Stigma and Stigmatic

draft

As we proceed inevitably to that automatic or machine-assisted diagnosis of eccentricities and other traits that have in the past been used to stigmatize people, can we say that that such algorithms and devices are "stigmatic"?

Stanley Kubrick and the Hotel in NY

I believe that as we live our pathetic lives in our corrupt society, that we are all of us under a moral obligation to enliven and otherwise entertain each other, so that we do not all collapse into a puddle of stress and unhappiness. Sadly not everyone holds to this moral principle.

Also sadly, some of the attempted entertainment items, jokes, gags, whatever, are better than others. “I have a million jokes as good as that one” always sounds like a threat to me. Nevertheless, every once in a while things come together and work out to everyone's benefit. The point of this post is to review the structure of such a gag first used in 1997 that those who are interested in continuing in this great tradition may do so. For reasons that will be obvious in a moment, this gag would have to be updated to modern times or it would take an entirely new, and darker, feeling.

There are several ideas incorporated in this gag and so lets review them here. 1. It works to build up the mythology of the designated target in front of his or her coworkers in entertaining ways, 2. It uses as a primary mechanism certain behaviors that have been noticed in a class of worker in our society in order to achieve our goals without being physically present, 3. It seeks to achieve its goals by exploiting a weakness, in this case, the unfortunate willingness to hold in high esteem members of the motion picture industry and to think that there is anything glamourous or exciting in that industry, 4. The gag uses modesty and indirection as a technique for achieving its goals, in this case one is not impersonating a famous person, one is impersonating an anonymous and lowly assistant to the famous person, 5. It goes further by suggesting that the target is in fact the important person, whereas the off screen celebrity is actually just nobody of any special interest.

The occasion for this event was the imminent arrival of a friend from the West Coast to NYC. I knew that my friend, from ILM, would arrive on a certain day and somehow knew what hotel he was staying at. He must have told me which hotel it was, but I have no memory of that. I knew that it was possible at most hotels to leave a message in advance of arrival of the guest if they had a reservation, and furthermore, that there was a good chance that the front desk would read any such message to the arriving guest. I also knew that it was procedure for such people to arrive in groups from the airport, so that it was likely that my friend and target would arrive and check in with his co-workers all around him.

There was always the risk that the front desk would not read any message aloud, but hand it to my friend on paper. It could go either way, this is a flaw in the approach. In this case, the events turned out the way I desired but it could have been different. Had my friend received the note on paper, it would still have been entertaining, but not as much.

Given this intelligence of the imminent arrival of the target, I waited until the day before arrival and called the hotel, asking to leave a message for a guest who had not yet arrived but whose arrival was expected. The front desk was happy to do so after looking up the guests' name, Josh Pines of Industrial Light and Magic, on their arrivals list.

Then I told the front desk, in the nicest and most innocent voice I could manage, that this was Mr. Kubrick's office calling, and if Josh had any free time during his trip to NY could he give Stanley a call at home whose number was 212 888 8888. There are several tricks to this message worth pointing out. I. the person who is leaving the message am nobody, I am just representing Mr. Kubrick's office. I assume that everyone knows who Kubrick is, and would know that Stanley refers to the top guy, and that Josh might not have Stanley's home number, so I give it. In reality, of course this number is my home number, something I figured Josh would realize after a moment's thought. Also, note that it is an affectation of the motion picture industry that everyone at the top is referred to in an aw-shucks manner and by their first name. If this had been Jeffrey Katzenberg, I would call him Jeffrey, etc. The implication of course was that it was Josh who was the busy one, and it was Stanley who would rearrange his schedule to fit in Josh whenever he might be available.

So, the trap having been set, all I could do is wait and see what happened. As it turned out, in this case, everything went our way.

A group from ILM arrived at the hotel and while they waited for each member to check into the hotel, the front desk read out to Josh in a loud voice that “A Mr. Kubrick's office had called, and could Josh call Stanley at home at the following number”. This got a suitable response from Mr. Pines colleagues, although Josh immediately saw through the ruse, and said it was “just” Michael Wahrman. Nevertheless, when Josh went up to his room, his electronic key did not work. Puzzled he went down to the front desk and discovered that he had been upgraded to a better room by the hotel.

[Josh tells me that he never referred to "just" Michael Wahrman, but in fact informed Ellen Poon, a member of that party, after the fact and outside the lobby, who was behind the  gag.  He also reports that the people most impressed with the gag were behind the counter, which does not surprise me at all, and in fact is part of the reason I hoped that they would read the message out loud.  In other words, they would read it out loud and make a slightly bigger scene of it all because the workers at the hotel thought it was exciting, not because Josh's colleagues did.  Anyway, Josh does report that he got a better room and it was very nice.  That of course was an unexpected result].

If we were to try and repeat this gag exactly today, we would want to designate a different celebrity director, as Mr. Kubrick is no longer with us, which is a shame.

In fact, the person most amused by this stunt was and still is myself.  I was really delighted and still am.   Probably would not work a second time (at least not at the same hotel).

In this manner, we endeavor to entertain our friends and try to alleviate the endless boredom and misery of their everyday lives. If only some of them would reciprocate, that my life would also be enlivened. But I wait in vain for that happy day.

Scale, Future and Decay at Disneyland

Christmas Day, 2014

This is the second part of my impressions of a recent trip to Disneyland, the original park, for the first time in many years. You can read the first part here.

It has been speculated that Disneyland has a function in our civilization beyond merely being an entertaining vacation destination. From Tinkerbell, to the ancient myths, to the promise of tomorrow, these concepts manifested in Disneyland but originated in our unspoken hopes and beliefs for the future. At least they were our beliefs in the future back when we were naive enough to believe in a future.

When I approached Disneyland on this occasion, I was moving fast to meet my friends who were waiting for me in Frontierland. I was late. I was also disoriented because the traditional parking lot was missing and the entire entrance now reconfigured into the space between two gates and a transit center. My pass worked and I sprinted to my rendezvous.

Having found my friends, I paused to catch my breathe. There was something wrong. I felt a sense of disquiet as I walked around New Orleans Square, past the river, across from Tom Sawyer's Island. It was something to do with scale. It was smaller somehow. Jungleland, Frontierland, the River it all seemed smaller than I had remembered.

Of course my first memories of Disneyland were from the mid-60s and I was much smaller and the park was much bigger, relatively speaking. Is it possible that the memories from visiting Disneyland all those times when I was young remained in ways beyond what we normally think of as memory, but as a sense memory of the rightness of things, of its basic size and dimensions? Could this unconscious dissonance be the cause of the unease that I felt?

