The Devil's Advocate

No, for once I'm NOT talking about the FINEST movie Keanu Reeves ever made. I want to toy around a little bit with what you "gentlemen" have posted so far.

First up, thanks again for filming and uploading these, EC. Second, thanks again for writing up some smart speculation about what these films could mean, G.

Third, I think you're both wrong.

If there's any one thing we've FAILED to learn as a country from the Cold War, it's that an idea of a threat can be as powerful as the the threat itself.

If we'd had an ounce of sense on September 12, we'd have said, "Ok, a bunch of useless whackjobs did this, and whoopie for them, they just killed off a third of their own manpower. They're a sad and lonely bunch of crazies who have to hide from society because of how much everyone else in the world thinks they're fucking dogshit. They punched us. It hurt. Who gives a fuck? We're bigger and badder than that, and we're going to rebuild, and they can go fuck themselves."

Instead, we fueled the idea. We made them supermen. We made them a thousand times more powerful in our nightmares than they ever could be in reality. A handful of totally twisted broken people with a severe inability to fucking DEAL WITH IT ("it" being the rest of the fucking world) became a monster in every shadow. We closed our eyes and saw them there too. When they probably weren't enough people to storm and wipe out half the fans of a southern high school football game.

The thing is, we ALWAYS do this, and we're ALWAYS wrong. Think back on Kim Philby and Team B and HUAC and McCarthy. We've got the worst track record on this shit. Every time we figure out that we were wrong, we say, "Well, we're never going to overreact like THAT again!" And then the next crisis comes along, and we go all, "WAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGH FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!" and freak the fuck out and act like a bunch of totally unforgivable pantswetting spazzes.

What's worse is, I think you guys are doing it again here. When, if anybody SHOULD know much better, it's you guys.


So what...?

Okay, first of all, let's accept that everything GFK said about the date of this video is true. Well, what's that tell you?

Look at the time period. The Soviets weren't stupid. They could see what was going on in America. Fuck, getting a subscription to the New York Times wasn't hard. They watched as we reported on our own paranoia. HUAC was a sitting committee starting in '45. Every time the communists made a gain in Europe, we flipped the fuck out. Meanwhile, look at it from their perspective:

1. They need nukes and don't have them.
2. They know even if they crack the nuclear code and start making nukes, we're way ahead of them.
3. But we'll believe anything we read, see, or hear, so...
4. What the fuck's it matter?

Instead of racing to close the distance between us on nukes, why not say, "Fuck it"?

I know what you're going to say: "Fuck it! Yes! That's your answer. That's your answer for everything! Tattoo it on your forehead! Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski! The bums lost!"

Seriously, though, follow me here. If we were so credulous we'd just buy ANYTHING, that meant they didn't have to sell anything real. Just invent something that would make us shit our pants. Sure, we had nukes, but all they had to do was claim they could seed the sky with something that would set the world on fire. Who needs nukes when they have that? BOOM, right there, it doesn't matter if there's a gap in nukes, because nukes are on equal footing with SKY FIRE.

It's not even that implausible when you consider 1946 is when cloud seeding was invented. We'd already just figured out that we could control the weather by dropping shit into clouds, so why couldn't the Soviets control the apocalypse by doing the same? Hell, WE tried to weaponize cloud seeding anyway, so we were already thinking perfectly along the lines they'd need to promote a propaganda weapon. WE started chemically altering the sky itself, so who could even say that they couldn't do it with the right compounds, ones we hadn't even found yet? Hell, just stop and think of the images in the film. Why are ALL their troops wearing gas masks? What is this stuff coming out of the plane? What could the Piemaker be making?




CHEMICALS. Or so we'd be totally willing to believe because we almost NEED to believe shit like this.

We set OURSELVES up. All they'd need was a punchline. One filmstrip leaked to the west later, and suddenly there's "proof" how they're going to fight American nuclear armament. A little push here with a cartoon and some Higgins motherfucker, and we'd shit our pants for them and create our own fears.

