Doris and Ron

Doris and Ron,
originally uploaded by Irish Hermit.

Two weeks ago I visited Doris and Ron at Doris' Attic in Haverhill. Doris is the boss; Ron is the worker bee.

Debbie avec les chatons.

Debbie avec les chatons.
Video sent by IrishHermit

My wife, Debbie, juggling kittens in 1997.

Cunard Wharf 2

Cunard Wharf 2,
originally uploaded by Irish Hermit.

Another photo of the Cunard Wharf.

Cunard Wharf 1

Cunard Wharf 1,
originally uploaded by Irish Hermit.

This is what's left of the Cunard Wharf in East Boston, Mass. It was here, in 1913, that my grandfather James McDonough came to America. He came on RMS Laconia that landed on 19 June 1913.

Cat's Birthday Card

Cat's Birthday Card
Video sent by IrishHermit

A birthday card for my best mate, Cats.

Fatman & The Lawnmower, American Style

Fatman & The Lawnmower, American Style
Video sent by IrishHermit

Inspired by Paul Knight (http://www.dailymotion.com/pjkproductions/video/39868) and Paul Reyno (http://www.dailymotion.com/paulreyno/video/143596), this is my version of Fatman & The Lawnmower, American Style.

I could still use some help from that pre-Raphaelite angel of gardening programmes, Charlie Dimmock.

DIY-TV is cool.

DIY-TV is cool.
Video sent by IrishHermit

Existentialist Bean and the thought process that led to this.

It started when I was looking for an audio clip from Armenia City In The Sky on the Who’s third album, The Who Sell Out. This is the album with a cover picture of Roger Daltrey holding an industrial sized can of Heinz Baked Beans with Tomato Sauce. As I listened to the album, I started up the Wayback Machine, as my wife calls it.

The Heinz beans reminded me of my father, a British Newfoundlander who worked most of his life as a fisherman. And like most Englishmen his idea of baked beans were beans in tomato sauce while most New Englanders eat their beans in a molasses sauce. When I was a child beans were a staple of breakfast in my home. When my father was home my mother would buy Heinz beans for him. And like a lot of youngsters who copy what their father did, I also wanted beans in tomato sauce. When my father was in port I got tomato sauce beans, but when he was at sea I had to eat molasses beans like everyone else. So beans in tomato sauce have a special meaning for me.

At this time I was thinking of making another video about DIY-TV. The beans made me think about the expression, “exciting as a plate of cold beans” as a metaphor for boring. And what is more boring than existentialist philosophy. Even if you are interested in it, as I am, reading it can be quite a chore. Besides, I couldn’t resist the pseudo-homophone between being and bean.

The one film style that epitomizes existentialism is film noir. So after writing some existentialist psycho-babble I video taped the first part. Popular culture visualizes the existentialist philosopher as a burlesque dressed in black while babbling about life, the universe and everything. The line, Ecce homo qui est faba, is from the theme to Mr. Bean with Rowan Atkinson. I used Adobe After Effects to process the video and tried to re-create the black-and-white, stark contrast, low-key light look of film noir.

To contrast the nihilistic look of the first part I used the second song on the Who Sell Out. Heinz Baked Beans, written by John Entwhistle, is one of faux commercials on the album. I used Adobe Audition create the audio loop and Premiere Pro to edit in the pictures of the beans.

When I thought of different expressions that used the word bean I came up with a pretty long list. I settled on these four because, to be frank, they were the easiest to find graphics for. The last section returns to the theme of eating beans. Of course I had to include the Heinz Baked Beans. The graphic behind me is an illustration of a 1950s kitchen.

The DIY-TV graphic is a parody of the illustration on the Mr. Bean American DVD release. The handsome gent behind the camera is Paul Knight, who along with Paul Reynoldson, is one of the founders of DIY-TV.

Long Live DIY TV

Long Live DIY TV,
originally uploaded by Irish Hermit.

I found this poster from the days of Chairman Mao and the Red Guards on the net. I thought I'd update it to reflect a more contemporary revolution.

