From Youtube: Lordi's brand new Hard Rock Hallelujah music video presented along with the actual stage show in Eurovision Song Contest 2007 Helsinki. The film is directed by Antti Jokinen and it's the most expensive music video ever made in Finland.
Of course, this song was in fact the winner of the 2007 Eurovision winner.
This video goes along with today's cartoon. It's the 1964 hit single by France Gall. I tried to find the original video, with the psychedelic dancing lollipops, but it no longer exists on Youtube. I am sorely disappointed.
Anyhow, France Gall got a lot of flack for singing this song. Apparently, she was an innocent teen ager and didn't get any double entendres. Eventually, she slipped into the world of German Shlager.
Gall made a big splash at the 1964 Eurovision contest by winning with the first ever pop song. I wonder what kind of songs won Eurovision prior to that. Oh well. Eurovison remains a big mystery to me. That it's been around for so long gives me hope for the continued existence of our American Idol, and eternal homage to total schlock.
By the way, I kind of like France Gall's music. She has a type of sixties cool which appeals to yours truly.
This is for all my cat loving friends. I found this on the New York Times Website, which has a very nice online humor section.
It also just happens to fit in with the subject of my cartooning class yesterday. I have a group of cat crazy kids. This gives me the opportunity to try something I've been wanting to do for a long time: create a group driven story. Having just one dissenter in a class of six, it was the green light to put together a cartoon project featuring cats as the subject. Our sole dissenter was given the green light to join our fellowship by providing cartoon mutant animals to compliment the cats.
About our lone dissenter...he's a fabulous seven year old boy. One of the girls in the class asked, "Is he always this crazy?" Oh yes, that goodness. We need at least one kid capable of providing the punchlines, if not the cats.
For the past few days, I've been hearing noises in the pool room. It's from this bird which keeps attacking my window. At first I thought maybe it's a woodpecker trying to poke holes in my window jams, but it's not a woodpecker. It seems to be either a crow or a starling. I think it's trying to fly into the house. It's wings are what are making the noise. Maybe there's a nest that I'm not seeing, but I doubt it. There's really not much space there.
Spring brings out the crazy in all of us, birds, humans, bees.
I mention bees because today I observed a daft couple of bees hovering over the deck. I watched them for a long time, waiting for one or the other to fly into something which might harbor their nest. They didn't though. They just chased each other around the deck, and then simply hovered. I gave up watching after a while and went back to my drafting table. I'm pounding out inked pages of my son's Bio-Hazard story. I want it done by the end of next week. Now THAT's crazy.
Thanks to Joey and Kate, I have this Turisas cover of Rasputin to share with my six fans. According to Wikipedia, Rasputin rose to the top of the charts in Germany and autria and went to number two in the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Rah Rah! Rasputin!
I don't want anyone to think that I've dropped the ball as regards to the history of editorial cartooning. Currently, I'm reading Albert Bigelow Paine's biography of Thomas Nast. It's an old book. Paine actually met with Nast. It's a very flattering biography. Nast was sort of a superstar in his time. Mark Twain offered to tour with him. Nast declined.
Editorial cartooning changed mightily with the advent of the magazine weeklies, but it remained a very partison activity. Nast worked for Harper's weekly, a Republican leaning magazine. Besides defining the modern version of Santa Claus, the Republican Elephant and the Democratic Donkey, Thomas Nast's biggest achievement was an extraordinary series of cartoons attacking a very criminal element in the government of New York City. You'll still see contemporary cartoonist borrowing his images, such as the politician with a bag of money for a head.
What I found particulary interesting, was Nast's approach to the Garfield candidacy. Harpers' naturally supported him, since Garfield was a Republican. However, Garfield had been involved in the Credit Mobilier scandal of the Grant administration. Various politicians, including Garfield, had been given shares in a railroad leading to investigation and castigation. Nast drew a picture of all those involved, including Garfield. Being somewhat principled, Nast decided to support Garfield's candidacy, but refused to draw him. What he produced, then, were cartoons supportive of the Republican ticket, but not of Garfield specifically.