Familiar and yet unfamiliar some of the dissonance was probably a reaction to the crass repurposing of classic attractions for more current popular product placement, the Swiss Family Treehouse was appropriated by Tarzan for example, but the feeling of a scale difference was persistent.

As evening approached this sensation finally went away. I had chosen to walk around the Matterhorn to New Orleans Square to meet my friends for dinner, and the dark of evening restored the sense of mystery and of scale that had been missing during the day. Night made it less apparent how the pieces all fit together, night allowed the park to expand in my imagination.

It was in this darkness that I was able to pass through Fantasyland and it was at night that I was finally able to get to Tomorrowland.

The old TWA rocket still remains, unlabeled, but defiant

Lets review for a moment the Tomorrowland of 1967 or so. On one side of the entrance is the AT&T Bell System Circlevision film with a working Picturephone to their headquarters in New York City. On the other side was the Monsanto exhibit “Adventure Thru Inner Space” which talked of the promise of microscopy and the quantum world through a journey into a snowflake. Dare I go any further into the center of the nucleus itself?

Further on was a recreation of our nuclear submarine force which had just recently gone under the polar ice cap for the first time. There was an external and beautifully plastic House of the Future. The GE pavilion's Carousel of Progress swept you away in a narrative of white suburban Americans singing about their home appliances. Trans World Airlines took you on a trip to Mars. The future of transportation opened in July 67 with the PeopleMover to augment the Monorail, the overhead tram, and the Disneyland Railroad. And even that 60s vision of world peace: There's so much that we share that its time we're aware: its a small world, after all.

We would go to the moon. We would explore the ocean floor. We would create new and unlimited sources of energy. We would look at the night sky and explore its mysteries.  We would heal the sick. We would live in a world of peace, freedom and harmony. We would save the world.

We jump to the present and we find the promise betrayed. AT&T and TWA no longer in business.  GE a shadow of its former self threatening to just go bankrupt rather than take responsibility for the gross environmental destruction of the Hudson river which they did with deliberate malignancy and for a fast buck.   A NASA without the capability of going to space without assistance from the Russians.  The people betrayed and unemployed.  A cluttered monstrosity of a “rocket jets” attraction destroys the symmetry of the entrance to tomorrow. The rotting hulk of decaying urban transportation infrastructure lies abandoned and rusting in the center of everything, attached to the former location of the “rocket jets”, now a transit hub to nowhere. Silent it stands abandoned at night. The Circlevision film about our country has been turned into some sort of video game arcade to promote a Pixar film. The Mighty Microscope (Monsanto Exhibit) becomes a redo of the original Star Tours continuing the theme of idle tourism for the wealthy  The Carousel of Progress is now a house of tomorrow that is more like a house of today, but for the very rich. You see, it seemed to be saying, this is how you could live today if you had a lot of money. The Submarine Ride which formerly presented the sense of adventure of those heady days of the submarine pioneers, now advertises a fish movie.

Abandoned rocket jets and Peoplemover turnabout

No transportation, the transport was all gone. Only the rotting infrastructure remained. The promise of how we would live in the future became the betrayal that said only the rich would live well. Advances in science were turned into cheap movie promotions. Symmetry became clutter. It was all outsourced to China, perhaps to Shanghai Disneyland, by our government.  I guess if you wanted to see the future you would have to go there, if you could afford it.

But if you look, you will find remnants of the former greatness. With the help of some docents at the Illuminations pavilion we were able to find elements of the Carousel of Progress hidden in plain sight on the outskirts of the exhibits.  In urban archaeology, you find the old doors, you walk to the end of the hallway and check to see if there is space beyond.  And there on the floor was the track of the former Carousel of Progress, now stopped with no promise for the future. But still there, nevertheless.

Look on the floor to see the seam that separated the unmoving stage from the rotating audience platform.

So what does the future hold for Tomorrowland?  We know that the Brad Bird movie of the same name and shot in part in Tomorrowland is coming out in a year.   I have no doubts that many plans are in the works for the rehabilitation of the future.   Will it convey an articulate and inspirational vision ?

Vision of Tomorroland from the first trailer for the movie

Trailer for Tomorrowland (2015)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11fgwFAk3fk

PeopleMover on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeopleMover

Updated 12/15/2025

Advertising and the Rights of Paranoid People on the Internet

[This essay is slowly being rewritten ... the topic is the relationship between targeted internet ads and big data machine learning of customer preferences and being slightly paranoid as you review the ads it selects for you ... which are so weird.   Several countermeasures are proposed ... ]

You know and I know that the ads we see on Google are targeted for and at us. Billions and billions of cookies and multiply/add instructions have been dedicated to determining, through expert systems and big data, what to sell to the biped, typing mammal at the other end of the line.

How many times have you waited for a web page to come up only to notice that the browser is waiting on a response from "www.double-click-and-steal-information-to-make-money.com" ? This all is part of an elaborate plot by left-wing health care supporters to gather data on our buying habits or is it?  How do we know what the data is really used for?   What if Proctor and Gamble is part of larger plot to enact gun control?   

Whenever you look at a web site today, it is trying to sell you something based on the conclusions its advanced machine-learning algorithms have selected from your interests on the internet.   But it seems there are still a few bugs in the algorithm because they are not always quite on target. 

Consider the following ads I recently recently experienced while trying to use Google Mail:

       PUBLIC ARREST RECORDS
       ARREST RECORDS NOW POSTED ONLINE

       BECAME A PERSONAL TRAINER

       U.S. MILITARY STORE

       AVOID BEING LIED TO

       SOFTBALL RECRUITING

I mean, pardon me, but what the fuck ? (1) Do they know something that I don't know? Am I about to be arrested, do I need a lawyer?  Am I about to join a softball team?   Are they lying to me about joining a softball team?  What do they really mean by asking me if I want to be a personal trainer?  Why am I always the last to know?

The biggest puzzle of all is why advertisers believe that by interfering with our ability to get work done on the Internet, that we are going to be predisposed to buying from them. Watching their stupid advertisement for the latest online dating service ("Liz!  Meet Brad !!!  6 feet of handsome !") while I am trying to download the latest horror movie trailer does not make me more likely to buy their product.

Here are two ideas to throw a wrench into their sales campaign:

The first suggestion uses good old American capitalism and micro economics.  The Googles of the world are making money selling ads, the ad agencies are making money designing the ads, the companies themselves must be making money selling product, right ? So why not just put a 10th of a penny in my Paypal account for every discreet little ad, up to maybe a nickle in my Paypal account for an obnoxious full flash multimedia ad? Then, as the mafia supposedly says, I get to dip my beak in the well and everyone is happy because although worried about what the ads really mean, our advertising victim is at least getting paid for his trouble and can buy himself an antidepressant or a stiff drink with the profits.

