Turkey Day Comics

National Blog Posting Month Day 23

Josh Fruhlinger, THE Comics Curmudgeon, has taken the weekend of to stuff his face full of leftovers. As a public service, I am filling the breach with my own comic strip deconstructions.

What goes together better than turkey and Thanksgiving? Pilgrims and football! Two comic strips pastiche all our great traditions together.

Rhymes With Orange 11/22/07

First, we have sideline footage of the first meeting of the Plimouth Plantation Pilgrims facing off against the Wampanoag Warriors. Goody Elway is calling a Hail Papist Heresy pass.

Bound And Gagged 11/22/07

In addition to stealing maize, cranberries, and lacrosse from the first inhabitants of North America, we also stole the idea of halftime. And it seems the Puritans borrowed the Santa Maria to make their first voyage. And if that is really Christopher Columbus interrupting the big game, shouldn't this cartoon have run last month?

Hat tip to 2fs for recommending me go with comics commentary for a cheap quickie post.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Are historical anachronisms inherently funny or just lame?

Giving Back

National Blog Posting Month Day 22

This year my wife made a lateral career move and became a teacher in the English as a Second Language (ESL) program. When she arrived in America in 1972 as a seven-year-old child with little English, the only system for immigrant children was the “throw them in the deep end” approach to English immersion. Since then, as a new flood of residents have joined our country, the system has learned how to streamline the assimilation of those not born here. This is her chance to make a difference to kids that are now in the position she was in so many years ago.

In today’s slightly xenophobic atmosphere, ESL (also called ESOL or ELL) is a much misunderstood approach. It is not bilingual education. It can’t be. Among the twenty-five students my wife works with, there are over a dozen nationalities and languages represented. The goal is to get children that don’t have English as their native tongue up to speed in the regular classroom as quickly as possible. Speaking a foreign language is neither mandatory nor necessary to be an ESL teacher, although my wife’s degree in French, her high school Spanish, and some leftover childhood Vietnamese help.

The other day one of her students, a little Vietnamese girl the same age my wife was when she came to the US, insisted on showing my wife her class assignment. The work involved putting different paper feathers on turkey cut outs. The girl had done the assignment fine, but didn’t know what a turkey was. My wife asked if she ever ate turkey at lunch. The girl had always eaten pizza, the universal food, because it was familiar and safe. They looked up “turkey” in a Vietnamese-English dictionary and the literal translation was “American chicken.”

My wife took the girl to the cafeteria where they were putting together a turkey lunch. The cafeteria lady took time to put together a little sampler platter with turkey and the fixings so the girl could try the meal. That day, my wife passed on a small sliver of our American culture to one of our newest members. It’s these small moments that despite the increasing hassle and frustration of being a teacher keeps teaching fresh and rewarding.

Our one true nation holiday celebrates sharing culture and welcoming new people. And it is about more than thanks, it’s also about giving.

Hitting The Wall

National Blog Posting Month Day 21

About twenty miles into a marathon, runners hit what the call The Wall. The body runs out of fuel and it must begin burning body fat to continue. Runners get an extreme sense of fatigue and struggle to continue. Or so I’ve heard. I’ve never run a marathon.

Twenty days into NaBloPoMo, I’m running out of fuel. Normally I have three or four blog post ideas running around my head. Right now I have one idea for Thanksgiving Day and a meme I’m holding in reserve for when I’m flat out mentally bankrupt.

The difference between blogging four times a week and every day is enormous. I’m constantly preparing a blog entry or thinking about the next one. I have about three hours a day that are mine. One in the morning before work and two in the evening once dinner is cooked and other chores are done. Since a really good blog entry takes me up to two hours to research, write, and edit, that is cutting it thin. Here is what has suffered while I’ve been running this virtual marathon.

Reading. I’m not even half way through the one book I’m trying to read this month, and while it’s physically heavy, the reading isn’t that difficult. It’s just that after a chapter or two, the eyes can’t stay open.

Television. I’m not getting the full benefit of my new DVR because I don’t get time to catch up on the recordings. This weekend I plowed through the backlog of 30 Rock and How I Met Your Mother but I still have three weeks of The Office and My Name Is Earl to go through. I figure the writer’s strike is going to give me plenty of time to catch up.

Dog Walking. As my dog gets older, he becomes more and more reluctant to take long walks in the morning. On weekends, we still make it to the site of the bread dump, but on weekdays, it’s a quick jaunt around the block. Especially if it’s rainy of extra cold.

