I find that sad, rather than adorable. Don’t you think he’s missing his mom? But he’s lucky. The dog is the adorable one, and deserves a medal for good-humored surrogation.
“Adorable” puts me in mind of what the Germans call “dancing mice”, which can be bought at pet stores. I still remember my anger when I saw one. It was twisting and turning in a strange way. Turns out this is due to a genetic defect which affects the vestibular system, condemning the mouse to perpetual dizziness. These mice are especially bred to inherit the defect. They don’t dance, they agonize. I can’t understand how people can misinterpet something so obviously dysfunctional about the animal’s behavior.
No. Momma cats are very pragmatic about when it’s time for their offspring to leave the nest. One day it’s milk and purr and tongue-wash, and the next day it’s “go out and get your own mouse”.
They’re both terminally cute; jamesal and codfish are lucky the critters let them stay in their house.
Yes, the mother who dropped him in the middle of the road, I think he is missing her. You think it would have been less sad had he been left on that road? No? Then unless you plan on chipping in for food and shots and litter (not to mention cleaning up his shit), I think I’ll interpret the poignancy of his snuggling up to my dog however the fuck I please.
The dog… deserves a medal for good-humored surrogation.
In other words: it is what it is, and for the kitten it’s pretty damn good. No point in saccharine anthropomorphizing; as far as we know, it’s cozy as shit in Champ’s folds. Muntz might not be missing a thing.
I’ll interpret the poignancy of his snuggling up to my dog however the fuck I please.
Ok, so I award you a medal too already. Sheesh, talk about touchy! In what I wrote, there’s not a word of criticism about you or Muntz’s road-mom, or anybody else. All I said is “I find that sad, rather than adorable.” I’ve tried for several minutes to imagine how one could find offense in that, but had to give up. Being grumbly, I respond more to “sad” than to “adorable”.
“Muntz might not be missing a thing”. I agree, because of the dog. Remember “I don’t want to miss a thing” by Arrowsmith? It’s the only reason I’ve watched Armageddon several times.
People think it’s as harmless as configuring the user preferences in a piece of software. I suppose they believe that sexual drive is not necessary for a happy life. At 60, I find a certain bitter plausibility in that. But it wouldn’t help to get fixed now, because it’s all in my head. You have to catch ’em when they’re young, before the hormones are replaced by habits.
The clip is sweet and sad, but in those household cartoons the graphic artist always makes the housewife’s lower half as sexy as possible. No face, but lots of leg. That was the message to cartoon-watching youth à cette époque anti-Levinasienne.
I do feel very torn over “fixing” an animal but we have a kitten problem in our neighborhood–to many unneutered animals is not a good thing. So, being that I believe that keeping a cat cooped up indoors does not lead to a happy life, Muntz will be fixed. And yes, before puberty.
Not a perfect world. If I could give Muntz “the bird’s and the bees talk” and a few condoms, I would.
Of course that’s what you mean. Very humanitarian. What better opportunity, after all, than when the fixees are least expecting it? In movies, the helper-person always distracts the person with a dislocated shoulder, then suddenly wrenches it into place.
I saw Jack Nicholson or Bill Murray do that recently, for a young girl who had just escaped from an attack by a rapist.
Richard Gere can play Kron–no, maybe someone more talkative. Maybe Gere should do Noetica. Johnny Depp for AJP? And JE, now that’s a hard one to cast. Grumbly is Todd Rundgren of course.
I’d be delighted to be played by J. Depp, though Woody Allen is more likely. What about the Irish guy for LH? Liam Neeson? I see Billy Bob Thornton as Emerson. If you don’t like Jack Nicholson (who wouldn’t want Jack Nicholson to play them?), how about Cate Blanchett — though I didn’t like her as Bob Dylan, no matter how ‘clever’ it was?
