I can relate to this.

Reading Penny Arcade the other day and saw that a strip had been made that dealt with some of my feelings towards Facebook. Please excuse the language as it is a bit extreme.

Facebook

I joined Facebook ages ago and sort of forgot all about it, until this week I received an email telling me that an old friend had added me as a friend on Facebook. I thought that was pretty cool and soon after a few more old friends had also added me to their friends list. Great!

Then I had other people who I don’t know or don’t remember, added me as a friend. OK. Worse still, people I could not stand from school also added me as a friend. Maybe I could like them now after the passage of time, but I doubt it. I think that these people just want to feel important by having as many friends as possible. I don’t know!

I also notice that there is a function on Facebook where you can announce what you are doing at that moment. I do not get that function other than it is a way for attention whores to get people to notice them or something.

As you can see I don’t really have any love for Facebook. It just seems so useless. Internet message boards are better places to go to have public conversations and if there’s anything private to say an email is so much better. I suppose the only good thing about Facebook is that you can appear trendy by saying you have a Facebook page, but that’s just about it.

Good old predictable Today Tonight

How surprising? Even though Today Tonight has a different host, this week they still felt the need to pick on migrants. They seemed to dedicate an entire program to attacking migrants this week. I suppose good, old fashioned xenophobia = ratings. It just shows that the more some things change the more they stay the same. If only this rubbish was taken off TV and we had a quality current affairs show that we could watch. Sigh!

Yo

It’s been another long break between posts. I have been very slack the last few weeks and I don’t really know why. Perhaps I have nothing to say? Perhaps I have got nothing that is worth saying?

Superman - Japoteurs

There is a little bit of interest in WWII era cartoons at the moment, with a disc on the latest Looney Tunes Golden Collection being dedicated to war cartoons, and of course the Popeye war time cartoons about to be released. I thought it would be interesting to look at how cartoons characters fought the war and how the enemy was stereotyped. (The Japanese came off the worst in the stereotyping.)

Here Superman battle the Japanese saboteurs (Japoteurs) as they try to hijack the Spruce Goose lookalike plane.

Mmmm, Icecream!!!

Meant to post something about this the other day but I was a little bit busy. I read that PETA had petitioned Ben and Jerry's ice cream in the USA with the idea of using breast milk in its products instead of cow's milk, saying it would reduce the suffering of cows and calves and give ice cream lovers a healthier product. After reading this all I can picture is a group of women with their breasts hanging out, being milked by an old farmer. Yes, I do know that there are some guys who fantasize about this type of thing, but I just think it is so ridiculous, like most things PETA say.

Betty Boop - Be Human

After 1934 Betty Boop's boop-oop-a-doop was taken away from her by the Hays Code which was introduced to make moving pictures less debauched and more moral. Betty went from a sexy, cute and very funny character to a boring haus-frau who was often reduced to being a bit player in her own cartoons.

Be Human is one of these cartoons and focusses on the issue of animal cruelty. It's not really that good but the song is quite catchy. I don't mind the Grampy character and agree he is a lot better than Betty's pup Pudgy, who was soon to be introduced. (However he is no match for Koko or Bimbo, who both disappeared around this time!)

Happy World Animal Day

Today was World Animal Day and it has been interesting to see how Australians have been celebrating this over the last week or so.

On Tuesday in Sydney a dog was found hanging from a tree, whilst on Wednesday another dog in Sydney died after being set on fire. Also on Wednesday a seven year old boy broke into the Alice Springs Reptile Centre to kill the lizards and to feed live animals to the crocodile. (In my opinion the authorities should feed this little waste of space to the hungry croc'!)

Just what is happening to this country? How can people be so cruel to animals? This is something I just do not understand. The sad thing is that this sort of behaviour is becoming more and more prevalent in Australian society. In August in Brisbane there were reports of a mother koala and her joey being beaten to death with sticks. Sadly this was not an isolated incident. Last year in Perth there were a number of occasions where kangaroos were shot with arrows.

We could say that these are all isolated incidents or that they were all done by kids who are just being kids, but these types of things are increasingly happening and I'd hate to have a neighbour who could participate in these barbaric acts of cruelty regardless of their age. We can all protest about the way the Japanese murder whales, but really something should be done to stop sickos in our own country from the barbaric torture and murder of animals, whether they are pets, zoo animals or our supposedly beloved wildlife.

