I have hungered for good animation shorts ever since, and will join the hipster-ish cry for more independent pieces, things that reflect individual creators and concepts, instead of a future marketing plan. A short is a lovely way to explore a new art medium like animation and requires good storytelling for it to make it out into the world at large.

Lately, I’ve come across two animation bits that I really like. One old, one new – and both using stop-motion techniques, one of my favorite kinds of animation.

Cheburashka is an adorable “creature unknown to mankind” whose name comes from his tendency to “topple” over. Produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a handful of shorts starring him and his crocodile friend Gena, they get into adventures together that bring out the strange and adorable in Soviet Russia. It is surreal to watch Gena fix a corporation’s big oil leak into a river and Cheburashka pine for the opportunity to be a Pioneer (very similar to American Cub Scouts).

This youtube user has been kind enough to subtitle most of the episodes in English here.

The newer animation short is from a Canadian (yep, lots of animators up there it seems) who has been playing with his toys for a long time. This short in particular makes the anthropomorphization of a popular 1980s toy seamless. The music works well too – I look forward to other non-Transformers shorts from him.

It’s so nice to discover new animation bits. Post more in the comments if you’ve seen some neat ones lately.

Any alarms going off yet? Luckily for these two Russian girls, their friend did suspect something fishy – and even from a road trip through Wyoming, he called upon help at Metafilter to work on preventing what sounded like a textbook case of human trafficking.

The full thread of what happened is here. It’s pretty long, but a breathless read if you have the time. There’s a good summary from Mother Jones magazine, and it may still be unfolding as the authorities did get involved.

It blows my mind that even rational people in reach of good technology, transportation and friends can be lured into this trap. Slavery is more rampant now than it was 300 years ago, it is just couched in more convoluted terms of owing money for room and board, or being “taken care of” instead of being a burden to the family. From wikipedia,

“The organization Anti-Slavery International defines slavery as “forced labour.” By this definition there are approximately 27 million slaves in the world today, more than at any point in history and more than twice as many as all African slaves who survived being taken to the Americas in the Atlantic slave trade.”

It is relieving to see how in this case how many strangers worked together so quickly (over a 24 hour period, practically) to keep these girls from falling into a bad, bad situation. And knowing both what this looks like (job offers fall through, then once the targets arrive in the U.S., a meeting is set for a job that doesn’t seem like something that would need to recruit employees from abroad); and who are some helpful sources (Polaris Project is recommended here) is information I’m glad to pass along.

“Fifty-something Jones was a session soul singer turned Riker’s Island Corrections Officer, until new vintage act the Dap Kings reanimated her career in 2001. With her latest LP of new material, I Learned the Hard Way, just weeks from releasing to what will be very positive reviews, the nine-piece was on fire at SXSW, playing triple and quadruple the number of events of any other band. The 1 a.m. performance was Jones’ third of the day, and she still went at it with more tenacity than any rested indie band. Title track “I Learned the Hard Way” is pure dynamite live, an original, daringly structured track that feels as if it was beamed directly out of the late Sixties. The structure is so tricky the band flubbed one of the transitions — likely a consequence of exhaustion — but recovered gracefully. Up-close, it’s apparent that the Dap-Kings have an entire grammar of eye contact at their disposal. They are the pinnacle of the profession and they simply could not be frazzled as Jones shimmied, cajoled, and howled her way deeper into a late-career renaissance defined by winning over new fans one stunned soul at a time.”

From David Downs review

• Both Sam and I are now employed. I am what you might call under-employed, but it works for now and forces some time organizing skills that are worth developing. Also led to an interview for a better job that I don’t have details on yet.


• The garden has gone through two frosts now, and we’ve pulled out most of the greenery. We have a funny system set up to hopefully ripen the tomatoes: a long pole stretched across a chair with the tomato vines draped across it. The tomatoes dangle down, hopefully turning red with a little more support. I wish I could speed up the process with some ethylene. Unfortunately, it’s not sold retail. For the garden plot, the hope is to switch to a sunnier locale next year, meaning that I need to pull out my herbs and sow a winter cover crop to make this plot more appealing. Luckily, I have extra wheat from my uncle to put down – it looks really attractive when it shoots up around Easter, and puts nitrogen back into the soil.


• Our road trip west was wonderful – and included cutting 21 mohawks! But get this: two of the mohawks turned out to be NEXT DOOR neighbors here in town. It was bizarre to meet 1000 miles away and find out we live so close in real life. It also included learning how to provide a variety of services in a pretty urban environment, including lots of bike repair for Sam, and general bartending for all of our friends. It is a great experience to realize how much we all like to fix things.


