"Drink" By Pat Smith

44 things to do with vinegar

Sure, it's good on fries, but that's not all vinegar can do. Here are tons of uses for this all-natural wonder liquid.

1. Kill weeds. Spray full-strength on growth until weeds have starved.

2. Kill unwanted grass on walks and driveways.

3. Increase soil acidity. Use 1/2 cup of vinegar in 1 gallon of tap water for watering plants such as rhododendrons, gardenias, or azaleas.

4. Deter ants. Spray vinegar around doors, appliances, and along other areas where ants are.

5. Polish car chrome. Apply full-strength.

6. Remove skunk odour from a dog. Rub fur with full-strength vinegar and rinse.

7. Keep cats away. Sprinkle vinegar on areas you don't want the cat walking, sleeping, or scratching.
8. Keep dogs from scratching their ears. Use a clean, soft cloth dipped in vinegar diluted with water.

9. Floor cleaner. Mix 1 cup white vinegar with 2 gallons hot water.

10. Freshen wilted vegetables. Soak them in 2 cups of water and a tablespoon of vinegar.

11. Soothe a bee or jellyfish sting. Dot the irritation with vinegar to relieve itching.

12. Relieve sunburn. Lightly rub on white vinegar. You may have to reapply.

13. Condition hair. Add a tablespoon of vinegar to dissolve sticky residue left by shampoo.

14. Relieve dry and itchy skin. Add 2 tablespoons to bath water.

15. Fight dandruff. Mix 2 tablespoons each apple cider vinegar, water and flax or olive oil and massage into scalp, shampooing out after 15-20 minutes.

16. Soothe a sore throat. Pour a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar in a glass of water. Gargle, then swallow.

17. Treat sinus infections and chest colds. Add 1/4 cup or more of vinegar to a vaporizer.

18. Deodorize the kitchen drain. Pour a cup down the drain once a week. Let stand 30 minutes and then flush with cold water.

19. Eliminate onion odours. Rub on your fingers before and after slicing.

20. Clean and disinfect wood cutting boards. Wipe with full-strength vinegar.

21. Remove fruit stains from hands. Rub with vinegar.

22. Cut grease and odour on dishes. Add a tablespoon of vinegar to hot soapy water.

23. Clean a teapot. Boil a mixture of water and vinegar in the teapot. Wipe away the grime.

24. Freshen a lunchbox. Soak a piece of bread in vinegar and let it sit in the lunchbox overnight.

25. Clean the refrigerator. Wash with a solution of equal parts water and vinegar.

26. Unclog a drain. Pour a handful of baking soda down the drain, add 1/2 cup of vinegar, and close with plug for 20 seconds. Rinse with hot water.

27. Clean and deodorize jars. Rinse mayonnaise, peanut butter, and mustard jars with vinegar when empty.

28. Clean the dishwasher. Run a cup of vinegar through the whole cycle once a month to reduce soap buildup on the inner mechanisms and on glassware.

29. Clean stainless steel. Wipe with a vinegar-dampened cloth.

30 Remove stains from pots. Fill the pot with a solution of 3 tablespoons of vinegar to a pint of water. Boil until stain loosens and can be washed away.

31. Clean the microwave. Boil a solution of 1/4 cup vinegar and 1 cup of water in the microwave. Will loosen food particles from microwave walls and deodorize.

32. Dissolve rust from bolts and other metals. Soak in full-strength vinegar.

33. Eliminate cooking smells. Let simmer a small pot of vinegar and water solution.

34. Unclog steam iron. Pour equal amounts of vinegar and water into the iron's water chamber. Turn to steam and leave the iron on for 5 minutes in an upright position. Then unplug and allow to cool. Any loose particles should come out when you empty the water.

35. Clean a scorched iron plate. Heat equal parts vinegar and salt in a small pan. Rub solution on the cooled iron surface to remove dark or burned stains.

36. Remove lint from clothes. Add 1/2 cup of vinegar to the rinse cycle of the washing machine. This also helps to brighten fabric colours.

37. Freshen the washing machine. Pour 1 cup of vinegar in the machine and let it run through a regular cycle (no clothes added). Will dissolve soap residue.

