Clever premise, stupid premise
Into cartoons? Oh yes. And thanks to an art department gig that put a TV at my desk, I got a huge dose of daytime television, right through the Eighties and Nineties.
My goodness, how most of it sucked.
I loved the premise for Thundercats, though. This planet of martial-artist-cat-people blows up, and everyone evacuates by space ship. Except, only one ship makes it out, and it’s the ship with the royalty on it — including the boy-cat who’s destined to be king.
Finally, the ship lands on a planet (Earth, as it happens), and it turns out their suspended animation thingie was gefukt. They’ve been asleep, but they’re decades older. Including the king, who is now unimaginably huge, powerful and in charge…and still has the mind of a seven-year-old.
So the others have to grow him up, without pissing him off too much. Must have been fantastically appealing to seven-year-olds who weren’t impossibly powerful.
On the other hand, there was Captain Planet. Brainchild of Ted Turner, with voice talent from every famous person who ever lived and surely one of the dumbest cartoons EVARRR.
See, there are these five children with power rings: an African boy in tune with the earth, a Malaysian girl with a deep understanding of the ocean, a South American Indian shaman boy with the ability to communicate with animals telepathically, a Russian girl computer genius, and an American boy whose special ability is hitting on the girls and being an irritating retard.
I’m loving this already.
Together, they can summon this warty superhero guy of indeterminate powers, to fight pollution. His one vulnerability? Pollution.
Oh, but the best bit is the cartoon’s complete and utter fail as propaganda. The villains aren’t greedy capitalist bastards whose money-grubbing activities cause environmental damage — an eco-villain with some kind of real-world meaning. No, the bad guys pollute for the sake of polluting. It’s their whole deal, no reason given. Hey, let’s pour shit in the ocean, ha ha ha!
It never ceases to astonish, how large pools of money and talent can come together and make infinite suck.
July 13, 2010 — 10:34 pm
Comments: 36
Paging Meester Bunny, Meester Bugs Bunny
You ready for this? This is the contents of one ten-inch pot. Huh? Huh? Any closer together, and I reckon these carrots would have facets.
Uncle B spent a lot of years in an upstairs flat smack in the middle of London. That’s where he developed the ability to grow whole fields of waving wheat in little teeny pots.
We’re going to fire up the chimenea, sit under the stars and get quietly snockered. It’s Friday. Have a good weekend, all!
July 9, 2010 — 10:03 pm
Comments: 21
ZOMFG!!! I SAW A STOAT!!!!
In my own garden! In broad daylight! I was sitting in the shade reading a book with the chooks around me and out he popped from a gap in the hedge — not twenty feet away — with his back to me. Didn’t look around. Hopped a few feet in a leisurely way (for a stoat), paused and stood up again (which is when I saw the black tip of his tail that marked him a stoat, not a weasel). Slinkied to the end of the hedge and popped back in again.
I couldn’t have been more astonished if a tartan plaid unicorn had popped out of the hedge and farted “God Save the Queen.”
Explains why I haven’t seen a stoat in the field, anyhow — they’ve been using the hedgerows as a highway. And probably killing runnybabbits in there, too.
Hedgerows are used as field boundaries much more often than fencing in Britain. Or were — in the mid-20th, farmers began to dig them up so they could use modern farming techniques with huge agricultural machines.
Mistake. There’s a whole ecosystem dependent on hedgerows. Lots of little birds and creatures live in them and off them and use them to travel in relative safety from one habitat to another. There are now laws in place to protect hedges and encourage new planting.
Some hedges are ancient. Ours is certainly very old. One rule of thumb is to count the number of kinds of shrub — the more the older — though a hedge around a house is planted for show as much as keeping the tups out of the garden, and so would have always more variety than a purely utilitarian hedge.
Ours is like a firework display in slow motion, with one thing flowering and fruiting after another, from Spring to Fall. Blackberry bramble, honeysuckle, some sort of thorn (hawthorn or blackthorn — you know them by the burst of white flowers in May), elder, several kinds of roses. Spectacular. And alive with bird nests.
And down below, a network of dark tunnels the little animals use to get around. And the not so little animals — I’ve seen the cat dive in the very hole the stoat disappeared into. Must be many a dark murder done in them green corridors.
