MACY'S THANKSGIVINGDAY PARADE

Many thanks to Mike Fontanelli for the tres cool pictures of past Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parades. Wow! How beautiful these balloons are! No wonder the parade attracted such big crowds. The gradual reveal of things like Pinocchio's enormous nose could only be appreciated by people who saw it in person. TV wouldn't have done it justice!

A magnificent crow (above), but who are the people who are carrying it? I like to think they're members of a secret society who just couldn't resist showing off their club's symbol.

Half the fun of any parade is watching people (above) in the crowd. I notice the kids in this picture are wearing the kind of clothes worn by the kids in the "Christmas Story" movie. My parents used to dress me like that. Only the cheeks were unprotected, and they froze like crazy!

Here's (above) Uncle Sam protecting everybody.

Unbelievable! Look at that crowd (above)! What if someone in there had to pee? How would he have done it?

A wild turkey takes flight (above). Look at those crazed eyes!

This (above) is indisputably the best Superman balloon ever to grace the parade!

People in those days (above) certainly had a taste for cartoon weirdness! Balloons today are too perfect, too middle of the road, too on-model.

I like how every parade ended with Santa, who was surrounded by dozens of beautiful women. Boy, Santa was the Hugh Hefner of his day!

When I was a kid nobody did any Christmas shopping til after Thanksgiving. Nobody tried to beat the crowds by shopping early, they just waited til the last minute then everybody shopped at the same time, shoulder to shoulder...what an ordeal!

Christmas shopping for us kids was easy. Mothers got quart bottles of cheap perfume or fuzzy slippers. Dads got ties. We kids really believed that they treasured those presents, and we devoted a lot of time to making sure that they used them.

My favorite thing to do was to visit the toy departments (above) in the big department stores. Sometimes they'd devote half of a whole floor to toys, and they were the kind of toys you couldn't get in your local neighborhood shops: chemistry sets, air rifles, Erector Sets, marionettes, space ships and space helmets, toy soldiers...what a feast! There was always a giant diorama showing all the top of the line toy trains weaving in and out of mountain tunnels and trestles. It was heaven for kids but hell for adults, who had to pry their crying kids unwilling fingers from toy shelves when it was time to go home.

Oh, well...enough nostalgia! Happy Thanksgiving everybody!!!!!!

MORE EARLY COMICS FROM "STRIPPER'S GUIDE"

Haw! From Allan Holtz's "Stripper's Guide" blog (link in the sidebar) comes yet another roundup of little-known comic strips of a hundred years ago. How do you like "Mr. and Mrs. Pippin" by the same artist who would later do Moon Mullins? Click to enlarge.

Boy, it was hard to make a living as a cartoonist even then!

Here's (above and below) a melodrama by girl artist Russell Patterson.

This (above) looks later than the other strips here, maybe from the 30s or 40s. 

I just can't get enough of the early Herriman. This is a fairly typical Herriman daily... from 1906, I think. 

Above, the relentless law of the cartoonist's universe: be funny or die!

This artist (above) isn't what you'd call wildly innovative, but his compositions are easy on the eye, and he manages to project a quietly happy and friendly tone. 

MAKE YOUR MOTHER HAPPY

If you're a guy, and you want to make your mother happy, there's no easier way to do it than to send her a picture of yourself in a suit. All parents, no matter how laid back, no matter how criminally inclined or grody they are, yearn to see a picture of their son in a well-tailored suit. Photo editing software makes that easy to do, so why deny that simple pleasure to them? Why not send them a distinguished picture of yourself this very day? Here's a little help from the staff of Theory Corner...

First, you'll need a good picture to graft your head onto. I recommend the one above, which I believe is the young Humphrey Bogart. It's black and white, which avoids color matching problems, and the pose is simple and direct.

Here's (above) a photo of my own face grafted onto Bogart's body.  I took a black and white picture of myself with the computer's camera,  cut out my face using the Lasso Tool, and slid it over Humprey's face with no further adjustment. I just can't believe how quick and easy it all was. The flat lighting on my my face, the ghost image, the chicken feathers coming out of my cheek...none of these flaws were bad enough to prevent the picture from being a parent pleaser.

Of course, Humphrey might not be to every one's taste. How about Errol Flynn (above) instead?

Or Tyrone Power (above)?

One more photo: this one to send to wives, not mothers. Put your face over Tyrone's. 

MY BOUT WITH SICKNESS

I thought I'd talk about how much fun it was to be sick for a week. I mean that literally...on some level it actually was fun.

When I realized the sickness was serious, when I shivered through two or three freezing, sweaty, virtually sleepless nights, I did what I always do in situations like that and went into my Ralph Phillips/Calvin and Hobbes routine where I psyched my self into believing that I was at death's door.  Boy, did I have fantasies!

What fantasies? Well there was the one where I gave a brave speech to the U.N. from my deathbed which had been halled onto the stage of the General Assembly pavilion . The audience cried as I took them through anecdotes of the ups and downs of my tumultuous life. There wasn't a dry eye in the house. Everyone saw himself, indeed the whole pathos and greatness of the human condition reflected in my stories. I bowed my head humbly to accept a standing ovation.

And my family? That was another fantasy. Tearfully they gathered round my bedside while grief stricken plantation workers sang spirituals under the Magnolias outside my window.  My children bade me goodbye and fessed up to lending my Halloween masks to their stupid friends when I wasn't looking. They assured me that they'd memorized every word of my priceless lectures, and would pass the precious-as-rubies words to their own children when they came along.

Last of all was my wife. With tears flowing down her cheeks she forgave me for not being a rich doctor or a lawyer, and admitted that I was probably the better cook. She confessed that all my tirades against Bill Gates and Japanese engineers were justified, and that she had secretly kept scrupulous notes so that what I said could be shared with the world in a posthumous book.

