What’s in a Name?
Monday, August 11, 2003My father has an uncanny ability to get the names of celebrities and movie characters’ names wrong. For the longest time he called that show about nothing ”Steinfeld.”
He visited this weekend, and Futurama was on the tv.
“I can’t stand the Simpsons,” he said. When I explained that it was a different show altogether, he said, “But isn’t that Bart and Burly, or whatever his name is?”
Then he went on to tell me how he rented Bringing Down the House starring Steve Martin and Queen Fajita.
Smack, Crack, Buzzwhacked�
Monday, August 11, 2003I’ve got another site to add to my growing list of word-related and lexicography links. Buzzwhack is dedicated to demystifying buzzwords, or “usually important sounding words or phrases used primarily to impress laypersons.”
Aside from presenting us with hilarious examples of pompous corporate nonspeak such as:
“Customers leveraging the Asera platform will have the ability to seamlessly integrate real-time product knowledge into their enterprise eBusiness environments,”
they also present a fun made-up dictionary of Buzzword Complicancy. Here are some I really liked:
Iraqnophobia: The fear of anything Iraqi. A condition increasingly aggravated by the talk of war, biological weapons and terrorism.
James Bond Effect: Shaken not stirred. As in: Your actions worry me, but I’m still not going to change.
duck shuffler: Just when you get all your “ducks in a row,” a duck shuffler—usually someone in upper management—comes around and rearranges them for you.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.
At the Beer Store
Saturday, August 9, 2003Man (noticing my iPod): Can I see that?
Me: Uh… sure.
Man: I’ve got one just like that.
Me: Oh?
Man: I didn’t think you could get them in Canada.
Me: Oh sure you can.
Man: No, I don’t think you can.
Me: I bought this one here.
Man: No, they’re only available in the States.
Me: This is 2 years old. I bought it here in Toronto.
Man: (giving me a funny look) Well, you never know…
My Missing Monkey
Thursday, August 7, 2003By now everyone’s aware of Google’s image search engine. Well, I certainly am. It’s a handy tool which I’ve used myself, but it’s also caused me a bit of annoyance.
Imagine how often someone types the word “monkey” into the image search. Now image you’ve drawn a cartoon of a monkey that shows up on the first page of results.
That’s what’s happened to me thanks to the previous version of robotjohnny.com, and it’s a thrill to be ranked so well in Google for such a common search, but many people started to deep-link to my image from various message boards and other sites, and well dammit—I’m paying for that bandwidth!
So for all you kids looking for my damn monkey picture, shown here a bit blurry:
I’ve replaced the original file with this:
So now, all you pesky kids linking to my image in your chatrooms and “what animal are you?” quizes will get the message! Okay, I’m a huge jerk, I know.... Originally, however, I thought I’d just replace it with something crude and pornographic, but I think most of these searchers are children, and I’m sure they get enough porn in their e-mail just like the rest of us.
Gigli: The Critics Don’t Lie
Thursday, August 7, 2003It’s true. It’s absolutely true. Gigli is everything the critics are saying. And less!
One can’t help but feel sorry for writer/director Martin Brest. Perhaps he’ll never work again! Perhaps we’ll never have to sit through another Gigli or Meet Joe Black!
It’s hard to pinpoint the *worst* moment of _Gigli_. Is it the lack of plot? The phoned-in cameos by Pacino and Walken? The heavy-handed Dawnson’s Creek dialogue?
I think the reason this movie fails is simple. Everything about it—every single thing—is awful. And by awful I mean completely delightful.
Let’s start with the performances. Ben Affleck. Ben, Ben, Ben. Whoever told you that you could be a tough guy? Was it your boyfriend Matt Damon? Because if it was, he lied.
J.Lo, by far the better actor in the Ben-Jen team, does surprisingly well. She plays a super-model lesbian hitman. We know she’s a lesbian because she spends a good fifteen minutes waxing muliebral about the majesty of the vagina while all but thrusting her genitalia right into Ben Affleck’s face in a bizarre spread-eagle Yoga cocktease. (Has Martin Brest even met a real lesbian before? Or does he just watch a lot of pornos?)
