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Archives for the month of: December, 2004
John Oxton ponders whether website is spelled out “website” or “web site”. I can relate, for the fact that there are a few words that perplex me as to which way they should be spelled or pronunciated. With that in mind I offer my list of odd words, pronunciations and misspellings:
Is it?
Road or Ro-ad? Chris Farley posed this question in Tommy Boy or was it Black Sheep?
Potato or Potatoe? The addition of an ‘e’ reminds me too much of toe and then I imagine potatos with toes and that’s just freaky.
Color or Colour? Granted, the difference in spelling depends on if you’re in Europe or Canada but for the life of me I can’t figure out which one is correct.
Music or Musak? I blame this on that wretched invention installed in office environments piping out the latest in Latin and 90’s street beats.
Christmas or Xmas? This reminds me too much of Kriss Kross and then I have nightmares of the pants backward rapping duo.
Television or Televizzle? Curse Snoop Dogg and his ghetto speak.
What do you think?
For those of you who read this site I’m not dead. Rather I’ve taken a brief vacation from kartooner.com to focus on college finals, work on a top-secret project with Matt and prepare for a vacation coming up in January.
A few months ago when I made the choice to go back to school, after a 3-year hiatus, I realized that it would take a great deal of patience and dedication and indeed it has. I’ve tried to divide my time between family, work, school and maintaining this site and I have to drop one of them, temporarily, in order to focus on furthering myself as an artist, student, father, husband and gamer.
I’ve noticed that a few of the sites that I visit on a daily basis have been experiencing brief hiatuses, mostly due to school and others the result of “blogger burnout”, a common occurence amongst those of us who live and breath in the blogging realm. Let’s face it, blogging has become mainstream and while that’s a good thing in the sense that the media and corporations are doing double takes, it also means that everyone and their donkey is blogging.
Most blogs are merely journals, outlets to vent frustrations or collect observations about life (including that guy who cut you off last week on the corner of 5th and Main) while other blogs focus on a specific subject matter like web development, advertising, corporate life and cartoons. In the past year I’ve amassed over 300 feeds from a variety of sources and between Feeddemon and Bloglines I can pretty much become more knowledgable in anything I wish to learn about.
You’ll find that most people are willing to share their ideas and by sharing I mean collaboration. As humans we love to gossip and build our egos and this is a good thing because if no one felt comfortable or excited about sharing new concepts then the world would be a solemn place. I couldn’t tell you the amounts of times that I’ve felt good (or great even) about receiving feedback on certain articles I’ve written.
It makes me want to continue learning about what I do best, what I’m curious about and what I know I’ll never do (like being a rocket scientist or ice-cream tester) because knowledge is the key to success. Bloggers are people who are willing to share their knowledge of various topics and in doing so they have hopes that they’ll also receive commentary and feedback, which ultimately builds a community.
The community that has developed from this site alone, the “kartooner’ites” as I call my readers, is important to me in more ways than I could explain. I love the feeling of posting an article and mere hours later comments start to collect like flies on honey paper. It builds my ego, yes, but it also makes me proud that I’ve managed to share something with someone and they got something out it. I think it’s important that if you’re reading these sites and enjoying them then you should make it a habit of leaving a comment here and there. Trust me, it’ll make a world of difference to the person who runs the site, does their research and releases their words to the world.
That said, I hope that everyone has a great holiday and makes the most of it. We have so little time here and it’s best that you breath in the details because before you know it the present will become just a memory.
In other site-related news (sorry for the abrupt off topic redirect) the Atom feed for this site is now powered by the excellent Feed Burner service. For those of you reading this site in your preferred feed reader, the feed URL is now located here. With this service enabled I plan on adding a few cool features to the feed in the next few days, so if you could do me a favor and switch over that would be great.
Thanks for reading and now back to your regulary scheduled lives.
Joseph Carey Merrick, famously known as the Elephant Man, always intrigued me after seeing the film of the same name starring Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt (as the Elephant Man). His story is one that exists without peace and begins with a tortured life through the eyes of society. The Merrick depicted in the movie while slightly skewed by Hollywood still paints an eerie portrait of a man whose only need was to be accepted in the society that shunned him.
According to About.com, at a young age Joseph’s mother noticed that her son’s skin was becoming blotchy and bulbous. Lumps began to form under his skin in several areas on his body including the back of his neck and on his chest. As Joseph got older the right side of his head enlarged and by the age of 12 his hands were so deformed they were rendered useless. Despite his condition, Joseph attempted to work a factory job but was ultimately made fun of and abused by the workers, to the point where he ended up as an oddity in a freak show.
At the time, doctors were convinced that Merrick suffered from elephantiasis, a rare disorder of the lymphatic system caused by parasitic worms such as Wuchereria bancrofti, Brugia malayi, and B. timori, all of which are transmitted by mosquitos.
