We’re on safari to stay

[austin_dern]

Not much fresh news on the Nicoll Highway collapse. Services were held for Heng Yeow Peow, and a liberal application of foam concrete is being used to make the debris easier to dig out. Estimates are the highway and bridge will be out of service for around nine months.

I knew I shouldn't have agreed to re-grade a few essays; another student came in just before noon today to ask for a re-grading. But I'd already turned in the course grades, which were due at noon. Perhaps defying all logic, there's no standardized form for this of which I'm aware. Even RPI and Saint Rose had Scantron or fill-in-the-blank preprinted forms. Here, I just print out a simplified copy of my grade spreadsheet, sign it, and go to the department office and wander around until someone takes it.

The one complication is the letter grade assignment. Left to myself I'd just make 90 and A, 80 a B, et cetera; but the school frets about letter grade distributions getting too far away from the bell curve, and so offers guidelines to the fraction of grades that should be A- or higher, the fraction that should be between C+ and B+, and so on. So I spend more time than I want -- that's any time -- figuring out where the deciles of my students are. Last year for this course grades were extremely tightly packed together. I believe the B range was something absurd like 88.3 through 88.9. Nothing that absurd this year, happily, but I haven't finished my other course's grades yet.

I saw an odd Popeye cartoon today -- not, mind, natasha_nelson's movie about Bruce Lee, James Bond, Dracula, Clint Eastwood, and Popeye -- but a plain old Famous studios cartoon. Popeye and Olive venture to Cartoon Jungle Africa and encounter Bluto Weissmuller, and Popeye and Bluto compete in feats of strength in which adorable animals participate (e.g., cute elephants line up to be hoisted by them). They start fighting, Bluto calls on the animals to stomp Popeye while he kidnaps Olive, you know where this is going. The bizarre thing is Popeye doesn't talk. He may have had a line at the start -- I was wrapped in a thick layer of LaTeX writing a project outline so wasn't paying full attention -- but nothing after a minute into the cartoon, when I noticed something was odd. Bluto barely talks too; his one line that wasn't calling animals or growling or such was a Senator Claghorn impersonation, whether by Jackson Beck or another I don't know.

The title I don't know; I can't find a good list of Famous Studios Popeye cartoons with plot summaries. The art style -- and the fact it was funny -- suggest it had to be done during World War II, probably when Jack Mercer was in the Army. I can't think any other reason for a Popeye cartoon without his dialogue in it.

Trivia: For the 71st space shuttle flight, STS-69, each of the five crewmen adopted a dog-based nickname. Source: Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System: The First 100 Missions, Dennis R Jenkins.

Currently Reading: The Second World War, John Keegan. I've almost figured out how to play Hearts of Iron, too.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

They don't use letter grades here. I hate that because that's what they used at my undergrad and my first grad program and hence what I am used to. Here, the final grades are on the 4.0 scale and can only be one of the following: 4.0, 3.5, 3.0, 2.5, 2.0, 1.5, 1.0, 0. Grade inflation is such that the only grades people consider decent are 3.5 and 4.0. Typically my average turns out to be about 3.2; I am a bit of a creampuff, though, and I think the university average is more like 2.8. But the distribution is screwy. You have a bunch of people who completely screw up and get 0 or 1.0, and almost everyone else hovers around 3.5, and there are hardly any 1.5-2.5 grades.

People will fight tooth and nail over getting that last half percent needed to change a 3.5 to a 4.0; there is a huge difference in people's minds between those two grades (and likewise between 3.0 and 3.5). The university has no standard grade scale, and professors can make it what they like. Students, however, always assume it's going to be 90-100 = 4.0 (giving 4.0 a bigger range than any of the other grades), and if a professor changes that they claim it goes against the mythical standard. For instance, last term the professor I was with used 92 as the bottom of 4.0, and everyone complained. The problem is that people equate 4.0 with A, and think that the A range is 90-100. Of course, 4.0 is A only in the sense of straight-A; 3.5 is A-/B+ and so the "A range" extends down to about 3.6, which means a low A- maps to 3.5. But I've given up trying to tell them that.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I try to pace my course so the average turns out to be about 80, and at that feel like I'm inflating grades a touch. Students aren't completely off base quibbling for points, at least if they know to put it in terms of ``I'm trying to understand why this was wrong''; in a close or borderline case I'll bump up a student who's shown she or he's trying more. As for number grades -- I know at some point the letter grades here get turned into numbers, but I don't understand the scheme they use, except that I've had students sent into furious burst of energy because their average looked to be 2.98 instead of 3.00 (to be fair, that's apparently a default cutoff for scholarships, so I'd be more frantic than just trusting that I could appeal a 0.02 difference isn't enough to cut off funding).