Russians often don’t “fix” their animals, insisting that “natural” is the way to go. But… it’s not really natural. They don’t have an outlet for all those wild feelings they get. So the dog across the street howls all night. And the cat of a friend attacks pencils. They’re miserable and they make everyone around them doubly miserable.
As much as I anthropomorphize animals, in actual fact they don’t have very good memories. They don’t lie around, ruing their lost youth, wishing they could go back to those good old days when they still had it. They just forget about it.
So don’t worry about Muntz. He’ll just be safer and happier.
For several years I haven’t listened to music much. I’d never heard of Todd Rundgren. I just listened to the instrumental excerpts on his “official site” – about ten times. That is definitely the guy to play me. You got it exactly right, Nijma.
There is a clip with other, more croony stuff of his from the 90’s here. It’s ok, but not like the hypnotic buzz groove on his site.
I think we’d better start fixing people too, while we’re at it.
Wasn’t it Mrs Gandhi, the one who got fixed by her own bodyguards, who thought like you do? (In Mistry’s A Fine Balance this is very well narrated — a forced fixing.)
Impressive clip of her as Dylan, from the acting skill standpoint at least–I like the complexity of the characters you’re assigning to play me, although the gender ambiguity isn’t me at all. I’ve seen LH as Indiana Jones from the very beginning–an academic veneer over something less conventional, but a romantic lead rather than a character actor, for sure, as is AJP.
Sig would be Peter Sellers, or maybe Marlon Brando?
And m-l is another tough one. Liz Taylor or Kathryn Hepburn would have had the stage presence for that kind of focus, but whether they could play an academic….and for some reason Laurie Metcalf comes to mind. Did Dorothy Sayers’ character Harriet Vane ever get played by anybody?
Did you notice the surreal detail of the vacuum cleaner hose and the dress?
I believe that the guys who made these classic Warner Bros cartoons were aiming to amuse themselves and each other more than anyone else. They unavoidably sent powerful messages to impressionable youth, but messages that were shaped by the personalities and (lack of?) experience of a roomful of barely adolescent misfits, as opposed to, for example, being shaped by the cynical rulers of a media empire. Also, the cartoons were intended for movie theaters, where presumably the audience was more mixed-ages. Only later did they become TV fodder.
About keeping the housewife’s face out of sight, I see that not as “the lower half is the sexy part” but rather as a dramatic necessity, somehow akin to the need to keep parents out of the story in children’s adventure tales so that the kids can be the main characters. In the Peanuts TV specials, adults are never seen but occasionally heard offstage in a sort of muffled quacking.
If you want to look at the portrayal of sexy females in Looney Tunes, the more common type is exemplified by Bugs Bunny in drag luring Elmer Fudd into shooting Daffy Duck, or a mechanical female designed to distract an enemy, or the cat pursued by the amorous skunk — female attractiveness as intoxicant.
Not sure how relevant any of this is to Grumbly’s point, if only because I don’t know what “Levinasienne” means.
BTW, I discovered LH as the result of a Google search for the phrase “pronoun trouble” from another classic Looney Tunes.
Tim Robbins as Language Hat
m-l = Charlotte Rampling
jamessal = Robert De Niro
jim as a boy = Spike Lee
Codfish = Jamie Oliver
dearieme = Ronnie Corbett
Stuart (NZ) = Sam Neill
Young Sig = Peter Sellers
Sig, later, upriver: Marlon Brando
Conrad Roth = Paris Hilton
John Emerson = W.C. Fields
David Marjanović = Macaulay Calkin
Mollymooly = Colin Farrell
Des = Michael Palin
Sili = Max von Sydow
John Cowan = Sylvester Stallone
read = Meryl Streep
Bill Walderman = James Earl Jones
Mark Liberman = Linda Hunt
Noetica = James Mason
MMcM = Diana Rigg
mab = Julie Christie
bathrobe = Sean Connery
Athel Cornish-Bowden = Stephen Fry
Michael Farris = John Travolta
Clodhopper = Benny Hill
Arnold Zwicky = Charles Hawtrey
nafahthi = Dr Carl Sagan
Siganus Sutor = Marlon Brando
Nijma = Vanessa Redgrave
Stuart (Grumbly) = Todd Rundgren
Bulbul = Javier Bardem
Bruessel = David Suchet
Vanya = Brad Pitt
Snow Leopard = Dustin Hoffman
Rootless Cosmo = Raymond Burr
Thegrowlingwolf = Al Pacino
AJP Crown = Laurence Fishburne
Jamessal and Robin — what kind of dog is Champ? (Other than sweet natured and adorable…)
Great photos. Does everyone who frequents this blog shoot fabulous pictures? Is there a photo test before Mr Crown lets you post?
