Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

So I’m goofing off, browsing Google Video and come across this silly Bollywood Comedy video… a cute idea, mouthing the words and aping to one of those syrupy Hindu pop songs. Then the comedian throws in an added feature, a strange little finger puppet. Hey, wait a second! That looks like something a friend, puppeteer Hobey Ford, showed me 4 or 5 years ago… a toy that he developed and patented, the Peepers Puppet. Small world, even if you’re not a puppet.

Turns out, it’s a cheating world too. Hobey tells me the peepers in the video are knock-offs, with enlarged pupils… the tell-tale sign of drug using finger puppets from the underworld.

Last month I caught glimpses of early American history in the two part PBS series The War That Made Americanarrated by Graham Greene, an Oneida Indian. The program shows young George Washington, a 22 year old Virginia militia officer leading men west into the uncivilized Ohio country. He is an powerful six foot two inch woodsman, who understands the value in learning wilderness survival skills of the native Americans and forms alliances with Indian leaders in order to defeat the French’s ambitions to possess their share of the new frontier. Washington faces many dangerous battles with the French, Indians and Nature itself west of the Blue Ridge Mountains between 1754 and 1759, accompanied with legendary characters such as Daniel Boone at the Massacre at Monongahela.

Exhilarated to learn more of the dashing young Mr. Washington, I found just the right book, His Excellency: George Washingtonby Joseph J. Ellis. Published in 2004, the author is a scholar of the many Washington biographies and collections of letters, and therefore crafts a character study of George Washington the boy, the young man, and on through his life. The author’s goal is to tell the story of how great leaders such as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison each acknowledged Washington as their unquestioned superior.

In this book I learned George Washington’s father died when he was only eleven years old, and the old tale about “I cannot tell a lie, I chopped down the cherry tree,” is baloney. At 16 he was working at his fist job, on surveying expeditions in the Shenandoah Valley. Out in this country Washington kept a journal of the primitive conditions and sightings of Indians on scalping parties. The story continues to describe numerous encounters and battles where Washington is surrounded by dead and wounded, and miraculously comes out unharmed. By only age 23 his remarkable capacity to endure had marked him as a man of destiny.

“I may point out to the Public that heroic youth Col. Washington, who I cannot hope Providence has hitherto preserved in so signal a Manner for some important Service to his Country.” – Reverend Samuel Davies.

Prophetic, and yet who then could imagine the legacy of our founding father would be inherited by what we have now?

Hey kids, what time is it? If you’re an experienced animation professional, then it’s time to move up as a CG Supervisor all the way to Mumbai, India where the flattened world’s new “baby Pixars” are sprouting up. If you’re really big and smart, you can stay here in the U.S. and recruit someone to do this for you, like Alligator Planet is doing.

Idea merchants producing low cost fresh computer generated feature films are popping up like weeds. Threshold Entertainment with Foodfight! (fall 2006), and IDT Entertainment Yankee Irving (August 2006), who also appears to have bought a piece of Vanguard Animation Happily N’Ever After (fall 2006), Space Chimps (2007) and Ribbit (2008).

The bosses of these studios are lean and mean, reflecting the reality of the working animation professional. A few sample quotes from The Attack of the Baby Pixars article:

“What do we care if a guy is in Van Nuys or India?” says Kasanoff, Threshold Entertainment.

“The studios we deal with are like call centers but with very talented artists. The next Pixar isn’t going to be a big building in Emeryville. It’s going to be groups around the world, networked together.” – Ralph Guggenheim, Alligator Planet

The obvious trend is for less employment opportunities in the United States, especially of the high paying kind unless you start your own venture. Otherwise, better pack your bags and head to the new lands of opportunity: India, South Korea, Australia, Canada or any location where labor costs are cheaper than in the US.

One of my current projects is working with geocoding and problems of graphic expressions and user interfaces on maps. The above example is from the German Yellow pages, and is a fairly wide view of southern Germany with the Alps at the bottom. The second picture is the result after selecting “Services” at the left. A myriad of services appear, which can only be made sense of when zooming closer into a city.

Another map from Topix.net an online chat forum, shows the areas of the country indicating the quantity and recency of their forum activity. This has caught the attention of marketing mavens, who make a study of consumer trends and behavior.

Joining in Robert Scoble’s blog search test getting volunteering bloggers to post the word brrreeeport and see how various blog search engines perform.

Another top blog word is Cheney, because of his tempest in a teakettle hunting mishap. We all know Cheney is tight lipped and private, so this is pretty much a non-story. Bush is probably glad it deflects from the bigger NSA eavesdropping story. Then there’s the distorted uproar over Al Gore apologizing to Saudi Arabians for racial profiling seems to have gotten typically blown out of proportion by the NASCAR heads. People will continue to believe what they want to believe, without doing their own research, so meanwhile let’s get back to what the science of search engines will pick up.

Recently upgraded to Cleaner 6.5 and have enjoyed putting its batch video compression features to work gradually updating and adding to Media Spin’s online QuickTime movies. The most recent addition are an expanded assortment of 3-D animations done awhile back for a science series on The Five Senses.

The animation clips have no audio narrative tracks, so I’ve referred to online research sources such as Wikipedia to fill in some text description for each clip. I’ve had fun adding descriptions such as this one for taste,

“Our sense of taste according to an expert taste researcher, is to decide if food in the mouth should be swallowed or spit out.”

In case you missed the Super Bowl XL commercials, they are posted at Google’s video site. Budweiser sponsored enough ads to assure a couple of winners, and my favorite was the follow-up to the previously aired and beautifully photographed Clydesdale horses lining up for a football scrimmage and being referreed by a zebra. In this one, a shaved sheep bursts on the scene, interupting the game, and two cowpokes comment, “Streaker.” Silly pink lamb animation adds to the fun. Also good was the suburban Bud guys telling their wives they were working on the roof, and then setting up roof top parties. The Burger King “Whopperettes” was great silly fun. A couple of big monster CG ads by FedEx and Hummer were good, but more weird than funny. My worst ad choices are the Pepsi themed ads, especially the Hip Hop one. Really weak. The Cadillac Escalade fashion model runway mix should make anyonewho owns one who isn’t already embarrassed, truly ashamed. I suspect most Escalade owners lack shame anyway.

In the end I felt the luster of the Super Bowl ads had tarnished a bit. Less great ads, more blah blah car and TV promo ads. It looks like the Super Bowl is headed the way of the Miss America pageant, like who cares?

Google Maps Mania, an unofficial Google Maps blog, was recently covered in an NPR news story. The site has many cool links to individual interests based on locations.

A related site, Google Sightseeing, is themed around collecting eye catching satellite photographs.

Yahoo’s new Flash-based maps also have an API that can be accessed and customized, as seen at the Programmable Web blog. Yahoo is also developing a Local Events browser based on their maps, as described by a Yahoo! developer’s blog. Other Yahoo map users linked their videos to locations.