38. Remove tough stains. Gently rub vinegar on the stains before placing in the washing machine.

39. Eliminate smoke odours from clothes. Add 1 cup of vinegar to a bathtub of hot water. Hang clothes above the steam.

40. Remove decals. Brush with a couple of coats of vinegar and allow to soak in before washing off.

41. Clean eyeglasses. Wipe each lens with a drop of vinegar.

42. Freshen cut flowers. Add 2 tablespoons of vinegar and 1 teaspoon of sugar for each litre of water.

43. Extinguish fires. Throw on grease fires to arrest flames.

44. Feel good. A teaspoon of apple cider vinegar in a glass of water, with a bit of sweetener added for flavour, will give you an overall healthy feeling.

GTA4: How Many Fingers?

Grand Theft Auto IV is a new video game in which you score points by meeting sexually suggestive women and running them over repeatedly in a burning SUV while they tell you their life story and how they happen to have six fingers.
[Via photoshop-disasters]

Watch some episodes of Making Fiends (now broadcast animated series), some funny stuff here:

Picture of the Day

Hellboy - From Sketch To Screen

Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro revels in freakish spectacle, the more elaborate the better. Comic book artist Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, likes to keep it simple. In pursuit of a fiendishly perfect Hellboy universe, they filled reams of sketchbooks with variations on Mignola's sinister bestiary.


Now, their intense collaboration on the upcoming movie sequel to 2004's Hellboy is bound for all eternity — in hardcover. Hellboy II: The Art of the Movie (Dark Horse Books) offers a sneak peek at the menagerie of mutants primed to swarm the world-weary demonoid, portrayed again by the heavy-browed Ron Perlman. "Del Toro created such an interesting world in Pan's Labyrinth," Mignola says, "that we wanted to do more this time." New creeps include albino elf-warrior Prince Nuada, his tusk-toothed henchman Wink, mummy-tootling street musicians, and a flock of leafy-winged "tooth fairies" with a taste for blood.

The Art of the Movie witnesses the evolution from Mignola's initial ink sketches to the film's densely detailed 3-D computer renderings. As if having a mechanical hand weren't enough, Wink picked up an armor belt and porcupine quills en route to his final form. "Del Toro and [3-D artist] Francisco Ruiz Velasco would talk about my drawings in Spanish," Mignola recalls, "but I knew damned well what they were saying: Add 600 gears, make sure smoke comes out of it, and get it to spin around so the guy's head comes off.' What you see in the book is how a simple thing gets turned into something much more."

Via wired.com

Joanna Stealing Eggs

Tree Love

A great link for you all: “Touchfood,” a comic by Jen Wang.

Saturday Morning: 1968

The operative word to describe the 1968-69 Saturday morning schedule was 'change'. After two years of superhero and action/adventure cartoons the networks and the animation studios decided to shake things up a bit. When you take a look at the world-altering events that occurred forty years ago, moving away from action and into some more amusing and less dangerous fare was not a surprising move.
That doesn't mean that Saturday mornings were totally void of any type of heroic action in 1968. In addition to shows like Spider-Man, The Herculoids, and Journey to the Center of the Earth, all entering their second seasons, three of the seven new series premiered that featured a hard-action bent. The rest focused more on humor and slapstick then on flying beings who could shoot beams out of their hands. And, out of the seven, five of the shows were the cornerstones of trends that would continue well into the 1970s.
So, if you have your Thing Maker in front of you, let's journey back in time to 1968.

Gallery: Saturday morning: 1968

ABC only had two new shows on the schedule as The New Casper Cartoon Show, Spider-Man, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Fantastic Four, and George of the Jungle all returned. Both shows featured adventures through unknown territories. The first, Hanna-Barbera's The Adventures of Gulliver, was loosely based on the book Gulliver's Travels. For this cartoon it was Gary Gulliver and his dog Tagg who, while searching for his father, end up shipwrecked near the kingdom of Lilliput. After Gulliver and the Lilliputians resolve their differences he continues the search for his father and the treasure he had found. Along the way Gulliver encounters the evil Captain Leech -- a man who is after his father's treasure map.



