UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

Does this site look completely wonky to you? I’ve just implemented a new design! Most likely you’ve got some old files cached. Clear your cache and refresh (or, just refresh about 20 times and your browser will get the hint and clear the cache itself). Of course, you might also be using Internet Explorer 6, in which case my annoying alert dialog box should have already goaded you into upgrading. If that’s the case, enough said.

Does this site look a little wonky to you? In that case, then you are probably a better graphic designer than I and/or you’ve discovered that the new design isn’t 100% implemented yet. If I’m lucky, it’s the latter. At any rate, I’ve already spent far more time in the past 24 hours working on this than I’d have expected to, given the limited extent of the results, but I’m a little burned out, so I’ll be finishing a few things (like the background on the footer and a few other little graphical touches) over the next few days. Oh, and I’ve only done the bare minimum trying to update the “Offspring” pages to work with the new look. (It took me about an hour of hunting before I realized/remembered that some of the style settings for the gallery pages are actually in the plug-in settings in WordPress and not in the Gallery2 files at all.) But I am hoping to make the move from Gallery2 to the Dutch Monkey’s DM Albums plug-in soon anyway.

Even though I’ve never dropped acid, looking back on the children’s television I absorbed like a sponge in the late ’70s, I think I got enough of the experience. Case in point:

I’m lazily linking over to this on YouTube, but I actually watched it again for the first time in 30 years earlier today on the Sesame Street Old School 1974-1979 DVD set I just bought at Target. Which is not — at all — to say that I hadn’t thought of it countless times in those intervening 30 years. The “plastic house” and the freaky yo-yo dude in particular are burned eternally into my memory.

Now, I know a lot of people my age are going to have a nostalgic recollection of clips like this, but I wonder how many are as deeply imprinted with these iconic images as myself. Back in 1978, when this clip actually aired, I was at my absolute peak of Sesame Street viewing and on most days I spent at least 3 1/2 hours watching the show. (We got two PBS stations; one aired it at 8:00, 11:30 and 4:30, and the other at noon and 3:00.) I saw many of these segments more times than I can count. And speaking of counting, fortunately, I didn’t need, at that age, to learn to do so in Russian:

The first time I watched this I was so in awe of the ambitious yet failed effort to squeeze the copious syllables of the Russian numbers into the fast rhythm of the song, I didn’t even pay attention to the fact that the entire “12” segment consists of U.S. landmarks (Statue of Liberty, Washington Monument, Mount Rushmore, etc.). I wonder when exactly this clip aired on Russian television, and whether anyone involved in putting it on the air realized what it was depicting wasn’t just drugged out hallucinations. (Well, it was, but not just.)

Yes, the manualist from my previous post also played the Super Mario Bros. theme, but I think this is even better: the SMB theme is here being performed by a pair of Tesla coils!

Of course, a quick search on YouTube reveals a ton of creative arrangements of this timeless piece of music. I have to give credit to even some of the less-than-stellar performances, like the one on a ruler. But for sheer audacity, the award has to go to this kid who played it on a church pipe organ… at a service!

Apparently this “art” is referred to as manualism. I always just called it “hand farts”… but then again, I’ve never gotten it as musical as this guy.

Of course, I never used a wah-wah pedal with it, either!

Much has now been written, a smidgen of it by me, regarding the various design faux pas committed by Apple with Leopard, but here’s another new inexplicable one I just noticed:

What’s wrong you ask? Well, if you think about it, this just plain makes no sense. I’m not complaining about the weird blur effect on translucent elements in this new version (although that bugs me too). It’s this bizarre drop shadow on the little slide-down alert dialog box. Why is there a drop shadow here? Presumably it’s to make us realize this dialog is attached to the window (as they’ve been ever since Mac OS X debuted, albeit without a gratuitous shadow). But the effect is to make it look like the title bar is casting the shadow. Yet, the title bar does not cast a shadow on the rest of the window itself. So it therefore appears that the dialog is recessed below the window itself. And yet, the dialog casts a shadow on the window as well. It’s M.C. Escher’s worst nightmare. As others have already said about other UI elements in Leopard: Why, Apple? Why?

On the other hand… I have to admit, I’m actually starting to like the translucent menu bar. The horror!!!