The second idea is a little more passive aggressive.  It would not be hard to generate internet marketing countermeasures that used their weapons against them.   A program could be written that accessed the Internet and left cookies around that implied a profile that you wanted them to see.  You could be an intellectual, or very interested in beach volleyball, or even an intellectual with a very serious interest in beach volleyball, or any of a number of other interests.  Or we could be even more devious and do big data analysis of the latest marketing trends and make you either fit in, or deliberately hide your real interests by overwhelming them with fake accesses designed to hide your real marketing preferences in a mountain of carefully selected spurious data.

I hope that all Americans will unite against this conspiracy to waste our time with stupid ads that are supposedly based on our interests.

Thank you.

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1. Probably stolen from Charlie Wilson's War (2007)

The Aesthetics of Earthquakes in Southern California

Well we finally had a decent earthquake after a long time. Not that great, but a 4.7 which is just ok. About 60 miles away. Pffft.  One good shock.  Is that it, I thought?  That's all you got?  Definitely not enough.

I may as well tell you that I have been very disappointed by the earthquakes I have experienced in S. California since I came back from the East Coast. Let me be blunt guys, its for your own good.  S. California is less than the East Coast in almost any measure one can use, its crummy weather, its crummy non-transit system.   Its failure to deal with civic planning.  The only thing it has going for it imho is earthquakes and a few other things like surfer girls and beachside Mexican restaurants.

Before I left for NY and Aspen in 1994 or so, I could count on a solid interesting earthquake every few months. One that would rattle the house, rattle the windows, annoy the dogs and set off the happy chirping of car alarms up and down Lookout Mountain. It was the car alarms and the barking that convinced the observer that the earthquakes were real and not just the result of a happy dream.

But since I have returned that old earthquake magic seems to be gone.  Dried up. Every once in a while  a dreary little rumble is felt, occasionally a shock to the house, more your imagination than anything substantial.

What happened?

No one knows. No one asks, No one cares.  Its like the rest of Los Angeles.  Dreary devolved robots, joyless, idealess, soulless.  Going through the motions.  Hoping that nothing will shatter the fragile illusion of normality that they clutch to their bosom so tightly.  That nothing will happen to make them fall into the abyss like so many of their friends, screaming soundlessly into the night, and then gone forever.

What constitutes a good earthquake? 

1. The earthquake should have structure, periods of intensity, periods of quietness. It shouldn't just be on and off.  One boom equals boring.  No, there should perhaps be a solid and dramatic initial shock to get your attention, then perhaps an anticipatory pause, then a good solid series of shakes building in amplitude to the point where you wonder if you should get out of bed to stand underneath a door jam. Then a pause again, and a few more shakes as a finale. Many variations on this theme are possible, this is not a hard and fast prescription. The general principle is that a good quake will reveal a structure and not just be one blow.

2. The earthquake should have solid aftershocks. After the main quake, in a minute or two, or five, or an hour, there should be another good earthquake or two. More than one if possible. Maybe not as ambitious and complicated as the first one, these could indeed be just one shock without structure, but an aftershock or two.  (1)

3. The house should demonstrate harmonics and vibrations. You should hear windows rattle, doors creak, and see or hear other examples of wave interactions.

4. The neighborhood should come alive with noise. Dogs barking, car alarms going, wind chimes chiming, radio announcers announcing.

MCA/Universal's Masterpiece starring Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner

5. Going beyond "good" to "excellent", an excellent earthquake should be violent.  It should wake you up and make you think.  It should make you wonder if this is it, if this is when you die, or someone you know dies, your existence forever extinguished.   An excellent earthquake makes you think about your own mortality.

6. After "good" and "excellent" of course is "Apocalyptic".    The "Wrath of God" Earthquake.  The one like the one you saw in disaster movies, but without the happy ending and Charlton Heston.   The earthquake that announces the "Last Days".  The one that demands your complete attention.  The one that does more than shake up your day.  The one that lasts a minute or two or five, is off the Richter scale, and leaves Los Angeles flattened, an even 1.5 or so feet of crushed plaster, with an oil derrick or two sticking out of the ruins and millions of BMWs, Mercedes, Lexus and Acura's alarms demanding attention but getting none until they finally run their battery down and one by one go silent.

Miles and miles of cars protruding above the crushed plaster, silent, motionless.

They stand silent forever, monuments to the shallow greed and the shallow graves of their former owners.

Soon, maybe, soon.

[Of course we do not really wish for the Apocalyptic earthquake to happen anytime soon, at least not until all the people we care about have sold their property in LA and moved out, especially the surfers and people who run beachside Mexican Restaurants. ]

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LA Times Article on Today's Earthquake:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2013/03/more-than-100-small-aftershocks-follow-47-quake.html

Information on 4.7 Earthquake

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci15296281#summary

Information on All Recent Earthquakes

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/

Earthquake (1974) on IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071455/

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1. The managed news media in S. California tells me that there were over 100 aftershakes after the one this morning.  Well, maybe.  But if so, I did not feel a *single* one.

Hollywood's Most Sacred Day of the Year

Tonight is Hollywood's most holy night of the year. It is the day when our people come from all over the world to virtually or literally celebrate themselves in a giant, ugly display of sheer power, whimsy, boredom, and oh so rarely, class. There are a number of things to know about this important day from my point of view.

This post is mostly general background, intended for people who have never attended or had the pleasure of working extensively in the glamourous and rewarding motion picture industry.  Another post will go over some of the nuances of this year in particular, as it affects computer animation and visual effects.

The first thing to know is that it is important to start practicing your acceptance speech now, wherever you are, however early in your career it may be. Because when you actually work in the industry and are up for an award you will be too busy to have the time. And God forbid you should make a fool of yourself in front of a billion people.

Second it is so important to remember to thank all the little people who have contributed to your award. You know and we know that they are not really important, that all the ideas came from you, of course, but they do like to be thanked, its human nature after all, and it makes you look like a better person who is willing to give credit to the unworthy.

Yes, they really are heavy.  I think they put depleted uranium in the bottom or something.

Third, when you get out of your car, your limo, or hybrid Prius, be sure to wave to your fans who have waited so patiently to see you and only you. It is such a courteous thing to do. I always wave to them when I get out of my car at the awards.