Well, I’d send you some dacha shots — was just out catching the late afternoon light — but 1) I can’t figure out how to make the photos small in my version of photoshop and 2) I don’t know how to post them in my comments. Tutorials are required.
Vanessa Redgrave would have the gravitas to do m-l; you would need a femme fatale.
What about Codfish? For sure not Julia Child, although I always liked the way she seemed to be sampling the cooking wine. Mae West? …to play opposite Robert De Niro’s jamessal? Hey, you changed it, that one was too funny.
I don’t even know who is Charlotte Rampling, besides I’m not a good judge of these things. But I was thinking more vampish than nude. Eyes. Mystery.
Since we’re on Dr. Zhivago, maybe Omar Sharif for Bulbul? And for Lameen, Shakira?
Bill Murray, though, that’s all wrong for Hat. Too slapstick, too smirky. I envision someone with more style but incorporating an element of grunge. Sean Connery?
Well, have you heard of “Neuticles”? Or did I actually hear of them myself somehow following a trail from here…? http://www.neuticles.com/
No. I don’t MEAN to be spam. But I admit this website made me laugh a lot, and not the parts that are meant to be funny…
Such rubber balls have been available for humans a good deal longer than for dogs and cats, so I wonder why the idea of Neuticles was judged patent-worthy.
(I know because I once came within an ace of losing a testicle. It was thought to be cancerous, but when the surgeon got in there he found that it was not. Very pleasant surprise to wake up and learn that I still had two. The plan was not to replace the bad one with a fake one, but that option had been offered.)
I once knew someone who would show potential new girlfriends his fake testicle in a moment of passion. What’s the point of getting something that no one will notice, then calling attention to it.
A Bad Guide
The Muntz, as you can see, is thriving. He’s three pounds. And in love with the dog.
Great pictures with the dog in the background. Is she a female?
He’s gorgeous as ever. Utterly adorable how he lies with the dog.
Thank you.
Is she a female?
Oh no, they’re both male. In fact, we should probably get Muntz fixed in a month or so.
Utterly adorable how he lies with the dog.
You have no idea. He snuggles him tenaciously, forcing his cute kitten head into the folds of skin around the dog’s neck. We’re hoping for a picture.
I find that sad, rather than adorable. Don’t you think he’s missing his mom? But he’s lucky. The dog is the adorable one, and deserves a medal for good-humored surrogation.
“Adorable” puts me in mind of what the Germans call “dancing mice”, which can be bought at pet stores. I still remember my anger when I saw one. It was twisting and turning in a strange way. Turns out this is due to a genetic defect which affects the vestibular system, condemning the mouse to perpetual dizziness. These mice are especially bred to inherit the defect. They don’t dance, they agonize. I can’t understand how people can misinterpet something so obviously dysfunctional about the animal’s behavior.
Don’t you think he’s missing his mom?
No. Momma cats are very pragmatic about when it’s time for their offspring to leave the nest. One day it’s milk and purr and tongue-wash, and the next day it’s “go out and get your own mouse”.
They’re both terminally cute; jamesal and codfish are lucky the critters let them stay in their house.
Don’t you think he’s missing his mom?