• I got to meet four bats up close through a volunteer position at the DBG. Wish I had brought the camera – but they were amazing even without it. A neat fact: only New World bats (microbats) echo-locate, and it makes them look like they’re silently screaming. I very much want a bat detector for Christmas, but understand if you’re not interested in dropping $300-$1800 for a hobby device.


• I’ve been tutoring calculus. It’s a good reminder of how much cooler calculus is than the math sections that come before it, and how much fun it is to share with someone else why we need calculus. I think I must be doing a better job than I expected.


• I have an obsession lately with reading and learning about America’s urban decay. That is to say, I am watching The Wire, reading Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and closely following the corruption and replacement of St. Louis’s police chief. Our current city really doesn’t have urban decay – it’s much too wealthy and restrictive for that kind of thing, but St. Louis has it in spades. I’d like to think that there are people in St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, the Bronx, and other major urban centers who are working to improve the education, opportunities, and lives of people who live in crumbling urban areas. I’d like to get back into more of that at some point, even if the overarching point of The Wire is that the situation is hopeless.


• We had a chance to show around an architect friend from Austin recently. Having visitors is fantastic for discovering the area in a new way – she had very different things she wanted to see compared to other visitors, and with the fall color, it was easy to oblige. This is a hint to those of you who might come visit – we are well outfitted to show you around and put you up.


• I’ll end by offering two interesting links that I think reflect my thoughts on the changing political landscape: a meticulously researched poll website called www.fivethirtyeight.com (referring to the exact number of electoral college votes) that gives some very well researched data on how various national and senate elections may go. The second is Flickr’s partnership with the Library of Congress. The set linked to in particular fascinates me. It is all shots of Americans during the Great Depression and just afterwards, showing the poverty, agriculture, industry and lives of citizens during the last period of serious economic turmoil. Flickr and the Library of Congress are asking individuals to tag the photos with any information you might have – if you can identify people, towns, crops, or other information it allows them to have a better understanding of what the Farm Security Administration was recording.

However, bananas are not an evolutionarily favored plant, for all their benefits. They are clones – which explains the lack of any seeds, and the remarkable uniformity of the ones you see at the grocery store. But in the past, and now again, it means bananas fall easily to any fungus, disease, mite or bacteria that successfully attack a single plant of a banana cultivar. In the 1950s, Big Mike bananas started disappearing due to a fungus traveling easily between plantations. Big Mike bananas are not extinct, but they don’t work in big plantations anymore. How frustrating, then, that our bananas today aren’t as good as back in your grandma’s day. I’m tempted to ask someone of the era what exactly these dream bananas were like…but to be realistic, if someone asked you forty years from your last one what was so great about Pink Lady apples, could you really pin it down?

In the 1950s, the banana companies were forced to realize that they needed a banana replacement for the Big Mike, and they scornfully switched to the “inferior” Cavendish banana you see now. It is more fickle in travel, smaller, less creamy, and generally considered a weak replacement (though consumers, apparently, didn’t mind or didn’t notice the difference slicing it into their cereal). But the Cavendish, as I write, is being attacked by a stronger strain of the same fungus that destroyed most of the Big Mike bananas. And we’re no better at solving the problem. Clones just don’t have the genetic strength of other breeding methods. The best hope currently for keeping our Banana Foster recipes for the next couple generations is to employ transgenic methods to produce a third commercial banana. Wild bananas generally aren’t very appealing, even if hardy, and most bananas eaten by the non-Western World are starchier, closer to a plantain (how many of us would switch happily to a plantain on your peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich?). And regular cross-breeding is next to impossible with seedless fruit. It’ll take a lot of trial plants to find something that we picky consumers barely notice is not a Cavendish, but doesn’t die from fungus or the other diseases currently decimating the crops.

Anyway, it was a really good book. If you don’t feel like reading it, you might want to instead check out the NPR Fresh Air interview the author did, complete with singing a banana jingle and a thoughtful explanation why transgenic bananas aren’t worrisome. The author had many opportunities to try bananas you’ll never see in the US, and confidently picks a favorite: the Lacatan. He claims it is sweet and extra creamy, and is beloved by the locals who have access to it. Again, no fair. I am being told that one of my favorite fruits isn’t even the best of it’s kind, with the two better varieties either gone from the market or only sold in and near the Phillipines. I’ll need to find someone to smuggle a Lacatan to me at some point, so I can tell kids years from now how amazing yet another banana they’ll probably never eat was.

I advise you to check out his other work, found here. Also check out his group, “Bears in Ill-Fitting Hats”.