Stalemate.

Jigsaw Post #3

EC, God help me, what you posted was disturbing and, to steal from Scotty's word vault, awesome as hell. I don't know whether to feel elated or unsettled. I know what my stomach feels like: it feels like about half a bottle of the Jamey. And it feels like the other half should be coming soon. I wish you'd gotten that video out before I'd got tossed out of my head, but I can't stop watching it. I really doubt I'll be able to contribute all that much, but it's just amazing to me. Where did you say you got this again? Promise me you'll remember better and tell us more.

Okay, okay, we should look at some of the frames of this, because the individual pictures reveal probably more than the video as a whole, insofar as the choices the director made are animated ones (at least partially) where he could pick out the themes of violence he wanted to evoke, irespective of consequence.


This is an amazingly menacing image, because you've got the rat behind bars. I can't tell if this is immediately a capitalist metaphor, the predatory animal that eats and steals from others. It would seem to be the well that any good Soviet video would go to. This thing creates nothing and yet prospers due to exploitation and theft from the creative and generative class. Better that he be locked up. What happens to him is anyone's guess. I can't tell what's killing him, but his stabbing/strangulation seems almost lusciously vindictive and bloodthirsty.



Given how much the "Higgins" (cf. Scotty's post) character is lecturing or directly narrating at the camera, this substance seems to be a critical element (but is it an element?—the notation suggests it is not) in the dramaturgy. But not knowing what it is obviously means that we can't really say anything informed without venturing into putting on airs or, if you like, Asshole Territory.

If you remember, our earlier inclination was to say this was an anti-nuclear film — as if to say, "Here are your horrors. You would not want them yourself. But what could they do to us?" Perhaps it was the USSR drafting a westerner ("Higgins") to warn us about the dangers of our overreaching militarily and damaging the balance of power or the planet itself. But given how threatening or frightening the rest of this clip becomes, I don't feel comfortable anymore with this being cautionary. It could be an aggressive warning. I don't know what the substance is, but my first guess is that it's highly radioactive particulate matter. Something that shows the west that their weapons have direct harm.

Can you weaponize exposed soils? If teh Soviets had access to low-density soils exposed to an atomic blast, maybe they might offer them up as condemnation (in this video) of western action, or maybe they might offer them up as a threat. Remember that balloon from the earlier clip? Perhaps they could be saying, "If you poison our soils, we will drop your poison on you."


I could not get a clear screenshot of any of this, but there is a sustained sequence involving burning bodies and fires within a city. My guess is that it shows the horrors of a deliberate strike and the breakdown in social order. But I don't know if this is a passive or active statement. Food for thought.



This is another complete puzzle. This plane flies, and after it we see stalled boats and driftwood, which seems to signify the arresting of conflict. I don't know if this is a propagandizing gesture or a descriptive one. Is what's within this plane a metaphor? Is it an actual, named weapon? Is the word an acronym or a representation of something else?




This shot is a very poor one, but I'm having trouble getting my fingers to hit the keys at the same time I'd like. What I was trying to get is the people going by in gas masks. Again, I don't know what that signifies. My quick guess would be "Fallout Protection." Going off my earlier guesses, if this animation sequence is immediately post-war, that means that the Soviet Union did not then possess nuclear capabilities. They didn't get those until the Cambridge Five brought them the necessary scientific shortcuts in the later 1940s. If my dating suppositions are accurate, then it would make this video the product of an era of total and extreme paranaoia. It would make sense that they'd broadcast to the world both nuclear horrors and how those horrors could be turned back on the aggressor: how the seeds he'd planted with his bombs could taint the soil and grow into death and malignance for himself as well, how ripe the death could be for everyone who tilled that murderous field. How crappy poetry he could write if he were drunk. Sorry for writing all dramatic like this. Gross.