Justin Bartha’s performance of the “Generically Mentally Handicapped” Brian is one of the most inconsistent characters ever seen on screen. Trying to fit a whole cuckoo’s nest of eccentricities into one head, Bartha takes turns channelling everyone from Rain Man to Cliff Robertson’s Charly. One moment he has Turrett’s Syndrome, the next minute he’s Leo DiCaprio in Gilbert Grape. Whatever his inspiration was, it is clear that Brian grows less and less “retarded” as the movie progresses.
Speaking of inconsistencies, how bout that music? Jokes are punchlined with soaring orchestral strings and the sex scenes between Gay-Lo and toughguy Ben are punctuated with plucky stoccato faerie music. The rest of the film seems to be underscored with a variety of jazzy porn instrumentals, except for that tear-jerking final scene (in which Bennifer Affleck stands at one end of the beach, fully able to hear a conversation between Bartha and a beach bimbo hundreds of feet away through the surf, the wind, and the hundreds of other people’s conversations) which is capped off with an emotional choral exaltation. It’s as if the heavens opened up and the angels are rejoicing that the movie is finally over.
But of course it’s not over. J-Lo has to make her return. She has to show the audience that Ben Affleck has the almighty power to make gay gals go ga-ga. After all, it wouldn’t be a “Ben Affleck Falls in Love with a Lesbian” movie without a little sexual conversion on the woman’s part.
This movie is so bad that even 14-year old girls left the theatre mid way.
Like a bowl of pie, says Christopher Walken, it’ll make your tongue reach out and slap your brain.
I can’t recommend it enough.
The Sketchbook Journal
Tuesday, August 5, 2003Weeks ago I purchased volumes 1 and 2 of James Kochalka’s daily Sketchbook Diaries. Like many of his readers I imagine, I not only fell in love with the earnest glimpse into his life’s playful banality, but I decided it was something I’d like to try myself.
At the risk of looking like a good old fashioned copycat I knew I at least had to do something differently than him (aside from not drawing myself as an Elf and having no intent to publish them). So I decided to limit myself to a single panel. Limiting myself like this turned out to be a fun little challenge—without multiple panels and the sense of time passing that such a narrative provides I am forced to find one single moment of my day to capture.
On their own, each mini comic isn’t necessarily always interesting and/or humourous, but I’m hoping that the final product is greater than the sum of its parts and that when completed (whenever that may be) the collection as a whole might serve as interesting look at a moment of my life.
If anything this new little project is turning out to be a great experiment in discipline and expedition. Doing a daily panel forces me to uphold a constant level of creativity—and so far that’s been the most rewarding aspect.
Now and then I’ll share some of them with you. Like this one:
Seeing Red
Wednesday, July 30, 2003I just returned from the laundromat where I discovered that due to a mischievous burgundy sweater, the little rouge rogue that it is, 5 of my favourite shirts are now a nice dull shade of pink.
Take this piece of advice now if you will—don’t be an idiot. Don’t be like Robot Johnny. Don’t have your mind on matters other than the cleansing of garments when it’s time to sort that laundry. Stick to the task at hand for the love of all that’s not naturally pink!
Shunned by Dave Eggers
Tuesday, July 29, 2003Tonight I was shafted by Dave Eggers.
Eggers, editor of the literary quarterly McSweeney’s, and author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and, most recently, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, gave a reading tonight in Toronto.
In the dilapidated old (and, according to the word of the evening, deconsecrated) Berkley Church, Eggers talked passionately about his youth writing centre, 826 Valencia and read one of the works written by a group of special education students. The story itself was a mock screenplay that involved raising trillions of dollars to save the world for the president of the United States ("you must be tripping, Mr. President!"). Eggers’s reading of the story brought out not just the humour in the childrens’ writing, but the earnesty and passion as well.
And despite whatever people thought of Dave Eggers before the reading, there was not a single person in the church whom he didn’t endear himself to after speaking about what is obviously a very personal and important project.
