Internet memes remind us of the classics

by T. Keith Edmunds

Internet memes, the online one-hit wonders (of a sort), occasionally serve a purpose greater than making us smile for a second before we click away through the never-ending world of primarily third-rate entertainment. One of those greater purposes is to remind us of true, top-notch entertainment.

True, the Internet also provides us with this good stuff. And, also true, Internet memes can sometimes be great in and of themselves. And, sure, the web can….you know what? My whole thesis has fallen apart already.

I was referring, in an overly oblique way to the “Smell Like a Monster” video that has been making the rounds. If you are the person that hasn’t seen it yet, here you go.

My point was that sometimes brand new videos, for example, can remind us of real classic entertainment. The kind of thing that was produced before anyone gave any consideration to the ideas of “stickyness” and “viral” and such. A more innocent kind of entertainment…

If it sounds like I’m reaching, it’s because I am. I just want a reason to post the next video. Then again, do I really need a reason to post a Grover video?

I think not.

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The best of Skeletor’s berating

by Grant Hamilton

This tickles my nostalgia bone.

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Sesame Street’s creepiest Count

by Grant Hamilton

I must say, this is kind of a creative way to take a childhood memory and make it inappropriate for children. But it’s still a childhood memory, made inappropriate for children!

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Is the stick shift going away?

by Grant Hamilton

I love my standard transmission car — even if it means Amy can never drive it. I love the feeling of actually doing something when I drive, rather than just steering. I love the extra control that even a not-so-great shifter like me can achieve with the clutch pedal.

And, frankly, it looks cool and it sounds cool. Standard transmissions are where it’s at.

But, they’re also slowly going extinct. Upwards of 90% of new vehicles have automatic transmissions. Auto writer Kirk Seaman at AOL Autos offers up a column in their honour that sometimes reads like a eulogy:

For the serious driver, piloting a car with a manual transmission is a badge of honor. Having control over your ride carries an appeal that may well go back to the time when man first rode astride a horse. That sort of intimate control over your steed is heady stuff, and a feeling not easily conceded. The conviction that the driver knows best also comes into play: an automatic transmission can’t see that just down the road is a decreasing radius turn that’s going to require you to downshift a gear or two so that you can launch yourself smartly out of the turn.

Then there is the pride one takes in a perfectly timed two-three upshift, wringing it out to the redline and listening to the symphony of pumping pistons and whirring camshafts, or perhaps mastering the black art of heel-and-toe shifting and precisely matching revs on a downshift as you drift into a corner.

Perhaps it is because, in a world that seems increasingly out of control, in the driver’s seat you are in complete control, and with a manual transmission and an open road to the horizon, that is as much as we can hope for these days.

Yes, I think I’ll stick with my standard for a few more years. Plus, they’re cheaper!

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This city used to be younger

by Grant Hamilton

Above is a shot of Sixth and Main, in Los Angeles, looking south, as it appeared in 1918, and again almost 90 years later, as it appeared in 2007.

It’s from a fabulous Flikr pool of old/new juxtapositions just like this. I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff, and it’s kind of in the vein of the younger pictures blog I posted about earlier.

Although it’s been stripped out of the main gallery for being slightly offtopic, a subset of these juxtapositions includes people who are holding the old photo up to replace part of the new scenery — with an exact match making it look like a window through time has opened up in the middle of the shot. It’s a cool effect, like the woman on a bench, below. You can find more of those types here.

(props to vokoban and uwgbadmissions for the pics)

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Tips for single women

by T. Keith Edmunds

As we move into the holidays — a time for love and togetherness (in theory) — some people who have yet to find that special someone can find this time of year depressing. Over the next few weeks, there will be all sorts of articles, columns and whatnot all over the Internet, in magazines, on TV, everywhere “helping” the single person.

I just want to get near the start of the line. So, allow me to present 12 Tips for Single Women, as published in a magazine in 1938. Among these tips are such important items as:

  • “Careless women never appeal to gentlemen. Don’t talk while dancing, for when a man dances he wants to dance.”
  • “If you need a brassiere, wear one. Don’t tug at your girdle, and be careful your stockings are not wrinkled.”
  • “Don’t talk about clothes or try to describe your new gown to a man. Please and flatter your date by talking about the things he wants to talk about.”