Fourth, depending on the year, they often have members enter the Academy behind whichever star is being interviewed at the moment. One year, the first time I attended with my friend Lisa Goldman, we happened to enter when they were interviewing Jodi Foster. The trick is to pass behind the star, then turn around and go back, and then of course reverse direction and go back in. That way you get three passes in front of the TV camera (admittedly in the background, of course). (1)

Fifth, do not be concerned about getting a date. If you are a single member of the Academy, or if you happen to wrangle a pair of tickets to the nosebleed section, which is possible but difficult, it does not matter who you are, what your gender preference is, or how much you are hated and despised the rest of the year, you will be able to get a date to the Academy Awards (tm). Trust me. (2)

Sixth, probably if you attend, you will be up in the nosebleed section. In fact, although it does make things a little less convenient, you will be watching television monitors mostly even though you can see the stage, you are much better off than if you are in the more prestigious orchestra section. Because you will be able to move around, you see, and those in the orchestra section can not move around if the camera is there to witness it. And when you do leave your seat down there, they have someone ready to occupy it when the camera is back on so that there are no empty seats.  But in the nosebleed section you can wander around, talk to people, get a soda water, and go to the bathroom.  This is much more convenient.

Everyone has stories about when they went to the awards and who they saw and so forth and so on. I want to mention one here, although it does not involve a famous movie star. About five years ago I went to the awards as the last-minute stand-in for the date of my friend David Coons (no reason to waste the ticket after all), and as we entered, I saw a receiving line of amazingly lovely young women from a local Catholic School in perfect Catholic School regalia, the dresses, the gloves, the knee socks. About 30 of them in a line, all about 17 years old. Why they were there, one can only speculate.

This picture makes me wonder if the Catholic School girls were part of a special security squad to protect Academy Members.  I did not notice any any weapons, but maybe they were concealed.

Exactly who is a member and why can be a little complicated. But it is fair to say that most of the members have a good reason for being members. Not everyone, not by any means. I know many, many people who are not members who are plausibly more deserving as members than some I know who are. But that is the case in many things in life, and it is not so surprising here. (3)

And yes, it is a little squirrelly who gets nominated and who wins. We all know some major gaffes in the Best Picture, Actor, Actress categories. But it is true in the technical areas as well, as you would expect. I will just mention one case because I think it is unfortunate. Without doubt, two of the most important visual effects films in the history of film are Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Bladerunner. Those two films were both nominated for visual effects but did not win either year. Admittedly those were tough years. But it happens that those two films were the two times that Trumbull and Yuricich were nominated, and they should have received an award for their work. In my humble opinion. If this world were fair, which it clearly is not.  (4)

Finally, one last thing, and since this is Hollywood, it is appropriate that it be about money. Because at the end of the day, whatever you may think or believe, and whatever else Hollywood may be about, Hollywood is about money.

This single night which may be the single most viewed event each year on television, with an international audience, also finances everything the Academy does for the year. They have major expenses and run some expensive infrastructure involving theatres, film archives, libraries, some restoration, and presumably some other worthy activities I know nothing about. And this single evening of the year finances all their work and activities, and that is probably a good thing, as they, from time to time, do good work.

Not always of course, but from time to time.

And the winner is ...

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1. That year ILM was up for an award, was videotaping the event, saw me and very kindly sent me a copy of myself behind Jodie Foster. That was very nice of them! I think it was Doug Kay who arranged that. I wish I knew where that tape was.

2. The only two events that come close as far as I know is the Presidential Inauguration parties (which I have been invited to, by the way, ahem), and/or if your country has a King or Queen, and they get coronated or married in your lifetime.

3. Each area (e.g. subsection) has its own story here. I am particularly amazed that Nancy St. John does not appear to be a member of the visual effects subsection, but it may have to do with the problem of admitting producers in certain areas, particularly visual effects, and some not-so-amusing history. None of this should, by rights, affect someone like Nancy, but apparently it does, or at least I presume so since Nancy does not seem to be a member of the subsection. Probably if Nancy really wanted to be a member she could be, is my guess.

4. The work was done at the Entertainment Effects Group, an important early visual effects company owned by Douglas Trumbull and Richard Yuricich, ASC.  Many interesting and talented people worked there, and many of them went on to do other things in the field.

Computer Graphics and the Doctrines of Original and Derivative Sin

[Substantially revised 2/19/2013]

Anyone who looks at the field of Computer Graphics and Animation today sees vast misery, incredible and increasing unemployment, despair and uncertainty. (3)  The political actions of other nations have made it impossible to do computer animation in this country and compete thus increasing the offshoring and outsourcing of 3D animation.  Our people are driven to the four corners of the earth;  parents are forced to work in slave-like conditions and separated from their families in order to earn what is barely a living, starving to increase the profits of the rich.   And the rich are very rich indeed, privileged and ruthless at maintaining their privileges and laugh at the misery of the poor.   Unemployment everywhere, despair everywhere, injustice everywhere.

Many years ago  I heard a talk by computer artist William Latham (1) in which he proposed that computer graphics imagery was different from other forms of imagery because, by its nature of being computed, it was thus free of the Original Sin, when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, eating from the forbidden tree of knowledge and then expelled from Paradise.

But since we are clearly not in Paradise, but are being punished daily, then it is likely that whether we are guilty of Original Sin or, even more likely, an unoriginal sin, a "derivative sin", but definitely a sin of one type or another, or so one might reasonably judge from the reality of the punishment that we are receiving. (7)

3D animators being laid off from a CG studio

Although this may seem superstitious to us, for large parts of history, people of all types believed in the concept of divine punishment so, for a moment, lets ask ourselves how people of the 1st Century AD might have looked at these things. How would they have perceived these disasters and calamities?

Ancient people believed that plagues, famines, war and so forth was God punishing a wicked people or evil nation for their sins.  They would look at a fallen meteor and see a sign from God that he or she was displeased.  They would look at our misery and say that God (or the Gods) were punishing us and that what we had to do was to ask ourselves in what way we have sinned, that we may sacrifice to the appropriate God(s), and change our ways, and repent.

If one were sincere, a number of cattle might be sacrificed, or if really sincere, in some cultures, a good human sacrifice or two was required.   (4)

So let us review the many ways that the field of Computer Animation has sinned.

First and foremost, 3D animation has utterly destroyed the commercial basis of the traditional arts of 2D animation and visual effects.   Thus we are so very guilty of putting many innocent and talented people out of work, forcing them to put down their pencil or their optical printer and get a job as a day laborer for slave wages.   You may call it progress, but I say that we caused a lot misery, however unintentionally.

What other sins are we guilty of?

Pride, arrogance, a failure to help our fellow biped, greed, indifference to poverty, to unfair practices, guilty of setting up and worshiping false gods, competitiveness without mercy, driven by self-interest, ignorance of our effects on the other arts, ignorance of our own history.  Not to mention the sins of making bad movies and creating very bad animation.

Without doubt, we are guilty of all of these.

And the Gods have responded to our wickedness by providing subsidies to foreign nations to uplift our enemies and cause great misery through divinely-sanctioned unfair trade practices!   Heaven has sent the Angels of Unemployment to strike down Sinners even as they type at their Workstations!