The other cartoon to premiere on ABC was the Filmation-produced Fantastic Voyage. Based on the 1966 film of the same name, Voyage featured the adventures of the C.M.D.F -- Combined Miniature Defense Force -- a government team that would shrink down to microscopic size in order to battle against unseen and unsuspecting enemies. Sometimes this would be genetic, just like it was in the movies, sometimes the criminal would be human in nature. The voice of the C.M.D.F commander, Jonathan Kidd, was Ted Knight, a man who was the voice of many Prescott-Scheimer-Sutherland (the founders of Filmation) creations in the late 60s.


CBS, like the last two years, led the way in series premieres and trendsetters with a total of four new offerings. The first of these was Go-Go Gophers. Actually, Gophers wasn't that new -- it was one of the segments on the Underdog show during its first few seasons. The show featured an Indian tribe composed of two gophers whose goal was to keep their sacred land protected from the nearby Calvary post. While not the most exciting cartoon, Gophers was a trendsetter because it was the first time a network had scheduled original Saturday morning fare prior to 9:00 am. It also knocked long-time player Captain Kangaroo out of the weekend market for the first time since its premiere in the 1950s.

The only new Hanna-Barbera program on CBS was The Great Race-inspired cartoon Wacky Races. Featuring a group of 11 different cars in a series of road rallies across the globe, Races was one of the first series to feature a large group of regular characters (23, plus the unseen narrator) as well as focus the attention of the show on the villains rather than the heroes of the series. So much attention was given to the villains, Dick Dastardly and Mutley, that they received their own spin-off series in the 1969. In addition to all of this, Races began a trend of slapstick/chase cartoons that would really take off in the next year.


The other two cartoons that premiered on CBS in the 1968-69 season were the breakout hits for the fledgling Filmation animation studio. One of them would be a trendsetter that would set the stage for other cartoons for years to come, while the other featured two voice actors that would have a regular place on Saturday mornings for nearly 20 years. The first show, The Batman/Superman Hour, was an amalgam of the older New Adventures of Superman/Adventures of Superboy cartoons with the first animated adventures of Batman, Robin and Batgirl.

As the show was ordered during the peak of the live-action Batman series on ABC, and the licensing of the animated series unknowingly went to Filmation, the voices of Adam West and Burt Ward were not used in the cartoon. Instead, actor Olan Soule and Los Angeles Disc Jockey Casey Kasem became the voices of Batman and Robin. Both voice-actors would move over to the same roles when Hanna-Barbera took over the DC Comics license in the 70s and would remain the voices of HB's Batman and Robin well into the 80s.


The second show offered by Filmation was the one that really laid down the framework for Saturday morning programming for the next few years. The Archie Show was the first in a decade-long line of cartoons that featured characters from the Archie comic books. Starring Archie, Reggie, Jughead, and the rest of the gang from Riverdale High, The Archie Show was most famous for its musical element -- The Archies musical group. During each of the 17 episodes produced for 1968 there would be two Archie's songs performed by Archie Andrews and his friends Reggie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica.

The Archie Show was a trendsetter in many ways. First, like The Beatles cartoon before it, and the live-action Monkees that aired in prime time, Archie prominently featured music that was playing on the radio at the time. Second, it set the stage for some of the first animated music videos. Granted, The Beatles had their own share of musical romps on their show, but on The Archie Show the musical numbers were separate from the story itself.



Third, the show introduced canned laughter to Saturday morning programming. Now, before you start writing that correction comment, remember that cartoons like The Flintstones and The Jetsons, which had a laugh track, were originally on the network's nighttime schedules before they jumped over to Saturday mornings. The use of of the laugh track would pave the way for shows like Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? and Josie and the Pussycats to use canned laughter in later years.
Finally, The Archie Show gave itself and other animation studios the impetus to create other cartoons featuring groups of characters that just happened to have musical interests. In the case of Filmation, those bands, while performing, would look a lot like The Archies did when they performed. As an example, view the following musical number from an episode of The Brady Kids, which premiered in 1972.



