Schmidt Meister's Grab Bag

[janice6]

On 7/6/2022 at 2:27 PM, Schmidt Meister said:

The controversial Georgia Guidestones, a monument located in Georgia, has been partially destroyed after reports of an explosion.
“Investigators said unknown people detonated an explosive device at around 4 a.m,” reports Fox 5 Atlanta. No one was injured as a result of the incident.
One of the “wings” of the monument was completely destroyed by the blast, which occurred despite constant monitoring of the site with cameras that feed back to a 911 call center.
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation responded to the explosion by sending the bomb squad. Drone footage shows that the tourist attraction has suffered extensive damage.
The monument has attracted opposition amongst some due to its creepy inscriptions, which call for “maintaining humanity under 500 million,” a figure which the world hasn’t seen since the 1500’s and would require outright mass genocide to achieve.
The stones also call for the imposition of a “world court” and demands humans “be not a cancer on the Earth.”
The Georgia Guidestones were built in 1980 at a cost of $500,000 dollars on behalf of “a small group of loyal Americans” who remain anonymous to this day, but is believed to include philanthropist and population control-enthusiast Ted Turner.
Turner has repeatedly advocated for a 95 percent population reduction and attends weird confabs with the likes of Bill Gates and George Soros to discuss how globalists could use their wealth to “slow the growth of the world’s population.”

https://summit.news/2022/07/06/explosion-partially-destroys-georgia-guidestones/

In the 50's I used to joke about making the world a better place to live by getting rid of people.........  Now some imbeciles actually believe that!  

[Schmidt Meister]

Bear tries to kick his own ass. Funny.

[railfancwb]

To those people who want to drastically reduce the world’s population or start a war with a nuclear armed country, I want them to take the lead and show us how it’s done. Get out in front and lead by example. 

[Batesmotel]

4 hours ago, railfancwb said:

To those people who want to drastically reduce the world’s population or start a war with a nuclear armed country, I want them to take the lead and show us how it’s done. Get out in front and lead by example. 

I got accosted by some Zero Population types a few years ago. They wanted to fight about lowering the population. They didn’t appreciate me telling them You First. 

[railfancwb]

Saw that a state’s selection of drugs fir executions had been approved so they announced the schedule of executions for the next few years. This should give the woke people something to scream about in addition to reversal of Roe vs Wade. So they can alternate between screaming to kill and screaming to save. 

[Schmidt Meister]

His Master's Voice

One of the most famous late 19th and early 20th-century advertising icons was, apparently, a Jack Russell terrier, the very same one who was a model for a painting called “His Master’s Voice.”
The image was the foundation of the logo for many gramophone and recording brands like HMV, EMI, RCA, Victor Talking Machine Company, and more. The curious dog which looks and listens to the gramophone goes by the name of Nipper.

Nipper (1884–1895) was born in Bristol, England, and was a mixed-breed Jack Russell Terrier. The playful dog’s tendency to bite the backs of visitors legs earned him the name.
When Nipper’s first master, scenery designer Mark Henry Barraud, died penniless in Bristol in 1887, Mark’s younger brothers, Francis and Phillip Barraud, took care of Nipper in Liverpool. In Liverpool, Barraud noticed how Nipper often curiously examined the phonograph (the cylinder record player) that they had at home. The little dog was puzzled by where the voice came from, and Barraud found it very amusing. The aspiring painter, Francis, sparked the hilarious idea of painting Nipper on canvas, depicting him absolutely confounded and wondering how the sounds could be coming out of the unusual object.
“It certainly was the happiest thought I ever had,” says Francis, commenting on how entertaining it was to watch Nipper stare and listen to the phonograph. The scene was, no doubt, inscribed in Barraud’s mind that even three years after Nipper’s death, he was determined to paint the little dog on canvas.

After he had finished the painting on 11th February 1898, which honored Nipper’s natural curiosity, Barraud thought to himself that maybe the Edison-Bell phonograph company would find his work useful. Sadly, the company turned down Barraud’s offer, skeptically stating “Dogs don’t listen to phonographs.”
Barraud named the painting “Dog looking at and listening to a Phonograph,” and eventually he decided to rename it to “His Master’s Voice.” At one point, he tried his luck exhibiting it at the Royal Academy, but without success. “No one would know what the dog was doing,” complained many advertising companies and clients.
Finally, on May 31st, 1899, luck smiled upon Barraud. When he went to borrow a brass horn to replace the black one on the painting from the Maiden Lane offices of The Gramophone Company, a manager of the company, Barry Owen, suggested replacing the phonograph with a Berliner disc gramophone, and then the company would buy the painting.
The painting would become a highly successful trademark of the Victor, HMV, and its many branch companies, as a registered trademark on July 10th, 1900.
For many years, the original oil painting was in Hayes, Middlesex, on a wall in the EMI boardroom.
The slogan “His Master’s Voice,” along with the painting, were sold to The Gramophone Company for 100 pounds; 50 pounds for the slogan, and 50 pounds for the painting itself.
The painting’s first advertising debut was in January 1900, on the Gramophone Company’s advertising literature. However, “His Master’s Voice” did not feature on the Company’s British letter headings until 1907. The painting and title were finally registered as a trademark in 1910.

