I spotted this on Heidi MacDonald’s The Beat. Apparently, it’s the work of an animation student, and I think it’s laugh-out-loud excellent.
[flv:/Video/2008/MAR/SaulBassStarWars.flv 440 300]Somehow, this makes me realize that the original opening credits to Lost In Space were influenced by Saul Bass.
Year: 2008
Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s New Book
What has cartoonist Jimmy (Arlo & Janis) Johnson’s ex-wife, Rheta Grimsley Johnson, been up to? That’s the subject of her new book, Poor Man’s Provence: Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana. Rheta is the author of the only authorized biography of Charles M. Schulz published in his lifetime.
For over a decade, syndicated columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson has been spending several months a year in southwest Louisiana, deep in the heart of Cajun country. Rheta fell in love with the place, bought a second home, and set in planting doomed azaleas and deep roots. She has found an assortment of beautiful people right on the edge of the Atchafalaya Swamp.
These days, much is labeled Cajun that is not, and the popularity of the unique culture’s food, songs, and dance has been a mixed blessing. Poor Man’s Provence helps define what’s what through lively characters and stories. The book is both personal odyssey and good reporting, a travelogue and a memoir, funny and frank.
Spam, spam, spam
The past few weeks have been brutal for spam floods, both in e-mail and blog comments. The Akismet service for WordPress does a great job of filtering out spam comments, but when the volume is bad, some slips through, especially when there are multiples of the same message. Here’s one example:
Name: best motorcycle insurance | URI: http://www.fullsizeinsurance.com/
| IP: 86.96.226.14 | Date: March 4, 2008
This is why I have to moderate comments. It’s not because any of the legitimate comments need censoring, it’s because I’d have to delete spam that would have already found its way to the RSS feed for comments.
Charlie Brown Bulks Up
An editorial cartoon last week, by Jeff Stahler.
Personally, I think Congress has no business investigating steroids in Major League Baseball. Another waste of time and taxpayer money was the 1954 Senate investigation into comic books and their claimed cause-and-effect influence on juvenile delinquency.
The Return of Eric’s Anime Pick
If I were to select one Anime title to show someone as an introduction to Japanese animation as it’s done today, it would not be something by Hayao Miyazaki. It would be Makoto Shinkai’s The Place Promised in Our Early Days. I consider this film to be an exemplary work of the highest quality and artistry, exploring elements of science fiction, fantasy, technology, politics, romance, and friendship, with deftness and subtlety. I blogged about it many months ago, but the pre-Flash video embedding no longer works, so I’ll have to do a fresh transfer of a choice scene.
Shinkai’s follow-up to Place Promised is 5 Centimeters Per Second: a chain of short stories about their distance. Eric has wanted me to blog something from it for a while, and now that the DVD is about to be released in America, I will. The final part of the movie includes this musical montage of flashbacks. Seeing it shouldn’t spoil your enjoyment of the movie. I transferred this video from the Japanese DVD.
[flv:/Video/2008/MAR/FiveCentimeters.flv 448 252]
Sibley Declares Pet ‘Dame-in-Waiting’
I would like to direct your attention over to Brian Sibley’s blog, where, at this link, he has written a lovely piece promoting the Dame Petula Clark PET-ition. Being an Englishman born and bred, his input should pack a bit more welly than my Boston-based entreaties. Thank you, Brian. (Just reading his stuff compels me to write with more style than my usual pedestrian prose!)