Sneak and ye shall find
Interesting. Interesting.
The internet says Kaye Ballard died Monday night. Noob ‘little sister’ picked Ballard at 2:10 pm Monday. The timestamp is my time, probably. Meaning it was eight hours earlier than that, Kaye Ballard time.
It looks legit. It is either legit, or somehow very very sneaky (which is even better). Congratulations, little sister — you take the dick!
See you all back here tomorrow for the usual. 6pm WBT (which is 10am Dead Kaye Ballard Time). Dead Pool Round 118!
p.s. Stole the header graphic from the Kaye Ballard FaceBook group. No, I didn’t know there was one, either. In fact, I had totally forgotten there ever was such a person.
p.p.s. Maybe not so mysterious. A Kaye Ballard documentary came out last week and she mentioned her health wasn’t good.
January 24, 2019 — 9:24 pm
Comments: 10
Stretched a little thin tonight
Brought work home again tonight. I think I’m more or less done at last, but at least I got an excuse to make a skinny weasel joke out of it.
January 23, 2019 — 10:27 pm
Comments: 8
Nailed it!
Two fingers bent over…check. Two fingers in the air…check. Thumb alongside, pointing up…check. Yep, it checks out. That’s just what a priest’s blessing hand looks like.
Some days, correcting Medieval drawings is a sad and lonely job.
January 22, 2019 — 9:46 pm
Comments: 4
Well? DO you?
No, no. Not me. Not here. This place dun’t have no rules!
I nicked the graphic off FaceBook, where people are potty about rules. Have you noticed? Is it true in your groups?
I got booted off an anatomy group once because my drawing of an armpit looked like it had flesh on it. Which, I dunno, I guess I didn’t KNOW THE RULES. I saw someone get scolded off a ‘bad art from junk shops’ group because her bad art was from a flea market. I guess she didn’t KNOW THE RULES.
And don’t get me started on the chicken groups. There aren’t so many rules about actually keeping chickens than there are posting in the chicken groups.
What is with people who get a little taste of the whip hand?
January 21, 2019 — 9:38 pm
Comments: 11
Please enjoy this luminous chicken
I brought work home tonight, so I fished this off my phone camera for you in lieu of a post. The limited dynamic range of a phone camera means I get the occasional delightful mess like this image.
This is Jenny, as fine a chicken as I’ve ever known. Fox got her. Still sore about it.
And tomorrow? Dead Pool Round 117. See you here!
January 17, 2019 — 10:11 pm
Comments: 5
erm…
Leafing through a very old sketchbook today, an envelope full of stamps fell out the back. Mostly Dutch and Danish, and also…umm…these.
I said Uncle B must have bought them for me and he got all huffy, like, “just because they have Hitler on them doesn’t make them my fault.”
Yeah, I’m pretty sure he bought them for me.
No, I don’t collect stamps.
January 16, 2019 — 9:04 pm
Comments: 9
G’bye
Well. Carol Channing has died, age 97. As often happens, I didn’t realize she was still alive, and now she’s not.
Banging around the tubes, I found the above: Carol with Mary Tyler Moore and Julie Andrews. Thoroughly Modern Millie, which I never saw.
One of the signature songs from that film was “Jazz Baby” from 1919, which Wikipedia says they had to buy back from the Washburn-Crosby Company, manufacturers of Wheaties, who had used it with variations for an advertising jingle since 1926.
The link from the Wikipedia article is dead to me (“not released in my country”), but I found this 1926 Wheaties jingle which…honestly doesn’t sound anything like “Jazz Baby” to me, but someone in the comments says it’s the first use of a jingle in a radio ad. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
While you’re there, please enjoy all these other Wheaties ads. Said it before, I’ll say it again — there needs to be a word for that thing you do where you start off with a simple Google search and find yourself an hour later squinting at Bruce Jenner eating Wheaties.
p.s. oh, yah — congratulations to peacelovewoodstock who wins the Dead Pool with Carol Channing. Y’all know what that means!
January 15, 2019 — 8:49 pm
Comments: 18
Swan goes here
There’s been a swan in this spot for the past few nights. I spotted him when I was out looking for the kitten (he’s nine months old now, the Wandering Age). I saw something white in the canal and thought it was an overcoat (yeah, my first thought was a dead body), but it was a sleepy floaty swan.
I can’t get over how swanny this place is. I mean, we had them in ones and twos and threes back in Rhode Island. But here? One foggy morning, some years ago, I stood in the field across the road and counted 35 of them.
(Ah, yes. Here it is. December 31, 2008).
A bunch of them flew over the car this afternoon. I bet it was a dozen. Their wings make the most extraordinary mechanical whuffing sound when they fly. I wonder if my ditch swan has joined them in migration.
An old farmer told me when you see them here on the coast in Winter it means a cold snap inland.
January 14, 2019 — 9:22 pm
Comments: 9
From my clipfile
I don’t have anything in particular to report today, so here’s an illustrator from my clipfile: Willy Pogany (Vilmos András Pogány) (1882 1955) (full illustration here).
Pogany was Hungarian, though he took American citizenship in 1921. He was one of the great names of what is called the Golden Age of Illustration.
No doubt, there was one of those strange historical throwings-up of an unfeasible number talented people during this era, but I’m inclined to blame the Golden Age on technology.
Book illustration went from the sophisticated black and white wood engravings of the late Nineteenth Century (giving rise to geniuses of ink illustration like Charles Dana Gibson) into early, cheap color reproduction (leading to the ascendance of figures like Rockwell).
Illustrators who surfed the timeline just right — like Arthur Rackham, N.C. Wyeth and Willy Pogany — moved successfully from one style to the next.
I admit, though, I like Pogany’s line work most of all.
Have a good weekend, everyone. I have to do my taxes this weekend, or at least get a start. They aren’t complicated on account of I am poor, but they still aren’t a lot of fun.
Revolución!
January 11, 2019 — 9:42 pm
Comments: 10
Oh, look…another one
Remember that time that you and everybody you knew was upset about high taxes and illegal immigration and the people in charge decided that the most important issue in the whole wide world was…gay marriage? Remember that? Or that time you and everybody you knew was upset about high taxes and illegal immigration and the people in charge decided that the most important issue in the whole wide world was…transgender teens?
Yeah. Are you getting the vegan thing at the moment? You can spot a put-up job when suddenly, inexplicably, it’s all anyone is talking about in government and the MSM. Left, right and center. Or left, lefter and leftest.
We’re getting Veganuary in the neck. I tried searching “who is behind Veganuary?” “why Veganuary?” all the way to “fuck off Veganuary” and all the results were tasty vegan recipes and why you should give up meat for the animals.
I find it bizarre that the slideshow at the top of the Veganuary site is a series of adorable farm animals. Because, you know, the only reason those beasts exist is because we eat them. Most bear little resemblance to their natural counterparts.
Cows, chickens and pigs, after so many generations of breeding for characteristics people convenient, can no longer make it in the wild. Maybe if we cut them all loose all and let the predators at them for a hundred years or so, a few hardy specimens would survive to create brand new breeds of wild animal, but I don’t think that’s what the vegans have in mind.
Just how many petting zoos do they think the market will support?
January 10, 2019 — 10:53 pm
Comments: 12