Visit the kelpforest....

Wrote last July, even though I first started watching Sherlock in January '12.  I had it private since I figured no one was interested, but there's a couple of people who are fans so I guess I'll make it public:

( Mostly a bullet list of observations that I kept going back and adding to - may be kind of dated by now... )

I want Sherlock's teapot.  Artist has tons of other neat stuff too, frogs and tuataras on teapots and mugs.

I had sushi three times this month before I remembered to have my camera along...

( It's still February, right? )

24. Sushi ☺
2. Groundhog, or someone/thing named Phil ☺
15. Sign of Love ☺
23. Something that represents where you live ☺
14. Heart ☺
12. Jelly beans ☺
16. Flowers ☺

Avatar: The Last Airbender at McDonald's
Huntington Beach CA
Canon EOS 1000D
04 September 2009

( Earlier... )

So last week, Angus and I stopped by Big Lots to pick up a couple of plastic bins. On the way out he caught sight of a bin full of $3 DVDs and I relented and allowed him to pick one out, pending parental approval. He picked out a one containing some Garfield cartoons; not the series, but three half-hour shows that I think must have been primetime specials. I rolled my eyes a bit but said he could have it.

Now, I used to like Garfield the strip, it was actually funny when it first started. I even bought the first book; Garfield was huge and fat and obnoxious, and Jon had an actual job as a cartoonist. It got dumb about the time Jon's roommate Lyman disappeared and Garfield started walking on his hind legs; everything became round and cute, even Garfield himself, who wasn't supposed to be. I stopped paying much attention to it decades ago, but a few months ago, Angus brought home the same book, given him to the school librarian because it was beginning to fall apart.

Anyway the kids love, love, love this thing. Avalon has watched it four times in the last couple of days. The one special "Garfield's Nine Lives" is interesting because it's a bunch of different shorts, some done with different animators and art styles. Two of them appear very Disnyesque; "Dianna's Piano" doesn't seem like it had anything to do with Garfield at all, being all pastels and colored pencils and a long-haired female white cat, the other "Lab Animal" looked a lot like Dragon's Lair, which, now that I think about it, came out about the same time this was originally aired (I didn't recognize any of the animators in the credits - but a lot of people are alumni of Disney). Another,"In the Garden" with a sing-song narrator describing Chloe and the orange kitten in an endless childhood fairyland, resembles someone's psychdelic LSD drug trip, complete with rainbow mushrooms, and disturbing floating balloon faces. Of course, that short happens to be Avalon's favorite one. One of the other specials, with Garfield playing a film noir detective (Sam "Spayed") had music vocals by Lou Rawls.*

(edit (8/16/2011): Aha! Here's a playlist with all of the shorts! In The Garden, the weird one, is #3.)

Huh. Well, I guess it's bearable every once in a while.

------------
While searching for a video of the Garden bit (which I could NOT find), so I could show you just how weird it was, I found it was based on a book - which I vaguely remember but didn't read - but reviews said it was a series of stories (not comics) and more oriented for adults. Also that it (the show) was nominated for an Emmy, but was beat out by the Garfield detective special mentioned above. Must not have been a lot of choices that year.

Well, I don't know why I allowed myself to get sucked into Code Geass: Lalouche of the Rebellion,as I try to avoid series based on political intrigue and masked antiheroes. Not to mention mecha, although I don't mind them. It finally finished last night. I think you could tell how it had to end, as it was leading inevitably in that direction. God, how depressing. ( Spoiler )

I also finished Watchmen earlier this week; someone in my book group had warned me it was not a fast read despite being a graphic novel, and he was certainly right. Most of the chapters have several pages of regular text in the form of news articles, describing character backgrounds. It's a pretty intense story, and it didn't really have a happy ending either.

And the first disk of Six Feet Under. I had caught a few episodes of this when cable let us have the channel for free a while ago and had been intrigued. Not quite happy either, plenty dark, but a lot of black humor too. And I'm slightly amused that I'm familiar with a lot of the outdoor locations - the intersection where Dad gets hit by the bus is on the street where we often went out to lunch at our old office in downtown Long Beach. I'm having difficulty finding the time to watch it, as it's definitely not for the kids, but John doesn't want to watch it either. I have to wait until he's out in the garage for a few hours. Anyway...