As a prophet of doom, I suggest that things will only get worse unless the people repent of their sins and return to the path of righteousness.

God only knows that our misery could not possibly be the result of our own actions, our failure to act, our cowardice, or the inevitable result of our own corrupt practices and stupidity.   It must be a result of divine displeasure.  Because if it was a result of playing it safe, of failing to protest foreign subsidies as a way of keeping quiet and "minding our own business" (2), of rewriting our own history whenever it was convenient to do so (or simply being ignorant of our own history), then we would have no one to blame but ourselves. If we are guilty of transferring our technology to foreign venues as a way of making a fast buck, then who is at fault other than us?   If we thought the studios that finance films cared about the computer animation community in this country, from whence their current riches originate, then that would be particularly stupid and indicate a complete failure to face reality of how these things work. No, the answer must not lie here, among ourselves, the answer must lie in the realm of divine displeasure.

I recommend sacrificing at least one goat or maybe two at once. (6)

Doctrine of Original Sin on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin

___________________________________________________

1.I http://www.nemeton.com/static/nemeton/axis-mutatis/latham.html

2. Ironically, of course, it is our business.  But it would mean making waves and possibly offending the rich and powerful.

3. Of course this does not apply to some people.  I believe, for example, that my friends at Pixar are treated quite well.   But if they could not work at Pixar for some reason, and were thus like the rest of us, and had to find employment outside of that special reality, they would very much not be happy.

4. Human sacrifice is in most cultures past whether or not they admit it.   But there was quite a diversity in how many humans, who they were (e.g. captured prisoners or citizens) and when they eliminated the practice.   Other than hating Christians, the Romans were tolerant of nearly everything among their multitudes of incorporated cultures other than human sacrifice.  They had no trouble with the death penalty, but that was completely different in their eyes from killing people for religious reasons which they considered barbaric.

5. Most Prophets of Doom are not volunteers, but claim to have been chosen by God more or less against their will.   Also prophets of doom normally do not make a good living but have to live as hermits in caves and so forth.  Much better to be a prophet of hope and joy if you want to make a profit, so to speak.

6. A little off topic, but the best political cartoon found on the topic of human sacrifice is:

7.  This is of course circular logic, and proudly so.

Photograph Demonstrating the Permanence of High School

New York Magazine has an excellent essay on the subject of whether or not we ever really leave High School.   Its a topic of great interest to most of us, but may be slightly misdirected, as it seems that so many of our peers have the emotional maturity of someone stuck in Jr. High School, not High School.

But nevertheless, its an interesting article and it can be found here.

But the real reason I am mentioning it is because I thought that they introduced their article with a truly great picture.

Does the "Happy Face" button and haircuts identify the year of the original photograph?

Notice the attention to detail.   They are wearing very similar clothes, if not identical ones, and are trying to duplicate their facial expressions, slumping body positions, the sense of a group of friends on the loose in New York City (presumably), etc.   Its the same t-shirt that the guy 2nd from the left is wearing, or an amazing replica.   Notice the vacant grin on the guy sitting down.   Its beautiful.

What makes it great is not the technique: the goal of the technique was to duplicate the cheesy feel of the original.   Technique is important in anything, but it is not the only thing.  These pictures could be out of focus and they would still be great.

White House Rejects Death Star Petition

In a stunning reversal, the White House has turned its back on the popular petition to build a Death Star, citing administration policy not to blow up planets and budgetary concerns.

Darth Vader appeals to Congress not to abandon the Death Star

See
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/01/12/white-house-rejects-death-star-petittion/?tid=pm_pop

The American Tradition of Christmas and the Mystery of the Aluminum Christmas Tree

In the spirit of the holidays, I set out to write a short essay on what I had learned about the origins of our Midwinter holiday and its traditions. I grew up in Virginia where Christmas was a much more important religious holiday than it is out here or other places I have lived, so perhaps that explains my interest.

So in this essay, I hoped to cover (a) the specific mechanisms by which Christmas traditions came into the popular culture in this country, (b) why these traditions seem to be rather oddly selected from a much larger set of European traditions, (c) why these traditions seem to be rather secular, which is odd, given that nature of the holiday, (d) whether any of these traditions are in any way based on the old religions of Europe as might seem likely in a few cases (e.g. the decorated evergreen), (e) why it is that Virginia seemed more devout and frankly Christian in its celebration than other places I have lived in this country, and (f) why an Aluminum Christmas Tree.  Lesser issues would also include the origins of the Yule Log, the various nativity scenes that are often set up, the tradition of the shop window Christmas displays such as one sees at Macy's in New York City, and the tradition of the candle in the window as one sees in Virginia.

Implicit in this might be why a third generation atheist liberal Jewish Virginian family such as mine should celebrate Christmas at all.  Not all of these questions are answered in this essay, but a few of them are partially answered. 

When I grew up in Virginia we had an aluminum Christmas tree. My father, a reformed sports writer, worked for Reynolds Aluminum and perhaps that is why we had a Christmas tree. It was pretty great, although as you might imagine it did not smell as good as a real evergreen. I always wanted to know where this thing had come from.

As I studied the origins of the various traditions of Christmas that I had experienced while growing up, two observations were reinforced, none of them particularly original.   The first is that what we celebrate in America seems to be combination of (as you would expect) a large number of Anglo-Saxon traditions in place about the time of the colonization but with an almost equal number of traditions seemingly picked almost at random from a large number of potential continental European traditions. The second observation was that these traditions were nearly all secular in origin and purpose.

But a third observation was somewhat new to me, but certainly not new to others who had studied the topic.  Apparently a significant number of attributes of what we consider to be a traditional Christmas celebration actually is American in origin and rather recent, e.g. the 19th century.   They just pretend to be older traditions, something I find amusing.

The following is an incomplete list of my research. I expect that many of you knew this already, but I did not know most of this.

I wish to emphasize here that there is a lot bad information out there which I hope I am not contributing to, but I probably am.   One such "wrong" belief is the common lore about the origin of the date of Christmas, at least in the Western Church, December 25th.  For many years I thought that it was accepted that the date of the Western Church's Christmas came from a very specific holiday, Sol Invictus, of the late Roman Empire.  I had been led to believe this by literally dozens and dozens of essays on the subject.  Looking a bit closer, I learn, again, that what one is commonly told is just flat out false.  So we begin with the issue of why December 25.

1. Most historians do NOT believe that the Western Church celebrates Christmas on December 25th because it was the date of a significant Roman religious celebration (e.g. Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, which was itself layered on top of other previous traditions). They do not believe it, because when Christians had started celebrating the birth of Christ, in the 3rd century AD, they were still in their conflict with Rome, e.g. before Constantine, and working hard to distance themselves from pagan traditions in any way they could.

