Background removal now offers a better and cleaner way to produce double exposures. This is from the 1960 classic, Horror Hotel. Don’t bother me with disparaging comments, this film is more than sixty years old. It has been shown on Turner Classic Movies, they approving it by introducing the film for two minutes with their usual solemn pronouncements and analysis.
Max Headroom returns to TV
“Why? Why? Why? Do I know him? And some of you are thinking, ‘Of course I do!,’ and some of you are thinking, ‘Gee, I’m sure I do,’ and some of you who have been unconscious for the last six months are thinking, ‘What the Hell is going on here!?’ You see, some people tell me that the first computer generated television personality is rid-ri-ri-ri-ririd– silly?”
Life Magazine. Sony advertisement for their new, larger portable television set.
Now with A/I background removal for added enjoyment. Dancing Girl has been here many times before (internal link), and many fans will say she never actually left.
And here is ten seconds of the original video for comparison:
Etsy now allows a seller to post a video of up to 15 seconds long to promote any product being sold. Unfortunately, no sound. I think I will harness the power of cheesy stock video that I am already paying for at Vimeo to do this. It’s all about video editing.
Here’s on of my products at my store. This looks almost too professional but I have changed the text around to better reflect my sparkling personality. It’s a little fuzzy here but that is from WP compressing the video. Looks great in normal 1080 p.
If you need a video done for an item you are selling, send me a message and I am sure I can help. you.
#etsy#vimeo#graphics#design#posters#etsystore#video#smallbusiness
The title of America’s Favorite Victim was first awarded to Mabel Norman in 1913 for her role in Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life.
Jamie Lee Curtis won the title for the entirety of the 1970s when she starred in Halloween.
The 1960s belonged to Jane Fonda for Barbarella but a number of researchers and scholars are now considering whether the prize should be given to someone else.
Academics are moving toward awarding Venetia Stevenson for her role as Nan Barlow in Horror Hotel, the curiosity killed the cat coed who should have stayed at a Hilton property.
Because no one wants to watch a video that is more than one minute long, the Review Board has broken down the key, critical, and controlling part of the film into six segments.
The Board hopes that its viewers can watch the entire run of moments, ADD permitting.
While Barbarella may once have been The Queen of the Galaxy, it is possible that a new Princess may soon rule the throne.
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A friend couldn’t recall the inner monologue scene from Annie Hall so I looked it up.
We are used to movie characters talking to themselves when they are alone but it is much rarer to see this between characters when they are physically together. Especially this example with its wonderful subtitles.
“I’m not smart enough. Hang in there.”
Superbly well done!
Paudeen was a not so kind word for a shopkeeper, someone below Yeats’ station in life.
A class system in Yeats’ time sharply divided people of the British Empire, with the high too often and too quickly exasperated with the low. That system lingers on today but in an implicit rather than an explicit way.
Yeats (internal link) in Paudeen reasons to understand why people like the poorly educated shopkeeper exist in God’s Universe. The arrogance to even think about why certain people merit life is outrageous. It reminds me of the cartoonish Judge Smails in the movie Caddyshack.
Smails was a caricature of a White Anglo Saxon Protestant or WASP. Upon hearing that his young golf caddy failed to get into college, the good Judge remarked, “Well, the world needs ditch diggers, too.”
Yet, from Yeats condescension a nice poem results.
Yeats wrote a book 0f autobiographical reminisces called “The Stirring of the Bones. ” In it, John Fredrick Nims says that Yeats describes a dream from which he woke to hear a voice saying, “The love of God is infinite for every human soul because every human soul is unique, no other can satisfy the same need in God.”
I wish I could wake up with a quote like that.
Paudeen
by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Indignant at the fumbling wits, the obscure spite
Of our old paudeen in his shop, I stumbled blind
Among the stones and thorn-trees, under morning light;
Until a curlew cried and in the luminous wind
A curlew answered; and suddenly thereupon I thought
That on the lonely height where all are in God’s eye,
There cannot be, confusion of our sound forgot,
A single soul that lacks a sweet crystalline cry.
NightWare™ review. A review of NightWare.™
Transcript delayed due to the death of a friend.
NightWare Review – Part One (internal link)
NightWare Review – Part Three (internal link)
NightWare Review – Part Four (internal link)
NightWare Review – Part Five – Final (internal link)
My first suicide attempt (internal link)
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS
[00:00:06.890]
Hi, this is Thomas Farley. This is my second video on the Night Ware system. I hope hope you’re doing well or at least coping. I wish the best for you.
