That would be Lotte Reiniger, honored on June 1st by a wonderful Google Doodle:
This is just a screen capture. You can watch the actual video here. (Incidental note: I find the division of GOOGLE into GOO + GLE risible. More goo!)
In honor of the great pioneer of animated cartoons, Lotte Reiniger.
(This takes a turn to sexual politics that some — though not, I think, Bill Griffith — might find surprising.)
Today’s Zippy offers us some office soap opera between boss (Don) and employee (Ms. Carlisle), from the point of view of Ms. Carlisle:
(#1)
The topic is a familiar one in Zippyland: cartoonishness or cartooniness, indicated by various physical characteristics — noses, eyes, eyebrows, ears, jawlines, and mouths. In Zippyland, of course, everyone’s a cartoon character and they’re all dressed like one, but some of them are “realistic”, normal, regular folks,, while others are flagrantly cartoony.
Yesterday’s morning name: the song “Video Killed the Radio Star” (which I’m inclined, for several good reasons, to recall as “Disco Killed the Radio Star”) — as recorded by the Buggles in 1979 (disco-inflected music, lead vocals in retro radio voice, electronica) and, deliciously, as performed by them in a, yes, video.
You can view the video here. Crucial lyrics (with my line numbering):
1 Video killed the radio star
1 Video killed the radio star
2a In my mind and in my car,
2b we can’t rewind we’ve gone too far
3 Pictures came and broke your heart
4 Put down the blame on VCR
Back in late January, I posted about a visit to the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto for a breakfast outdoors, among early spring flowers and
some winter-blooming ornamentals that I haven’t yet posted about: red hot poker [which brings us to a plant family not previously posted about here: Xanthorrhoeaceae, #57 on this blog], strawflowers, and Euryops virgineus (honey daisy) in particular [also Asphodelus, asphodels]. I’ll get to them in a later posting, a posting in which I’ll also get to [two] plants from the Gamble’s Australian desert garden, plants that are probably blooming here now because they’re still on a Southern Hemisphere internal clock [Chameleucium uncinatum and Boronia crenulata].
Not in bloom, but very noticeable, was an agave [much like Agave americana, with its great big, spiky, fleshy leaves]
That day was just after my man Jacques’s birthday (his 74th). Today is just before Jacques’s 2003 death day (on Sunday), so there’s a certain symmetry to these two plant postings.
On Facebook, Max Meredith Vasilatos has been reporting on her wars with fruit flies in her San Francisco condo. Even when there’s no food out for them to feast on, still they persist. Max has tried to eliminate possible breeding places by pouring boiling water and bleach down the bathroom drains, but still there are flies.
Commenters on Facebook suggest that she is facing, not fruit flies (Drosophila species, especially the common D. melanogaster) in search of fruit (rotting if possible), but drain flies (from one of a large number of species, though the moth fly Clogmia albipunctata is especially widespread) in search of sludge.
I am, of course, familiar with common fruit flies, but also with at least one species of drain fly (though not C. albipunctata), a species that’s a minor summertime nuisance around my house.
Yesterday’s morning name: the adjective nefarious. From NOAD2:
(typically of an action or activity) wicked or criminal: the nefarious activities of the organized-crime syndicates. ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from Latin nefarius, from nefas, [stem] nefar– ‘[a] wrong’ [that is, ‘something contrary to divine law’] (from ne- ‘not’ + fas ‘divine law’) + -ous.
Two notes on usage, the first having to do with ‘something contrary to divine law’ — directly following from the Latin nefārius (embedded in Church teachings) — the second an ordinary extension of the sense ‘wicked or criminal’ (of an action or activity’).