OMG, I love Key & Peele

Bari Leigh coming to the Music Cafe July 5th

So I Raise A Bottle to You! Television Sucks! And What They Did (Do) for Love!

Must-see hilarity, skewering NBC at the Tony's:

Ji-Hae Park on Music, Despair, and Transformation

TMI: Leamur has moral "tastes"

In graphs! Graphs, people!

Leamur has a moral foundation, and can now prove it with a graph:


Leamur is more satisfied with life than most Liberals or Conservatives:


Leamur is less psychopathic than you are, but just as deviant anyway:

The idea behind the scale is that psychopathy is thought to be continuously distributed in the population so that individuals have varying degrees of psychopathic traits which can be measured. In addition, the concept of psychopathy is often separated into two factors, each with emphasis on a different aspect of psychopathy.

The first type, primary psychopathy, more closely resembles the prototype description of a psychopath and emphasizes a lack of emotion as well as other personality features. Primary psychopaths are often described as glib, superficially charming, grandiose, lying, conning, manipulative, lacking empathy or guilt, emotionally shallow, and callous.

The second type, secondary psychopathy, describes individuals characterized mostly by deviant behavior. Features include a need for stimulation, proneness to boredom, impulsivity, irresponsibility, risk-taking, and poor behavioral control. Overall, psychopathy is often thought of as the epitome of immoral behavior....

Please note that psychopathy has been found to correlate positively with other personality traits such as extraversion, adventure-seeking, and other traits which are often valued in leadership and competitive environments, so higher scores may not necessarily reflect deviant or immoral behavior, but instead reflect more outgoing personality styles.

Leamur has a stronger preference for furniture over drugs than either Liberals or Conservatives:

Positive scores indicate a greater implicit preference for Drugs relative to Furniture, and negative scores indicate an implicit preference for Furniture relative to Drugs.

Your score appears in the graph below in green. The score of the average Liberal visitor to this site is shown in blue and the average Conservative visitor's score is shown in red.

[If I could digress for just a moment here: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAA!!!!! Cripes that's probably true. I am so effing OLD. OK, back to the graphs.]

Leamur is less Hedonistic and more Benevolent than you are. (But not more modest.)

The idea behind the scale is that there is an internal order and structure to values. Using various statistical techniques, Schwartz has found that the ten basic human values show a pattern of relationships... Political liberals have been found to endorse the "openness to change" values, while conservatives are more likely to endorse the "conservation" values."

The values are described by Schwartz as follows:
POWER: Social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources
ACHIEVEMENT: Personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards
HEDONISM: Pleasure or sensuous gratification for oneself
STIMULATION: Excitement, novelty, and challenge in life
SELF-DIRECTION: Independent thought and action - choosing, creating, exploring
UNIVERSALISM: Understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature
BENEVOLENCE: Preservation and enhancement of the welfare of people with whom one is in frequent personal contact
TRADITION: Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that traditional culture or religion provide
CONFORMITY: Restraint of actions, inclinations, and impulses likely to upset or harm others and violate social expectations or norms
SECURITY: Safety, harmony, and stability of society, of relationships, and of self

That was fun. But seriously, this article about what this all means in the context of The Culture Wars in the U.S. is excellent reading and has the links in it to the fun & games above.

[Yes, Leamur really is making you click through to the article to get to the fun & games. Such a Puritan!]

Wedding Vid or Car Commercial?

BMW (for the party crowd):


Prius (for the earnest individualists):


Audi (ummm...):

Because nothing says "I'll love you forever" like 50 or so of your best buds surrounding your vehicle firing shotguns as you drive through town. (Really, to me, that says something more along the lines of "I'm taking her, what are you going to do about it?" but that's probably just my cultural prejudice, right? Right?)

Gerry Rafferty Classics for Boom Boom's Bday

Munch a Bunch uh Crunch!

Don't forget the dads!


Different kind of crunchy, but too awesome to leave out:

Superman's Dead

When the brain doesn't work right, OTOH, it may become necessary to change reality.

Peter and the Wolf

A classic I've always loved. Although the music does not require narration, the narration does provide clear and fun education for a child, without feeling like a lesson:









Happy Birthday, Prokofiev!

Ralph Wolf & What's-'is-Name Sheepdog

Another great series featuring a Wile E -type character, Ralph. In these first two 'toons, the sheepdog's name is Fred, but later, he becomes Sam.






Here they are a sort of "odd couple", and the sheepdog has become Sam:




I love how smug Ralph looks here going through his morning routine. I never feel smug in the morning. Must be nice. Of course if the rest of your day goes downhill from there...




Well, that's probably enough for today. More tomorrow...

Duck Dodgers!!!

As promised:





[We'll pretend the TV series didn't happen...]

Bugs vs. Marvin

In honor of JMax's birthday, here are some Bugs Bunny gems featuring Marvin the Martian:









[We'll save Duck Dodgers for another day...]

Witch Hazel

Another fav associate of my illustrious hero Bugs Bunny is Witch Hazel:


1954:




1956:




1959:

Two Favs in One 'Toon

One of the great things about the Coyote/RoadRunner cartoons is that they do not require speech (although they do rely on English writing for the signs and labels and kabooms and such), but in this cartoon, Wile E speaks. It's all good. :)





"Why do they always want to do it the hard way?"








In this one, Bugs is standing in for the Road Runner, and he deconstructs the 'toon while he's at it :)

My Hero...

...and the origin of my "Bugs Bunny face". (Look for it at 4:10)


Hyde and Hare - The best bloopers are here


For my imaginary audience who hasn't seen my Bugs Bunny Face, it's sort of a stress signal and stress reliever in one. When I recognize that I'm getting stressed, I make the Bugs Bunny Face to remind myself of what stress does to me. And it makes me giggle, so that's a less philosophical bonus.

Not Always a Story

Animation does not always tell a story. Neither do songs.





But we tend to find stories, don't we? Our minds work to make them up from what we see/hear/feel, whether or not we want to or mean to.





Sorry for the poor sound quality on this last one, but it's one of my fav pieces of music and IMO historically interesting/significant. Betcha can't keep from seeing a story...




OK, I totally cheated, the music in that last one has a story, and the animation follows it. How does the music have the story? By what means? And how does the animation show it? How do the shapes and their movement represent characters and a story? How do some of the shapes seem more or less abstract to us than others?


Great stuff. Way to go, Norman. May all beings benefit from your life & work. R.I.P., eh?


Who's Norman McLaren?

Kung Fu Raccoon vs. Sumo Rabbit

& a lot of red-eyed rabbits:



(Is it just me or does the kung fu raccoon sound Mexican?)


The guy who did these (myshland) had previously done the following cartoon, which he describes thusly:

Two bureaucrats guard the passage between this world and the next one, guiding those who died to their next incarnation. Their routine is interrupted by a man who doesn't play by the rules.

This one's a talkie, but since it's in...Hebrew, I guess?...(which might as well be Greek to Leamur), and since it doesn't seem to require the meaning of the words to "get" the 'toon, it's in a gray area as far as whether it has the feature of great cartoons of not requiring speaking or narration.


Dude seems to escape rebirth, but not the Buddhist way...