[00:00:32.670]
There’s so much information. I’m not sure how to present this. I’m just going to go in and pull out what I think are the most important points from my point of view. When I’m working, I am a professional writer and editor. Perhaps I take offense at this material more than I should.
[00:01:01.930]
I got the watch.
[00:01:09.350]
I have an Apple watch already, so I’m familiar with this, but at least several times I stopped the recording of the device and I thought I pressed the stop button, but it continued to run and record and eventually essentially timed out very puzzling. If the wrist strap isn’t tight enough, it will stop recording your heart rate. You’ll get a message saying there’s been no heart rate detected for ten minutes and it will stop and I don’t have the screenshots, but several times at least three or four didn’t work as they should.
[00:02:06.710]
And I wanted it to get right because there’s this initial calibration period that they talk about. I wanted to make sure the watch was working correctly and didn’t know if it was working correctly, and that’s a problem with the tech support not being available at night when us nightmare suffers are up at night, and of course, nothing on the weekend.
[00:02:27.350]
So rather than getting this resolved in real time, it has to wait. And anyway, so the watch seems to be working now correctly. It stops when it should stop, starts when it should stop or start.
[00:02:56.910]
When I was having those events, what I did was started a dream diary. So if something like that went wrong, I noted the time so that I thought we could go back to the charts and correct them. Similarly, when it was sounding off incorrectly, like once I pulled up on the sheets too hard and it marked this thing they call an acceleration when in fact just pulling up the sheets too hard. So I had this idea that I would make all these notes on these false positives.
[00:03:32.430]
Such an ugly phrase, but false positives.
[00:03:35.670]
And then somebody at night where we would go back correct the record so that the algorithm could learn. Because how else can the algorithm learn about an event like pulling up the sheets too hard if that only occurs every five, six days? Similarly, the literature says you can use the restroom, just take a short break, come back and it won’t affect the record. But each time I did a short break, it would sound off. So again noted that in my sleep Vlog because this is the first couple of days and I actually keep a sleep blog for your own records, but there’s nobody at night where that’s going to go back and reconcile this the algorithm is running on its own, which I found out later.
[00:04:35.190]
It’s a lot of stress before I found that out for, like, bathroom behavior. The Apple watch has a gyroscopic function, which you may be aware of, and so it can track movement, get out of the bed, move toward the bathroom and back. So it is probably recording that event as an activity, logging it and then over time, maybe dismissing it. But this initial calibration that I read about apparently finally got an email on this.
[00:05:20.210]
You’ll get no interventions. The initial calibration period lasts one to three nights. After the system collected 1000 samples.
[00:05:32.210]
I thought with such a wide variety of activity possible at night that it would take a long time to dial in. And tech support is saying it actually happens in one to three nights. So problem is, you’re new to the watch. You’re turning it on and off. You may have really ragged sleep like I do.
[00:05:58.190]
And because of that, I was turning the watch off repeatedly when I would get up for a couple of hours, because I have my insomnia.
[00:06:10.010]
Actually, that’s probably not a good idea. Probably keep it on at all times, because what happens is there’s this 30 minutes window when you hit the pillow and between that? Well, actually, when you go to sleep, when it first registers that you’re sleeping, it will provide none of these interventions. None of these tap on the wrist for 30 minutes. You’re on your own for that 30 minutes.
[00:06:35.210]
And some of my worst nightmares hit me as soon as I put my head on the pillow. And there’s nothing to be done about that. Tech support repeatedly claims that an improvement in that area would require FDA approval. I don’t see why that would be such a problem. Perhaps it is what we have is adaptive technology within limitations undisclosed so that it doesn’t adapt, for example, to that 30 minutes window.
[00:07:15.110]
It’s not going to lower it, and it also won’t adapt to if you have anything outside the criteria or the settings of what they deem a nightmare, that is your stress level, measuring your heart rate, your movement in bed, some other factors that I’m still not aware of. If that criteria isn’t reached, then it’s not going to be considered a nightmare. You will not get an alert, you will not get one of their so called interventions. And again, without reconciling your chart with your sleep log, it’s going to be saying, maybe happily, that we provided five interventions when, in fact, they could have been false readings, false alerts.
[00:08:14.210]
But again, the bottom line, nobody is going to reconcile your sleep record with your actual chart.
[00:08:26.910]
What else? Yeah, I thought I was going to flip through some of this, but actually trying to think if there’s anything important, a lot of us have nightmares. That may not be the classic you’re killing somebody or somebody’s killing you, but you just might be having to watch. I don’t know, a loved one being tortured or suffering, and it may go beyond going. I had a nightmare the other night where I had lost my cat in a retail store.
