Via Boingboing

“Top McCain policy adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin. Waving his BlackBerry personal digital assistant and citing McCain’s work as a senator, he told reporters Tuesday, “You’re looking at the miracle that John McCain helped create.”

To me this claim that McCain claims the invention the Blackberry is about as substantial as the Republican myth that Al Gore claimed the invention of the Internet. I haven’t researched it but I’m sure that at least Gore knows how to email. And the fact that McCain has publicly called himself “computer illiterate” is certainly is something everyone should know.

I always wanted my animated films to have a sound tracks. Now this one does. I had fun writing the dialogue to make some sense of the existing action. The music was composed on an ancient Casio CTK-150 keyboard.

My pal CybersAM sent this along to me, when I asked if he was going to the playa this year.

My guess on the year of this 8mm stop-motion footage is 1962, making me 14 or 15 at the time. I loved the films of Ray Harryhausen and Willis O’Brien. Twilight Zone and the Outer Limits were my favorite TV shows. I always wanted my animated movies to have sound, but I didn’t have the equipment. I had fun putting the sound effects and music in, and I couldn’t resist some editing, zooming and panning to help move things along.

This was probably the third fifty-foot, 8mm, not Super-8, reel I’d shot. The first reel was completely without intentional plot, and oily, melt-under-the-floods plasticine was the medium. The second featured a carnivorous, cave-man eating Brontosaurus made from foam rubber, cut with a scissors, not molded, around bendable wire. In Wild Kingdom all the models were foam rubber. Spikes coming out of the saucer-alien’s feet punched into the corrugated cardboard that covered the table. This only poorly supported the puppet. He swayed a lot. The yellow Martian creature did a little better in keeping upright, he was supported by a tail, as well as some spikes. The camera wasn’t capable of shooting single frames. I had to twitch at the shutter release aiming for two frames. What I was most interested in doing was the shrinking and ray gun effect. Everything else was just an excuse to shoot and shrink.

The insurance company Mutual of Omaha was the sponsor of the real Wild Kingdom. The show, as I remember it, often featured Marlin Perkins with his camera crew going along on those scientific studies where they sedate and tag. You know, get up close and personal with wildlife, and annoy the heck out of them, but don’t actually kill anything on camera.

It made me laugh putting this together, and trying to get back into my teenage head. I hope you enjoy.

I still have the 8mm reels but no way to project them. This video is captured from a deteriorating VHS tape made at least 20 years ago.

Most of my computer time has been taken up lately editing my Toy Tower video. To make up for my lack of daily blogging, here are some guaranteed laughs.

Crazy street stunts in the Roaring Twenties in NYC and San Francisco. The cab driver is Harold Lloyd, the passenger Babe Ruth. The segment with the racing horse drawn bus is insane.

ROBOHAMLET is a play about the extinction of the human race at the claws of their own creations, the Crylons, genetically modified crabs created to make a caviar substitute, whose incredible fecundity has overwhelmed their human creators. The last humans make a brave stand, and the only weapon that can stand between them an annihilation of humanity is the Robot, who carries the burden of human culture, recites Shakespeare, and feels ambivalent.

ROBOHAMLET is written by Pat Harper, who was House Manager of Theater for the New City from 1999 until 2006, and is not only a barbed commentary on humanity in general but also on off-off Broadway theater and its denizens.

More information and credits here