Since the move, we are subleasing in a rather large apartment building, living 7 blocks from the downtown area. This is really great for walking down to restaurants, bars, groceries, etc. In fact, I’ve found a website that identifies exactly what it is I like about the places I choose to live. It’s called walkscore, and you put in your address to get a rating between 0 and 100 (with 100 being a good thing) of how closely you live to various services. It then produces a map and a list of the nearest grocery, movie theatre, hardware store, bar, dry cleaners, you get the idea. Our current score is 88, and our last place was an 82. Aaaaahhh. Quantifying what were previously unquantifiable qualities is very satisfying for engineers…

However, that’s irrelevant to this story. In our building of about 30 units, there is an open area linking the hall to the laundry room and leasing office. It’s where the mailboxes are, and there’s a bulletin board, useful things like that. The weird part is the “free” bookshelf. A bookshelf in one corner accumulates and dissipates….stuff. Sure, there are lots of very dated books and magazines that seem to stay on the shelf, but we’ve seen lamps, TVs, houseplants, what I assume are doctoral theses, and other bookshelves come and go. Sam grinningly brought home one day one of those plastic sheets that magnify whatever is behind it. (One guess as to the first thing he, and probably any boy, wanted to magnify). I topped that by bringing home a gauzy, pink curtain with screen-printed trees on it in various shades of pink.

But the truly WEIRD item found in the pile sat there for close to a week before finding an anonymous new home. A cabbage. A cabbage bigger than the average adult human head. It was bagged in a plastic grocery sack, unassumingly sitting there. Who buys a cabbage and sadly, finds that it does not meet their needs, leaving it instead in the building-wide free pile? And even more strange, who decides, “AH-HA!! Exactly what I wanted! A giant cabbage! ‘Ask, and ye shall receive!’” I just wish I could find out about the adventures this cabbage embarked upon, and am a little sad I never will.

Take a moment for yourself, and relax.

Some people wrap themselves in a warm blanket, hold a cup of steaming hot cocoa with both hands and relax with a good book propped upon their knee. Others put on a favored movie or record, and allow themselves to take a luxurious nap. Bubble baths and aromatherapy candles may also be included.

I’ve got a new guilty pleasure, one I’ve enjoyed a few times, and will likely become a habit of mine.

I find a quiet place, settle myself down, put on a pair of headphones, blast the glitchiest drum and bass and breakbeats I can get my hands on, and read The Economist. Lately I’ve been happy listening to The Freestylers (particularly their live albums, like Fabric Live 19), and Pendulum’s album True Colours or Live on Breezeblock. But I’ve recently gotten back into some of the new releases by Bassnectar which are incredibly good. His beats are raw, the bass is grinding and the limited vocals are radically leftist. Lorin AKA Bassnectar is from Santa Cruz, CA, which is great, because I fondly remember hearing him spin early on at Moontribe beach parties. These days he’s a very accomplished producer, and is touring like crazy. I chatted with him briefly after his set here in St. Louis a few days ago, and he was a real pleasure. He obviously loves what he does and has a great time doing it. His sets reflect his energy, and are always special.

But remember, this isn’t just an opportunity to bang some beats, its about the reading material too. The Economist is one of my new favorite news rags. It’s a weekly news publication, but is very unique. Nearly every article is written in an editorial fashion, and they don’t hesitate to make value judgments or criticisms. However, they are never unfair, and seem to make a legitimate attempt to have their facts straight. The thing I like about it is the fact that they make their personal and editorial biases clear, and are consistent with them. I believe that all news sources are highly biased, and I become very wary when a news source claims to be “fair and balanced” (a favored phrase by Fox News, which is not fair or balanced). Usually this just means that they are making an attempt to disguise their bias, or mislead you into thinking a certain way.

I think the Economist is actually pretty fair, and well balanced. But not in the smarmy, way, but the real way. Their coverage of international politics is better than any other major news outlet, and their UK base and international editorial departments mean you get real coverage about things happening in “poor” countries that are often ignored by mainstream media.

It’s not a perfect news magazine, but it is significantly better than most, as far as I can tell, and I enjoy reading it. The material is quite heady, and even their advertisements are fun. Instead of shampoo ads, there are job advertisements for things like CFO of the State Bank of Pakistan. Maybe I should apply.

Plus, it makes me feel smart. I’m reminded of the Simpson’s quote when Homer is on an airplane and manages to get into first class, he finds an Economist and says, “Look at meee. I’m reading the Economist! Did you know that Indonesia is at a crossroads?” Apparently intentionally, the next issue of the Economist had an article entitled, “Investing in Indonesia, at a crossroads”.