Andrew Sullivan says:

This president has now made the Republican party an emblem of exclusion and division and intolerance.

Now? Now he figures it out. In all fairness to Andy, he also posts this letter:

"Seriously, when they have to hit you with the speech equivalent of a two by four to get your attention as to how they feel about you, you might want to rethink your party affiliation."

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, Adbusters has gone absolutely batshit insane by posting a list of "the 50 most influential neocons in the US," marking, with a little dot by the name, those "neocons" who are Jewish. I'll let you supply your own david-star-juden-verboten joke or outrage. For my part, I'd just like to note that this is eerily similar to that list of abortion doctors that the antiabortion dude posted on his website, with lines drawn through the murdered docs.

And, incidentally, Adbusters has no fucking clue what a "neocon" is. Gary Fucking Bauer? Ack! The title of the article is, "Why won't anyone say they are Jewish?" Adbusters having published such a list, I'd have to say the word "pogrom" springs to mind.

I saw The Triplets of Belleville tonight, and it's fantastic. A particularly nice blending of animation styles, I thought. I'm also terribly fond of any movie that tells its story without dialogue. I may have to go see this again.

If you have seen this film, I would like to draw your attention to a detail. The mother, at one point, shacks up with the eponymous triplets. The walls of their apartment are lined with various framed posters. One of these is an advertisement for a dinosaur called Gertie.

Gertie is one of the earliest pieces of animation, a film composed of roughly ten thousand individually drawn frames, done by Winsor McCay with the assistance of John A. Fitzsimmons. They began work in 1913 and debuted the short in February 1914. The film itself presents an amiable dinosaur named Gertie, a black and white line drawing of no small charm, who interacts with a basic prehistoric environment, snacking on trees, drinking from a lake, and even dancing on her hind legs.

Gertie's presentation as a film was far different from what we expect from a movie these days. McCay was a cartoonist who also performed in what were known as chalk talks. In these performance pieces, an artist would sketch out cartoons on a tableau in front of an audience, following their suggestions. McCay created Gertie as a sort of super chalk talk. As the filmed animation was presented, McCay would issue orders to Gertie. Having timed his presentation beforehand, Gertie would then appear to follow McCay's commands, creating the illusion of interaction between McCay and the cartoon dinosaur. At one point, McCay appeared to toss Gertie a pumpkin, which Gertie then ate. For the finale, McCay walked behind the screen as an animated representation of himself entered the frame and climbed up on Gertie's head.

Dinosaurs on film tend to be pretty scary (Babies, Secrets of Lost Legends excepted), but Gertie was thoroughly affable, cute, and quite whimsical. When Gertie takes a sip from a lake, she leaves a dry canyon behind. When she eats a tree, she doesn't pick at it but rather swallows the whole thing up in a comic trope that would be revisited in animation many times again. Plus, just look at that mug, with its broad grin and pupilless, ping pong ball eyes. What's not to love?

And now for the links.

This is the home page of the Gertie Restoration Project, which features (on that linked page) a 2 meg animated gif of Gertie dancing. This page also features a scene-by-scene breakdown of the film, along with a gallery of stills from all parts of the film.

Here is a short biography of Winsor McCay, referencing his other works. I'd like to check out his Little Nemo strip, sounds good.

VanEaton Galleries has some Gertie material, but also shows some stills from McCay's earlier animation work. He had done two animated films prior to Gertie, Little Nemo and The Story of a Mosquito.

This tripod page documents Gertie's fate shilling ice cream.

Finally, the Library of Congress has clips from Gertie's later film adventure, Gertie on Tour, which does not exist in its entirety. The film, from 1921, shows Gertie playing with a toad, a trolleycar, and attending a dinosaur rave. Although not the original Gertie, it's still fun to watch. The fluidity of the animation is gorgeous.

Asked to comment on the trade of Alex Rodriguez to the New York Yankees, Derek Jeter had this to say:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the pursuit of balls, I must say that there's nothing wrong or immoral about wanting to be in a committed relationship with the person you love, no matter the gender. We only ask that those rights extended to straight couples be available to us as well. People worry about the impact on society, well, I don't see how bringing about justice for people in loving, committed relationships can do anything but good.

