THE PHILOSOPHY BOYS

INT. MENS CLUB: Several Philosophy Boys relax near the hearth.

BERTRAND: "You really have to explain yourself Philip. Why do you buy into the idea that liberal arts courses should have as their goal the improvement of character and judgement? I'd have thought the quest for truth was more important."

PHILIP: "Well, it seems to me that only a person of character would recognize the truth when he found it."

PAULI: "He's got you there, Bertrand. Without character you're unlikely even to search for truth."

BERTRAND: "True enough Pauli, but truth still matters. You don't want to waste your life upholding assertions that turn out not to be true.

Um, Ira, what are you writing?"

IRA: "Just jotting down notes. Mainly I want to say that nobody can agree on what the truths are in the liberal arts. In the absence of certainty, character and judgement are all the tools we have to navigate the facts."

MACMILLAN: "But surely character is something you're born with. How do you educate for it?"

RUSSELL: "By the example of first-rate teachers and first-rate fellow students, and by studying the right texts. Since character counted for a lot in the ancient world, that means reading and discussing the Greeks and Romans. In addition to the standard authors, I'm thinking of authors like Homer, Xenephon, Polybius, Cicero, Plutarch, Marcus Arelius, Caesar and Tacitus."

WILLIAM: "Caesar and Tacitus? Those seem like odd choices, if you only had to choose a few."

SHERLOCK: "Ah, I get it. They're there as examples of manliness. It's a word you can't define, but everyone knows it when they see it, and it's universally admired. Combine manliness with intellect, vision, and the ability to do hard work, and you have something approaching the ideal."

GLADYS: "Yeah, manliness....I'll buy that."


PHILOSOPHY BOYS (ALL AT ONCE): "GASP!!!!!! A girl!!!! A GIRL in the MENS club!!!! How did she get in? We'll all be kicked out forever!"

THOMAS: "Wait a minute, wait a minute! I've got an idea! Gentlemen, I move that we regard this young lady as an honorary man for the night! What say you?"

PHILOSOPHY BOYS (ALL, RELIEVED): "Here, here!!!!!"

THOMAS: "The motion carries! She's a man!"

JOSEPH: "Whoa, wait a minute! If she can be a man, then I want my dog to be a man, too. He's over there, under the 'No Pets' sign."

PHILOSOPHY BOYS: "What!? A DOG!!!?? No way! No way!"

DOG: "Hey, hey! If you don't want me in your stupid old club, then I don't want to be here. I mean...GEEEEZ!"

STILL MORE "PEOPLE OF WALMART"

Haw! I haven't visited the People of Walmart site for a while because I thought it would have run out of gas by now. Boy, was I wrong! It's still going, just as strong as ever!

I swear, I've seen this very woman (above) in every city I've ever been in.

Ouch!

Double ouch! Man, that's nasty!

Zulu leg warmers and hot pants (above)!

Thanks for sharing that (above).

A weird Lawrence of Arabia look (above). Amazingly his posture conveys such dignity that he carries it off.

A man (above) with high standards.

Nice long hair (above) but it'll look better with another yard or so of length.



The fluorescent turquoise shampoo (above) or the hot pink? The huckleberry fire or the lavender surprise? Decisions, decisions.

It's okay. She's wearing underwear!

Ouch! Ooch!

Ooch! Ouch! Ooch!

Another woman (above) that I would swear I've seen everywhere I've lived!

Underwear outside the pants (above)! I used to see black guys do that in the mid 70s. Now it's a girls' thing.

A Walmart family!

This (above) is my favorite picture of the bunch. Casper pajamas, witch boots, a big old sedated leopard of a housecat, and....what's that in the square bag? I'll guess tampons or cat food, but it might be marshmallows or cheesewhiz.



I have a feeling that graphic (above) doesn't wash off.

JOAN CRAWFORD PICTURES

Here's (above) a Joan Crawford coffee mug. Unfortunately it's been out of print since the fifties. A larger version would have made a great front piece for a car or a locomotive.

Here's (above) the tortured Joan.

Her plans for conquest have backfired, gone awry.



Joan's husband is on the other side of the bathroom door (above), lying unconscious in a bathtub that's rapidly filling with water. She steels herself to listen to his final struggle if there is one. How much will the life insurance amount to? Did she remember to wipe her fingerprints off the rim of the tub?

Huh? What's HE doing in the courtroom? I thought Big Joe paid him off!

Sometimes Crawford's characters (above) grow weary of life. When will it be over, all this game-playing? Why can't the rich just give her their fortunes? Why must she have to work so hard for them?

Poor Garfield (above) should have known better. No man can have Joan for more than a short time. She's tired of him, but he can't take the hint.

You don't mess with Joan!



You're a man, and you're head over heels in love with Crawford...pathetic, because she won't give you the time of day. Normally she looks the other way when you're around, but it's just dawned on her that maybe she can use you.

Pretty as a cupcake, but there's larceny in those eyes.