Newspaper Reading. If I’m almost done with a post in the morning, rather than saving a draft and working on it later, I take my breakfast downstairs and rush it out before I have to leave for work. This cuts out the time I have for the front page and the editorials. Some days I don’t even finish the comics. Horrors.

Other Blogs. I feel I'm giving the blogs in my blogroll short shrift. Especially the ones that also post every day. Sometimes I find three or four new posts and even though I would have something witty to say on the older ones, I feel the moment has passed. I haven't even updated my blogroll to the new Masters of Gilligan page.

Romantic Activity. This blog stops at the bedroom door. I’m no Mitch McDad. However, proximity is 90% of seduction. If I’m downstairs in basement tapping out a draft of the next day’s blog and my wife is upstairs reading trashy romance novels, there have to be some missed opportunities happening.

So why am I doing it? To prove I can. But that is the topic for Post 30. I’ve got to pace myself if I’m going to make it to the end.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: I need ideas. Give me some.

Ugly Betty Friedan

National Blog Posting Month Day 20 Bonus Post

While I’m doing silly comparisons today, Joel Achenbach has a column on the Achenblog that cites some wingnut survey that declared The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan to be one of the most harmful books of the last two hundred years, up there with Mein Kampf and Das Kapital. Judging by the column and the completely looney commenters, these folks would have problems with any books not written by Fox News talk show hosts.

Besides, I think Betty Friedan looks a little like another Betty trying to enjoy the fruits of the feminist revolution:



Beauty is in they eye of the beholder. And the idea that women are the equals of men is one of the least harmful idea of the twentieth century. Methinks the wingnuts want to turn back the calendar a few decades. Perhaps even centuries.

Pretty Portman

National Blog Posting Month Day 20

Maybe I'm a little too worked up about Natalie Portman doing a nude scene for Wes Anderson in a 17 minute prequel for The Darjeeling Limited called Hotel Chevalier. And I still fondly remember her work as a movie stripper in Closer. So when I saw the movie poster for squeaky clean kiddie movie Mr Magorium's Magic Emporium, I was reminded of the pose by that famous movie hooker.



Yeah, It's just me.

3D: The Eyes Have It

National Blog Posting Month Day 19

I don’t do a lot of movie reviews here on Foma because not only am I not very good at it, there are a lot of people that do it very well. I saw Beowulf this weekend up in Pennsylvania and the Stephen Hunter review in the Washington Post is very good. There is no way I could match a line like "Ma is Angelina Jolie as interpreted by someone who apprenticed by doing airbrush portraits on custom Harley gas tanks." For a ordinary viewer’s opinion, Ivansmom at the Achenboodle sums up my opinions pretty well.

What I will discuss is the technical features of the movie. I had seen The Polar Express in 3D Imax a few years ago and was a little creeped out by the woodenness of technology. Part of my desire to see Beowulf had improved the state of the art. My other purely prurient reason was to see if it was possible to make Angelina Jolie look hotter than she does in real life.

Eyes

I was tipped off to the movie over a year ago when Neil Gaiman discussed it while at Balticon. He mentioned that the motion capture software had been improved by at least two generations. In particular he mentioned the eyes. The eyes in Polar Express were cold and soulless and made all the characters look like zombies. In Beowulf, not only are the eyes much, much better, they actually do some extreme close-ups just to show off the verisimilitude.

Hair and skin

Hair and skin are the bane of CG movies. That is why Pixar tends to stick to things like toys and cars that are supposed to be shiny and smooth. In Beowulf, the male characters tend to be suitably craggy and hirsute. The female characters and the queen in particular still suffer from a botoxed Princess Fiona sheen.

Photorealism

The real irony of motion capture animation is that it tries to be realistic, but the point of animation is to do things that can’t be filmed in real life. In Spiderman 2, anytime Spidey had his hood on, I feared I was watching a cartoon instead of an actor. And it looked it. In Beowulf, the level of detail keeps shifting back and forth.

Motion Capture

The alleged advantage of motion capture and rotoscoping is too add a level of realism pure animation can’t attain. Even with the finest actors lit up like a Christmas tree and Tron, they can’t capture everything. Every now and then a “character” will jerk around like an extra in a Thunderbirds puppet movie.