There was only one new entry on the NBC schedule during the 1968-69 season: Hanna-Barbera's The Banana Splits Adventure Hour. One of the most expensive shows that Hanna-Barbera had produced up to that time The Banana Splits mixed live-action and animated segments into a one hour program. While many local stations broadcast shows featuring a live host introducing various cartoons, this was the first time since Ruff & Reddy that Hanna-Barbera had produced this type of programming for Saturday mornings. And, it was also a trendsetter as it marked the return of original live-action programming to the weekends.
The live action segments featured Fleegle, Bingo, Drooper and Snork (or Snorky, if we are getting technical) -- a group of costumed characters (designed by Sid and Marty Kroftt, who would go on to bigger and more psychedelic things) who were also a band. The meetings of the "Banana Splits Club", many of them taking place at Six Flags Over Texas, would be wrap-arounds for three cartoons and one live-action show. The Splits would also perform musical numbers from time to time to fill the space.
During the first season the three cartoons were The Arabian Knights, The Three Musketeers and Micro Ventures. Knights was the story of a unique group of heroes with extraordinary powers who banded together to fight the corrupt ruler of Baghdad. Musketeers featured the animated adventures of the characters created by Alexandre Dumas. Micro Ventures was similar to the concept of ABC's Fantastic Voyage -- a professor and his children would shrink down in a dune buggy in order to view the world from an insects point of view.



The only live-action series to air on The Banana Splits was Danger Island. Directed by Richard Donner and featuring a young Jan-Michael Vincent, the show centered around a group of explorers who were looking for the lost city of Tubania on a chain of islands in the Pacific. Pursuing these explorers were an inept (of course) group of pirates led by Captain Mu-Tan. Each episode of Danger Island was 10 minutes long and would end in a cliffhanger.


As you see, 1968 was a year of transition for Saturday mornings. And, while there were fewer premieres that year, those shows that were new set the stage for the total transformation of the schedule from one full of superheroes to one full of pies in the face and pratfalls. We'll look at that transformation next time as we explore the year 1969, which featured a pink panther, a detective dog, and the first solo outing for Sid and Marty Kroftt.

Via Richard Keller from tvsquad.com

Captian America & Thor

Apparently when Kevin Feige, head of Marvel Studios, sent out invitations to online bloggers for a meet and greet, he forgot to send mine out. That’s okay, Kevin, next time, my man. In any case, Feige took questions and dished out answers about Marvel’s two high-profile movies coming up very soon — the Captain America movie and Thor. First up — No, says Feige, Matthew McConaughey is NOT in line to play Captain America as previously rumored. And the real biggie: Captain America will be set in World War II, and Thor will be set “mostly” in Asgard.

Sci-Fi Wire has more “Thor” details and other Marvel news:

Feige also talked about the upcoming Thor movie, confirming that it will take place mostly in Asgard, the mythical Norse realm of the gods, and not in the contemporary real world. “The film is not all Asgard, but it will be a big chunk in Asgard, yeah,” Feige said.

Feige promised an announcement about a director for Thor “later this summer.” Mark Protosevich (The Cell) is drafting a script, which should be submitted in a couple of weeks, he added.

As for a second Iron Man movie, Feige said that talks are underway with director Jon Favreau to return and that he hopes to wrap them up soon.

Other notables:

“Captain America” will pave the way for the “Avengers” movie, which will open 6 weeks after Cap’s movie. Also, that rumor about Captain America’s shield being spotted in Tony Stark’s lab in “Iron Man”? True, says Feige.

Via hollywoodreporter.com

Art of Joonas From Finland

The Art of Carl Fredrik Holtermann

Graham Annable's SPACE WOLF

CalArts Experimental Animation Online

CalArts: 20 Years of Experimental Animation, 1970-1990 is a website that offers for viewing nearly twenty experimental shorts created at CalArts. The selections were chosen by Jules Engel who started the experimental program at CalArts, and includes works by many well known names including Joanna Priestley, Paul Demeyer, Henry Selick, Kathy Rose, Gary Schwartz and Eric Darnell. The image above is from Pink Triangle by Bob Doucette.