Wednesday, July 31, 2002
Fascinating - an article that details a 1973 Disney-produced educational film on venereal disease. No clips, unfortunately. Via Consumptive.
Tuesday, July 30, 2002
Old-ish, but so what - a comprehensive page of over 130 Hostess superhero comic book ads. Because nothing satisfies after a long day of crime fighting like Hostess Twinkies, Cupcakes and Fruit Pies. You get a big delight in every bite!
Sarah pointed me to these Alexander Girard tees (1, 2, 3, 4) which are similar to the pricey pillows I lusted after last year. Neat stuff from the same site, Reprodepot Fabrics: Ghost World fabric dolls, big-eyed dancing kids switchplate, Dia De Los Muertos fabric, a kit for making a Howard Finster-esque Mermaid Angel, etc.
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Tom Shales is pissed about the state of music today, and one show is to blame! I've never seen American Idol, but Shales pretty much crystallizes the show's non-appeal with me.
I also enjoyed this article about the tough times reality show participants face when they find out they're not celebrities, just regular shmucks with extreme delusions of grandeur.
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Monday, July 29, 2002
 Lovely photos of Disneyland taken by Mena of Dollar Short. I haven't been there since 1995 1996, and those pics make me wanna go back so bad. I miss the whale and that giant tree in the Tiki Room courtyard. Waaah.
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Stressed out at work lately, and it shows in my lack of posts to this page. Sorry. The only relief in today's hellish workday was this, found thru yip-yop's page. It's cute. Insidiously cute. Slowly seep into your bloodstream until dizzy spells turn into vomitous death spasms on the floor cute.
Sunday, July 28, 2002
Cool DVD We Just Saw: The Young Girls of Rochefort, a French musical from 1967. Christopher hated this movie, I loved it. How much you enjoy it depends on your tolerance for unyielding optimism, a-line dresses, bright, sunny colors and the constant sight of extras prancing down the street as if auditioning for a Bob Fosse production. The director and star - Jacques Demy and beautiful Catherine Deneuve - previously collaborated on another musical. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was a darker, more barouque (and, frankly, better) film that's been hailed as a classic. This one, a lighthearted throwback to MGM musicals, lies halfway between homage and parody. The story is hokey and some of the dubbing is atrocious (particularly Gene Kelly's) - and Deneuve's makeup gives her a creepy, doll-like appearance. Still, it's easy to lose oneself in the kaleidoscopic visuals and sounds: costumes, sets, photography, and Michael Legrand's wonderfully kitschy songs are all excellent. Watching it brought to mind when I first saw Funny Face as a teen, blown away by the sheer fabulousness of it all.
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Saturday, July 27, 2002
Happy Birthday to Christopher! What did I give him -- a copper watering can from Restoration Hardware, a set of stationary and an address book with Charles and Ray Eames designs, and this book about Ruth Harriet Louise, the first female portrait photographer in the movie business (she worked at MGM in the '20s). We spent the day going antiquing and trying to forget the lady who was looking intently at the Princess Diana teacup and the baby dolls dressed as "Wizard of Oz" characters -- while an employee was telling her about how Marie Osmond is employing different artisians now, and consequently her dolls no longer have a consistent look. We also had lunch at Carlos O'Briens, the world's only cavernous disco-turned Mexican restaurant with Irish decor.
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Friday, July 26, 2002
Jordan Isip - beautifully bleak images from one of my fave illustrators. Hearty thanks to Mr. Aabb for finding this.
 Behind the Typeface: Cooper Black. Just when we're getting sick of Behind the Music parodies comes this funny Flash movie via Metafilter. Good history, too, if a bit dodgy -- Pet Sounds revived Cooper Black? Nah. What about the famous Levy's "You Don't Have To Be Jewish" ads, created six years earlier (seen at the bottom of this page)?
Next deserved subject: Avant Garde, the Leif Garret of fonts.
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Wednesday, July 24, 2002
Two good articles in Slate - Afrodisiacs on CD, written by Bill "Smoove B" Barol, rates those cheesy "as seen on TV" CD collections on their libido arousing abilities. Interior Anti-Design is a provocative, sometimes bitchy slide show of current trends in industrial design. Enjoyable, both!
Me me me! New Homes Arizona is a section I design for the paper every month. Don't mind the articles, unless the thought of cookie-cutter housing developments carved into the desert turns you on.
A side note: the photo seen with this article is one of the most blatant examples of Photoshop trickery I've ever encountered. Not only is the boat artificially grafted onto the water ("We can't show a placid lake, our residents have an active lifestyle!"), but a little girl is grafted into the boat ("No creepy, solitary men, we're a family community!").
