At Georgia’s kindergarten class this week they’ve been all about Dr. Seuss, in recognition of his birthday. Georgia’s teacher stopped me today when I was picking her up, to let me know that Georgia had been working on a special Seussian project of her own. Namely, writing a letter to Dr. Seuss to tell him that he was dead, and that she loved him.
This was the cover letter. It reads
Cat.and.the.Hat
Sorey Men that I Love
In other words, she’s labelled the hatted figure in the middle as the “Cat in the Hat,” and then written a note direct to his creator reading, “Sorry, man that I love.” She’s sorry because he’s dead, of course.
In the end, she decided not to write “You’re dead,” having reconsidered at the last minute and deciding that it might hurt his feelings. Instead, she writes…
Der Dr. Seuss
I Like Your Books
I Love You
Love, Georgia
Other than noting that “Der” is “Dear,” the rest is self-explanatory.
I wondered what she wanted to do with the letter, now that it was done. Georgia looked at me as though it were entirely obvious. “Bury it, of course,” she said.
So we got out a pair of shovels, dug a hole along the back fence in the back yard, and buried the letter, carefully sealed in an envelope of course.
“Now,” Georgia said, a little wistfully, “he’ll know that he’s dead, but that I love him. And like his books.”
You can’t ask for fairer than that. We should all be so lucky to inspire such devotion in a six year old, two decades after we shuffle off this mortal coil.
Check out this awesome print that Jason Chalker has done for this weekend’s STAPLE! show here in Austin.He’ll have copies at the show, but it’s also available for sale at The Manly Shop.
(via) Hey, remember OK Go’s video for “This Too Shall Pass“? (Which, in addition to kicking off a fascinating discussion about the label’s refusal to allow the band’s videos to be embeddable, despite the huge boon that “viral” marketing has been for the band, was itself one kick ass son and video.)
Well, the band has released another video for the song, this time for the recorded version, and this time out it is embeddable.
Here’s how the official posting describes it:
Directed by James Frost, OK Go and Syyn Labs. Produced by Shirley Moyers. The official video for the recorded version of “This Too Shall Pass” off of the album “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky”. The video was filmed in a two story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The “machine” was designed and built by the band, along with members of Synn Labs ( http://syynlabs.com/ ) over the course of several months.
I’ve switched from Blogger to Wordpress, as I noted a while back, but an unintended consequence is that now the comment feature on the older posts is broken. I’m debating the wisdom of trying to import the old posts into the new format, which would lose all of the old comments but allow new comments to be made. More than likely, though, I’ll just leave the old entries static. Please note that any comments made on older posts will appear to go through, but won’t actually end up updated here on the blog. (I’ve already gotten one or two phantom comments in the last couple of days, which now reside out there in Blogger limbo.)
Thomas Perkins, whose Kid Kthulu pieces I’ve raved about a couple oftimes before, writes to say that he’s posted some more Kid Kthulu-y goodness to his blog.
But that’s not all. For the truly discriminating wardrobe, might I recommend the Kid Kthulu emblem t-shirt?
The video for Butch Walker and the Black Widows’ “Synthesizers,” in which Matthew McConaughey reprises his role as David Wooderson from “Dazed and Confused.” I like it.
The backgrounds for Secret Saturdays are fantastic. Here’s Jay Stephens talking about the look they were going for:
I really wanted a lot of solid blacks and gritty texture to stay on the screen, which is fairly abnormal these days, and I sent the crew a bunch of old Roy Crane scans to emphasize the ‘spotted blacks’. I think we’ve achieved a really nice comic-booky, updated Jonny Quest vibe with these.
Some of Jay Stephens’s character designs for Secret Saturdays. One of the most appealing things about the show is the look of it. You can see the Alex Toth in its DNA, but Jay’s unique style is always apparent. (All images from Jay Stephens’s blog.)
In the end, Cartoon Network picked up the show, now called The Secret Saturdays (though for a while there was a bit of a kerfuffle where the network wanted to call the show The Secret Adventures of Zack Saturday, but thankfully saner heads prevailed). Here’s the text of the original press release:
“THE SECRET SATURDAYS: Jay Stephens has created a new comedy/action series, in which Doc, Drew and Zak Saturday are a family of world-saving adventure scientists called The Secret Saturdays. Living in a hidden base, they are part of a network of scientists who protect against all the hidden and terrifying things in this world. To The Saturdays, ordinary folktales aren’t just legends — they are real-life mysteries and adventures. Traveling from the hot Gobi Desert to the icy Marianas Trench, they explore ancient temples and bottomless caves and tangle with twisted villains like the masked madman V.V. Argost and his half-human/half-giant spider.”
The networks weren’t interested in the funny animal version of CRYPTIDS, but they did express an interest in a version of the idea featuring human characters. Here’s Jay Stephens describing the second version of the pitch.
Now, I love a good adventure cartoon as much as the next guy, and I told them I thought I might be able to rework the pitch. I immediately went for a kind of Hanna-Barbera action show look from the mid-‘60’s… like Mighty Mightor, Space Ghost, Galaxy Trio, and especially Jonny Quest and the Herculoids. I absolutely love the work of Doug Wildey and Alex Toth… great monster drawings! So I drew up a bunch of creature sketches, and reconceived the team as human adventurers. The basic story was the same… our stars were Cryptid-friendly heroes who, instead of solving mysteries like Scooby-Doo, wanted to keep them a secret.
This was the cover letter. It reads
In the end, she decided not to write “You’re dead,” having reconsidered at the last minute and deciding that it might hurt his feelings. Instead, she writes…