Oddly enough, there have been slight mishaps and revoking requests which led to the brand’s label as null and void. Emile Berliner, the highly successful inventor of the gramophone, asked permission of the slogan’s copyright from Barry Owen, the man who accepted Barraud’s request.
EMI paid the price of the careless legal handling and lost the trademark’s rights. Eighty years later, with the grand arrival of the CD, which forced the companies to start central manufacturing throughout the world, EMI Classics gained the position as the main “heir” to the “His Master’s Voice” slogan.

Today, the “His Master’s Voice” trademark is only used by EMI as a marketing brand for HMV Shops. Nevertheless, it is still recognized by many and remains in the Top 10 of “Famous Brands of the 20th Century”.

As for Nipper, although he was definitely not a purebred, he never hesitated to take on another dog in a fight. With undying vigor and enthusiasm, he loved chasing mice and pheasants in the local park.
The Jack Russell Terrier died from natural causes and was buried in Clarence Street, Kingston, near the Thames. His grave is in a small park full of magnolia trees.
Nipper Alley, a road near Nipper’s final resting place in Kingston, was named in his honor on 10th of March 2010 to commemorate his ever-curious look of wonder.

Below:

His Master's Voice - Francis Barraud Painting Nipper

The Painting

[Schmidt Meister]

History of the California Raisins

By Adam Campbell-Schmitt

In 1986 the term "viral" didn't exist in its current context of describing a media phenomenon. But if it had, surely we'd have been applied to the remarkable ascent of a bunch of humble, dried grapes from advertising mascots to pop culture icons. The California Raisins were the product of an exacerbated ad team, a few broken rules, and the execution of a fascinating visual art form. Even if you weren't alive to see the advertisements, TV specials or listen to the charting singles, three decades later you've still most certainly heard about The California Raisins through the grapevine.

Raisin Roots
Let's be real. Raisins, as a food, aren't very exciting. That was a widely accepted opinion the California Raisin Advisory Board (CALRAB), a coalition of 5,000 growers in the San Joaquin Valley tasked with increasing the visibility of the wrinkled fruits of their labor, had to face. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding worked with CALRAB producing raisin commercials that tried everything from branding raisins as "nature's candy" to slo-mo shots of them as sexy salad and dessert accessories. It wasn't working. Regardless of consumers' affinity for the product, people still held a generally neutral-to-negative view of raisins because, well, they're raisins. They lacked a cool factor, which is precisely why in 1986 ad writer Seth Werner turned to Motown (arguably history's coolest music) to make the healthy snacks hip.

The Perfect Song
"I Heard It Through the Grapevine" had just seen a resurgence in popularity thanks to its inclusion on the soundtrack of the 1983 Boomers-get-existential film "The Big Chill." The idea to pair the lyrically apt track with dancing raisins seems almost too cute in retrospect, but with a pitch to CALRAB that included the ad men acting out the dance moves to Marvin Gaye's version, the farmers agreed it was worth a shot. Former member of The Electric Flag and Jimi Hendrix's drummer Buddy Miles rerecorded the song, and became the voice that would propel it back onto the Billboard 100.

Living and Breathing Food
The task of bringing the raisins to life ultimately landed on the shoulders of a Portland, Oregon-based studio founded by innovative animator Will Vinton. By the mid-1980s, Vinton was already a veteran of stop-motion animation, receiving an Oscar nomination in 1974 for his short film "Closed Mondays," and releasing the first (and arguably last) fully clay-animated feature film "The Adventures of Mark Twain" in 1985, which showcased the limitless potential of the pliable art form. Vinton had coined the term Claymation back in 1976, but it would take another decade before the medium danced its way into America's living rooms via dried fruit grooving to a catchy tune.
The combination of the dancing raisin concept with clay animation was kismet. "The Raisins really put us and Claymation on the map," Vinton tells FWx. In the decade before the Raisins, his team had done a lot of commercial work, including the Domino's Pizza Noid, as well as projects for clients like KFC. But those campaigns were all missing one element. "People were afraid to personify food. There was this unwritten rule in advertising, you don't represent food as some sort of living and breathing thing. They shied away from it," Vinton says. With rare exception, that kind of non-edible mascot campaign had persisted since the dawn of TV. "The Noid was a nemesis for bad pizza delivery, not representing the actual product." Who knows? Had Domino's tried dancing pepperonis, perhaps we'd be talking about them today instead.

