Archives for the month of: December, 2004

Zoe Elizabeth Sagen

Thank you for being a part of our lives. 

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. 

Elephant Man (1980)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):

himalayancola.jpg

The ques­tion is, Did Coca-Cola and Pepsi deface the beauty of nature to spread the world of their engine-cleaning soft drinks? 

Film ReelWhen 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 35 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.