I guess this piqued my interest mainly because this blind loyalty to party has been particularly strong among Republican leaning cartoonists during the Bush administration. It brings up a fundamental question I have regarding the purpose of editorial cartooning: Does it exist to please a partisan audience, or is it meant, like the Nast cartoons about Boss Tweed, to hold politician's feet to the coals?
Kate mentioned Lester Bangs in her comment on the blog at about the same time I was sharing really bad music with the regular gang of idiots on a list serve I subscribe to. Someone complained about being sick of eighties music, someone else suggested listening to european eighties music as a change of pace (like way yuck). One thing led to another and I stumbled over this classic Boney M song. It's probably in the top five of my favorite crappy songs list. That is, it's so bad it's good (like the movie Jack Frost)
I watched two horror movies today. The first was Jack Frost. It's about a murderous snowman. The last scene is a classic. The snowman falls into a truck full of anti-freeze along with the family of the main character. It's rollicking good fun after which the remains of the snowman are doled out into a plastic anti-freeze jug.
The second was the Boogeyman. This is dated 1980. It's kind of an Exorcist wannabe wedded to the cinematic techniques of an Herschel Lewis. Like Jack Frost, has a classic last scene. The Boogeyman is set on fire at the bottom of a well...you got it... the evil one burns in well.
When we were in Stuttgart, we vistited the Mercedes Benz Museum. It's fabulous. A super high tech gear head's delight, spanning the one hundred twenty plus history of automobiles. We spent hours there. They had to kick us out.
One of our favorite exhibits was the famous car display. That's where I snapped this photo of Rod in front of the Popemobile. I figured I'd post that in honor of Pope Benedict's visit to the U.S.
This other picture is me in front of the care used in the movie Jurassic Park. It's the same car as Rod's, but with slats in the back window and a cool camouflage paint job. Note the gear on our heads. These were high tech audio guides. They would activate automatically when you'd go from one part of the museum to the next. If you wanted to hear something about one of the exhibits, you'd simply point and the guide would give you options about whether you wanted to hear about the mechanics, the history, some technical point or a spiel oriented towards kids.
The black car at the left of the picture is Ringo Starr's black 190E. We owned one of those for twenty years, until I got my SLK 230 last year.
Naturally, you can only really get to the Museum by car. We had to walk in the rain through some pretty dingy underpasses to get there from the ubahn.
I had my picture taken with that shrunken head we found in St. Augustine. I also had Rod snap a picture of me next to the Trolley of the Damned.
Today, I brought my brand new skull and crossbones soccer ball to a clinic. There were a couple of kids there plotting to steal it. I growled at them and they retreated. That's what I get for having the coolest ball in the entire league.
After practice, I went to the local Panera coffee shop with a group of my teammates. One of our younger players was explaining how she worked in the Mergers and Acquisitions department of Aetna. My other teammate's eyes opened to the size of saucers: "You work for Murders and Inquisitions? What kind of insurance company is THAT?" That had us all in stitches.
When we go on our trips, Rod and I like making ordinary observations of ordinary life. One pretty obvious place to do this kind of observing is in the public rest rooms we seem to frequent well, frequently. I guess that question of frequency comes up from time to time as witnessed by this Flomax ad Rod found hanging over the urinal at the Tampa Forum. Rod snapped it at great danger to life and limb as getting the shot required restraining a couple of irate not to mention anxious men. Yeah, I was going to make a witty reference regarding the mention of a "shot", but I refrained myself.
I, too, found an interesting advertisement in the ladies' room of the little grill across the street from the Forum. It was a picture of a lovely card playing girl and mentioned a "royal flush" in reference to a nearby luxury hotel. Alas, it was on the door opposite the urinal (well, duh) so I couldn't get a shot of both the ad and the toilet.
The fifty minute airplane ride from Jacksonville to Tampa was pretty exciting. About ten minutes before landing there was a huge noise like an explosion and the entire plane shook. As I played back the words my friend Kathy said about her near death experience after a heart attack about remembering all your regrets, Rod leaned over and said "lightning" before going back to reading the paper.