And now you know why the chickens don’t ‘free range’ unless one of us is watching them. Though if old Stoaty had popped out twenty feet closer and nabbed a chook, there’s not much I could do about it.
July 8, 2010 — 11:27 pm
Comments: 28
Now *that’s* a funky chicken
It’s a breed called Modern Game and it’s endangered.
There’s an article in this month’s Practical Poultry — or as Uncle B calls it, Chickens and Chickening — about Britain’s vanishing chicken breeds. According to the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, twenty species of British domestic animals went extinct between 1900 and 1970.
I never thought about that before. It’s not like plants; you can’t stockpile seeds in some cryogenic warehouse. It’s even more precarious than wild animals, for whom you can only provide the habitat and hope for the best.
For domestic stock, somebody has to be out there actively keeping the line alive and not letting it get fatally outbred or dangerously inbred.
Funny you never hear of endangered livestock breeds — considering all the howling and handwringing about endangered wildlife, where the number of actual modern extinctions approximates zero.
That’s because the eco nuts think domestic animals aren’t “real” animals somehow. Or, worse, they’re some kind of evil species traitors for cooperating with sinful humans.
Stupid hippies.
I just finished Temple Grandin‘s Animals in Translation — which I can definitely recommend if you find animal behavior interesting. She’s the autistic PhD who designs abattoirs.
When asked how someone who loves animals can build slaughterhouses, she points out — no slaughterhouses, no animals.
Or as someone else put it, if you want to get an animal off the endangered list, convince humans it tastes good.
July 7, 2010 — 11:00 pm
Comments: 14
The Scarlet “L”
Oh, the shame.
The humiliation.
The sheer, uncut pain-in-the-assery.
I have now flunked my driving test THREE TIMES (and boneheadedly showed up on the wrong date a fourth time, forfeiting the fee). At over £100 a pop (£64 for the test and £40 for two hours of instructor time) this is no longer amyooosing.
First time, I cut in front of somebody a bit too sharply. The second time, I stopped when the repeater lights turned red (what are repeater lights? Exactly!!!). The third time, somebody topped the hill behind me as I was pulling away from a parked position, and I kissed the curb at the corner.
It’s probably just bad luck and nerves on test day, but the problem is that I can only get test appointments every couple of months. Between time, I don’t get any practice at all because I’m not insured to drive our cars as a learner. Two months is plenty of time to sink back into teh sux0r, when you haven’t completely mastered a skill.
Coincidentally, it costs £64 to put me on the policy until October. So, what the hell? That’s three one-hour lessons. Or one more flunked test.
But I have to slap these big red magnetic LOSER plates on the car — front and back — whenever I’m driving it. And if you think other drivers go easy on you when they see you’re a beginner, you live in a magical, mystical land where people aren’t assholes.
July 6, 2010 — 9:33 pm
Comments: 30
Rockin’ the Chicoms
One of the great things about being an artard — I can have a whale of a time just looking at stuff. Give me stuff to look at and I’m a happy weasel.
I love the internet.
I don’t know what led me to this site, but they sell reproductions of Chinese propaganda posters from 1925 to the present. Hours of wholesome, snarky amusement.
Most of them have titles like “let us strive to forthrightly repel the foreign invader through Mao Tse Tung Thought.” The artwork ranges from really very good to “yikes!”
And then there’s this.
Published in 1986, titled Youthful dancesteps. The description: “Disco is a huge craze in the 1980s. The poster shows that it is accepted and should no longer be condemned as a form of Western decadence.”
There is so much wrong with this picture. His mom jeans. Her capri pants. The finger snapping. The fact that their “disco” band includes a flute and somebody sawing on a bass fiddle with a bow.
Man, what I wouldn’t give to listen to whatever they’re playing back there. (Listening to stuff is my other great pastime. I really, really love the internet).
Anyhow, start at the beginning and have a browse through their gallery. If that doesn’t make you happy to be a Namerican, I don’t know what will.
July 5, 2010 — 9:44 pm
Comments: 13
Not exactly Superman…
Faster than a speeding runnybabbit…
More powerful than a really strong runnybabbit…
Able to leap tall runnybabbits in a single bound…
Look, under that hedge! It’s — A WEASEL!
Yeah. Heh. My nephew bought a weasel shirt.