The most commonly held belief among scholars for the date has to do with the psychology of determining aspects of Jesus's life from traditions in the so-called Old Testament regarding prophecy of the Messiah. The trick here is to find a day such that Jesus was conceived (not born, conceived in Mary's womb, e.g. a miracle) and executed which was the same day of the year although obviously in a different year.   So take the date of the Crucifixion as the date of conception, advance 9 months for a canonical pregnancy period, and you have December 25 as a birth date.   People used to do calculations like this all the time back in the good old days (e.g. 2000 years ago).

This is a specific example of a larger heuristic: that if Jesus was the messiah, then he must have fulfilled various biblical prophecy about who the messiah was.  Therefore, people worked backwards from these prophecies or what they thought those prophecies must have been to determine details about Jesus for which there was no clear documentation.  Getting to the bottom of what was and what was not prophecy for this and other matters is a job for a specialist, and I am not going to go further here.

Note that the Eastern Church(es) also have disparate ways of celebrating the event, but their chosen day is January 6. Note that this is all mixed in with issues involving the Marian traditions of the various churches, specifically the Feast of the Annunciation which celebrates the visit by the Angel Gabriel to Mary to tell her that she should expect a blessed event, as unlikely as that might have seemed to her at the time.

This reminds me of a joke I learned in the Upper West Side of New York.   How to annoy your Christian friends on Christmas day.   On Christmas, you call up a friend and invite them out for pizza.  When they say "But today is Christmas!", you feign ignorance and say: "Oh! Is that today?"

2. There were various traditions in Anglo-Saxon England for midwinter celebrations, including the tradition of a family dinner on December 25th (the wealthy had roast beef, but the poorer classes had a goose which was far less expensive, hence the Christmas goose). And also a tradition of people singing carols outside homes on Christmas eve, particularly homes where they might expect the people inside to give them a few coins for their effort. In other words, it was mixed in with the various traditions that make it more socially acceptable for the poor to request money from the more wealthy on a special day. Many of these traditions would have crossed the Atlantic with the settlers, particularly those who came to the more Anglican part of the colonies, e.g. Virginia and also (but its more complicated) to the mid-Atlantic states.

[I am told that beef is now much less expensive than goose today, but the point that Hutton was trying to make was that goose was less expensive back then].

3. Most Americans are blissfully ignorant of most of the history of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, but this affected everything in Europe and it certainly affected the Colonies and what beliefs were transferred.  England had a reformation all its own and there were several centuries of a complicated and messy process of  determining which pre-reformation traditions they were going to keep, and which they were going to suppress. But the more purely Calvinist in England believed rather strongly that the celebration of Christ's birth was an accretion that was not justified by scripture, more papist frippery if you will. As you must have guessed by now, these Calvinist dissenters emigrated (or some of them did) to New England and are who we incorrectly call Puritans.

4. So to begin with we have the Calvinists of New England, the more Anglican states like Virginia, and the mid-Atlantic states which have their own unique story here including as it does not only members of the Roman Catholic church but also protestants from other parts of Europe, especially and including the Low Countries, e.g. the Dutch Netherlands who settled New Amsterdam, and various regions of Germany who went to various places in the middle Atlantic, often Pennsylvania, and still spoke German and maintained their traditions.  Other dissenters from England, not the Calvinists we call Puritans, but of other beliefs, such as Quakers, generally went to the middle Atlantic states.

[Just a reminder, the Calvinists mostly went to New England to build their "City on the Hill".  People of other variations on the theme of Christianity, e.g. Quakers, Catholics, presumably Lutherans, in general went to the mid-Atlantic states: New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland.  Various religious groups went to Virginia but most of them were vanilla Anglicans of one school or another.  There were also other faiths such as Presbyterian in Virginia from the earliest days.  This is not a hard and fast rule: the Calvinists in New England were quite strict, but the mid-Atlantic states were specifically open, and Virginia and other territories did not have much of a policy either way as far as I can tell.  What they did have was an Anglican "founder effect" which persists to this day.]

5. We now jump ahead to after the American Revolution: the Anglicans in this country have become Episcopalians because of the issue of Archbishop of Canterbury needing to swear loyalty to the King. New England is no longer a pure Calvinist enclave but has begrudingly diversified by allowing people of other faiths to live among them. The Middle Atlantic states have enclaves of Germans who are true to their traditions and language. And there have been a few Jews there all along the seaboard, from top to bottom, although they play very little role in the rest of our story ironically since, of course, Jesus was a very devout 1st Century AD Jewish apocalyptic prophet and the influence of Judaism is all over the various Christianities in various diverse ways.   There are other minority communities seeded here and there in North America, keeping or not keeping to their traditions each in their own way.

6. Our story now enters the 19th century, e.g. from the 1800's on, and we have some specific events in popular culture that have immense impact.

In 1809, former lawyer and writer Washington Irving, executed a hoax claiming that a Dutch writer and historian, Diedrich Knickerbocker, had disappeared and failed to pay his hotel bill, and if he or someone on his behalf did not pay the bill, that the hotel would publish a manuscript found in his room.

This was all made up of course, and the manuscript had been authored by Washington Irving and purported to be a history of New York from the beginning of time to the present day, from a Dutch point of view.   This was also a satire on the self-important local histories that one could find in different communities.

New Yorkers fell for this hoax hook, line and sinker, and as it was serialized, it went viral, as we say today.  A search was supposedly made for the disappeared Dutch historian, Mr. Knickerbocker, but to no avail.  Eventually the book got published, was very popular and established Mr. Irving's reputation.

In the history of New Amsterdam, Irving/Knickerbocker discuss the traditions from the Low Countries of Sinterklaas, of St. Nicholas, and of hanging stockings by the bed to be filled mysteriously with various edible goodies and toys by the morning of Christmas Day.  And this is the accepted version of the specific reason that we in America who are not from the Low Countries originally associate Santa Claus, St. Nicholas and hanging stockings on Christmas Eve with Christmas.

Knickerbocker's History of New York Complete by Washington Irving
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13042

7.  In England another writer, and social reformer, Charles Dickens, was struggling with his work and very upset about the poverty and misery among the working poor, after a lecture he gave in Manchester in 1843, walked around Manchester at night and conceived of a story of a greedy industrialist who is visited one Christmas eve by the ghost of his former business partner.   He went home and wrote the story as a short novel in six weeks and published it on 19 December 1843.   To his surprise, it became immensely popular, and has never been out of print since.

