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Since we’ve had cats, K and I have been obsessing over the packaging on most commercial cat products.  There is an absurd reliance on Photoshop to produce cats with faces that are creepily perfect (or in industry parlance, “purr-fect”).  Lots of unnaturally large eyes, batting paws, licking of lips.  Of course this happens for all kinds of human marketing too, but cats are cute!  They don’t really need Photoshop help.  It’s weird to think that it’s someone’s job to take an ordinary good-looking cat and turn it into a weird anime-ish cat-like thing.  However, the makers of Friskies would disagree:

Various wierd cat food photoshop experiments

Here is a ridiculous array of their line of dry cat foods.  Each one of these is a masterpiece of Photoshop and imagination, bringing us a new version of a cat paradise.  Somebody, and possibly a whole team of marketers and graphic designers, developed this line, with glorious results.  Let’s examine them more closely.

Seafood Sensations

  • Slogan: “Welcome to Paradise”
  • Captures Felix Everycat’s dream of a luxurious beach vacation, where the seafood is so abundant it literally leaps out of the sea onto your batting paw
  • Cats love swimming in the ocean
  • Cat appears to be about 7 feet tall
  • Where the heck is the orange fish jumping from/to?

Grillers’ Blend

  • Slogan: “Step Outside the Ordinary”
  • Captures Felix Everycat’s dream of a mountain excursion for hunting and subsequent grilling
  • Wait, grilling?  Why is Felix further grilling the tiny cat food morsels?
  • Features Mount Rushmore of land-based cat food meats: beef and turkey
  • Cat also enormous-looking and licking lips while batting at whisps of smoke

Indoor Delights

  • Slogan: “Explore the Great Indoors”
  • Will make Felix feel like his indoor lifestyle is just as good as free jungle roaming
  • An ordinary blanket is like unto a majestic waterfall
  • Cats also love swimming in jungle pools
  • Cat neither batting nor licking lips!  How did this get past marketing?

Surfin’ & Turfin’ Favorites

  • Slogan: “Cat Dreams Do Come True”
  • Deliciously-shaped clouds
  • Actually slogan is pretty spot on, this could be a cat dream
  • Cats enjoy sailing
  • Cat batting AND licking lips, as God intended

Oh well, actually the joke’s on us.  We eschew these marketing ploys to buy an expensive brand called Wellness thinking we are making an important decision to buy quality.  When the vet asked us what kind of food we buy, I hoped our reply would make her say, “Yes, you guys are doing it the right way.  That is the best brand available for the health and happiness of your cats.”  Instead, she had never even heard of Wellness.  You win again, Friskies!

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Frosty Returns

The best Christmas specials have this irreproducible inspired weirdness, the worst try to simply re-capture this, without the original inspiration and probably without any real budget, and it shows.   Frosty Returns is just such a mess.  There’s not much in common with the original, other than the fact that a few kids befriend a magic snowman.  This time, it’s a lonely girl with only one hopeless nerd for a friend.  That’s about all there is to say about her.  Her relationship to Frosty has little point and is not developed; instead, the story ends up being about how great snow is, and how evil a local inventor is for developing an aerosol spray to get rid of it.  Mostly the show has an environmental health message, that mindlessly spraying chemicals all over snow to get rid of it is ultimately not a good thing.  The townsfolk are convinced of this through a song.  Then Frosty feels his work is done, I guess, because he leaves.  The whole thing is weird.  The inventor’s sole motivation is that he wants to be King.  Which seems an anacronistic yet overly ambitious reward for inventing a helpful spray, but later we find out that he just means King of the Winter Carnival.  Only that’s still weird because how are you going to win Winter Carnival King points as an inventor of a spray that ruins winter?  More baffling is that Frosty apparently just exists now, without the aid of any magic hat.  He wears a hat, but evidently just for fashion because he freely takes it off to gesture with it while dancing, and even gives it away at the end.  Overall: stay far away.

(Note: this is the second special so far involving Mark Mothersbaugh.  He did the music (I liked it).  He made a cameo on Yo Gabba Gabba! to draw stuff in the “Mark’s Magic Pictures” segment.)

A Charlie Brown Christmas

A Charlie Brown Christmas would never get made today.  (Even ignoring the dated things like a lack of diversity and inclusion of an actual Bible passage.)  The animation is choppy and unpolished.  It’s 90% depressing.  There are no celebrity voices or potential hit songs.  And ultimately, it’s a giant rant against commercialism.  On network TV, mind you.  Actually it’s a wonder the thing ever got made, but it did, and it’s totally unique on the Christmas specials landscape.  There’s no Santa or magic or triumphs.  Charlie Brown is feeling blah about the holidays, and eventually he finds a good reason not to.  His peers (can’t really call them his friends, save for Linus) help him get there in the end, but most of the time they’re just making him feel alienated.  Ultimately he just sticks to what makes him happy, like adopting a pathetic dying branch as a Christmas tree, and successfully dodges commercialism until he feels better again.  Overall: a must-watch.  (Do today’s kids still like this? Or is it now just boring and weird?)