[xolo.livejournal.com]

> I can't find a good list of Famous Studios Popeye cartoons with plot summaries.

Well, fortuitously enough, I spent several hours last night reading through this site http://www.mtcnet.net/~bierly/popeye.htm which among other things has what's claimed to be a complete list of plot summaries for the Famous Studios Popeye cartoons. For once in my life I actually know a cartoon resource that you don't :)

[natasha-nelson.livejournal.com]

Hey, give the poor noser a break. Or at least a bend. Or something.

Quick glance through the list there suggests it might be "Safari So Good" (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0152263/plotsummary). Its IMDb entry lists Beck and Mercer (and Questel, for that matter), which may or may not mean any of them were actually involved.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's definitely Safari So Good -- the monkey helps out Popeye and as in the screen grab even blows his pipe for him in the end -- but assuming the 1947 date is accurate there's no clear reason Popeye didn't speak in it. I wonder if it was something akin to 1948's Symphony In Spinach, which shows signs of being intended to be almost dialogue-free. Maybe they were getting arty.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

> Maybe they were getting arty.

There seems to have been a big burst of that right after the War, from all of the cartoon studios.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Ah! I couldn't find this one -- I'd liked the ``were the animators on Bluto's side'' essay -- but thought it was lost to archive.org. Thank you.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I remember that cartoon, and I never liked it because I don't like cartoons where Popeye hits animals. In the comic strip days, Popeye once got frustrated with a horse and punched it -- apparently killing it, or at least knocking it out cold. The mail from outraged readers convinced E. C. Segar that Popeye should have a policy of not hitting dumb animals. At least, that's the story given in "Popeye: The First Fifty Years." In any case, he is usually portrayed as having a soft touch when it comes to animals. There's a great strip in which he starts crying over a steak dinner that Olive Oyl is serving him because he's thinking of the "poor, trusting" cow.

As a kid, I knew little of the comic strip but loved the cartoons. One of my special favorites was "Be Kind to Aminals" (1935) in which Popeye sees Bluto whipping an overloaded cart horse and comes to its rescue. Another Fleischer great is "Bulldozing the Bull" (1938) in which Popeye decries the bullfight as "cruelty to aminals." That one has a really good ending; I get smooshy inside just thinking about it. But I was troubled with the inconsistency between these and cartoons like "Safari So Good" and (to prove this isn't a Fleischer vs. Famous or earlier vs. later thing) "I Eats My Spinach" (1933). The latter shows Popeye trying to outdo Bluto at a rodeo and ultimately pulverizing a bull into cuts of meat in the standard cartoon fashion.

Unfortunately Popeye's regard for animals seems to get turned on and off depending on what gags they wanted to use in a given cartoon.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah; unfortunately Popeye's got a great ethical code he doesn't get to show consistently (but then who of us does?). Somehow the cartoon pummeling of animals is less troubling when the animals end up de-furred but all right and just run away.

``Be Kind To Aminals'' bothered me, because it felt wrong to punish cruelty to animals with cruelty to people. The Betty Boop cartoon ``Be Human'' has the same problem (though a better song). Even though I felt Bluto deserved it I didn't enjoy seeing it.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I haven't actually seen it since I was a kid, so maybe my estimation of it would change as an adult. Still, I guess I take Popeye pummeling Bluto to be a given in the series, not to be taken very seriously, so I don't find it bothersome. And the poetic justice of the horse getting to whip Bluto appeals to me as a literal depiction of "how would you like it if..." Obviously I don't advocate retribution, but I see it as a metaphor for the need to put oneself in another's place when considering one's actions.

With regard to "Safari So Good," I'm not as much troubled by the animals losing their coats (they were attacking Popeye, after all) as with the fact that Popeye was hunting them in the first place. I'm not too keen on Popeye-as-macho-big-game-hunter. This is also why I can't fully enjoy "Olive's Boithday Presink" (1941) despite the rare appearance of Geezil.