Here's where the warning stops being implicit and starts getting explicit. But I don't think this amounts to any such thing as a declaration of war. Although, I'm not naive. It just as well could be. However, as I've said, the dating of the video seems to be from a very praranoid time, so you can see this violence as retributive. If there is an atomic age that the USSR isn't part of, you can see them conceptualizing nuclear violence as something that beats back and bloodies its user just as hard and just as well. I don't know. I feel like I'm almost arguing against myself and better judgment at this point.



And here's where I'm starting to freak the fuck out looking at it. Because you can see the spread of this "CNOPbl" element cast across the North American continent and rise up into this Death's Head. Obviously, it's easy to incorporate this in my earlier thesis: this is the Soviet fright manifesting as a cautionary tale for the Americans. "Use this," it says, "and the death you bring is death across your own territory too. It doesn't get localized. Nuclear terror is global. Even for the user." On the other hand, there's something not at all "friendly warning" about skulls skipping across a continent and getting huge until they blot out the screen.

I feel like I started out wanting to believe one thing about this film and now almost want to believe the exact opposite. My problem is that I still think the dating of the film is on-target. If that's the case, it just makes it more confusing and difficult to deal with. If this is a pre-nuclear Soviet film, the threats it makes are all threats WE created. If it's post-nuclear (and I don't think it is), then the threats are clear. And it's an aggressive and confident document from early in their nuclear career. If it's not nuclear and not passive, it's just a bizarre anomaly that's hard to reconcile.

I have to quit now because I'm just drunk enough to be starting to write really crappy prose-poetry, tilling that field of sounding really sappy. And I need the rest of that Jamey.

Thanks again, EC.

Also, Boston College sucks completely and couldn't even come close to the spread. Assholes.

(I'll add links in the morning.)

(Hell, who am I kidding? I'll add links in the afternoon.)

(Links added — 12/7 8:09 p.m.)

finally got more footage up

(not just talking about the footage in my pants)

okay guys, i have had a HELL of a saturday...all according to the gf's evil plans to steal all my weekends from me forever...and i am uploading this thing and sprinting for a bar

i wish this sucker answered more questions than it makes me ask...but it sucks that it doesnt. that film is really looking bad. there are bits that seem like theyre gonna break off at any second, so i tried to film a bit that looked like it was going to be pretty good...there were a lot of false starts in there. i figured you didnt want to hear me yelling at shit breaking or watch clips that were 11 seconds long. this is the best stretch

theres a lot of that Higgins guy again

we open with the spruce moose, then a lake i think...

about 25 secs in theres a FUCKING COOL scene with a rat

CNOPBLI! its what plants crave...a ton of people on fire...BAPNN -- you get it from planes

some dude gets OWNED with a flagpole in the FACE after getting seriously fucked up by someone

get this though...its a SOVIET flag...and the flag dude has a GAS MASK

after that the CNOPBLI spreads across america like death...VERY creepy

i hope this is enough for you guys to sink your teeth into because getting any kind of long clips off this reel is going to be hard...its just falling apart depending on where we are on it, and i cant sit and refeed it forever to try to get it going again. tell me you guys can get stuff out of this much because im not sure how much more i can get out of the reel without fucking up something really cool that we might not get to see again...also, i do you think im off base not taking this in somewhere? do you have a guess if its valuable??

Jigsaw Post #2: I think it's teddible you are not taking me vetty seriously

Now that we got the less critical analysis out of the way, it's time to look at this a little seriously. You know, use the brain device thing to do brainwork. I said I'd actually THINK about this stuff, and I will keep my word. Word is bond. Straight up. You feel me? Also, big ups to Biggie. Love you, dawg.

Something Max said in the comments on Post #1 got me thinking. He asked,

have you considered whether this could be anti-nuke propaganda? if the dates are as right as you think they are, then that would put the film in a period where the russians didn't have nukes, so this might be their attack on them to discourage other nations from using them or condoning them.

He raises some good points. Combined with G.'s comment that, "Something about him doesn't sit right with me at the moment," I spent a while thinking about this guy before I made my other post.