Something cheery, now, please?

Dream:

We were all in the park at the end of my street, flying kites, late in the afternoon (note:in real life, this park is not all that great a place to fly kites; there are too many trees, and a couple of buildings for them to get stuck on the roof of). I think even my dad had come. Instead of flying them from west to east, the normal wind dirction, we were flying them from north to south, so we were actually standing in the street and the kites were in the air in front of the scout cabin. Our kite was pretty small and plain. Another man showed up and began setting up a series of figures in a semicircle on the grass in front of the scout cabin. The may have been cartoon characters or political figures or flowers, I don't remember, but we wondered why he was taking such care with how they were arranged. Then he came back to where we were standing and began sending a black kite up in the air. By this time, it was after sunset and it was getting fairly dark, so the rest of us were working on reeling our kites in. Once we had gotten them down and put away, we heard a BANG BANG BANG, and look up to see the man had set off series of fireworks along the string of his kite. They traveled up the string, and when the sparks reached the kite, it burst into a fan-shaped fountain, which burned for a few seconds. This of course burned up the kite as well, and it turned over and nosedived to the ground, crashing right in front of the figures set up on the ground in a shower of sparks. This set off lines of incendiary to each of the figures, of which the outlines flashed into flame from top to bottom. Wow. We all stood and clapped, as he smiled quietly and began to pick up all the remnants of his display.

This may have been triggered by commercials for Making Fiends running on Nickelodeon lately. where evil Vendetta brings a kite to fly alongside her would-be friend Charlotte's kite.

Charlotte: "Oh, you have a kite too Vendetta?
Vendetta: "Oh yes, it's a very special kite!

And then her black kite sprouts tentacles and teeth, growls, and grabs Charlotte's kite and eats it.

(I actually started watching these as web videos a couple of years ago before Nick started airing the series)

I was thinking about this dream when first got up (actually I was ( TMI! )), and it segued in my head to the the little kite I'd gotten once as a prize on the bottom of a Slurpee cup, and how free prizes in kids products used to be so much better than they are now. Cracker Jacks (a brand of carmel popcorn snack) used to have actual toys in them; I remember when I was about five, getting a tiny plastic elephant (assembly required) that had some kind of rider (a monkey or a mahout, I don't remember) that fit into a slot on its back. You pushed down the elephants tail, or maybe its trunk, and the rider went flying off somewhere (and you were lucky if you ever found it again). Nowadays, you get a sticker or a temporary tattoo. My father used to save Planters Peanut wrappers for me because you could send away for free stuff with them. I think I still have a Mr. Peanut bank out in the garage somewhere. Nothing on the backs of their wrappers now. I notice the Dums-Dums suckers my kids got in their Halloween candy have a "save wrappers for stuff" thing, but you order from a website and the wrappers only get you a discount.

An exception lately was the alarm clock from a box of Poptarts, which you needed to have several coupons from a box to able to purchase. It has pictures of a the little dinosaur from the commercial on the hands, and when the alarm goes off, it says:

"Get up. One of us has to get up, and it ain't gonna be me. Get up or I tell all your friends you wear jammies!"

It also runs backwards, so it takes a bit of squinting to tell what time it actually is.

I should make a pattern for that kite. It always amazed me that it actually flew. What do you remember getting out of a box or sending away for when you were a kid?

(Well, I suck. Real life has sort taken over the last few months. Haven't taken all that many pics).

We came home from camping and were as fascinated as everyone else by the Olympics opening ceremonies. Except I could not figure out why we kept hearing "Scotland the Brave" (by a pipe band, of course) during the athletes walking in, for the games in China, and for countries on the other side of the globe. Turns out it was an amateur group chosen by the Chinese Olympic Committee to represent Europe, and there was one song representing each of the Olympic Rings.

Opening Ceremonies
Sharp VE-CG30
08 August 2008