Recently, however, researchers have concluded that The Elephant Man suffered from something different. In 1996, a radiologist named Amita Sharma of the National Institutes of Health (U.S.) determined that Merrick lived his life with Proteus syndrome, a condition identified in 1979. Proteus syndrome, named after the Greek god of the same name who could change shape, is a rare disorder that is characterized by “multiple lesions of the lymph glands (lipolymphohemangiomas), overgrowth of one side of the body (hemihypertrophy), an abnormally large head (macrocephaly), partial gigantism of the feet, and darkened spots or moles (nevi) on the skin.”
Recent study of Merrick’s skeleton and documented photos have determined that Merrick suffered from an extreme case of Proteus syndrome, to the point where the hat he wore was reportedly measured three feet in circumference.
In the end, Joseph’s dying wish was to fit in with society, to blend in with the population to the point where he was just another human being instead of being shunned as a freak of nature or an obtrocity of man, as he was described by those who refused to understand his circumstances. In the movie and in real-life, Joseph couldn’t sleep lying down because of the size and weight of his head. Rather, he had to sleep sitting up with pillows propped up behind his head to support the weight. On one particular morning in 1890, he was found lying on his back, his wind pipe crushed to the point where he died of suffocation. He was only 28 years old.
Picture this: You and your friends are taking a brisk hike through the Himalayas enjoying the fresh breeze sifting through your hair. You inhale the serene qualities of nature and out of nowhere you notice in the distance something familar. It’s not until you decide to investigate the situation further and lo and behold, painted on some rocks are advertisements for Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
You all wonder how in God’s green earth did advertisements for soft drinks end up in the Himalayas (of all places)?
Representatives at Coca-Cola and Pepsi India have no knowledge as to why these rocks have been defaced and would much rather evade the issue. Despite this “Oliver North” approach, the court has ordered the National Environment Engineering Research Institute (Neeri, for short) to inspect the stretch of land in the surrounding area for an ecological damage report and from there they’ll work out the verdict for this case.
For purposes of reference, I’ve come up with an unauthorized ad campaign (utilizing pictures from various sources):
The question is, Did Coca-Cola and Pepsi deface the beauty of nature to spread the world of their engine-cleaning soft drinks?
When I was in high school, my friends and I over the course of an entire summer would shoot 35MM films. We filmed original movies only. With titles like Boris the Spider, Degenerate Donkeys and Kyle the Barbarian we utilized whatever space we could to flesh out the feature including abandoned parking lots, run down apartment complexes and for one scene in particular a tilted shack.
We’d write scripts, hand them out and study them over night and over the summer we’d complete a film in about 3–5 months time. I can remember one filming date when everyone in the crew decided that I’d wear a makeshift necklace of firecrackers under my clothing. The idea was that when the director yelled “Action!”, someone would light the firecracker and in effect it would create the illusion that I was being shot. Long story short, they wanted to set me on fire. Surprisingly I turned down the offer and we used a makeshift dummy instead. We filled condoms with ketchup and attached it to the dummy along with firecrackers and ultimately the dummy caught fire.
One particular scene in Boris the Spider called for a blubbering, truck driving idiot, a guy who would prop his tar-covered shoes on a couch and rub his greasy hands across the fabric. This slob of a human being would most likely live behind a dumpster and collect anything he assumed was valuable. However, in our film this character lived in a spotless apartment with a smudge-free television set and a glass coffee table.
For this scene I was chosen as the blubbering idiot who lived in this spectacle of an apartment and I was also scheduled to die. To disguise myself as this character I used shoe polish on my eyebrows to create black eyebrows (since I’m blonde by nature) and pressed a fake Mario-style moustache above my lips. Boris the Spider (played by a friend of mine named Greg) was to enter my apartment — unexpectedly of course — and then proceed to kill me by cracking my neck. As noted previously when my school buddies wanted to attach firecrackers to my body, there was no way in the depths of hell they were going to crack my neck.
To achieve this effect we set up a perspective shot wherein the camera pointed at a wig asphyxiated to a basketball. The camera pointed just above Greg’s shoulders so he could shake the basketball and the wig pretending that it was my head and then with a swift twist (and thanks to our off camera Foley artist) the effect of a cracked neck was achieved.
After all of the initial footage was shot, Greg and the editing team would spend the next several weeks editing the film to their liking, which meant most of the time that a good portion of my scenes were shortened in length or cut out entirely. When everyone was pleased with the editing as a whole we’d then do the post-production work which included dubbing lines if the actor’s delivery was weak or muffled and choosing the soundtrack. In most of our films we used songs from Devo, Meatloaf and Talking Heads and finally we’d screen the film to our friends, family, co-workers, neighbors and just about anyone willing to stomach the material.
It was amature movie making at its best and something I’ll treasure in my memories for years to come.