True to form, bad weather followed us to Tampa. We got to the St. Pete's Forum only minutes before torrential rains hit. We managed to find shelter at a burger joint until the rain let up enough to let us run accross to watch the basketball game. We were seated behind the Tubas of the UCONN band. It helped that the guys playing the instruments were really nice. They kept sniping about how snotty the Stanford band was, hepped up on being painfully hip. They also mentioned that the UCONN girls basketball cheerleaders were a lot friendlier than the cheerleaders for the men. It's not exactly news you can use, but what the hey. The Stanford mascot is a tree. It's about the dumbest mascot ever, being as far from cute as you can get. In fact, it's downright scary. I didn't take pictures because I'd brought my video game to the Forum. It should have been confiscated at the door, but we didn't know that until after we'd gone through the door. We were damned if we were going to get our regular camera in the rain so we just stayed pictureless.
Uconn lost, unfortunately, so we'll be able to get pictures of the dancing tree tomorrow. Probably the only thing to come out of the loss.
We spent the day today with my mother. Well, at least it didn't rain.
Yesterday, Rod and I decided to drive out from the resort to visit St. Augustine. We had seen the webpage of the Leightner museum and decided that Elena NEEDED to see the shrunken head. St. Augustine is not only the oldested settled city in the New World, but a fabulous tourist trap as well. It's a mixture of interesting Spanish flavored architecture and gaudy neon.
After a few wrong turns, we got to the Leightner. At the very moment we found a parking spot, our daughter Julia called to say the Wilkes University women's lacrosse team she's assistant coaching lost, badly. Twenty-one to six. Needless to say, she was mad. I handed the phone to Rod. All I could say was sorry, better luck next time. Rod's always full of good advice.
Finding the shrunken head was no easy matter. Walking through the Leightner is like walking through someone's attic...albeit a very rich someone. Finally, in the very last room we visited, we found it, right next to the dinosaur egg. That was also the same room with the Egyptian mummy kid. Naturally, we took lots of pictures.
This morning we saw Charlton Heston died. I had dinner with him once. He gave a very famous NRA presentation at a meeting of Editorial cartoonists. I had brought along a book I'd bought which Heston had written to his grandson. He signed it three times. I should have realized then that he had Alzheimers', despite his excellent humor and friendliness.
I've begun to feel funny just posting without visuals, so I found this German commercial on Youtube. It fits in with my general love of all things weird and frightening. I was so proud of myself yesterday for buying an Orland Pirates soccer ball. It's black with a huge skull and crossbones on it.
We're off to Florida. Originally, the plan was for the two of us to spend time in Jacksonville on business, then Rod would come home and I'd stay on in Tampa. However, since UCONN is in the women's finals, plans have changed.
We've always gone to these finals. We thought this year we might skip it because we have a pretty exhausting travel schedule. However, this Jacksonville thing came up, then blah blah blah one thing led to another and we're going to yet another final yet again.
One obsession I have is graffiti. I love it. I took this picture from the train going to Frankfurt. It's just the coolest.
Taking pictures of graffiti with my digital camera from a moving train is not small trick. The darn camera has a delay. I have to anticipate a shot and click in advance. Sometimes I forget and expect an instant shot. This is what happened when I tried to photograph some cranes being moved through the interior of the Dom. By the time I clicked, the cranes were out of position.
In short, getting this photo of a graffiti skull from the window of a moving train (The superfast ICE train no less) happened by sheer luck. I basically clicked as I saw something approach which I thought I maybe might could perhaps want.
This past Saturday was my last day of the Winter session teaching cartooning. I received such a nice piece of news from one of the mothers. Her son was required to write a paper for his class about someone who influenced him the most. He wrote about me! I already like the young man a lot, but now I like him a real lot.
We had a little party for the last class. We watched cartoons and ate cookies. The kids had a ball. I came home and slept for one and a half hours.
Elena Steier is a cartoonist whose work has appeared nationally on ESPN Monday Night Football and Nickelodeon Magazine. In addition, she has had syndicated strips, editorial cartoons and freelance illustrations appearing in various and sundry publications. Elena's self-published book, The Vampire Bed and Breakfast continues to be sporadically published while her Goth Scouts comic strip appears online daily except weekends on the Humorous Maximus website. Elena is currently happily middle-aged with grown children and a husband with whom she has shared a life for more than thirty years.
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