After reading another story, a short piece of scatalogical fiction told from the perspective of an oversexed, 13-year old with no attention span (something far more juvenile than he should be proud of, according to Mr. E himself), Dave answered a series of questions from the crowd of 20-something hipsters and then was ushered to a table to commence the book signing.
We didn’t have to wait very long, but my friend and I couldn’t help but notice that Dave took the opportunity to not only sign whatever items people had, but to also engage in conversation, which was very polite and generous considering the size of the audience.
So we’re next in line. Dave Eggers is chatting up what I can only describe as literary groupies: three attractive young women obviously charmed by the magnetic and handsome author. Finally my friend and I approach the table to have our books signed.
Matthew has his books signed and exchanges a few jokes with Dave, shakes his hand and gracefully thanks him for his time.
And now it is my turn! I ask Dave to make it to John, he makes sure to ask if that’s with an ‘h’ (I decide not to make the usual joke of, “No, it’s with a ‘J’") and then, as I attempt to shake his hand and thank him for being so entertaining, he turns his head and talks to some woman who has creeped up beside him to ask him something.
My hand remains outstretched, and I mutter something along the lines of “thanks for the..thing.. with the… whoozit...and the...”
Dave Eggers has forgotten that I am standing in front of him. He is oblivious to what I am saying to him. He certainly doesn’t see that I have my hand open to him in a gesture of goodwill. No. All Dave Eggers can focus his attention on is the blonde woman crouching beside him who no doubt has matters of grand importance to discuss.
I am shunned by Dave Eggers. With the little pride I have left, I withdraw my unmet handshake, retrieve my copy of Staggering Genius and walk away. Looking at his autograph, I see Dave has drawn an image of some type of ring and attached a mysterious adage: “This is how I left it.”
So with my head hung low, my hand unshaken, my praise unheard, this is how I left Dave Eggers.
Recreating My Music Server
Sunday, July 27, 2003My mac, a blue & white G3, has not had a good year. First the DVD drive went kaput. Next, my monitor fizzled out. Finally just last week I had a gruesome hard drive crash.
After backing everything up and reinstalling OS X I have begun to rebuild what was the most labourious part of my previous setup—my music. I have an 80 gig drive dedicated entirely to MP3s, and it was at half-capacity at the time of the crash.
With around 600 CDs (and let’s be honest, a song or two from the Internet) it will take quite a while to re-rip every CD back into MP3. But losing everything has been very cathartic. It’s a lengthy task, but relatively brainless—pop in a CD, hit “convert” and wait for it to end. In alphabetical order I have so far converted “ABBA” through “Björk”. I already don’t look forward to the C’s—with about 50 Elvis Costello albums and bootlegs alone it’s without a doubt the biggest part of my collection.
The real loss, however, is not all the archived music, but iTunes‘s playlists and various statisitics such as play count, song rating, date added, etc. that are now lost and have to be recreated. And with nearly 40 gigs of music, that’s not an overnight task.
But the exciting part is that now I have a wireless network thanks to my new Airport. And with the help of iTunes’ network-sharing I am able to keep all my music on my G3 but use my iMac to play the songs through my home stereo system, which was the point of having a music server in the first place.
Soon I will be able to play any song in my collection without having to look for or touch the actual CD. MP3s and my iPod have changed the way I listen to music. No longer am I limited to just one CD… I can create playlists, see which songs I play the most, sort songs by artist, genre, rank… I could never go back to listening to music on CD.
There are some side effects to the digital music revolution, however. For one, the tactility of scanning a shelf of CDs, selecting a case and opening the CD player is gone. MP3s have taken all the sense of anticipation out of listening to music—they give instant gratification. This also lends to my ability to play every song I own on random, which I most always do, so I don’t appreciate full albums and their original song order as much as I was able to with CDs. In fact, after being conditioned by listening to digital music I find I have a much shorter attention span. I am far less likely to give a new album the time it deserves when I know that with a click of a button I can instantly hear something I know I like.
But the convenience and interaction of digital music is worth it to me. Besides, otherwise how would I ever get to hear Marilyn Manson, Petula Clark, and the theme to Magilla Gorilla all in one sitting?
Photoshop Boobery
Friday, July 25, 2003Of course this never would’ve come to anyone’s attention had there not been nudity involved, but it’s interesting.