Yes, the mother who dropped him in the middle of the road, I think he is missing her. You think it would have been less sad had he been left on that road? No? Then unless you plan on chipping in for food and shots and litter (not to mention cleaning up his shit), I think I’ll interpret the poignancy of his snuggling up to my dog however the fuck I please.
The dog… deserves a medal for good-humored surrogation.
On that, we agree.
In other words: it is what it is, and for the kitten it’s pretty damn good. No point in saccharine anthropomorphizing; as far as we know, it’s cozy as shit in Champ’s folds. Muntz might not be missing a thing.
Ok, so I award you a medal too already. Sheesh, talk about touchy! In what I wrote, there’s not a word of criticism about you or Muntz’s road-mom, or anybody else. All I said is “I find that sad, rather than adorable.” I’ve tried for several minutes to imagine how one could find offense in that, but had to give up. Being grumbly, I respond more to “sad” than to “adorable”.
“Muntz might not be missing a thing”. I agree, because of the dog. Remember “I don’t want to miss a thing” by Arrowsmith? It’s the only reason I’ve watched Armageddon several times.
I can’t understand how people can misinterpet something so obviously dysfunctional about the animal’s behavior.
I thought that applied to me. But whatever. If I didn’t know you could shrug off a good fuck I wouldn’t have written it. You know I’m a fan.
Only the “fuck” should have been italicized.
I would never shrug off a good fuck. They’re too few and far between, nowadays.
I can’t understand how people can misinterpet something so obviously dysfunctional about the animal’s behavior.
I guess the definite article should have tipped me off. Sorry.
“I wouldn’t want you to miss a thing” reminds me of Lou Reed.
Muntz’s mom was a filthy whore.
(Figured, if these comments were already full of foul language, I’d go ahead and contribute.)
Classic 7-minute animated film featuring that same kind of cuteness, with sad bits, too:
http://www.220.ro/xei0GlSRHX/Looney-Tunes-Feed-The-Kitty
In fact, we should probably get Muntz fixed in a month or so
Fixed? Is there something wrong with him? It sounds like fixing a car, or a computer.
People think it’s as harmless as configuring the user preferences in a piece of software. I suppose they believe that sexual drive is not necessary for a happy life. At 60, I find a certain bitter plausibility in that. But it wouldn’t help to get fixed now, because it’s all in my head. You have to catch ’em when they’re young, before the hormones are replaced by habits.
The clip is sweet and sad, but in those household cartoons the graphic artist always makes the housewife’s lower half as sexy as possible. No face, but lots of leg. That was the message to cartoon-watching youth à cette époque anti-Levinasienne.
Off the charts on the cute-o-meter.
I do feel very torn over “fixing” an animal but we have a kitten problem in our neighborhood–to many unneutered animals is not a good thing. So, being that I believe that keeping a cat cooped up indoors does not lead to a happy life, Muntz will be fixed. And yes, before puberty.
Not a perfect world. If I could give Muntz “the bird’s and the bees talk” and a few condoms, I would.
I think we’d better start fixing people too, while we’re at it. ‘At it’ — is that what I mean?
Of course that’s what you mean. Very humanitarian. What better opportunity, after all, than when the fixees are least expecting it? In movies, the helper-person always distracts the person with a dislocated shoulder, then suddenly wrenches it into place.
I saw Jack Nicholson or Bill Murray do that recently, for a young girl who had just escaped from an attack by a rapist.
AJP is going to get Jack Nicholson to play me in “Languagehat, the movie”. I’m still trying to figure out how I really feel about that.
I’ve always thought Hat was miscast as himself. Harrison Ford should play him.
Richard Gere can play Kron–no, maybe someone more talkative. Maybe Gere should do Noetica. Johnny Depp for AJP? And JE, now that’s a hard one to cast. Grumbly is Todd Rundgren of course.