Woken out of sleep by the sound of crying (above)! It sounds like the woman she used to work for, the one she deliberately drove mad so she could marry her husband...but she's been dead for weeks now! How can it be!?



Ha! It was almost too easy! Did that plain Jane of a girlfriend really think she could keep a man like David?



Joan relaxes (above) after cheating her deceased husband's daughter out of her inheritance. She'll send the girl away to boarding school and have the fine old house to herself. Ah, life is good!

Sometimes Joan played honest but rather cold women who worked hard to get where they were. These women were nobody's fool in the business world, and they dominated the men in their personal lives...that is, until they encountered...HIM.

You can buy dolls of Crawford and Davis, the way they looked in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" The Davis doll (above) came out the best.

Above, two Crawford look-alikes . I'd say the picture on the right comes closest.

BTW: I'm a guest on the latest ASIFA Animation Archive Podcast. The URL is on the sidebar.

"IT MUST BE HIM," SUNG BY VICKI CARR

Argghh! I thought I'd have this (above) science-fiction story up today, but I'm having Photoshop problems again. Will someone please tell me why layers that are supposed to be locked, unlock themselves and change names? The background layer (supposedly locked) becomes layer one, without me doing anything to it. Layer one looses its image and becomes transparent, even though I'm looking at it on the screen, and it's not transparent. AAAAAAARRRGGGHH!!!!!

Just so I don't start throwing things, I think I'll switch to trying out Pages (mac's version of Word) for an hour or so. I need to learn it so I can start writing the pamphlets I want to sell in the Theory Corner Store. The first one's on the subject of showmanship as it relates to animation. Pages looks pretty easy, so I'm not expecting many problems.

On a lighter subject, here's (above) a terrific video of Vicki Carr singing "It Must Be Him." I was reminded of it when I heard it in "Moonstruck," which I saw again for the sixth time last night. Geez, I wish I'd written that story myself! I love the way it pretends to be naturalistic, but is actually much larger than life. It's Shakespearean in the sense that it's a lot of set pieces strung together, with an emphasis on beautiful language, overt theatrics, and surprisingly deep philosophical ideas.

The Carr song is incredible. The woman in the song tries to convince herself that she doesn't need the man who's slighted her, but when the phone rings she turns into an abject, quivering bowl of jelly, ready to give him whatever he wants. In my opinion, that kind of vulnerability to hurt is essential to romance. As the Nicholas Cage character says in Moonstruck, love isn't about perfection...it can be a disaster for the people involved. It might bring them misery and humiliation, but if they fail to seek it out, they'll never have a chance to experience the greatest pleasures of life.

PHOTOSHOP'S DILEMMA

I almost called this, "Why I Hate Photoshop," but you can't hate something that can accomplish miraculous transformations like the one above. Maybe it's more accurate to say that I hate learning Photoshop from books, which is what I've been attempting to do.

What I hate about these books is how it's possible to follow the directions and still not get the same result as the author. When it doesn't work, you have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what's wrong. I hate having to do that constantly. Sometimes the answer's buried in some other chapter that dealt with photographers' issues, and which I thought an artist like myself could skip. Very frustrating. Artists need their own book.

The most striking thing about these books is that the authors never thought to stick ordinary readers of the books in front of the program to see what problems they have. Of course that would be a big undertaking. Photoshop is a big, lumbering behemoth (above) of a program, and reader-testing every part of it could be a chore. Even so, somebody should attempt it, at least for the chapters dealing with the fundamentals.

It's that big, lumbering thing that I want to talk about here. I almost feel sorry for Adobe because every new idea they come up with has to be built mostly on existing architecture. That lumbering architecture is what they own, what they have unassailable patents for. If some third party comes up with something new, say an intuitive, drag and drop version of the same thing, then Photoshop is sunk.

Their answer to third party challenges has been to keep adding functionality to the hippopotamus that they already own, but how long can they continue to do that? What happens when their manuals are 2,000 pages long? Some simplifying revolution is bound to happen.

[NOTE: I don't wish the program was dumbed down, I just wish that it would do what it already does in a simpler, more intuitive fashion. That way I could learn the basics from a book and get on with my life.]

It's interesting to imagine what would happen if Photoshop decided to build a new architecture based on more current ideas. A lot of the new ideas are open source or have legally uncertain paternity. It would be hard to build something really big and exclusive on a mess like that.

It's interesting to see how many current non-Adobe programs also use layers and filters and all that. I wouldn't be surprised if Blogger offered some much simplified, open source version of some of that for free to its users. My favorite non-Adobe Photoshop-type program is Pixelmator, which is a sort of reduced Photoshop for mac users. It does some of what Photoshop does, but it appears to be easier to use and costs a tenth of the price. I say "appears" because I haven't tried it yet.

Here's (above) a nine minute video showing how a composite is done on Pixelmator. Compare it to how the same thing would be done on Photoshop. Pixelmator is so cheap that I assume it's based on open source. It shows how far open source has come in legally approximating what Photoshop does. It's only a matter of time before this OS method is merged with iPad-type drag and drop simplicity.