It’s the first I’ve seen one of my own products in person, on account of I am FAR too cheap to pay trans-Atlantic postage. I’m relieved to observe that the print quality and color fidelity looked good.
Okay, y’all — you know the drill. Show up tomorrow at 6pm Weasel Blog Time to make your pick in the Tenth Celebrity Dead Pool.
And if steve wins it a third time in a row, for god’s sake nobody sit next to him.
July 1, 2010 — 10:34 pm
Comments: 18
No better than she should be
Today we took Clan Badger to Smallhythe Place, an early 16th Century half-timbered house in, of all places, Small Hythe in Kent. Small Hythe was once an important port and shipbuilding center, until the sea hiked her skirts and skittered away. It is now miles and miles from the water (making the boat launch look rather silly).
A National Trust membership for two cost us £84 and we’re by-god going to get our money’s worth this year.
The house is in much the same Tudor style as Badger House, but maybe a hundred years older. That room farthest away in the photo was held in place by iron braces, and the floors were so outrageously wobbly and wonky that walking around the room made us all feel a bit ill, like one of those state fair funhouses.
From 1899 until her death in 1928, Smallhythe was home to Ellen Terry — the leading Shakespearean actress of her day. For which read: scenery-munching hambone.
She gave the house to the National Trust on her death, and it doubles as a museum of her life and acting memorabilia. Pretty cool stuff. She was the model for this iconic Sargent painting — the dress is upstairs in the Wonky Room.
Terry had three husbands, a series of lovers and a couple of illegitimate children (the son made eight bastards of his own; the daughter set herself up in the house next door to Smallhythe in a lesbian ménage à trois). Pretty good going for a woman of the High Victorian age.
Mother Badger seemed deeply perturbed by this information, although she mostly viewed it as a schedule management problem. “How did she have time?” she kept asking, shaking her head.
The gardens were lovely. And Uncle Badger was gratified to see they were laid out and planted up very similarly to our own — obviously aiming for a lush Tudor cottage garden effect.
But this sign was his favorite part. He refused to budge until he’d seen the odd stoat.
June 30, 2010 — 10:59 pm
Comments: 25
When you’re a chicken, everyone looks like a tree
It’s been hot here lately. The chickens don’t like that much. In the middle of the day, they stay in the shade under the chicken house, on the cool paving slabs, trilling quietly.
In the evenings, though, when the air cools, I let them out and sit in the garden with them for an hour or so, letting them “free range.”
This consists of squawking, flapping short distances, pecking everything that moves, pecking everything that doesn’t move, belly-bumping and pecking each other, running for cover when anything flies overhead, teasing the cat and, increasingly, perching all over my person in the most outrageous and undignified manner.
That last bit is worth every penny they cost.
That, and so far nobody’s shat on me. Bonus!
June 29, 2010 — 10:41 pm
Comments: 32
…signal weak…
Yeah. Sorry. Mum-in-law descended on us this morning. Which is not a problem — we get on just fine, thanks — but is going to absorb much of my sitting-at-the-computer-poking-F5 time. In other words, blogging is likely to be light this week — unless we take the old dear someplace cool.
So! Two things: the button design thing at Watts has been narrowed to smiley variations. I gather they’re going to pick one and have a bunch made up. Mosey over and repost, if your design fit the brief.
And thanks for playing on my (related) design thread last week. That was fun! I might pinch some of the design ideas that don’t make the cut (with permission, of course).
And finally — YES! The black fetid heart of Grand Kleagle Exalted Cyclops Robert Carlyle Byrd beats no more, ending Dead Pool Round Nine. Here’s this senile old coot shouting the word “barbaric” over and over to an uncaring America. But you don’t understand! The dog…died…dog…died…died…dog died…dog.
And who could forget these stirring words from the man, in the clarity of his youth:
I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side… Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.
Nice. How on earth they let him ‘unsay’ ideas like that, I will never know.
Anyhow, I suppose this means steve, having been cheated of his proper dicks once, now has gathered unto himself two dicks in a row. Thank goodness I haven’t mailed them off yet. (Yeah…umm…sorry).
Remember — see you back here Friday at 6pm Weasel Blog Time for Dead Pool Round Ten. Make your pick in that thread, or it doesn’t count!
June 28, 2010 — 10:14 pm
Comments: 10