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Something I've never seen 'til now: Little Lit is a series of comic books for kids edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly of RAW fame. The Hungry Horse by Kaz is a delightful sample.
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Tuesday, July 23, 2002
Neat - Action Comics No.1 (via Daypop Top 40). The whole thing. I love the back cover ad. Interesting to note that the Superman saga takes up only the first thirteen pages. The rest is devoted to various other characters who didn't quite resonate as well -- whatever happened to Zatara, Master Magician?
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Monday, July 22, 2002
An L.A. Times article (via TV Tattle) tells of how movie lovers are deserting the AMC channel and switching over to Turner Classic Movies. Good. I hope their ratings go down. Meanwhile, I'll be glued to TCM's Joan Crawford film festival next month, including a new documentary that premiers on the 1st. Backless bias-cut gown lovers, unite!
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Thirty Minutes With A Surly Harrison Ford - a funny glimpse into "roundtable" movie press junkets. Although, to be fair, you can't fault Harrison Ford for an industrywide publicity machine that favors fluffy soundbites over anything of substance, supplying ill-prepared reporters who ask dumb questions with steady jobs.
 On a related note, how often do you see publicity interview videos for movies with an actor yapping away in front of a movie poster, lit with a key light for emphasis? What is the point, does it really help having the poster in the backgound? We watched the Beautiful Mind DVD last night, and the publicity interviews with Ron Howard were ... interesting. I always ignore the talking heads and pay attention to the backgrounds, anyway. Ron Howard's backdrop was nicely lit, with an attention to detail that's usually missing from this stuff. A desk had "A Beautiful Mind" artfully displayed in 3-D letters on top, with a houseplant and a bookshelf off to the left. Fine and good, but the bookshelf had several bound Readers Digest Condensed Books on it. Oh sure, you couldn't tell what they were in the video clips, but I could recognize those ubiquitous thick bindings with rectangles of color anywhere. It's the kind of ersatz literature that even thrift stores can't give away. Real classy, guys!
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The New York Times magazine has a nifty profile of Marc Shaiman, composer behind the brilliantly subversive songs in South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut (I especially liked "Up There," a parody of that special breed of craptastic, uplifting "I have a dream" Disney swill which often winds up winning Oscars). I am so jazzed that he has a musical version of Hairspray coming to Broadway.
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Saturday, July 20, 2002
Game Shows '75 - this brings back to whenever I was home sick as a kid, I'd happily lie on the couch with blankets and a big bottle of 7-UP (my mom thought 7-UP cured everything) and watch all the morning game shows. Obsessively detailed sites like this are what the www is for. Pretty much a rundown of every game show of that year, complete with such trivia as whether a home version was available and if they'll ever be repeated again (it's astonishing how many of these shows were trashed - literally - by the networks after their runs completed!). Why did he pick that year? Probably because there were simply a lot of shows running in '75: old stalwarts, goofy one-shots, and future classics.
Sobering thought: in July 1975, the three networks had at least fifteen game shows on their daytime schedules. In July 2002, there's only one.
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Friday, July 19, 2002
The snarky, faux-hip 100 Albums You Should Remove from Your Collection Immediately isn't so notable as the amount of passionate discussion it inspired at Plastic.com. Whoa, people, it's just somebody's opinion there.
For the record, I own twelve of the 100. Three of them I genuinely love (#s 13, 25, and 50). The other nine are either pleasantly overrated music collection staples or noble failures like Sinead O'Connor's Am I Not Your Girl. The listmaker's comments are silly, sure, but he does have insight into the kinds of albums that everybody buys but doesn't listen to anymore (or wants to get rid of).
Thursday, July 18, 2002
I could so relate to this funny local restaurant review, which springboards into a critique of the lunching scene in downtown Phoenix and the pains of cubicle life in general. In fact, the first time I saw this piece I was eating in one of the restaurants she mentions (the Downtown Deli). The place she's reviewing is one I never tried, although I used to frequent its predecessor in that spot about once a month. It had strictly OK salads and sandwiches - usually served by a cute waiter. Yes, isn't being catered to hand and foot by a total hunk what it's really all about?
The article touches on the fate of the Professional Building, a gorgeous old grey concrete skyscraper with Moderne touches in the lobby and outside. That austere structure is my favorite around here, but it's stood empty for as long as I remember. Plans will have it renovated into a hotel and retail space. Joy.
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Wednesday, July 17, 2002
 The Ace Doubles Paperback Image Library - ignore the ugly website design and savor the art of cheezy vintage paperbacks. Great illustrations, nifty titles, breathless story descriptions, crazy hand lettering ... it's all there. Via Metafilter.