According to various accounts, including that of historian Ronald Hutton, whose book we discuss later, this story had a vast impact.  From it, he claims, came the particularly British charitable tradition that no one should go hungry on Christmas.   Whether or not this is true seems difficult to believe, but that is what he and other sources say.   Furthermore, it supposedly influenced an industrialist to begin the tradition of letting the workers have Christmas Day off, a tradition our right wing has been fighting and trying to destroy ever since.

[My readers in England dispute that Dickens was ever surprised by his success and dispute that Christmas Carol had that much influence on the charitable organizations.  I also wonder about this, but historians such as Hutton claim up and down that it is true.  Read Hutton and tell me what you think.]

8. Note we still have not explained Santa Claus' sleigh with reindeer, with his bag of gifts, in a red suit, or even the notion of having a decorated tree and other important elements.

9. Then in 1823 a poem was published anonymously in Troy, NY called "A Visit from St. Nicholas". It had been written by a professor of Classics at Columbia University and published without his permission (or his name) in a local newspaper. The poem tells the story of a Christmas Eve and a man who wakes up in the middle of the night to find a miniature sleigh flying over his house with eight miniature reindeer, and a person who is recognized as St. Nicholas (an elven and miniaturized version of the 4th Century AD Greek saint and bishop, I suppose) who climbs down the chimney with a sack of presents, and fills the children's stockings with candy. The man and the mysterious visitor exchange a conspiratorial wink, then the stranger leaves by the chimney and flies away saying "Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!".

Clement Moore supposedly came up with the idea during a sleigh ride to do some Christmas shopping for his family, incorporating certain aspects about St. Nicholas that he had learned from a local Dutch handyman. But the rest of it, the sleigh, the eight reindeer, their names, etc, he made up himself out of whole cloth.  This poem became immensely popular, went viral as we say, and I end the essay with it.

10. But we still have not explained the tradition of the Christmas Tree. The various German ethnic groups that had emigrated to this country, the Moravians, etc, had/have a variety of traditions for their Christmas celebration. One of them is the notion of having a tree, given the time of year it is an evergreen, and having a celebration in which the tree is decorated with little ornaments. Somehow this became something that the President of the United States did every year in the White House.  But believe it or not, it is not clear when the tradition started.  Some say it was in the 1850s when Franklin Pierce was President, and other say it was 1889 during the Harrison Administration.  This became a tradition, became electrified, and is now one of the ceremonies of the season in Washington DC, the lighting of the Christmas tree.  From this, it is alleged, having a Christmas tree became a generalized holiday tradition for the American household.

Implicit in this explanation is the idea that perhaps the President was running for reelection and was trying to attract votes from the German ethnic groups in this country.  This last observation is pure cynical speculation on my part and is not in any way implied by anything I have read on the topic.

At some point we are going to get to the topic of the Aluminum Christmas tree, but this seems a good time to interject that Pierce or Harrison may electrify their tree, but if you have an aluminum tree it would be a very bad idea to try to electrify it.   Aluminum is very conductive of electricity and an electrical short would be very exciting but also unpleasant.   One uses an external color wheel to illuminate the tree in a festive manner.

Of course this begs the question of where the German's got their tradition from and whether it is a remnant of an archaic belief system, perhaps of the evergreen representing eternal life, as some assert. This essay will not go into that, it will have to be a topic for another time.  For now we must be content with the notion of how a specific German tradition came into American popular culture.

11. Although there is far more to mention, our research and this essay will almost but not quite end with mentioning one more influence because it was so important.  Apparently, a lot of what Americans think about Christmas from a visual point of view came from an illustrator and publisher, Thomas Nast, in the mid to late 19th century. He is known for many things, including his depiction of Boss Tweed, Uncle Sam and last but not least Santa Claus in his red suit (a Nast invention, among others).  (I have checked and this Nast appears to have no relationship to Conde Nast).

Not allergic to cats, I hope! 

But still we are not done, for we have not explained the notion of an Aluminum Christmas Tree, the Yule Log, the candle in the window, why Virginia appears to be more devout (e.g. Christian) in their celebration, and other matters.  I have not been able to figure out where the Aluminum Christmas Tree came from but I suspect from the image I found online and put at the top of this essay, that it may have been a marketing effort on the part of the Richmond, Va based Reynolds Aluminum.   I only know that we had one and that I was very unhappy to hear that it had been thrown out because it was in such bad shape after decades of use. It was in our family when I was growing up, and I wish it was in our family today.

What can we conclude from the stories reported above?   That Christmas in this country was, as it appears to be, a pastiche of traditions from England and the rest of Europe, but not all of them by any means, and that they were in part selected for their secular character because many Americans were ambivalent about the various religious traditions of Europe.  Whatever a stocking or a decorated tree may stand for, the relationship to the birth of Christ is not obvious.   The closest we get to religion seems to be a reference to a saint (St. Nicholas) and that star at the top of the tree, which may indeed be the Star of Bethlehem.   Even more amusing is that the details of many of these traditions were elaborated and created in this country by writers and artists of various types and only pretend to be older than they are.

When I transcribed Clement Moore's poem written for his children, also published here without his permission as is traditional, I discovered to my amazement that I knew it by heart. I have no idea how it is that I happened to know this poem by heart, but I do.

And so with that thought, I am wishing you a happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

A Visit From St. Nicholas

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of sugar plums danc'd in their heads,

And Mama in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap —
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters, and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow,
Gave the luster of mid-day to objects below;
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and call'd them by name:
"Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now! Prancer and Vixen,
"On! Comet, on! Cupid, on! Donder and Blitzen;
"To the top of the porch! To the top of the wall!
"Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all!"
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of toys — and St. Nicholas too:
And then in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound:
He was dress'd all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnish'd with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys was flung on his back,
And he look'd like a peddler just opening his pack:
His eyes — how they twinkled! His dimples: how merry,
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry;
His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face, and a little round belly
That shook when he laugh'd, like a bowl full of jelly:
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laugh'd when I saw him in spite of myself;
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head
Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And fill'd all the stockings; then turn'd with a jerk,
And laying his finger aside of his nose
And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose.
He sprung to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew, like the down of a thistle:
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight —
Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

____________________________

By far the most comprehensive work that discusses and attempts to explain where various Holiday traditions in England came from is Ronald Hutton's book "The Stations of the Sun".  If you are at all interested in this topic, this is the book to get.
http://www.amazon.com/Stations-Sun-Ronald-Hutton/dp/0192854488

Essay on the origin of American Christmas Myth and Customs

http://www.arthuriana.co.uk/xmas/swartz/American%20Christmas%20Origins.htm

Clement Moore

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Clarke_Moore

Sinterklaas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinterklaas

A Christmas Carol Wikipedia Page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Carol

The Manuscript for A Christmas Carol

http://www.themorgan.org/collections/works/dickens/ChristmasCarol/1

A Christmas Carol at Project Guttenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46


[December 25, 2012: This is the 4th rewrite of this essay, and it will not be the last].
[December 26, 2012: We have some comments from friends in England, see below].
[December 27, 2012: More rewrite on the date of Christmas]
[December 25, 2013: Miscellaneous but especially on the ambiguity of which president started the tree]

Petition to Build Death Star Succeeds

In a remarkable turnaround, over 14,000 signatures were added to the petition to Obama to start building a Death Star by 2016.   The current total signatures is 26,887 as of 10:30 PST on December 13, 2012.