Superelectric attempted to solicit George Steinbrenner's opinion for this blog, but he was too busy making true the blood libel to comment.

For entries like this:

But why has Bush learned that lesson “in recent days?” Because the press corps avoided this story in 1999 and 2000, when it should have been doing the basic reporting. But at that time, the press was conducting its War Against Gore. It was inventing ludicrous tales about Gore—and taking a total pass on Bush. Troubling tales about Bush had to die. So the national press corps went AWOL.

The point we made yesterday is quite important. When one follows the current reporting on Bush and the Guard, it’s hard to believe that this is the second time Bush has run for the White House. Why is the reporting being done now? Because the press corps went in the tank for Bush during Campaign 2000. The press corps’ conduct during that campaign is one of America’s greatest scandals. When you see them reporting this story today, don’t forget how they sold you out then.

God bless the Howler.

One of the unfortunate side effects of my having a job now is that I have little energy and time. I sleep a lot. One of the nice perqs of the job, though, is that the hours and general mindlessness of the tasks allow me to listen to Stern in his entirety.

Today Courtney Love called in. I've never liked her. She seemed like Nirvana's Yoko. Today, though. She couldn't really hold a conversation. Unable to maintain a dialogue. Spoke off in random odd tangents, her thoughts continually circling around hazy notions of conspiracy. There's a certain explosive joy to be felt in hearing the thoughts of somebody who's mind is firing in lots of different directions. But then, in other circumstances, you get the shiver down your spine to hear somebody completely lost in their own delusional world, unable to be understood. It's frightening. So today I felt pity and sadness for her.

I have been trying to rebuild my JD Salinger collection. I went to the large used bookstore on Page the other day. Half the store is used books, the other half a massive porn collection. Got Franny and Zooey. Also picked up a cassette tape recording of TS Eliot reading some of his poems, including The Waste Land. He didn't read the introductory bit in Greek and Latin, which disappointed me a bit. TS Eliot's reading contained many instances of rising ends of sentences. You know how when somebody raises the pitch of their voice at the end of a sentence, making declarations sound interrogatory? He does that a lot in the recording, though it sounds more menacing than questioning.

I also wanted to say that I am confused about this whole gay marriage business. What's being asked is not to allow people to marry, but rather to extend the governmental benefits of marriage to a different group of people than before. I mean, marriage hasn't really ever meant what's meant by "gay marriage." If I had my druthers, those governmental benefits wouldn't exist for marriage. Rather, marriage would mean whatever anybody felt like making marriage mean, and we'd have a separate civil union system for gay and straight people. To expand marriage is a bit of social engineering, and while I can't say that it's a bad thing, it's something I'm loathe to endorse. I mean, we're talking about an incredibly small portion of the population. And the advocacy of this one issue has now encouraged amending the US Constitution. I mean, there're people rumbling to add a specifically anti-gay amendment to the fucking Constitution. How is this good? I don't really want government interfering in the personal lives of people, and so I'm troubled by making interpersonal relationships the business of the government.

A far more important question is health care. Affects a jillion more people. Plus, it represents something that is, I think, unambiguously evil. The notion that a person's sound health and own life should be determined by their finances is abhorrent to me.

What's more, this lack of access is distributed across racial lines. One, minorities are far more likely to have access to health care than are whites. Two, minorities who do have access to health care are less likely to receive full treatment than are whites. This is an issue that's been studied, controlling for disease, history, diagnosis, and even economic factors. A black person presenting the same condition with the same history and possessing the same finances is less likely to receive extensive treatment than is a white person with the same situation. It would be hyperbole to call this genocide, but surely the injustice falls into the same category.

And isn't private insurance in itself socialized? I mean, it pays for the care of all by spreading the costs across a large group of people. Why is it so much better to have it administered by a group of people with a profit motive? Isn't it the worst system to have these patchwork quilts of coverage, failing to spread the costs and benefits across the larger population?

And what's with people leaving weird, nonsensical comments in my fucking blog? Goddamn it.

Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters is really good, by the way.