Saturday, February 15, 2014

A laugh and a half





I've gone Blingee!




For a long time, before I even knew what a gif was or figured any of that out, there were these sparkly things that you could find on the internet. Sparkly like old greeting cards with that sandlike stuff stuck to them. Mostly they were puppies and kittens and things. I hated them.

When I was swallowed up by the enchantment of the World of Gif, I turned disdainfully away from sparklies. To hell with them! I was a Giffinator now. That is, until my favorite gif site just pulled the plug on me. It doesn't work for shit now and turns out these small stretched uglies that I won't post.




While throwing together bad valentine verses that turned into a dissertation on writer's groups and why I hate them, I wanted to illustrate my points (and break up monotonous blocks of text, which is the main reason I use images) with tacky Valentine sentiments. It wasn't hard to find them. Nearly all of them, the really tacky ones anyway, were Blingees.




Something had happened in the interim, and now these were interesting. Tawdry, most of them, but in a good way. Some of them were wildly creative, just flashing with crazy energy. The animation had improved substantially to allow dancing figures and even, in one case, a walking one.

The hunt was on! I wanted to find them ALL. I wanted Bigfoot, I wanted Bob Dylan, I wanted William Shatner, Jesus, and everything else. What really triggered this search was a Blingee of a squirrel with a bottle of Jack Daniels beside it. WTFFF? It was so nonsensical, so incomprehensible, it was beautiful.




Blingees have been taken over by the cool element, the gangstas, though there are still lots of glittering ponies and bleeding Christs. Jesus probably accounts for 85% of Blingee images, a sort of modern update of the old lenticular pictures that flashed back and forth between the Crucifixion and the Last Supper.




I confess that I lost my virginity not long ago and Blingee-d the cover of The Glass Character (which I am not quite allowed to show you yet, but it's a doozie!). I had to keep the blings to one side to avoid covering Harold's face -  but strangely enough, at the bottom of the cover, the author's name turns out as Margaret Blingee.




I like that. It could be a pseudonym. I could at last be Cool. Margaret Blingee could wear things that Margaret Gunning couldn't get away with. Margaret Blingee could write cool things and win swell prizes. It would be a different life.




Puppy, don't chase that squirrel! "Dis muh nutz, you can't have em!"






Beautiful images that evoke Bob Dylan. Note the walking cat, and the angel perched on the roof playing a violin that releases a cascade of gold shimmers. The second one is Slow Train Coming.






Just beautiful.




 "For dinner, we're having moose chili and caribou hot dogs!"




I assume this cat is dead.







Uhhh. . . 




Blinged out.