. Protest the casual mangling of language, even if you risk being criticized for getting it wrong (which you will). Words should not mean what we want them to mean. They mean what they mean. Am I a purist? About this? Fuck, yes!

I don't want to somehow get transported into the future and hear an unintelligible garble that used to pass for language. Yes, we somehow had to evolve from Chaucer to today's standard English, but I don't think people back then were casually crossing out meanings and changing them according to whim (or, more likely, popular opinion). In other words, for something as crucial and beautiful and powerful as language, there should be a standard, or how on earth are we ever going to communicate in a world that seems to be hurtling along at a billion miles an hour?

If a word means one thing to one person, and its exact opposite to the next person, what might that mean to detente?