Friday, May 12, 2006

Theory of Relativity

Okay, here's something I'm trying to figure out and I'll bet someone reading this can help me...

John is Jerry's uncle. Marsha is Tom's sister. John marries Marsha. What relationship then is Tom to Jerry? He's not his uncle. Is there such a thing as an uncle-in-law? Or does this make him some kind of cousin? Is there any tidy term to describe this relationship? I'm an unmarried only-child so this stuff is alien to me.

Some of you will probably recognize the real-life people I'm writing about but that's not important. I've asked about a dozen people and gotten several different answers, many of them accompanied by "Well, I'm not sure but..." So please only write and tell me if you're reasonably certain. And thank you in advance.

• Posted at 10:26 PM · LINK

Audition Piece

Over on his fine weblog, Ken Levine tells a great casting story. Read this post for Part One and then read this one for Part Two.

• Posted at 7:28 PM · LINK

Boning, Tempering, Peeling...

Do you know how to bone a turkey breast? How to temper eggs? How to peel pearl onions? You can learn how to do all these things and more thanks to some nifty online how-to videos offered up by Cuisine at Home magazine. They're on this page.

• Posted at 6:50 PM · LINK

Apple Corps

Wanna get a lot of e-mail? Just make a vaguely disparaging comment on your weblog about Macs. You should see what I'm getting...and some of them are reacting like I made a vicious racial slur about them and their mothers.

There's nothing wrong with owning a Mac. Just as there was nothing wrong with owning a Betamax until, of course, they stopped making them. In the technological age though, we commit to formats and accept their limitations. You stay with videotapes and you can't get certain films because they're only available on DVD. You buy a car with a stick-shift, you have to put up with valets and car wash attendants who can't drive a stick. My friends who own Macs are all pretty happy with them except when they see a great Windows program with no Mac equivalent.

This is why there are new Macs that run dual-format and software to run Windows programs on Macs. They're probably great machines but I'm not ready to junk my three PCs and plunge into a new system just because I don't like one piece of Windows-based virus protection software.

I'm on a deadline this weekend so I can't respond individually to you all. But most of you are reading a lot more into that comment than was there.

• Posted at 6:48 PM · LINK

Software Bitching

I've just about had it with Norton Anti-Virus. I've been a Norton customer since...well, somewhere here I still have a 5" floppy of The Norton Utilities with a photo of Peter Norton printed on it. That's how long. I don't think Mr. Norton has anything to do with the current software products that bear his name, which may be part of the problem.

Norton Anti-Virus probably does a decent job of protecting me from dread computer viruses...although it's failed me a few times, once because I contracted a virus so new that no one in the anti-virus community had heard of it yet. If I'd gotten it a week later, I would have been fine...but some things are beyond our control. My big problems have to do with the fact that it doesn't play well with other programs. Four times now on my three computers, I've installed or uninstalled something else and Norton A-V has gone kablooey. Each time, the solution has been the same. I wait 15-20 minutes for someone I'm pretty sure is not on this continent to come online for a "live chat" and they tell me to do a complete uninstall, including running a program to cleanse my system of all Norton and Symantec products, and then do a reinstall. This takes around an hour each time...and I can think of so many other things I could do with that hour. For instance, I could wait on hold for the people who handle tech support for Microsoft Money. I think they have two guys and they each work an hour a month.

My computer guru Bill Goldstein recommends that I try AVG instead, and I intend to give it a try. I'm also instituting a new policy. I can't do anything about Microsoft products but otherwise, I ain't installing anything that has a fee-based Tech Support phone number. I never called the one for Norton but every time I saw they had one, it made me think they're not all that unhappy when their product doesn't work properly. In any case, the next uninstall I do of Norton shall be my last.

(And don't write me and tell me I should buy a Mac. People who have Macs remind me of myself when I had Beta and I kept seeing movies I wanted to own come out on VHS only.)

• Posted at 3:59 PM · LINK

The Blair "Which?" Project

Preston Blair was one of the great animators. He was responsible for the Red Hot Riding Hood animation in several Tex Avery cartoons, for the hippos and other memorable characters in Fantasia, and many more classic examples of making drawings move. But his most lasting contribution to the art may rest with a couple of books he authored for the Walter Foster art book series. They were repackaged a few times under different names — Cartoon Animation, Advanced Animation, How to Animate Film Cartoons, Animation: Learn How to Draw Animated Cartoons and others.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the Blair books to animation. Darn near every kid who ever thought it might be neat to learn how to do that started to learn how to do that from these volumes. Many who took expensive courses in art schools reported that it was more educational just to page through the Preston Blair books and copy his work. (And speaking of copying: Blair's drawings have been ripped-off countless times for advertising and other purposes. I believe this current edition contains all or most of both volumes and if you buy it, you'll recognize a lot of duck and pig drawings.)

What many did not know until recently was that Blair had to redo his first book after its initial publication in 1947. He'd used drawings he'd done for MGM and a few from Disney, which caused legal problems. That edition was redrawn and he refashioned all the images of Tom & Jerry and Screwy Squirrel and Droopy and other established characters into generic versions. The drawing below shows how one rabbit received a makeover.

Copies of the first version are rare and prized. My pal Jerry Beck scored one from another great animator, Dave Tendlar, and now you can experience it. ASIFA-Hollywood is archiving and sharing rare treasures of animation and they've scanned Jerry's copy and posted it here and here. This is a valuable resource for wanna-be animators, and I'm sure seasoned professionals can learn from it, as well. A lot of those who do cannot teach but Blair was that rare talent who could so something and explain clearly how he did it.

• Posted at 12:56 PM · LINK

Kandid Killer

This sounds like something the writers of Mad Magazine would come up with: O.J. Simpson is doing a pay-per-view hidden camera show called Juiced. In one segment, he tries to sell his infamous white Ford Bronco, touting it as a good getaway vehicle. (Don't believe me? Read this.)

I'm trying to think of a TV show I am less likely to ever watch and I can't. I don't like hidden camera shows at all and I think Simpson belongs in a small room with bars on the windows and door. I've never even sprung for pay-per-view on anything, and I ain't starting with this.

The only thing that interests me here — though not enough to watch and try to figure it out — is this: Is Simpson doing this program because he thinks it will rehabilitate his image...and if so, why does he think that? Or has he given up all hope of widespread public acceptance and is just doing it because he figures it doesn't matter what he does? I suppose there's a third possibility, which is that he figures that if he goes around doing hidden camera stunts, he just might catch The Real Killers on tape. But that seems like an outside possibility...

• Posted at 12:55 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Some time ago here, I hooked you all up with a video of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello performing their famous "Who's on First?" routine on some fifties TV show. Today, we have a clip of them performing it on radio in the early forties when it was a little fresher for them and for audiences. It's interesting to compare the two performances. I like the radio one better even though — for obvious reasons — it isn't as physical and based around Costello's facial reactions. But the timing's better and there's more sense of the two guys playing off each other.

Also note that on radio, Lou made a conscious attempt to keep his voice higher so it would be easier to differentiate him from Bud and that when they did this routine during the war, the Shortstop's name changed from I Don't Give a Darn to I Don't Give a Damn. The logic, as I understand it, was that these shows were being broadcast to Our Boys Overseas and those who were offended stateside would have to accept that our fighting men deserved a little earthier entertainment. Frankly, I think the soldiers would have preferred a couple of strippers but they had to settle for the naughtiness of Lou Costello saying "damn" instead of "darn."

This clip runs three minutes. It goes way outta-sync near the end and when it does, you might want to just listen and not look.

• Posted at 12:04 AM · LINK