I’d be delighted to be played by J. Depp, though Woody Allen is more likely. What about the Irish guy for LH? Liam Neeson? I see Billy Bob Thornton as Emerson. If you don’t like Jack Nicholson (who wouldn’t want Jack Nicholson to play them?), how about Cate Blanchett — though I didn’t like her as Bob Dylan, no matter how ‘clever’ it was?
Russians often don’t “fix” their animals, insisting that “natural” is the way to go. But… it’s not really natural. They don’t have an outlet for all those wild feelings they get. So the dog across the street howls all night. And the cat of a friend attacks pencils. They’re miserable and they make everyone around them doubly miserable.
As much as I anthropomorphize animals, in actual fact they don’t have very good memories. They don’t lie around, ruing their lost youth, wishing they could go back to those good old days when they still had it. They just forget about it.
So don’t worry about Muntz. He’ll just be safer and happier.
For several years I haven’t listened to music much. I’d never heard of Todd Rundgren. I just listened to the instrumental excerpts on his “official site” – about ten times. That is definitely the guy to play me. You got it exactly right, Nijma.
There is a clip with other, more croony stuff of his from the 90’s here. It’s ok, but not like the hypnotic buzz groove on his site.
Have you considered a vasectomy instead of out-and-out neutering?
I think we’d better start fixing people too, while we’re at it.
Wasn’t it Mrs Gandhi, the one who got fixed by her own bodyguards, who thought like you do? (In Mistry’s A Fine Balance this is very well narrated — a forced fixing.)
Impressive clip of her as Dylan, from the acting skill standpoint at least–I like the complexity of the characters you’re assigning to play me, although the gender ambiguity isn’t me at all. I’ve seen LH as Indiana Jones from the very beginning–an academic veneer over something less conventional, but a romantic lead rather than a character actor, for sure, as is AJP.
Sig would be Peter Sellers, or maybe Marlon Brando?
And m-l is another tough one. Liz Taylor or Kathryn Hepburn would have had the stage presence for that kind of focus, but whether they could play an academic….and for some reason Laurie Metcalf comes to mind. Did Dorothy Sayers’ character Harriet Vane ever get played by anybody?
Harriet Vane was played by Harriet Walter in a BBC production. I liked the casting, but they took terrible liberties with the plot of “Gaudy Night”.
Meryl Streep for m-l?
Did you notice the surreal detail of the vacuum cleaner hose and the dress?
I believe that the guys who made these classic Warner Bros cartoons were aiming to amuse themselves and each other more than anyone else. They unavoidably sent powerful messages to impressionable youth, but messages that were shaped by the personalities and (lack of?) experience of a roomful of barely adolescent misfits, as opposed to, for example, being shaped by the cynical rulers of a media empire. Also, the cartoons were intended for movie theaters, where presumably the audience was more mixed-ages. Only later did they become TV fodder.
About keeping the housewife’s face out of sight, I see that not as “the lower half is the sexy part” but rather as a dramatic necessity, somehow akin to the need to keep parents out of the story in children’s adventure tales so that the kids can be the main characters. In the Peanuts TV specials, adults are never seen but occasionally heard offstage in a sort of muffled quacking.
If you want to look at the portrayal of sexy females in Looney Tunes, the more common type is exemplified by Bugs Bunny in drag luring Elmer Fudd into shooting Daffy Duck, or a mechanical female designed to distract an enemy, or the cat pursued by the amorous skunk — female attractiveness as intoxicant.
Not sure how relevant any of this is to Grumbly’s point, if only because I don’t know what “Levinasienne” means.
BTW, I discovered LH as the result of a Google search for the phrase “pronoun trouble” from another classic Looney Tunes.