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A perceptive editorial by Mark Morford of the highly addictive Morning Fix - "After all, an HIV-positive Muppet sounds like a bad joke. I mean, it's a puppet. It's an orphan puppet with a deadly sexually transmitted disease. It's Bert and Ernie with herpes, only a million times more dire. It's initially funny and then immediately turns painful and weird and wrong in its necessary rightness."
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Stockpile of Milwaukee's Best, Earl's Liquor: $8.50. Souvenir Elvis photos, Graceland: $29. Lap dance, Tiffany's Babe-O-Rama: $49. Getting caught using the Army credit card for un-Army things: Priceless.
Monday, July 15, 2002
The Denver Westworld recently profiled a collector of Scopitones (via Alt-Log), those wild and colorful '60s precursors to music videos. Jennifer of Sharpeworld currently has a lovely, if atypical, Scopitone posted at her site - Debbie Reynolds' "We'll Sing in the Sunshine". Somebody needs to put this stuff out commercially.
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Via Fimoculous: a lively interview with Traktor, Swedish collective behind those hilarious Fox Sports commercials and other things. Check out the creepy/funny clip from Basement Jaxx's "Where's Your Head At" video. Kewl.
Spied at the Jell-O site while looking for media pics - 100 Years of Jell-O ads.
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Sunday, July 14, 2002
Rememberances of "Pink Lady and Jeff" from one of its writers. From my own hazy memory, it really was called just "Pink Lady" (no "Jeff") and it really was bad. At any rate, it sits on my Netflix queue awaiting a painful rediscovery.
I wonder if "Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters" will ever show up on DVD?
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Friday, July 12, 2002
 Kino put together a fantastic site for its definitive reconstruction of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. I didn't know the extent that Paramount futzed with the film to make it palatable for American audiences in 1927 - eliminating characters, subplots and much of Lang's original symbolism. This truncated cut has basically been the version seen since then. Kino's restoration is currently touring the U.S., with a deluxe DVD release to follow.
Also of interest - the New York Times review of the restored version (thanks Christopher!), which describes star Brigitte Helm as "the Kirsten Dunst of the Weimar Republic".
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Thursday, July 11, 2002
Seeing this frightening macrame and beercan hat on Who Would Buy That prompted a repressed childhood memory - my Dad had one! It was even cheezier than the one pictured, if you can believe it - all Budweiser cans, bright red yarn, and styled like Gilligan's hat. Yeeks.
Somebody at Metafilter linked to a batch of weird Shooby Taylor mp3s. The mysterious Shooby's recordings were halfway between scat singing and psychotic outsider sensibility. Unbelievable.
 Mothra! Mothra! Mothra! (via Kim) "The Mothra Song", performed by the lovely girl duo The Peanuts, rocks my world. There's even an updated version from the TV show. I have happy fun smile.
Evan graciously added our cat to his Pets and Design site. Now it can be confirmed he's the hippest cat in town.
Happy Birthday to Max!
Our Town - examples of entire towns that vanished (cue "X-Files" theme).
Wednesday, July 10, 2002
Last purely self indulgent post of the week. How I first found some of my favorite weblogs, mostly during the last half of 2000:
- GMTPlus9 - found through the ancient weblog directory at Boing Boing.
- Lots of Co. - Back when I would routinely click on Blogger's most recently updated weblogs, I went to Max's page because the name sounded interesting. This is also how I first came across little yellow different (still the best weblog name ever).
- Mermaniac - saw it updated frequently at weblogs.com and was attracted by its clever, long name ("Mermaniac: A Showtunes Weblog"). To be honest, I thought an all-showtunes weblog sounded like it would get real boring real fast. Thank goodness Bill's site is so much more than that.
- Jonno, Other Stream - via the links at Michael Daddino's gone but not forgotten Cultural Artifacts of the Moment weblog. Found a lot of the better gay weblogs through him.
- Encorswish - via Matt's GLBT Weblog Portal. Excited about finding another blogger from Phoenix, I wrote to Chris and later found that his home is a ten minute walk away from mine.
- Web Goddess, Travelers Diagram, Excitement Machine, several others - through the referral logs on this site. Anyone who links here is worth checking out. That's how I come across most new weblogs now. I'm lazy.
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Labels to Net Radio: Die Now - this kinda stuff gets my panties in a bunch. Screw the RIAA.
 Scrubbles just turned two years old. When I think about the changes with this site, especially since a year ago, it's amazing. The number of visitors here has more than tripled in that time (although a good chunk of them are just horny M@ry-K@te and @shley fans, hello there). I'm indebted to those who brought many new readers by linking to this page since last summer: House of Fun's Sarah and Evan, Weezer, two weblogs that helped inspire the one you're reading now, and many others both familiar and new. Thanks to all of you.