Why Purple?
Taking cues from the Motown soundtrack, the Raisins sang and danced akin to classic vocal groups like The Temptations. But striking the right tone was also critical. Color tone, that is. Vinton explains: "A raisin is kind of an uninteresting form. It's a shriveled, dried darkish thing. If you're not careful it can look like a potato or a turd." Hey, when you're trying to use hunks of clay to make raisins seem appetizing, you have to think of these things. Clearly a raisin's actual color, brown, was out. So, since grapes are purple and raisins are grapes it seemed the next logical choice. According to Vinton the signature purple hue was carefully mixed so as not to be too grape-y, not too garish, and not too dark (so as to avoid turd territory).
The first commercial featured a conga line of raisins, no two alike, emerging from a box. Even at just thirty seconds long, the ad took about four months from concept to finished product, given stop-motion animation's grueling 24 frames-per-second pace. Each of the 720 frames is an incrementally and precisely composed photograph which, when shown in sequence, achieve the illusion of movement. When the commercial aired on September 14th, 1986 it was immediately a sensation.

Another spot followed a couple months later and with it the public's appetite for The California Raisins increased. Luckily for CALRAB, the appetite for actual raisins increased as well, with sales jumping 20% in the wake of the campaign. The attempt to make raisins cool had succeeded.

Celebrity Status
More commercials followed, each attempting to top the last with a slightly altered version of the theme song. Celebrities jumped on the Raisin train as well. Ray Charles was rendered in clay and sung "Grapevine" with the backing vocals of some female Raisins.

Making the Brand
In 1986 Vinton was already working on a Claymation Christmas variety special to air on CBS for the holiday season, but with Raisin-mania ramping up, he wisely decided to hold a spot open to include the characters to sing a doo-wop version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (complete with a glowing-nosed Raisin). The special was a ratings hit, and with that the Raisins went from being just marketing mascots to fully-fledged entertainers and merchandising megastars.
Their first album went platinum just seven months after its release. Hardee's restaurants licensed the Raisins as figurines to sell with their kids meals, creating a cottage industry of collectables. By 1988 there were 300 officially licensed products. Everything from t-shirts and shoes to bed sheets, Halloween costumes, car sun visors, lunch boxes and even toilet paper. A cross-country tour took costumed Raisin performers from coast to coast. A Nintendo game had players helping the Raisins fight baddies while collecting music notes. Two Claymation Raisins TV specials were produced focusing on four distinct bandmates: A.C., Beebop, Red, and Stretch. The Emmy-winning Meet the Raisins was a mocumentary of their rise to fame while the latter, The California Raisins: Sold Out captured, almost satirically, their soon-to-be waning popularity. A 2-D Saturday morning cartoon attempted to keep the momentum going, but failed to capture the charm of the fully-fleshed out clay figures.

Legacy
By the early 90s, The California Raisins were relegated to fad status, but their impact on advertising would continue to ripple. "The Raisins opened up a floodgate," Vinton recalls. "Everything had to be personified. Ultimately M&Ms dusted off their food characters and brought them into the 3-D world." They, along with the likes of Kellogg's Mini Wheats and Chips Ahoy! joined the anthropomorphized food genre. Certainly M&Ms Red and Yellow characters could be considered the heirs apparent to the Raisins place in advertising, right down to the shoes and gloves. "The M&Ms are a terrific example of characters that completely embrace the concept that they will be eaten." Vinton was also behind that campaign, pioneering some early techniques in computer animation as well.
Today's nostalgia-crazed adults who came of age in the 80s and 90s may have a fond, if slowly fading memory of the Raisins, but their legacy as a cultural touchstone remains.
Vinton admits nothing else he's done has had the fervor of the Raisins. "I've often worried that's all I'm going to have on my tombstone, 'Here lies the Raisin King.' But it's quite wonderful to see something you've launched sitting in the Smithsonian. I couldn't be more proud of the work we did on it. It's a cool thing for sure."
And that was the whole point to begin with: Make raisins cool. I'll be honest, the whole time I was researching this story I found myself craving raisins and inevitably gave in. Pop culture phenomenon aside, using singing and dancing raisins to get people to eat more raisins still totally works.

[ChuteTheMall]

7 hours ago, Schmidt Meister said:

His Master's Voice

One of the most famous late 19th and early 20th-century advertising icons was, apparently, a Jack Russell terrier, the very same one who was a model for a painting called “His Master’s Voice.”
The image was the foundation of the logo for many gramophone and recording brands like HMV, EMI, RCA, Victor Talking Machine Company, and more. The curious dog which looks and listens to the gramophone goes by the name of Nipper.