Thanks to all of you who responded to our urgent appeal on this important matter.

See:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/secure-resources-and-funding-and-begin-construction-death-star-2016/wlfKzFkN

The original post:

With only one more day to go and another 12,000 or so signatures required, its looking very bad for the Death Star petition.  It has to reach the 25,000 signature mark by Dec 14th, e.g. tomorrow, in order to be sent on to President Obama.

The petition requests that the US commit to start building the Death Star by 2016.

"By focusing our defense resources into a space-superiority platform and weapon system such as a Death Star, the government can spur job creation in the fields of construction, engineering, space exploration, and more, and strengthen our national defense."

To sign the petition, go to www.whitehouse.gov/petitions, filter by "science and space policy" and look for the "Start construction of Death star by ..." petition.

Read more about this exciting expression of public opinion here:
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2012/12/10/over-13000-petition-white-house-to-build-a-death-star.html?col=7000023435630&comp=7000023435630&rank=8

Drums Must Not Stop

The other day after a memorial service for an old friend from Disney, some of the Disney people took me to a local restaurant for dinner.  Somehow this restaurant was the center of the lattice of causality that night, as various friends of ours accidentally stopped in including a mutual friend from the National Security Agency.

The establishment was a mexican restaurant and cowboy western bar and musical venue all in one.  It had some sort of mid-50s cowboy band from the valley and a height-challenged fan and amateur yodeller who performed a spirited rendition of "I wanna be a cowboy girlfriend" complete with extensive yodels.  Its very hard for me to evaluate the quality of such a performance.   But they were certainly loud.

So in the brief period between songs, when you could actually yell something and be heard, I told them my one music industry joke.

A man is in the jungle, accompanied by native guides. Off in the distance, somewhere in the jungle, a drum starts beating. The drum keeps beating, on and on it goes, day and night, over and over again, endlessly.   "What are those drums" he asks? The natives reply "Drums not stop."   The drums keep going on, hour after hour, beating, pounding, endlessly. "What are those drums?" he asks again.  The natives reply "Drums Not Stop! Drums not stop!"  Finally the man says, "I cant take this anymore, when will those drums stop?  Please tell me!"  The natives reply "DRUMS MUST NOT STOP!!!" and the man finally understands, he is in terrible danger.   Suddenly afraid, he asks desperately,  "Why? What will happen when the drums stop?"  The natives reply "BASS SOLO STARTS".

I think you might have to have attended rock concerts in the 60s and 70s to truly appreciate this joke.

Visual Effects Humor and the Titanic Alternate Endings That Never Existed

Generally speaking, visual effects people are more deadpan than animation people. Animation people are generally more wacky. For example, animators may make funny noises as they eat their dinner (a salt shaker may become a dive bomber, for example) or funny noises as they leave a room (whoosh !) and no one would even notice. Visual effects people are generally more serious than that and rarely make funny noises.

The following is a story from the time when Titanic was finishing post-production which means it was the summer of 1997.

Visual effects can take a long time to do when compared to the schedules of other parts of the motion picture production process. There are a variety of reasons for this, but in general visual effects shots are awarded to facilities far in advance of the release of the film. But sometimes, for various reasons, effects are awarded at what seems to be the last minute, very near the release date of the film. Although this is often perceived as a mistake, it may not be. In the case of Titanic, it was not a mistake.

Most of the effects for Titanic were being done by Digital Domain, the effects studio that Jim Cameron had helped to found. But there were effects that could only be awarded until after sequences of the film had been edited, because they involved adding the "cold breathe" that people make outside when its cold, and that could not be done until they knew which of the many shots they were going to use. They had originally hoped to be able to get that breathe naturally by keeping the set very cold, but it turned out that was not practical down in Mexico, so they just moved on and planned to fix it later. Jim is well-known as a perfectionist, and he worked on those sequences as long as he could, and then released them to effects. In any case, Digital Domain was quite busy getting the primary effects shots of the film done, so these other shots generally went to other facilities.

[Note: Richard Hollander of VIFX/R&H tells me that all these shots were done by VIFX and that there were a lot of them and that, yes, they were always planned.]

Although there was a perfectly good reason why these shots were added when they were, it was a lot of work, and individual technical directors often like to complain, and to brag, so they did. And the field is very competitive, so maybe people were taking shots at Digital Domain (ha, they couldn't do this so we had to, that sort of thing, as juvenile as it may sound).

This seemed like a good opportunity for a joke. At various industry events, when I would run into my peers, I would say that I had heard that these shots were part of a new and very secret alternate ending to the movie.  The studio executives had become worried,  they were spending a tremendous amount of money on this movie, if it bombed, their careers were probably over.  The director was still pushing for a historically correct ending which was a very dramatic, but down, ending.     They thought it was worthwhile to prepare an alternate cut of the movie with an upbeat ending, and see how well the two versions tested against each other.  After all, they did not want to go down with the ship, so to speak.

In this new ending, the Titanic would still hit the iceberg, they couldn't change that, but our hero breaks in at the last minute and turns the ship, so it only partially hits the iceberg. and they use most of the footage of water breaking in and so forth, so some people still die, but the ship manages to make it back to NY and our heroes live happily ever after. And all of these extra shots that you hear about all over town [well you did hear about them all over town, even if they were actually being done at one facility, VIFX...], that is mostly the big crowd shots at the end as the Titanic limps into NY harbor and everyone cheers. Yea ! We made it!

My colleagues in the glamourous and rewarding visual effects industry would just look at me. You could see them thinking.  On the one hand, the story is ridiculous.  On the other hand, we all know some pretty crazy things that have happened.  After a while they realize this has to be a joke, and they would say something like "This is a funny joke, right ?"

I would like to think that I had planted a seed of doubt and that they were wondering if the studio might actually do this.    Demi Moore had just done a version of "The Scarlet Letter" in 1995 and in her version there was a happy ending, so if Hester Prinn could have a happy ending, why not Titanic?

Yes it was a joke, I would admit. "Very funny", they would say. And glare at me.

[I don't think they had to think very hard before they rejected my story, but as I mentioned above, visual effects people are generally quite deadpan and it can be hard to tell...]