Here's what I think the problem is: he looks too bourgeois.

Look at that picture. Three-piece suit. Desk blotter. Pen set. Nicely wood-paneled room. Maybe some sort of exotic bird in a cage next to him.

The entire thing sets off alarm bells with me that this guy is not an engineer, and he's not a proletarian. He seems un-Soviet.

If you think about most of the videos we wind up looking at, you usually see some dude in a jumpsuit or a white coat. Something that really brings out the SCIENCE+WORKERS! element of the Soviet Union. Either that or you get some jowly commissar with a bad haircut and bags under his eyes. By comparison, this guy looks like he lives in some nice digs. He almost seems like a banker. Maybe even a British banker. Like any second he's going to get a teacup and saucer and say "oooh, lovely!" and then say

Oh, by the way, I can't believe I forgot about this; I really would lose my head if it weren't attached to my neck! I'm so bloody forgetful. But, the thing is, and this is really quite a tedious point to make, chaps, but the thing is there's this new bomb that can obliterate life on earth. Cheerio! Toodle pip!

THAT'S what makes me think Max might be onto something here. What better way to send a message to democratic governments than with someone FROM there? He can talk to us because he looks like us. If you think about it in those terms, he looks more like a professor than a banker, so maybe he can tell us about the GRAVE THREAT of nuclear weapons.

You know who he really reminds me of? The English guy from the reanimation of animals video that EC linked way back in this post. You know, this dude:

I'm too lazy to go back and read when they did that video, but I remember he was a British scientist who got discredited because people thought that the USSR was using him as a mouthpiece to front for propaganda. The thing was, a lot of the stuff he was talking about WAS real, but it just seemed a little fishy that here was this guy who was just perfectly willing to shill for Soviet science. Maybe it's a loose connection, but if years before or years later or whenever it happened the Soviets were willing to go looking for a westerner to talk to a western audience, maybe that's an idea they would have had before or gone back to after. Does that make sense?

I'm not saying I have any real reason to go with this idea, but this is just what I came up with. Like GFK, something about this guy was just bothering me in my gut, and I couldn't tell what it was. This explanation quiets my gut down, and it would make sense given the dates this is probably from.


EDIT:
Somethings's gone really wrong with blogger all of a sudden. Arrrrggghghghghghghg fuck blogger!

My first post from today - which was AWESOME - for some reason is totally fucking up our blog's main page and making it not load. I figured out it was that post, but I don't want to delete it because maybe someone at blogger can fix it.

We can get around it for now though by making every post its OWN PAGE. I know it's sort of a headache to have to click if you want to go back and read GFK's post or something, but it's better than not being able to see it at all.

Scrimshaw Post #1: Mutual ASSured Destruction, Prying Open the Truth and Cracking The Code

NOTE: I rewrote this late last night when the kid woke me up. It's sort of like the post Blogger - FUCK BLOGGER - deleted. I had a shell of it in a Word doc but had to rewrite a bunch anyway. Whatever. If you guy's think it's dumb to have it follow the serious post I technically wrote after writing this, go ahead and backdate it. I don't care.
- LS, 12/6/08


GFK has done a wonderful job of breaking this film EC found wide open and probing inside, but anyone who thinks that's where all this ends is fooling himself. After plunging off an intellectual waterfall, skiing slopes of meandering thought and snaking dynamically through the subterranean text waiting to be mined, indeed, it's time to admit: we walk from here.

What my man G. cannot tell you is critical and vital to understanding this video, and what he can't tell you is very simple. Who the fuck is El Baldo of the Professor Institute of Knowing Things?


Thankfully, I can, b/c I hold advanced degrees in Awesomeness, a Bachelors in Being Rad and a minor in Doing It With Ladies. The man in the picture is none other than Galactic Rear Admiral Chester F. Buttocks, and he's not even a man at all b/c he is 10 million times older than the Earth itself, if you're one of those people who believes in the literal word of bible (which he wrote, to troll everybody).