King Kong

Speaking of movies this week I hope to get to the National Gallery of Victoria to watch their free screening of the original King Kong. Even though I already have this movie on DVD and have seen it several times, I feel that it would be good to watch it on the big screen whilst surrounded by other people.

The movie is screening tomorrow and Sunday at 2.30pm and is absolutely free.

What a way to start off my holidays!

At 3.35 this morning I heard a drip, drip, dripping coming from my bathroom. Even though I was dog tired after a long day at work, I awoke and went to investigate. The first thing I noticed was that the bathroom was flooded. Worse still was that the water had flowed out of the bathroom and into the hallway, where it was soak up by the carpet. This is really not the way I wanted to start my holidays!

Anyway, I discovered what had happened. The hot water system, which was installed into this apartment exactly 15 years ago, had sprung a leak. As I said earlier there was water everywhere, but unfortunately it was hot water, so my feet ended up a little bit burnt. Ouch!

So at 3.35 this morning I woke Priscilla up and we both mopped up all the hot water from the bathroom floor and tried in vain to also dry the carpet up. By 6.30 we had just about gotten things dry-ish and to a stage where we could go back to bed. (Not that we really ended up sleeping!)

At 9 am we rang the real estate agents so that they could contact the plumbers. They arrived here at 1.30 and informed us that the hot water system had gone and needed to be replaced. (Duh!) They also told us that they had had to replace at least one hot water unit per-month in this apartment block. The hot water system just celebrated its fifteenth birthday as a sticker on it proudly says that it was installed in September 1993, so it is the same age as the apartment itself.

This whole episode makes me wonder why the real estate agents didn’t decide to replace them earlier as a preventative measure. Then again, they may have contacted the apartment owner who is a renowned tight-arse who is well known for not doing anything unless he really has to. As I said earlier, this apartment is fifteen years old and looks it. Lots of things need repairing after a decade and a half of wear and tear. We have blinds, a light fixture and a toilet fan that we have be asking to be repaired for the last five years but unfortunately the owner only repairs the absolute essential things such as toilets, plumbing and hot water systems.

Of course even though he does nothing I still expect a rent increase next month, which will be the sixth one that we have had in a row. As we have constantly been told there is a rental crisis on at the moment, and if we moved from this apartment there is no guarantee that we could find another one in this location at our budget. Not only that, but if we left the owner could double the rent on the place and still have potential renters lining up around the block willing to pay that price to move in.

My Holiday

One thing I hope to do during these holidays is to watch more movies and DVDs. At the moment I really want to watch so Hitchcock movies, especially some of his earliest films like Blackmail, Mr and Mrs Smith and Shadow of a Doubt. I know that I can pretty easily get Shadow of a Doubt, which is the movie that I want to see the most, while there are two box sets of Hitch’s silent and early films available quite cheaply.

I am very wary of these two sets as they are both made by a company whose reputation I am uncertain of. As all the early films are in the public domain, it is quite easy for some shonky company to whip up some dodgy copies of these films and sell them to unsuspecting suckers, um, I mean customers, who buy these sets. Even companies with good reputations such as Magna Pacific and Beyond Home Entertainment have released DVDs of public domain films where there have been syncing problems or poor quality prints used.

The most annoying problem that can occur is when the mouths don’t sync with the words being spoken. I recently wrote about Beyond Home Entertainment’s Laurel & Hardy Volume 1 set where only two of the twelve short films on the set didn’t have syncing problems. I also have copies of 'Frankenstein' and 'It’s A Wonderful Life' that have syncing issues. Of course a while after I bought these DVDs official versions were released in Australia and I believe that they are no longer in the public domain. (I never thought that Universal had allowed Frankenstein to slip into public domain, but I don’t think a company like Magna Pacific would release a DVD of a movie that they did not have the copyright to!)

The other problem I have is that I don’t know which version of Blackmail is on the set. This was Hitchcock’s first talkie but he also shot a silent version simultaneously as not all cinemas were equipped to show sound movies in 1929. I would prefer to watch the sound version of Blackmail to the silent version. (Still, if it is the silent version then there won’t be any syncing issues!)

Koko's Earth Control

Not sure if I've posted this before. This Fleischer cartoons from the 1920s features Koko the Clown getting into all sorts of trouble.

If you are interested in Koko the Clown then the best place to go would be to Inkwell Images, where they a few DVDs packed full of Koko's silent adventures, as well as lots of other stars from the silent animation years.