It’s a Wonderful Life

Somehow I have become a total sucker for this movie.  I feel no shame over it.  No other film gets me closest to crying.  (I have never actually cried at a movie.  I am a robot.)  The characters and story are just about perfect – it’s funny, touching, well-constructed.  It’s still very modern.  Now, some questions.  I’m not religious at all, so why would I like a movie so much with such an overtly spiritual message, that angels will help you out in times of crisis and prayers are heard?   Another interpretation is that it’s fantasy.  The angels aren’t seen as heavenly beings, they are seen as galaxies talking to each other.  One of these beings, Clarence, appears and the appropriate time and proceeds to bring George to an alternate reality in which he didn’t exist.  It’s more than an illusion: George is really in that place that does not exist on our plane, no one knows him, and the town is entirely transformed.  Clarence has the power to appear and disappear from that reality at will, and when George wants out, he’s returned just as easily.  Clarence proclaims to be an angel from heaven but isn’t that just done for George’s benefit?  George isn’t much inclined to believe even that story, but certainly it’s more plausible to him than a super-galactic being showing up to help him.  I guess these beings are helping George out maybe because they’re universal peace-lovers and fighting against tyranny wherever it lurks, such as in Bedford Falls.  It really doesn’t matter how you look at it, whatever suits you is valid I think.  Overall: interpret it how you want, but it’s an all-time classic.  Unless you think it’s corny.

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Here is a list of tweets I am not interested in.

  1. Tidbits from the conference you’re attending
  2. Anything about Conan O’Brien
  3. Retweets of any of the 4 million Hulk streams
  4. Real-time reactions to the TV show you’re watching*
  5. More than like three hashtag jokes in a row
  6. Your flight status

Thank you.

*Unless I am watching the same thing.  In which case, you should definitely tweet about it.

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Do the thing with your fingersOK, classic Trek.  I’m going to start right in the middle of the thing because I’ve seen most of the early episodes recently.  I’ll circle around and catch them later.  Also I’ll go by disc order, which is the same as episode airdate order.  I’m not going to worry to much about spoilers since these shows are, you know, over 40 years old.

Set phasers to minimum kill and let’s roll.

38. Metamorphosis. Pretty standard Trek fare to start us out.  An Enterprise shuttle encounters a weird probe in space, which disables it and strands it on the surface of a nearby planet.  The only person here is Zefram Cochrane, famous known as the inventor of warp drive, only that’s sorta weird because Zefram Cochrane had been lost in space 150 years before.  Also he was 87 at the time, and is now a young man.  Events are further complicated (aren’t they always!) by the presence of diplomat Nancy Hedford, whose rare and fatal disease chooses this precise moment to cause her serious health issues.  Kirk spends most of episode slowly figuring out Cochrane’s relationship to “The Companion,” an alien entity that restored Cochrane’s health and keeps him company.  The Companion won’t let them leave or help Hedford in any way, but eventually they figure out a way to make it happen and all is well.  Episodes like this usually bore me a bit: there is a stubborn alien preventing people from doing something.  They talk to it for a while, and then they get it to do what they want and wrap things up.  Usually you just hope the themes are interesting.  In this case, a yes: considering their interaction, the Companion can really only be considered to have a sort of intimate relationship to Cochrane.  The thought instantly disgusts him, which highly amuses the progressive Enterprise crew, themselves frequent intimates with a variety of species.  Spock’s killer line: “Fascinating.  A totally parochial attitude.”  All told, a decent episode with some interesting ideas.  4 out of 5.

Trek tropes (number of instances encountered in series so far in parentheses):

  • Strange probe encountered in space (1)
  • Badger alien until you get what you want (1)
  • Guest star abandons life for new existence (1)

39. Journey to Babel. Escorting a shipful of diplomats to political talks, the Enterprise picks up Vulcan Ambassador Sarek and his wife Amanda.  If you have never watched any Trek before or it’s November 1967 where you are, it will come as a surprise to you to learn that these are Spock’s parents.  We learn that Spock and his father aren’t on speaking terms, dating back to when Spock joined Starfleet against his father’s wishes.  Some of the workings of Spock’s familial relations are covered here, along with an assassination plot, mysterious space probe, and the health problems of Sarek.  A lot happens and it makes for a highly suspenseful, terrific episode.  A great quandary comes from Spock’s refusal to leave command while Kirk is injured, despite Spock being needed for a blood transfusion for his father.  Lots of gem scenes about duty, logic versus emotion, and whether you should give up a dangerous amount of your blood in a highly risky surgery for someone that doesn’t like you.  Spock’s killer line: “Worry is a human emotion, Captain.  I accept what has happened.”  Great ending with McCoy hopelessely trying to keep Spock and Kirk in Sick Bay while both recover. Everything good about Star Trek on display here: 5 out of 5.

Trek tropes (number of instances encountered in series so far in parentheses):

  • Strange probe encountered in space (2)
  • Highly experimental plan with low probability of success somehow works anyway (1)
  • Lighthearted banter to close episode (1)