A Day in the Life

A Day in the Life
Video sent by IrishHermit

This did happen to someone I knew when I lived in South Boston. I haven’t spelled everything phonetically, but did so for some of the more famous Boston expressions. For those of you who can’t understand this dialect of English I added endnotes. For more information see, Wicked Good Guide to Boston English

I was up at Castle Island[1] having a spukie[2] and a beah[3] for lunch when I heard this really bizah[4] thing on the cah[5] radio. The Broonz[6] were playing at the Gahden[7]! And this was July!

So I decided to cruise over there and see wa’zup[8]. I was driving through the Combat Zone[9] when I got stuck in traffic so I decided to bang[10] a yoo-ie[11] and take the X-way[12] to the North End[13]. All of a sudden there are blue lights in my rear view mirror. An unmarked car pulls up next to me with two black guys in it. One of the black guys flashes a badge and tells me to pull over.

Now, I’m no chowdahead[14]. Only that morning I was reading the Globe[15] and the headline said that no black cops were getting promoted to detective. So I figured these guys were phoneys and I take off down Stuart Street, through Chinatown and over the X-way to Southie[16]. The two black guys stayed on my tail all the way. By now I’m freaking out. So I cut across the pahk[17] towards the old MDC[18] police station. I pull my cah right up on the sidewalk. The two black dudes are right behind me, so I go running in, yelling that two black guys with guns are trying to kill me. As they come running in the Staties[19] pull their guns, point them at the blacks and tell them to freeze. The black guys are pointing their guns at me, flashing badges and yelling, “Freeze! Police!” It was a frigging Mexican standoff[20] with everyone pointing guns and me in the middle!

Finally, Light Dawns On Marblehead[21]! The black guys are cops! When I tried to explain why I didn’t pull over everyone got a good laugh out of it. Except me. I got bagged[22] for banging a yoo-ie, Failure to Stop and Resisting Arrest. Ain’t that just pissa[23]!

When I finally went to court the judge thought it was funny too. So all I got was fined for a traffic violation. And he told me not to believe everything I read in the papers.

And the Broonz game I heard on the radio? I forgot that I taped that game last winter and was listening to the cassette. Ain’t that bizah?

---

[1] Castle Island - A recreational area of South Boston at the seashore.
[2] Spukie - A submarine sandwich.
[3] Beah - Beer
[4] Bizah - Bizarre
[5] Cah - Car
[6] Broonz - Bruins – Boston’s National Hockey League Team
[7] Gahden - The Boston Garden – the arena where the Bruins play
[8] Wa’zup or 'zup – What’s up
[9] Combat Zone - Boston’s red light district
[10] Bang – Make an abrupt turn
[11] Bang a yoo-ie – Make a U turn, reverse direction
[12] X-way – The Southeast Expressway, a dual carriageway, a limited access highway
[13] North End – a downtown neighborhood where the Boston Garden is located
[14] Chowdahead – stupid person
[15] Globe – the Boston Globe, major Boston newspaper
[16] Southie – South Boston, an urban Boston neighborhood
[17] Pahk - park
[18] MDC – Metropolitan District Commission, a now defunct government agency that had a police force. The police were asorbed by the State Police.
[19] Staties – the Massachusetts State Police
[20] Mexican Standoff - two or more opposing men with guns drawn and ready, creating a very tense situation
[21] Light Dawns On Marblehead - used when a dense person finally realizes something
[22] Bagged - arrested
[23] Pissa - used as an exclamation when something goes wrong

---

A few more South Boston links:
My South Boston photos
Old Photographs
Neighborhood site
South Boston Online
South Boston Tribune

Nana's Secret Recipe

Nana's Secret Recipe
Video sent by IrishHermit

This is a true story of my grandmother and the secret ingredient she was going to put in Sunday dinner. For years, when ever I asked my mother what was for dinner, she would answer, "magairle Mhaítí ús".