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Vintage logo better than the new-fangled one

by Grant Hamilton

I was kind of jazzed to see the Manitoba provincial logo from my childhood profiled on the Draplin blog. In a post entitled “Getting our butts kicked by those provinces,” he calls it a “Manitoba gem.”

Draplin noticed it via SlantSixCreative, who posted it on their blog with the simple note: “This one just stepped into the running for my top ten logos of all time.”

Should anyone tell them that we changed it? Raise your hand if you think that anyone will ever say that the current logo is a “top ten” effort. And let’s not EVEN talk about “Spirited Energy.”

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The internet has brought us many things. Here’s some that it took away

by Grant Hamilton

Interesting list in the Telegraph, as pointed out by Colin: 50 things that are being killed by the Internet. It includes some gems:

7) Adolescent nerves at first porn purchase
The ubiquity of free, hard-core pornography on the web has put an end to one of the most dreaded rights rites of passage for teenage boys – buying dirty magazines. Why tremble in the WHSmiths queue when you can download mountains of filth for free in your bedroom? The trend also threatens the future of “porn in the woods” – the grotty pages of Razzle and Penthouse that scatter the fringes of provincial towns and villages.

…

9) The myth of cat intelligence
The proudest household pets are now the illiterate butts of caption-based jokes. Icanhasreputashunback?

…

47) Footnotes
Made superfluous by the link, although Wikipedia is fighting a brave rearguard action.

All in all, I’m glad for the Internet, but it sure has ushered in a social sea change.

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Cartoons of the ’90s

by T. Keith Edmunds


The video above takes the first second of the opening credit sequence from a whole slew of cartoons from the 1990s and hobbles them all together. The creator of this video pulled these clips from a longer video — close to a half-hour long — that had the entire opening credits. This longer video was pulled at some point from YouTube, but I found it HERE.

If you have the time (and inclination), I highly recommend watching it. Not only was I reminded of a few cartoons that I had forgotten about, I was introduced to some of which I had never heard. Some of them I watched a lot (Animaniacs), some of them I didn’t watch enough of (Freakazoid), and some I watched entirely too much (Pokemon).

There is one clip I’m asking for help on. It doesn’t name the cartoon and it comes in at about the 12 minute mark — it involves a buxom blonde social worker, a big creature/guy that lives in a box and travels between worlds and a seemingly psychotic narrator. Can anyone help me on this?

I also found it interesting that so few iconic cartoons came out of the 1990s. The bulk of them seem to be based off other properties or to have disappeared entirely. Hmm. A moment’s reflection and it seems that the same could be said of much of the 90s as a whole.

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Hearkening back to the state of publishing at my birth

by Grant Hamilton

scifi1

I am considering buying the two sci-fi magazines above, on eBay. They’re listed by the same seller, they’re only a couple bucks apiece (plus a ridiculous $7 or more for shipping) and some of the stories in them will probably entertain me, at least a little.

But the real reason I want to buy them is because they’re from October of 1976 — my birth month.

I had this idea when I was flipping through old issues of Rolling Stone at a used bookstore last week. I idly searched for my birth week, but couldn’t find it (closest was November of 1977) and then I wondered if I could find it online (no luck yet). I also thought, when my brother recently had a baby (okay, his wife had the baby) that an interesting gift would be a copy of every magazine on the rack from that month. Imagine getting a slice of that nostalgia when you turn 16 or 18 or 21 or something. Just being able to delve back into the world as it was on the day that I came into it intrigues me.

But I’m curious what other people think. Am I alone in this desire?

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Ever wonder, what was the first video uploaded to YouTube?

by Grant Hamilton

That’s the kind of crazy question that just pops into my head. And, with a quick second of Googling, you can find out that it was a video of one of the founders, at the zoo, watching the elephants.

It was uploaded on April 23, 2005. Here it is:

Wikipedia has a good overview of the history of YouTube, if you’re really keen.

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We need more commercials like this

by Grant Hamilton

I used to love this ad. I love the non-threatening way they present what could be a scary message. I’d like to see more stuff like this — and not just for kids, but for people of all ages.

Critical thinking should be required curriculum in all schools. In an era where we are presented with too much information and too little context, critical thinking is a more important skill than rote memorization.

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