Tomorrow: how I first found some of my fave weblogs. Retro-2000 fun!
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Tuesday, July 09, 2002
Bill Watterson's Private Hell, a gallery of those godawful "peeing Calvin" window stickers (via PCJM). Yeah, I believe those sticker owners really appreciate the sweet, subtle humor of "Calvin and Hobbes".
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Monday, July 08, 2002
 I went looking for an Edweard Muybridge animated gif to put on this very page, and found a ton of info (the horse came from here). The Muybridge section of Chronophotographical Projections is the best, copiously researched with delightful animations. What an interesting fellow; I'm happy his influence lives on.
Sunday, July 07, 2002
Groovy photo tour of the Oceanic Arts warehouse, L.A. purveyors of neat custom-made tiki objects. According to Cory at Boing Boing, this company carved a lot of stuff for Disneyland's Adventureland.
{an addition to the post below} I also have this imported Francoise Hardy best-of for $15 for any scrubbles reader who would enjoy lovely "ye-ye" French pop from the '60s. Contact me for more info.
Scrubbles.net used cd blowout, yeah! I decided to take a tip from Chris and sell some of my old music at half.com. Out of 35 discs, I've already sold two. Goody goody.
Speaking of which -- I've always been fascinated with how, over the course of a few short years, a successful album will go from the hottest thing EVER to just another crap disc crowding out used cd store bins. The process used to take something like 8-10 years, but lately it's happening with discs that are barely out a year or two.
Here are some examples of the most popular used cds at half.com, taken from my own unscientific search for the duddiest of the duds:
1. Hootie & The Blowfish - Cracked Rear View (1,976 copies available)
2. Whitney Houston et. al. - The Bodyguard (991 copies)
3. Boys II Men - II (946 copies)
4. Green Day - Dookie (883 copies)
5. Backstreet Boys - Millennium (694 copies)
6. Santana - Supernatural (675 copies)
7. Live - Throwing Copper (650 copies)
8. Puff Daddy - No Way Out (576 copies)
9. Britney Spears - Baby One More Time ... (519 copies)
10. Red Hot Chili Peppers - One Hot Minute (518 copies)
If anyone has more/better examples, post 'em here.
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Saturday, July 06, 2002
Collectible cookie jar made to look like a can of Pepsi. Better get it before the limited edition of 5,000 runs out.
Thursday, July 04, 2002
Our home's hot water heater broke yesterday, flooding the sunroom and kitchen. The water was about 2 inches deep in some spots. Spent several hours wet-vacuuming it all out. Then we trekked to the Home Depot a half hour before closing, dodging all the parents and their noisy little scrogs, to get a replacement. I consider ourselves lucky - nothing was damaged, and only two rooms got waterlogged.
Now it's back to Fourth of July festivities - our own little barbeque with friends, then watching the fireworks display from our backyard. Hope everybody has a good one.
Seems like I'm always plugging Basic Hip Digital Oddio, but he currently has a handful of funny vintage commercials up for download (scroll down the main page to find them) --- "Will your Mystery Date be a dream (aahh) or a dud (oh)?"
Tuesday, July 02, 2002
This Wired story uses the case of Amazon's #1 reviewer, Harriet "never read a book I didn't like" Klausner, to expound on the reliability of online reviewers and such. Interesting article.
Essential - Janis Ian's compelling argument that file trading helps recording artists (via Boing Boing). Janis Ian already had a place in my heart for writing "At Seventeen" - classic awkward teen anthem and hilarious punchline in one of the best Simpsons episodes ever. Go visit her website and buy one of her CDs, please.
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The Atlantic Monthly is starting a three part series on the excavation of the WTC site. American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center is the longest article published in their 145 year history. From the excerpt they have online, it looks like a chilling read.
Monday, July 01, 2002
 The Kodak Girl Collection, great images of female photographers in vintage ads, posters, toys and more. Check out this old Kodak Brownie guide featuring the early "Peanuts" characters. Cool!
A sad page of obituaries for Rosemary Clooney.
People today might know her better as George's aunt, but Rosemary herself was quite a hottie back in the '50s. A couple of years ago, I was designing a section around the opening of a new housing development outside Phoenix. One of the articles was about a special Grand Opening concert in which Rosemary was one of the performers. I searched the paper's photo archives and found a wonderful old publicity pic of her, seen from the hips up with a saucy "oops!" expression on her face. I lovingly scanned the image, outlined it, converted it to a duotone and built the article's layout around this photo. Then I went on vacation for a week. Once I returned, my wonderful photo was replaced with a recent, bland head shot.
That story tells less about the brilliance of Rosemary and more about the stupidity of home development companies, but anyway I'll miss her.
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