No Eudemon

No happy spirit this morning. Our parochial school held its annual Mardi Gras party last night. I didn't get to sleep until after 1:30. When you consider I normally go to bed at 9:00, it was a very late night for me.

For occasions just like this, I stock "mini essays" and other features and store them in a "blog bank." My withdrawal this morning is pretty good:

I learned a little bit about the early cartoon history while reading John Leland;s Hip: The History. The thing that surprised me most: cartoons for the first 20+ years weren't meant for children; they were for adults. It makes sense, looking back at some of the content and Betty Boop's body, but I just figured those were aberrations. I also found the industry's racism interesting. I knew about it, but not the extent. Consider:

An early instruction manual for animators advised that "the colored people are good subjects for action pictures. They are natural-born humorists and will often assume ridiculous attitudes or say side-splitting things with no apparent intention of being funny. . . The cartoonist usually plays on the colored man's love of loud clothes, watermelon, crap shooting, fear of ghosts, etc." In many cartoons blacks carried razors, dice and libidos the size of automobiles.