Videoblogging is Dead

Videobloging is Dead
Video sent by IrishHermit

A satire on rocketboom and Amanda(http://www.rocketboom.com) To understand it, first you need to look at this one: rocketboom. Amanda Congdon and Andrew Barton at rocketboom are nice people and I hope they enjoy the satire.

I made this because it seems to me that part of the videoblogging community is the artsy-fartsy crowd who think that videoblogging is the biggest thing in communication since Gutenberg invented movable type. They take themselves too seriously, and think that every vlog is the equivalent of Edward R. Murrow’s expose of Joe McCarthy.

As William Shatner said, "People, get a life!"

All the best,

Tom

Star Trek Meets Bush Administration

Star Trek Meets Bush Administration
Video sent by IrishHermit

I was wondering what it would be like if Star Trek had to deal with the Bush Administration's method of supporting the military.

Two weeks ago I watched a show called "How William Shatner Changed The World" on the American television network, The History Channel. It was a light view of the history of Star Trek and how the series inspired some kids to become scientists. Don’t we all now have a communicator in our cell phones? The documentary is based on Shatner’s book “I’m Working On That.”

One of the things Shatner talks about is how Gene Roddenberry’s view of the future was of a utopia where everything worked perfectly on Earth. This started me thinking about what it would be like if the Enterprise had to deal with getting replacement parts in the same way as present day private businesses. And with the Bush Administration moving more and more in that direction it isn’t too far fetched.

The video was made with Adobe Premiere Pro. I took clips of Kirk and company from the “Shatner / World” program. The audio for Uhuru and Scottie came from wav files I found on the net. The view screen and beeping sounds were also found on the net. The desktop background came from Visual Communicator from Serious Magic. The computer animations and sounds are from LCARSCom.net (a really great site!).

I’m still learning how to use the colour balance and chroma key effects. And one thing is for sure, I’ll never be a great actor. Maybe I should ham it up like William Shatner and say … every … word … like … it … is …it’s … own … sentence.

Barracuda Highschool Hellcats

Barracuda Highschool Hellcats
Video sent by IrishHermit

Here's how I did it. My old video camera is an analog 8mm format. Because of that, I had to transfer the original video to my computer using an ATI capture card. The one mistake I made was in capturing it as a .wmv file instead of an .avi file to keep the size down. The compression took a lot of quality out of the video. Then I converted the Hellcats trailer to an .avi file with Quicktime Pro.

Once I had both of them converted, I imported them into Adobe Premiere Pro. The next step was find those parts of the trailer I wanted to use. I put that on the second video track in Premiere. Then I had to go through the video from the cookout and decide on what parts I wanted to use with the captions and audio from the trailer. I put those parts on track one and converted them to black and white. On track two I used the Luma Key effect to make the black parts of the video transparent. In Adobe Premiere, like most non-linear editors, the higher tracks cover the video in the lower tracks. The transparent sections allow the lower video to show through.

Except for the Hillary joke, I killed the audio from the original video and used the trailers audio. I played around with the levels and roll-off to try and match the audios. Most audio editing programs will allow you to create newsreel type audio by playing around with the roll-off of the low and high frequencies.

Once that was finished I used Adobe's Media Encoder to export the video. Dailymotion limits the size of the video you can upload to 150 MB. So, I had to experiment with various encodings to get the finished product to a size that I could upload. I ended up using mpeg with a frame size of 320 x 240 pixels.

What I didn't do was balance the contrast, brightness and gamma in the original video. Also, you can see quite a bit of bleed through in the titles from the trailer. They look like poor video overlays from the fifties. Even though I was trying to recreate the look of an old American International movie, it still had too much of a "video" feel. Considering I just started playing with this and have yet to read the manual it didn't come out too bad. I have access to Adobe After Effects and want to learn that program. From what I read, that is better for the video effects.

That's it in a nutshell. Now I have to read the books.

Videoblogging

I've just started creating some videos for posting on http://www.dailymotion.com/IrishHermit I'll use this blog to explain how and why I created them.