Over five billion years ago, after losing an apocalyptic battle of fission thumb-war with Superman - who's actually a massive DICK - the Admiral was exiled as punishment. Superman dispatched him to the outer boundaries of the new galaxy that had come into existence after the Admiral had punched him so hard in the stomach that his anus dilated like it was trying to say "Whuh-oooooooooo-OOOOOOOwwwwww" and Superman literally sharted out the new creation - much of which never changed form at all and later became Texas.

After failing to wrest control of the oblong brown prisoner transport vessel he was locked in, the admiral instead fled via escape pod after overwhelming the security forces controlled by Aquaman - proving once again that Aquaman isn't worth a tenth shit-all of FUCK outside of the water. Also, the escape pod looked a lot like like a bomb being carried by a balloon. The bomb was later worshipped as a godhead in part of a cargo cult in the year Andre 3000.


Superman's forces opted not to fire on the escape pod even after it was jettisoned, b/c sensors indicated no life forms were aboard. This is because the Admiral had changed physical form to that of an ambient gas to evade detection - like one of the angry gods of a foreign world in Star Trek. Or a vampire. Later, some of Superman's stormtroopers examining the landing area on the ground would find clues that were inconclusive.

"Look, sir! Admirals!" said one to his supervisor, while holding up a navy cap with gold-thread "scrambled eggs" on the brim.

"You're a goddam idiot," said the other. "That's just a fucking hat."

Superman's forces combed the earth, trying to track down the escaped Admiral, flying crisscrossing search patterns in airplanes that looked remarkably like Spruce Gooses. Each craft was capable of carrying 200 passengers from New York's Idlewild Airport to the Belgian Congo in 17 minutes, but almost all of them crashed due to crewmen knocking over their own jars of urine on the instrument panels and causing the craft to plummet and then augur hundreds of feet into the ground - which, if you weren't dead, you could look to the left side of the aircraft and see out the window. But you were, so fuck you.


Special note: Wonder Woman coulda totally helped out with the search party, but she didn't. Why? Because Wonder Woman is a stone bitch. The other reason is because her plane's all invisible or whatever, you can look up in the sky when she's passing over and notice what a fat fucking ass she's got now that she's all old and shit. Girl's ass so big, they call the strap of her thong the International Ain't Gettin No Date Line. Seriously, Superman told her she had to stop flying in front of the sun b/c her assclipses were scaring the shit out of all the Maya. Bitch fat, that's all I'm sayin.

Anyway, Superman eventually gave up and fucked off b/c he wanted to investigate whether somewhere in the galaxy there was a Planet of Impressionable Gay Boys Who Looked Tense and Could Use a Massage. The Admiral was left to wander the entirety of the earth in solitude for billions of years. After one billion, he settled on a static visage of himself as some kind of grayhaired suit-wearing version of Higgins from "Magnum, P.I." Either that or one of those dads from the 80s tv shows about white dudes adopting young telegenic black kids. I don't know which one. I don't have a degree in Looking Up This Gay Bullshit. You know what I do have, though? I have a doctorate in Eat Me, Look It Up Your Damn Self.

For a while, he wrote a series of totally incredible romance novels and, ashamed that they weren't his best effort, buried them for millions of years in a ditch in England, where they were eventually found and published under the name Barbara Cartland. After people were invented, he'd randomly leap into their bodies and try to help them with the aid of an invisible cigar-smoking former child actor. But the Admiral could never leap home and died. He died 1,478 times actually, regenerating every single time. Why? Stick-to-it-iveness. Also, heart.

Sometimes he'd pretend to be a god just to see if he could get a couple million people to kill a couple other million people over invisible bullshit. He would never have done this if he could have gotten drunk while watching television. Once, he got so bored waiting for Philo Farnsworth to show up and invent TV that he just invented it anyway, but it turned out it was useless b/c nothing was on. He thought about inventing Lucille Ball to have something to watch, but he knew with a flash of incredible perception and prescience that Lucille Ball would be an annoying overrated harpy that no one born after 1970 would ever sincerely like but would profess was a genius anyway b/c that's what a bunch of assholes always said.