[00:09:07.490]
Fremont is an indoor cat and had a huge store running all over the place. Can’t contain them, can’t collect them. And this goes on and on and you would say, well, so what? It’s a cat. You’re running out of a cat.
[00:09:21.110]
But the anxiety and the stress which just goes on and on is just one of these what I would call stress dreams. And people dismiss them because they don’t have the same level of anxiety that I do. Or maybe they’ve never had a cat on the loose and they can’t find it. It’s lost. You can’t get it back.
[00:09:45.170]
That’s incredibly stressful. It doesn’t have to be chopping up people for me to constitute an extremely difficult to deal with situation. And a lot of this is a background to my sleep. And I’m really bothered by the fact that that stuff. They just keep going.
[00:10:06.290]
Now, at this point, this guy just would probably like to put down praise in which has never worked for me before. One of the few dreams that are actually prescribed for nightmares. I’m sure most of you have used it and know that it really doesn’t work for most people because otherwise VA hospitals would be cleared of PTSD victims in a hurry. But the other thing introducing other medicines. I don’t know how you’re going to tell what’s working or what’s not.
[00:10:42.050]
Maybe three of them can clear up the lower level stuff and the night where system can clean up the more violent stuff. It’s just an experiment right now. I’m going to end the video with those random thoughts, and I hope something helps you. My email is Thomasfarley at Fastmail. Com.
[00:11:02.030]
Thomasfarley at Fastmail. Com. And you’re free to email me and we can commiserate with this. And I’m really hoping for the best for this product. I really hope tonight that you don’t have any nightmares.
[00:11:16.130]
I really hope tonight is a good night for you. And let’s hope that for everybody. So thank you.
I thought the neighborhood in Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” video was in Palm Springs.
Had to be.
Turns out the location was Balboa Heights which is a part of the greater San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles.
The most featured home is an Eichler. That architect I do recognize as Joseph Eichler who in fact populated Palm Springs with many of its best mid-century modern home designs. Do I get a pass?
Eichler’s work was so significant to Palm Springs, and the lust for money so great now among home builders, that “new” Eichler homes are being built today.
I’m not sure how Eichler would feel about that. Or Billie’s video. I feel Eichler and the video are both great.
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Bad Guy by Billie Eilish
White shirt now red, my bloody nose
Sleepin’, you’re on your tippy toes
Creepin’ around like no one knows
Think you’re so criminal
Bruises on both my knees for you
Don’t say thank you or please
I do what I want when I’m wanting to
My soul? So cynical
So you’re a tough guy
Like it really rough guy
Just can’t get enough guy
Chest always so puffed guy
I’m that bad type
Make your mama sad type
Make your girlfriend mad tight
Might seduce your dad type
I’m the bad guy, duh
I’m the bad guy
I like it when you take control
Even if you know that you don’t
Own me, I’ll let you play the role
I’ll be your animal
My mommy likes to sing along with me
But she won’t sing this song
If she reads all the lyrics
She’ll pity the men I know
So you’re a tough guy
Like it really rough guy
Just can’t get enough guy
Chest always so puffed guy
I’m that bad type
Make your mama sad type
Make your girlfriend mad tight
Might seduce your dad type
I’m the bad guy, duh
I’m the bad guy, duh
I’m only good at being bad, bad
I like when you get mad
I guess I’m pretty glad that you’re alone
You said she’s scared of me?
I mean, I don’t see what she sees
But maybe it’s ’cause I’m wearing your cologne
I’m a bad guy
I’m, I’m a bad guy
Bad guy, bad guy
I’m a bad
As a young teenager I practiced a great deal with a slingshot called a Wrist Rocket. They’re still sold today.
After some time I got quite accurate and one day a bird in a tree seemed a natural target.
I hit that bird square in the chest. It let out a painful cry and fluttered away with its injury.
I can still hear that cry and I never shot anything living again.
Lawrence battles against the practice of the time to kill snakes. He fought that urge well but eventually gave in a little. Enough to be disgusted with himself.
As I was with that bird.
Snake
by D. H. Lawrence né David Herbert Lawrence (1885 – 1930)
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough
before me.
He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over
the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused
a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels
of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold
are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink
at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.
And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!
And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.
He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.
And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders,
and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into
that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing
himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.
I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.
I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed
in an undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.
And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.
And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
Read by Tom O’Bedlam
