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August 2007 Archive 30 August - The Forest Heaved With Cats  On Patrol in the Forest Preserve We went on a rare four cat catwalk today - Natasha, Leroy, Peake, and Kitten Nutmeg, plus myself and Martha Norbeck-Wallingford, our Director of Planned Giving. Everyone was having a nice time 'til Peake got into Leroy's face, and Leroy got all hissy and laid his ears flat and stuff:  "This is why we can't go on family outings!", I cried. But everyone behaved after that and we all got popsicles. Actually, I find herding cats rather simple. link home 30 August - Off to the Shoot  As mentioned in my previous report on our television project, we were scheduled for more taping on Tuesday - this time at a museum in Virginia, near Dulles Airport. Instead of the busy highway route, I took the back roads through lovely rural Montgomery County Profonde, and we crossed the Potomac on the General Jubal A. Early, the only ferry still in operation on the river: The ferryboat's named after Jubal Anderson Early, the Confederate general who led the 1864 raid on Washington, during which the Battle of Derwood, occasionally mentioned here, took place. The river crossing, White's Ferry, was the place where Lee's army crossed into Maryland during the Antietam campaign of 1862. Early actually forded upriver, at Harper's Ferry, during the raid. Oh! Here's a good old Rebel song from the Civil War, Riding a Raid (streaming MP3), about fording the Potomac. It's sung by Bobby Horton from his album Songs of the C.S.A., Volume 1. More on the actual taping later on. link home 30 August - Updates In reference to our exciting Nelson's Cat Counterfactual, it's come to my attention that there's actually a bit of folklore that Admiral Nelson did have a cat - one Tiddles, for god's sake - at Trafalgar. It turns out to be a hoax fathered by a National Trust (UK) employee named Guy Evans. Shocking to find someone tampering with the historical record... Our old Friend of the Museum, Dr. John Herrera of the famous High Speed Triumph Research Laboratory, Myersville, Maryland, pointed out a detail that I had overlooked in discussing the Greener police shotgun as featured in Hot Fuzz. David A. Cushman, author of the web page I cited, mentioned that he had envisioned several special features that the Greener could perform, including car stopping, wire cutting and - most fascinating - an anti-airship capability. Tragically, the Home Office was not interested. Thinking along those lines, a Greener could be mighty useful in another airship scenario. 26 August - Hot Fuzz  Hot Fuzz, starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost of Shaun of the Dead, received great reviews, but I can't recall that any of them mentioned that the film features the Greener police shotgun. This is, of course, the British shotgun issued to colonial police forces in the 19th and early 20th centuries; it uses the Martini action also used in the Martini-Henry rifle, so familiar to fans of the film Zulu. Here's a larger version of the thrilling screencap pictured above. Oh, yes - Hot Fuzz is a fine film - very exciting and darkly comic. I loved the scene with the Greener police shotgun. link home 25 August - Production Report  Gilmore the Lion in HD I apologize for the delay in reporting on the taping for our television project that took place a week ago. Very interesting, it was, though tiring, and, for my part, quite humiliating. As mentioned previously, our maintenance man Gus Norbeck was tapped for the on-camera interview - my lisp, obesity, wall eye, and complexion problems disqualified me from that role, apparently. Gus insisted on introducing me to the crew as his "personal assistant", and I had to crouch unseen out of camera range and prompt the brute as he stumbled through the damn interview:  Bet you can't spot me in this snap! The taping took place at a large government storage facility in suburban Maryland, and there were many curious sights to ponder between takes, such as:  ... This two-seater trainer version of the Japanese Okha kamikaze aircraft (Kugisho MXY7 K-2 Okha 43B).  Gus was particularly impressed by a training shape, or a "pumpkin" of Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Predictably, he believed it was the actual bomb. I told him that - yes, Nagasaki's ground zero had been rigorously combed for fragments of the bomb - mostly microscopic fragments, at that; and then the bomb was painstakingly restored - lots of model cement used, no doubt. Gus nodded his head, much impressed. Here's an album of snaps I took of some of the other aircraft. ... And here's a brief video of the dramatic dolly shot that reveals good old Gilmore the Lion in his fridge. More taping on Tuesday. link home 24 August - Painful Reply One of my tasks here is to answer the reference requests that come in from time to time. One serial researcher - we'll call him Mr. Spatulate - one serial researcher tends to send in long shopping lists of material he's looking for, necessitating long tedious exhausting searches in the files. I've asked him repeatedly to restrict himself to one or two requests per email, promising him much quicker turnaround with my replies; but Mr. Spatulate continues to send the shopping lists. I work in a bit of research on them as my other duties allow, but they tend to take a good bit of time to complete. So the other day