A friend told me that a Sydney church had already jumped on the bandwagon. I googled, I goggled, I gonquered:
I encourage them to go the whole hog and adopt my script (we can come to some arrangement) for a full-blown national media campaign. Mine has the distinct advantage of avoiding pointing the finger of blame and guilt for past demeanors, and suggesting a bit of head scratching and bemusement.
Updated links 2015
There is a curious $150,000 church advertising campaign on in Canberra at the moment. With the tag line ‘I’m not into religion, but I reckon a lot of what Jesus taught is pretty amazing’, it really makes me feel as if the institutional church knows they are up against the wall. Some of the banners outside the participating churches give the main impression of the face of a pretty girl, and the word ‘Jesus’. I always look for the exclamation mark…
I propose they would have more success with a mash-up of our controversial tourist ads, which have been almost banned in Britain (because of the ‘bloody’), in Canada (because of the beer – huh?), and now in the US (because of the ‘bloody’ and the ‘hell’ disturb the ‘family values’ mob):
I’m fighting the temptation of making it into a flash movie myself, so if you want to do it and save me the trouble, go to it!
Updated links 2015
Artnatomy is a fantastic anatomical facial expression learning tool by Victoria Contreras Flores. Play with
the actions, especially in naturalistic mode. The pout is wonderful. (via Drawn!)
This reminded me of a collection of life casts that I had seen a while ago. Life casts are plaster casts of actors’ faces, made so that makeup artists can develop prosthetics. The thing I find curious is that with no hair and eyes closed, the faces seem to lose much of what makes faces distinct and individually recognizable. (via Extreme Craft)
Updated links 2015
Four of us in turn in the queue at the supermarket last night had multiples of bright yellow things: a bottle of detergent and a stack of sponges, a bunch of soup packets, bottles of lemon juice, and my hand of bananas. I felt very colour co-ordinated! Wouldn’t it be funny if you had to queue by item colour?
To introduce the system you could have people swanning around in appropriately brightly-coloured body suits helping shoppers sort their shopping and find the right checkout lane. Banana Man, for instance, would show yellow. Should the aisles be stocked by item colour? And the checkouts and lanes be demarcated by item colour? I think so.
This Banana Man is by Hilda Boswell, taken from Enid Blyton’s Marigold Story, from the 50’s. In the story the golly decides to go to a fancy dress party in a real banana skin. He asks the baby doll to sew up the skin around him but after much giggling in a corner of the toy cupboard… she can’t do it because the cotton slips through the skin. So they call on the elf who puts zips in with a bit of magic. Golly wins the fancy dress prize, but then can’t undo the zip magic to get out. I always felt sorry for him.
I could do with a bit of zip magic making the big body suit I’m working on at present.
This is a cool idea: Michael Paulus has a gallery which takes a look at the skeletal systems of cartoon characters. The distortions are interesting. For example, Betty Boop has no lower jaw!
(Via Drawn!)
Updated links 2015
The moniker for the new adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is likely to be ‘the Kiera Knightley version’, but I am going to campaign for ‘the one with the pig’ until someone does a Wishbone-type adaptation with Babe animatronic technology (starring the pig) or puppet pigs (move over Miss Piggy, I don’t want a Muppet version!). I’m amused by the fuss the pig is causing – ‘It shouldn’t be in the house’ – ‘How many times must I explain it’s not in the house’ – ‘It’s too rural and makes the Bennets seem too poor’ – because I suspect the distaste probably stems more from the implication intended by juxtaposing the stud pig with Mrs Bennet gloatingly sending Jane over to Bingley at Netherfield:
iW: Then you have this pig walk by and he has enormous balls.
JW: That’s not something we thought of before we saw the pig. Then when we met the pig, we were incredibly impressed by him. I’m rather interested in the fact that a family like the Bennets would only own female pigs. They’d hire the male pig to come in and, as they call it, cover the sows, at a fee. I kind of liked the parallels between human and animal procreation.
This rather puts new life into a rather jaundiced cartoon I did a few years ago:
The only other Austen cartoon I made was this one of Charlotte shrewdly eyeing off Mr Collins:
Of course you could add cartoon bubbles to the pictures in the Jane Austen Colouring Book.
From south eastern Australia, possible evidence that the Flying Spaghetti Monster was known to ancient peoples:
This is my submission for Loobylu’s July’s Month of Softies, a sock monkey. I’ve been curious about sock monkeys since first reading about the tradition a year or two ago, so I’m glad to have tried it out. This one started out plain and ugly, and I nearly abandoned him altogether, but I kept going back and reshaping bits. Now he is more refined, and I have grown quite fond of him.
Here are a few more pictures of him:
Last week my son and I cracked up when we happened across a video clip of Bud Light’s Real Men of Genius: Mr Giant Taco Salad Inventor (‘I don’t see no lettuce!’).
I had no idea it was part of a series of Bud Light commercials but yesterday my friend Amy serendipitously blogged about a collection of them. I just love them! (2015 updated link)