Then he decided to invent the hot ladies from "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie," and they spent ten straight years having totally hot unnatural sex. Why unnatural? Because one was a witch, the other a genie, and the other a billion-year-old goddammed immortal gas being vampire god who shart-punched superman. That's just how they do. They'll do whatever the fuck they want. I don't slap the dick out of your mouth and tell you how to do your job, so you just listen to the goddam story and stop being all snippy about why this and why that. Bitch.

Sometime in the 1940s, after spending years carving a mile-wide glacial frieze of a veiny and erect uncircumcised penis to impress Jodie Foster, the United States' atomic tests roused the Admiral from his languor. Fearing the vengeance and return of his SuperNemesis, the Admiral captured the world's leaders and imprisoned them in back braces intended to prevent scoliosis and made them watch a color broadcast of his warning to the globe.


In it, he showed off the totally badass desk he'd stolen from an old person who smelled like powder and death and on it displayed the special white mask he wore to protect himself from the haunted vapors that could be projected out of his ass. The mask rested on a canopic jar. It contained the brain, nose and ilium of Austrian empress Maria Theresa. For luck. The Admiral demanded the world cease all nuclear research and production or else be leveled by his stunning flatulence.

Undeterred, American general Carl "Tooey" Spazz ignored the threat and made more nukes. The Admiral made a face like Magnum had forgotten to let Robin Masters' dogs out. That was it. Fuck you if you thought he was just going to stick around and wait for that George-Lucas-hair-having twink bitch Superman to tie him to some half-cylinder justice dome and cram a fat man suppository up his little boy and blow him up forever. Fuck that.


Both sides in the Cold War thought they could dress everyone up in gas masks like a Wilfred Owen poem on acid and ride out the coming apocalypse in trenches, but they were wrong. the Admiral "called down the thunder" and "dropped the bomb."


It was over. The blast killed Superman. This is what happened to his face:


The Admiral was fine b/c he was dressed like a ghost. Only Americans survived b/c they led the world in being fatties and cutting ones. The rest of the world is just an illusion maintained by the Admiral to give them busy work.


Later the admiral returned to his self-imposed exile, fleeing to his White Castle of Fear in the Colorado mountains in a vintage WWII T-34 tank that he'd generated by re-arranging matter around him with the power of his mind. There he lives in seclusion and sleeps in a speedboat with a dog that can mix drinks and use a toilet.

Jigsaw Post #1

I couldn't think of a good post title, so I just went with the name of the puzzles that annoyed the bejesus out of me as a child. Since we're basically trying to piece together just what the hell EC found, it seems appropriate.

First up, I don't have a Russian dictionary/Cyrillic type pack installed on this computer, so can anyone translate this? The same goes for the text that opens the film. I have a feeling both could be of enormous help.

I have an overall impression of the film, but I want to get there after making note of a few things.


DETAILS:
1. This looks to be fairly standard WWII-era tank; the profile looks pretty much like a T-34, so going off the other cues/clues from the film, let's just assume it's that.



2. This scene shows a soldier running down a trench. Also, all the soldiers seem to be wearing gas masks. While there was significant entrenchment in Stalingrad and the siege of Leningrad, these images really seem like throwbacks to WWI — especially since they're combined. On their own, they don't signify much, but together they seem like artistic choices deliberately meant to evoke a memory of Great War-style warfare.



3. That said, while the first two pictures ground us in WWI and the early years of WWII at the latest, this image establishes that this video can't pre-date 1945.