Mr. Spatulate sends me a little email, wondering, in a polite way, where the hell is the response to his current shopping list? I could have told him that if he had actually heeded my helpful advice, he would have had his material weeks before. But that might be rude. So instead, I replied with this: I'm very sorry it's taken so long to respond to your current request, Mr. Spatulate - my convalescence has taken longer than the doctors expected, and it turns out to be a bit trickier and much more painful to operate the photocopier one-handed than I thought it would be. But the good news is that the fainting spells are slowly becoming less frequent, and so I hope to be able to mail the material to you in the next day or two.No reply. Not even flowers, or a little bottle of slivovitz. link home 24 August - Generous Contribution  Contributions to the Janus Museum are always gratefully accepted, and need not be in the form of cash in unmarked, low denomination bills. For example, Friend of the Museum Jelena recently returned from a visit with her family in Serbia and kindly brought back a bottle of her dad's homemade slivovitz - plum brandy. Jelena says that everyone makes slivovitz and other fruit brandies back home - there doesn't seem to be that tiresome question of legality that we have over here. Knjaz Miloš is a brand of Serbian mineral water - the slivovitz was decanted from the family keg and shipped in the Knjaz bottle. And how is Jelena's dad's slivovitz? Excellent - smooth, not harsh, with a real taste of the fruit and a lovely, almost floral bouquet - much better than the storebought stuff available around here. I am even now enjoying a caffè corretto slivovitz.  On the other hand, Maxine was not thrilled by the bouquet, and didn't partake. She has her own preferred beverage. See you at the big Slivovitz Festival? link home 19 August - Nelson's Cat vs. Fokker D.VII  It must be admitted that Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson (1758-1805) was not known to have owned a cat, or to have liked cats, or to have ever actually seen a cat. But one needn't be hampered by mere tiresome verities when considering this fascinating bit of counterfactual history: What would have happened if... ... At the Battle of Trafalgar, Admiral Nelson had been accompanied by a cat, and the French had been armed with Fokker D.VII fighters? The thrilling photograph above sets the scene - Nelson, on the quarterdeck of HMS Victory, has just issued the immortal signal and the battle is about to be joined with Victory engaging Bucentaure and Redoutable. Leroy, the admiral's faithful cat, is calmly playing with a spent round shot. Suddenly, he's on the alert - his preternatural feline hearing has picked up an unfamiliar sound - the roar of the 185 hp BMW IIIa powered Fokker D.VIIs of the French Naval Air Service, diving to the attack! Leroy, thinking quickly, sinks his fangs into Nelson's ankle. The Admiral shrieks with agony and crouches, massaging the injured limb. Rounds from the D.VII's LMG 08/15 "Spandau" machine guns trace the air where only a moment ago, Nelson had been standing. The Fokkers are quickly driven off by the concentrated fire of the Marines' Brown Bess muskets. Smiling, Nelson bends again, this time to caress the heroic cat. "What a good kitty!" he says. Moments later, a lead slug from a musket fired by a sharpshooter on the mizzentop of the Redoutable hits Nelson in the left shoulder and passes through his body, lodging in his spine. Nelson, comforted by his faithful cat, dies several hours later, as shown in this affecting counterfactual painting:  Nelson's last words are "Kiss me, Leroy..." All right, history wouldn't have been very different. But it still makes a thundering good yarn. link home 18 August - Recent Acquisition  We're very pleased to show off a recent generous gift from an anonymous Friend of the Museum - a lead goat, probably a votive offering. Thought to be of Minoan work, or possibly Mycenean. Also not quite ruled out is that it may be of early Byzantine origin, or Proto-Elamite, or Mature Harappan, or maybe even a rare artifact of the Kura-Araxes culture. Actually, we could use a generous grant to help figure out what the heck it is. It's very very nice and it's now on display in the Norbeck-Wallingford Sculpture Gallery. UPDATE - the Votive Goat may also be Etruscan, or Olmec. link home 16 August - TV in the Good Old Days, with Hashish  Miss Molly McMahon Last night while slogging through 300 or so channels on the new Fellow's Lounge television and failing to find anything worth watching - and also contemplating the Museum's bizarre programming effort, I happened to recall a program I watched with friends many years ago, when I was living in Iowa. It was a documentary about baton twirling. It was filmed at what appeared to be a vast youth baton twirling camp where youths were trained in the art of baton twirling. The teacher was at the top of a large wooden watch tower, just like in any prison camp movie you'd care to name, shouting out instruction through a megaphone to the ranks of young twirlers. My friends and I found it absolutely fascinating. It's possible that the hashish we were smoking, and the kosher wine we were drinking may have had something to do with it, but taken on any critical level, it was an excellent program - it was very fine. If I close my eyes and hyperventilate a bit, I can