3D

Three-D is and always will be a gimmick. The scriptwriters of anything 3D always think of as many was as possible of having things point or fly at the viewer. This always breaks the forth wall and disrupts the suspension of disbelief.

Depth of Field

A problem related to 3D imaging is that the “camera” seems to have an infinite depth of field. This ends up making the screen have a layered look that reminds me of prismatic books I used to read as a kid. When the background is as sharp as the spear pointing out over the audience, the emphasis becomes fuzzy instead of the scenery.

Peripheral Vision

The Imax screen has its own issues. The screen is so huge, it’s hard to see everything going on at once. In particular, things in the foreground at the edge of the screen catch the eye. At times the glasses (especially, if like me, you have to wear them over regular glasses) don’t cover enough of the field of vision to avoid fuzzy artifacts at the edge of you field of vision.

I really liked Beowulf, especially the meta-epic subtext that questions the entire mythmaking process. The motion capture technology is really maturing fast. Animation lets directors tidy up even Angelina Jolie’s few flaws. Her fluid gold skin is really no more revealing than Mystique in the X-Men movies, which is to say she is easy on the eyes. And the eyes are the windows to the soul.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Will CGI ever get so good it will replace real actors?

Imax In Demand

National Blog Posting Month Day 18

This weekend was time for the Fall Philly Road Trip. Last year we went to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Fair. This year we went to catch Beowulf in Imax 3D. My son began broadly hinting that he wanted to take some friends to see the movie a week or so ago.

We usually take him out to a fancy steak dinner for getting a good report card, but we decided a road trip with three of his friends was an excellent alternative. Since none of the vehicles in our current fleet will fit six, I got a Grand Caravan for the day and we all hit the road. And just so we didn’t neglect the steak part of the tradition, we hit Pat’s in South Philly to school the kids in what real cheesesteaks taste like. They all agreed they were infinitely better than the pale imitation the school cafeteria serves.

But why did I rent a minivan and drive two hours to see what is showing just down the street? Because the closest theater with an Imax screen is in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, home of what must be the biggest mall on the eastern seaboard.

I can’t believe that the greater Washington/Baltimore area can’t support a commercial Imax theater. There is no shortage of museum affiliated screens including the National Air and Space Museum, the National Museum of Natural History, the Udvar-Hazy Center, and the Maryland Science Center here in Baltimore. Some of these dabble in commercial releases after hours, but none show them on a regular basis.

A few years ago while killing time during the holidays down in Tampa we caught The Polar Express in 3D Imax at the otherwise nearly deserted Channelside Complex. If Tampa can support an Imax theater, I don’t know why this area can’t. You expect to find Imax theaters in big cities like New York, San Francisco, and Dallas, but according to Wikipedia, other US cities with commercial Imax screens include Nashville, Fresno, Colorado Springs, West Palm Beach, Boise, and dozens of others.

The movie chains need to get a clue and tap a market that demands it. If I can drive a hundred miles to see an Imax movie, think of the thousands that would drive across town.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Would you pay more to see a movie in Imax? Would you drive a hundred miles?

Happy Hour Hijinks

National Blog Posting Month Day 17

Never let anyone convince you that teachers can’t party. One of the schools my wife works at has a happy hour party every Friday. Last night it was at one of the teacher’s house in Arbutus. Let’s see what I remember:

Sangria
Mai tai
Pomegranate martini
Another pomegranate martini
Three or four mudslide shots
Jello shooter

And I met a lady that truly can tie a cherry stem into a knot with her tongue. I had hitherto thought that was just a sleight of hand parlor trick. Now I’m a believer that it can be done. Not sure what value that skill has, but it does fascinate people.

There is also one disappointed husband out there. He had stayed at home to watch their seven and four year olds while his wife, Teacher A, stopped by the party. Teacher B stole her cell phone and started hot-texting the husband in guise of Teacher A. The first message was “If you’re not up when I get home, you soon will be.” His reply was “Oh my!” It went downhill from there. At one point I was looking the wrong way to catch a particularly spicy cell phone picture being taken.

Unfortunately for her husband, Teacher A was just a little too shnockered to drive home and deliver on any implicit promises made on her behalf. Fortunately for me, my wife is a very dedicated designated driver. On the way home, she noticed that my drivers side mirror had been clipped just enough to spiderweb the mirror. Having some experience with mirror replacement during my son’s student driver days, I know this will exceed my deductible but not be worth filing a claim for. Makes for a very expensive happy hour.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: How was your Friday night?