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I was playing around with Isle of Tune (links play music, sort of):

Give ’em a thumbs up, won’t you?  That is, if they meet your rigorous standards for quality of music made by little cars driving past musical landmarks.  Or thumbs down if that’s how you feel.  It’s anonymous and I can take it.

This is a lot of fun to play with, but time consuming.  You also can’t exactly make a song like you want it, there is a very definite set of notes and effects and you’re constrained to three tracks that need to loop appropriately to keep things going.

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Not much time today, so I will just share a few recent favorites from the SI Vault:

Billings’ own Brent Musburger wearing a goofy old-school Falcons cap goofily

Stephen Jackson wears old-school Eric Dickerson goggles during the Rams’ throwback game

1980s Jim Valvano doing an interview at NC State

&

Another Jim Valvano and NC State (I wish NCSU basketball was that much fun again…)

A couple of Hartford Whalers missing a high five

A wonderful Dolphins fan

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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.