still see the serried ranks of sun-bronzed twirlers, and the wooden watch tower, and hear the loud cry of the twirler instructor. Why can't we have imaginative programs like that nowadays, instead of the inane "Salute to Bebop" that the local PBS affiliate thinks I want to see repeatedly? link home 14 August - Programming Update  There's news on our TV project, mentioned here from time to time as it lurches sporadically forward. The news is that Gus Norbeck, our maintenance man, is to be interviewed on camera on Thursday. Regular readers, if any, may recall that Gus has been represented, in a Monty's Double sort of way, as the author of Animals Aloft. Gus, who usually dresses like a defrocked ratcatcher, had to have a new wardrobe provided him so he won't totally disgrace the Janus Museum. The Total Disgrace won't occur until the camera starts rolling and Gus starts talking. Not that I, the real author, am bitter. No, I'm not bitter; furious is closer to the mark. It occurs to me that I haven't actually gotten around to giving the complete details of the project - I confess that it slipped my mind. My apologies. Oh, there's another TV deal in the works, too. link home 13 August - Bloodbath Averted  Glimpsed briefly during yesterday's catwalk, a cautious fawn. Luckily, the cats didn't notice it, and didn't chase it down and didn't rend it into pieces. I hate it when catwalks become bloodbathwalks. Appearing in a catwalk for the first time:  ... was Kitten Nutmeg, who followed Natasha, Leroy, Martha Norbeck-Wallingford and myself all the way to the Old Footbridge. Natasha was the tiniest bit hissy, but Leroy was jolly accommodating. Then we all came home for pudding pops. link home 11 August - Play it Again, Sanjay  Bollywood director Rajeev Nath is planning to make a remake of Casablanca called Ezham Mudra, which translates as The Seventh Seal, adding an additional layer of cultural dissonance to the project. In this version the Bollywood Bogey helps the Bollywood Bergman, a Tamil separatist, escape from the Sri Lankan authorities. Read more about it here. Other Bollywood homages previously mentioned include China Gate, after Magnificent Seven and Seven Samurai, Body, based on Body Heat and Double Indemnity, and my fave, Tarzan. link home 8 August - Little Cat on the Prairie  On those rare occasions when he can be forced to mow the Museum's lawn, Gus, the Museum's maintenance man, the lazy sod, always leaves a patch of lawn unmown. When called to account, he claims that the patch - about two feet across - is his prairie restoration project. I'd cut it myself, except that we discovered that the cats enjoy hiding in it. Above, Nutmeg's in the middle of the prairie and demonstrates how not to be seen. Get too close to the Cat Prairie when it's occupied, and you risk having your ankle savaged. Unless the fell beast is taking a nap. link home 4 August - Movie Milestone  Cat Leroy with giant squid - production still from Giant Squid vs. Cat The Janus Museum Film Unit's most successful production, Giant Squid vs. Cat has, amazingly, surpassed the 100,000th viewing mark on Youtube. Not all of the 145 reviews have been kind, though. The language in the reviews is uninhibited, and a certain freedom from traditional notions of spelling, punctuation, syntax and grammar is observed. PikoParty had this to say: stop anoying your cat ya butt! all it wanted to do is sit in the chair an take a nap, but noooo you couldn't let THAT happen could you? No you couldent. You had to take your $4 toy squid and video yourself being a butt to it. SHAMEDamuffinman24 didn't care for it either, but had a suggestion: That cat sucks and that's not even a real squid ... at least not a giant one O_o and it should be set to techno musicBy the way, several other reviewers also noticed that it's not a real giant squid - a very perceptive audience. The charmingly nicknamed LavaPimp didn't like the video at all; he also had a suggestion, but of a personal nature, rather than a production tip: wow... ok... so that was 4.04 mins of my life i have just wasted on your pathetic little wank stain of a giant squid v cat movie. it wasn't even a real fxxxxxg squid. you coulda at least put the cats into a full bath with a real giant squid!! shit, that squid wasn't even giant, more like average/fxxxxxg small. even the cats thought that was a stupid fxxxxxg idea!! will you please hurt yourself for me? don't ever come to england...At least he said "please". I added the Xs. I hope that some day LavaPimp will relent and allow me to come to England. Draganvranjes' review was sadly revealing of his own depressing situation: man leave that cat alone...he's like "Oh great here he comes again with the fake rubber squid" I live near an airport...could my life be anymore depressing!...i need a smoke...Gorillazbo's review was positive, but with a twist: so humiliatingly terrible (no offence) it's funny. I give it a 4.... As was brando19nz's: Does anyone else think that this is KINDA like napoleon dynamite humor? Like its really funny but sooooooooooooo [several o's removed for space reasons] oooo stupid?? I think it is hilarious! And I'm not normally a fan of stupid humor!There are 145 comments so far, and, sadly, the video has only two stars out of a possible five. See it for yourself, again or for the very first time, and see what all the buzz is about: I think I need to make a sequel. link home |