Tim Robbins as Language Hat
m-l = Charlotte Rampling
jamessal = Robert De Niro
jim as a boy = Spike Lee
Codfish = Jamie Oliver
dearieme = Ronnie Corbett
Stuart (NZ) = Sam Neill
Young Sig = Peter Sellers
Sig, later, upriver: Marlon Brando
Conrad Roth = Paris Hilton
John Emerson = W.C. Fields
David Marjanović = Macaulay Calkin
Mollymooly = Colin Farrell
Des = Michael Palin
Sili = Max von Sydow
John Cowan = Sylvester Stallone
read = Meryl Streep
Bill Walderman = James Earl Jones
Mark Liberman = Linda Hunt
Noetica = James Mason
MMcM = Diana Rigg
mab = Julie Christie
bathrobe = Sean Connery
Athel Cornish-Bowden = Stephen Fry
Michael Farris = John Travolta
Clodhopper = Benny Hill
Arnold Zwicky = Charles Hawtrey
nafahthi = Dr Carl Sagan
Siganus Sutor = Marlon Brando
Nijma = Vanessa Redgrave
Stuart (Grumbly) = Todd Rundgren
Bulbul = Javier Bardem
Bruessel = David Suchet
Vanya = Brad Pitt
Snow Leopard = Dustin Hoffman
Rootless Cosmo = Raymond Burr
Thegrowlingwolf = Al Pacino
AJP Crown = Laurence Fishburne
Jamessal and Robin — what kind of dog is Champ? (Other than sweet natured and adorable…)
Great photos. Does everyone who frequents this blog shoot fabulous pictures? Is there a photo test before Mr Crown lets you post?
No. I’d love to post a Russian picture.
John Travolta for Crown? Or am I way off?
I’ve been looking for a role for John Travolta. Naturally I didn’t think of myself, though I did think of you.
Julie Christie for me? Don’t I wish. You’ve been led down the David Lean Dr Zhivago path, haven’t you?
Well, I’d send you some dacha shots — was just out catching the late afternoon light — but 1) I can’t figure out how to make the photos small in my version of photoshop and 2) I don’t know how to post them in my comments. Tutorials are required.
In photoshop: IMAGE > Image size > make the image about 25 cm width and 72 dpi
Save as a jpeg image, (quality: 12)
You can’t post images in the comments. If you have them online somewhere, you can link to them. Otherwise you would have to email them to AJP.
W.C. Fields as Emerson, that was inspired.
Vanessa Redgrave would have the gravitas to do m-l; you would need a femme fatale.
What about Codfish? For sure not Julia Child, although I always liked the way she seemed to be sampling the cooking wine. Mae West? …to play opposite Robert De Niro’s jamessal? Hey, you changed it, that one was too funny.
Here’s International Feel from Todd Rundgren
Me? No.
Oh, ok. That makes sense.
You don’t think Charlotte Rampling can do femme fatale? Charlotte Rampling?
I don’t even know who is Charlotte Rampling, besides I’m not a good judge of these things. But I was thinking more vampish than nude. Eyes. Mystery.
Since we’re on Dr. Zhivago, maybe Omar Sharif for Bulbul? And for Lameen, Shakira?
Bill Murray, though, that’s all wrong for Hat. Too slapstick, too smirky. I envision someone with more style but incorporating an element of grunge. Sean Connery?
I meant to say that the creators were barely past adolescence, not barely adolescent.
Well, have you heard of “Neuticles”? Or did I actually hear of them myself somehow following a trail from here…?
http://www.neuticles.com/
No. I don’t MEAN to be spam. But I admit this website made me laugh a lot, and not the parts that are meant to be funny…
Such rubber balls have been available for humans a good deal longer than for dogs and cats, so I wonder why the idea of Neuticles was judged patent-worthy.
(I know because I once came within an ace of losing a testicle. It was thought to be cancerous, but when the surgeon got in there he found that it was not. Very pleasant surprise to wake up and learn that I still had two. The plan was not to replace the bad one with a fake one, but that option had been offered.)
I once knew someone who would show potential new girlfriends his fake testicle in a moment of passion. What’s the point of getting something that no one will notice, then calling attention to it.
This is the first time Grumbly has ever said anything nice about me. Thank you so much, Grumbly.
Todd Rundgren kind of effects people that way sometimes.