No, I didn't fantasize about being levitated up into heaven in flowing white robes, that's silly, but I did imagine friends and visitors to this site swamping my family with telegrams claiming that I had transformed the animation industry. A collection was gotten up to install a bench of meditation and remembrance of me in the middle of the highway, at the juncture of the 101 and the 405, where I had spent so many unwilling hours in life.

I could go on, but you get the idea. When the flu finally abated, I was slowly brought back to the real world. After grappling for long hours on my back with the great philosophical issues, after listening to the creaks in the lonely house made by the wind and the rattling pipes, after watching endless TV documentaries in which Australians reached into Python holes, I made my way into the blinding sunlight of the workaday world.
I felt like I had been away in a foreign country, and I had.

GLORIOUS IKEA!!!!!

After more than a week spent mostly in bed with a flu,  I finally felt well enough to venture into the world to buy a present for my kid. I ended up at Ikea. Man, what an experience!

I love the place. It's so bright and inviting, and full of ideas. An awful lot of them are bad ideas, but you forgive that because every once in a while you stumble on something that's a brilliant rethinking of something you thought couldn't be improved.

But like I said, it's not all good. Some of the kids rooms (above) bordered on child abuse. How do you like those High Kitsch flat-colored cabinets or the deliberately generic design of the ladybug? Why is the yellow stool so dorky?

On the other hand, you gotta love these bunk beds. Kids like stuff like that!

What do you think of this work space (above)? It's so tiny! Surely big ideas require big writing surfaces. Ikea does make beautiful, sturdy wooden desks but they're called dinner tables. I have lots of ideas for desk designs. Maybe I'll do a blog about them sometime.

Boy, Ikea sure is good at cheery! It's hard not to smile when you see a room like this, even if you'd go nuts if you had to live in it. This is the kind of place Stimpy would design for Ren, the kind of place that would provoke a curmudgeon into homicidal rage.

I think here in America we're shielded from the weirdest stuff (above). It would be great to go to Sweden and see what's for sale in the Ikeas there.

I think the native Swedish Ikea is chock full of promotions for their prefab houses and office buildings, and for plans for office interiors. Come to think of it, I think Ikea designs whole communities. Fascinating! Disney might have gone this route if he'd lived longer.

BTW: I haven't forgotten the Beatnik stuff. I'm working on it now, and it's a ton of fun. I was just too spaced out to do it earlier in the week!

TYPES OF FACES

I thought I'd blog about faces again.

It occurred to me that there are two kinds of faces in the world. In one kind (above) the elements are unified. All the features seem to fit with each other. You would expect a girl with eyes like the ones above to have a small mouth, and a girl with those kind of rounded cheeks to have a rounded nose. Everything harmonizes, as if the face were sculpted from a carefully made blueprint.

Young women in particular have faces like this.

The other type of face (above) is diversified. In this example the lips seem out of sync with the rest of the face. I picked a pretty extreme example just to prove a point. On most women the out of sync quality isn't this drastic, and doesn't detract at all.

Older people tend to be out of sync more than younger people. I guess that's because different parts of the face age in different ways. A face can be in sync in youth, and out of sync in middle age. Oddly enough, extreme old age tends to put the face back in sync again.

In the case of the woman above, whole facial masses are out of sync. The upper half of the face is broad and wide. The lower part is long and slender. She's still pretty. Every detail within the two masses is in sync, only the two large masses are off.

Here's (above) a woman with three major masses that are out of sync: the forehead and eyes are one mass, the cheeks and nose are another, and the mouth and chin are still another. Three separate design groups on one face! I kinda like it.

Here (above) we're back to a unified design again. What harmonizes this face is the repetition of rounded chevron shapes, not only in the details of the face, but in the shape of the jaw.

That's all I have to say about faces. I hope I haven't given the women on the site something to worry about. Most people have out of sync faces after 25 or so...that's what gives them character. Look what it did for Jeanne Moreau (above).

I have nothing else to say about facial structure, but while searching for faces on the net I discovered the interesting pictures above and below, so I thought I'd pass them on.

What do you think of the picture of the two sisters above (click to enlarge)? I like it a lot. It's so happy, so full of good vibes. It brings back pleasant memories of family members I met when I was a kid.

Okay, this is gruesome. Sometime after this picture (above) was taken, this woman was shot in the face with a shotgun. After shooting her, her husband shot himself. Miraculously both survived, but the wife required a facial transplant, possibly the world's first.

Here she is before surgery (above, left), and after (above, right). I assume the swelling in the jaw'll go down when the face heals. If you cover the overly-broad part of the face, you can see that the middle is a big improvement. Maybe I'll donate my face to somebody before I kick the bucket. It won't mean much without the buck teeth, though.

NOW I GET TO USE MY NEW BERET!

Sorry, I wasn't able to finish the blog post on time. I'm still just too sick. Just for the heck of it, I thought I'd show you a few outtakes of the beatnik story I was working on when the flu descended, and I had to stop. No story here, just random stuff.

Er...this didn't turn out the way I intended. Actually, I was going for a "dismissive "tut, tut" and didn't realize how it would look to the camera.

How do you like the beats in the background? They're so delightfully decadent!

It occurred to me that Beats were always angry, so I tried an angry pose. Geez, is my head really that big?

Beatniks smoked a lot, so I thought I'd throw that in.

While I was fooling around with beatnik pictures like these I chanced on a one act play about the subject that turned out to be brilliant, so I decided to illustrate that story instead of my own. The problem is that I had to change it a bit in order to squeeze it into a single post. I'll give the author full credit, but I doubt that will deter him from coming after me with a meat cleaver!

Aaaaargh! Now I'm going to drag myself back into my sick bed!