The preview image in Photoshop apparently doesn’t always change dynamically if, when editing the original image, your changes are minimal.
Really though, this could’ve been prevented by using the “Save for Web” feature which strips jpegs of all Adobe’s superfluous data including thumbnail previews in order to make the files as small as possible for download.
Here’s the article which goes into full detail as to how this bug (or feature?) was discovered. And warning: there is some nudity.
I suppose I needn’t point out the irony of the victim working for TechTV.
Not Necessarily the News
Thursday, July 24, 2003Is Richard Lederer writing for the CTV news these days?
Last night they piled pun on top of pun in their exposé of ice cream’s deadly health risks.
“You’ll scream when you find out what’s in your ice cream! Is summer’s favourite treat a coronary in a cone? We’ve got the scoop on some chilling facts that will leave you cold!”
I wonder what would happen if they took the same approach to less frivolous news matters.
“Health Canada coughs up some facts on SARS that will take your breath away. Tune in at 11 if you’re dying to find out.”
RobotJohnny.com Version 5.0
Thursday, July 24, 2003After months (dare I say years?) of inactivity on my website, I finally release to you, the public, a new version of robotjohnny.com.
It still needs some tweaking here and there, but it’s otherwise ready for your consumption. As you can see I’ve jumped head first onto the blogging bandwagon. Now you might ask why.
“Why, Robot Johnny? What was wrong with the previous site?”
Well it wasn’t being updated enough and although it was serving its purpose as a place for people to download my fonts, I stopped getting any enjoyment out of it—it became quite stagnant. So turning this site into a blog not only gives me a reason and a method for continuous updating, but it also means I’m instantly trendy!
So now we’ll see how often I can update this sucker now that I’ve implemented Movable Type. Of course, the success of this new format relies on the assumption that complete strangers care what I have to say about anything and everything, but heck, if Sally Housewife can post pictures of her cats on the web then I can post a few thoughts on illustration and design.
That’s the Internet for you. This is my hill and I am its king.
So eat up. All the fonts are still here, and yes I’ve promised it before, but there are new fonts in the works and on the backburners of the font kitchen. And those of you looking for the illustration and sketchbook galleries can soon find them at martz.ca.
Wizarding getting out of hand
Wednesday, July 23, 2003When Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was released it wasn’t rare to see at least 5 people on any given subway car reading the book. But today I saw the most extreme case of Harry Potter Fever yet. A man trying to parallel park his car used one hand to manoeuvre his car into the spot while the other hand was propping open a Harry Potter paperback—just in case he missed one moment of the adventures at Hogwarts.
What’s scarier, though, is knowing that he was reading the book before deciding to stop driving and park the car.
Looney Tunes on DVD
Sunday, July 20, 2003Finally, after years of collecting DVDs, I can finally get my hands on another one of my “DVD Holy Grails”. On October 28th, Warner Brothers is set to release *The Looney Tunes Golden Collection*, a 4-disc set containing 56 classic shorts.
Understandably, the shorts are not being released chronologically, but thematically. This set in particular is more of a “best of” collection than anything else.
According the list of shorts, there seems to be a good selection of what are surely people’s favourites, but with only 56 out of over 1000 shorts that Warner produced from 1930 to 1960, I’m bound to be disappointed that some of my favourites aren’t included—namely _Rabbit Hood_ and _Duck! Rabbit! Duck!_ (especially frustrating since Chuck Jones’ other two installments of his “hunting season trilogy” _Rabbit Fire_ and _Rabbit Seasoning_ are included on the set, and chronologically out of order for that matter). I hope that’s just a sign that we can expect more Looney Tunes DVDs in the future.
Hopefully Warner Brothers will take note of how Disney has been presenting its classic shorts with their _Walt Disney Treasures_ sets and continue to release more sets of what are the best and funniest animated shorts ever produced.
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RobotJohnny.com is the personal weblog of Toronto illustrator and cartoonist John Martz. Read more...
The blog is made up of regular entries, Cinema Toast movie reviews, and Warm-Up Drawings.
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