Nipper (1884–1895) was born in Bristol, England, and was a mixed-breed Jack Russell Terrier. The playful dog’s tendency to bite the backs of visitors legs earned him the name.
When Nipper’s first master, scenery designer Mark Henry Barraud, died penniless in Bristol in 1887, Mark’s younger brothers, Francis and Phillip Barraud, took care of Nipper in Liverpool. In Liverpool, Barraud noticed how Nipper often curiously examined the phonograph (the cylinder record player) that they had at home. The little dog was puzzled by where the voice came from, and Barraud found it very amusing. The aspiring painter, Francis, sparked the hilarious idea of painting Nipper on canvas, depicting him absolutely confounded and wondering how the sounds could be coming out of the unusual object.
“It certainly was the happiest thought I ever had,” says Francis, commenting on how entertaining it was to watch Nipper stare and listen to the phonograph. The scene was, no doubt, inscribed in Barraud’s mind that even three years after Nipper’s death, he was determined to paint the little dog on canvas.

After he had finished the painting on 11th February 1898, which honored Nipper’s natural curiosity, Barraud thought to himself that maybe the Edison-Bell phonograph company would find his work useful. Sadly, the company turned down Barraud’s offer, skeptically stating “Dogs don’t listen to phonographs.”
Barraud named the painting “Dog looking at and listening to a Phonograph,” and eventually he decided to rename it to “His Master’s Voice.” At one point, he tried his luck exhibiting it at the Royal Academy, but without success. “No one would know what the dog was doing,” complained many advertising companies and clients.
Finally, on May 31st, 1899, luck smiled upon Barraud. When he went to borrow a brass horn to replace the black one on the painting from the Maiden Lane offices of The Gramophone Company, a manager of the company, Barry Owen, suggested replacing the phonograph with a Berliner disc gramophone, and then the company would buy the painting.
The painting would become a highly successful trademark of the Victor, HMV, and its many branch companies, as a registered trademark on July 10th, 1900.
For many years, the original oil painting was in Hayes, Middlesex, on a wall in the EMI boardroom.
The slogan “His Master’s Voice,” along with the painting, were sold to The Gramophone Company for 100 pounds; 50 pounds for the slogan, and 50 pounds for the painting itself.
The painting’s first advertising debut was in January 1900, on the Gramophone Company’s advertising literature. However, “His Master’s Voice” did not feature on the Company’s British letter headings until 1907. The painting and title were finally registered as a trademark in 1910.

Oddly enough, there have been slight mishaps and revoking requests which led to the brand’s label as null and void. Emile Berliner, the highly successful inventor of the gramophone, asked permission of the slogan’s copyright from Barry Owen, the man who accepted Barraud’s request.
EMI paid the price of the careless legal handling and lost the trademark’s rights. Eighty years later, with the grand arrival of the CD, which forced the companies to start central manufacturing throughout the world, EMI Classics gained the position as the main “heir” to the “His Master’s Voice” slogan.

Today, the “His Master’s Voice” trademark is only used by EMI as a marketing brand for HMV Shops. Nevertheless, it is still recognized by many and remains in the Top 10 of “Famous Brands of the 20th Century”.

As for Nipper, although he was definitely not a purebred, he never hesitated to take on another dog in a fight. With undying vigor and enthusiasm, he loved chasing mice and pheasants in the local park.
The Jack Russell Terrier died from natural causes and was buried in Clarence Street, Kingston, near the Thames. His grave is in a small park full of magnolia trees.
Nipper Alley, a road near Nipper’s final resting place in Kingston, was named in his honor on 10th of March 2010 to commemorate his ever-curious look of wonder.

Below:

His Master's Voice - Francis Barraud Painting Nipper

The Painting

I remember driving past this 18 foot high statue when it was beside Lee Hwy in Merrifield VA, before it was moved to Baltimore.

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]

The dog wants to eat anything you might be eating but he gets po'ed because he thinks he got played.

[Schmidt Meister]

Looking south through Zion Canyon from Angels Landing in Zion National Park, UT

[railfancwb]

California Raisins…

In a “cozy mystery” series by Sofie Kelly - Magical Cats Mysteries - father of the protagonist is an actor who wore a California Raisin costume for a singing dancing part in a commercial.

Just sayin’

[Schmidt Meister]

A tethered parasailer watches as a small airplane misses his tether by what looks like a few feet. The airplane pilot probably never knew he was there.

I took a screen shot of the moment the airplane passes by the tether line.

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]

Hummingbird nest on a peach.

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]

I saw this somewhere and redid it. I found it amusing.

[Schmidt Meister]

When he sees the 'other pet' get a beat down, he decides he really don't want to play with the toy, rofl. It looks like he says, "No, that's all right, give it to him."

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]

So .... she told me to kiss her where the sun don't shine .... and now I'm confused ...

[Schmidt Meister]

[Schmidt Meister]