4. The presence of the balloon, though, makes me reluctant to date this much later. And this is a significant reach on my part, so feel free to call me on it. The thing looks like it's delivering a bomb payload, but why? Balloons are incredibly unreliable, and the bomb could wind up anywhere. No country is going to go to the balloon (pardon the totally inappropriate metaphor) well if they have access to supersonic jets; the value you get out of a balloon is so much less than a jet delivery of a bomb. So that makes me want to date this no earlier than 1945 but no later than 1948 — 1949 at the latest.



5. This actually looks like a souped-up B-29 or an end-of-war prototype for a super-fortress style bomber. Actually, what it really reminds me of is the Spruce Goose, only with four fewer engines. The important distinction here is that it's very reminiscent of American bomber designs. That's actually helpful, because it only helps further anchor this film in the immediate post-war period. If you'll recall, both Lend-Lease and our open allied partnership with the USSR from 1941-1945 saw American arms shipped to the Soviet Union en masse. There was no shortage of Douglas and Lockheed aircraft in the Soviet Air Force and Army support, so it would make sense for Russian artists to go with what they knew. What they knew was a lot of American designs. It would make sense to date this video in a period before the two Air Forces significantly diverged.



6. I literally have no idea what this guy is doing, but I've been watching a lot of Pushing Daisies lately, so every time I watched this video (which was about a round ten, trying to figure it out), I thought, "Meanwhile, The Piemaker...." So that's who this guy is: The Piemaker.


SUMMARY:
As I've said, I don't see any reason to date this later than 1949 at the very latest, and because of the balloon technology and absence of jets, I really want to date this film to 1945-6. Remember the old adage: generals always fight the last war. Consumed with the desire to correct the mistakes they made last time, they make mistakes by ignoring the new details of this time. Artists make the same mistakes. They always have difficulty envisioning the next conflict (the few who don't are the real geniuses), and because of that they tend to describe what they just saw. The presence of WWI-era gas masks and trenches and WWII-era tanks and propeller planes date this as the product of the Second World War or its immediate aftermath. The presence of an atomic mushroom cloud gives us a hard date of 1945 at the earliest.


SPECULATION:
I have no idea what this video is for, just yet. Anything I say would be wildly off-base and just what I want to hear. Right now, though, the only supposition I feel comfortable with is that this is either:

a. A recap of WWII, in instructional form, maybe meant for the civilian populace's education/entertainment.

b. An immediate post-war video meant to show the Soviet Union's continued mobilization for war and readiness for national defense.

Of course, a lot of that speculation hinges on what this guy is here for:

Right now, I don't know. Something about him doesn't sit right with me at the moment.

Either way, that's my speech. What do you guys think?

pink floyd goes to war all fucked up in russia

ok, so heres the motherbitch...i cant believe it took me this long to get it up (all up in your blog).

i dont even know what to tell you about this. its like watching The Wall high as shit, only its not The Wall, and ive never seen it before, and its actually kind of fucking scary if youre in an empty office with the projector going clickclackclickclack over and over alone



i KNOW what you guys are going to bitch about though, so let me get this off my chest RIGHT NOW. i threaded the film in the projector and started going and realized id left my camera downstairs with the gf.

so i have NO idea how far into the strip we came in

i was running around downstairs trying to find her...i found her on the back porch, but she said shed left the camera in her bigass purse by the couch...so i had to find that. that was a HUGE help considering her purse is BIGGER THAN GOD...i spent another minute just throwing away wads of tampons and an old EXTRA CELL PHONE before i got the camera that i guess she managed to cram at the VERY BOTTOM OF THE BAG. i got it and went upstairs and fired it up and started recording

trouble is, this film is OLD. i got about a minute recorded before it broke...do NOT get on my case for this. i had no idea...i thought i had the camera with me at the time...and i really didnt sweat missing a few seconds because i thought theyd be all credits

fire away...its late and i need sleeeeeeeep

UPDATE: i added 2 stills i snapped with my point and shoot....the embedded video quality blows...

happy thanksgiving, this is fucked up

not sure i had the best holiday, hope your guys' was better

its nice to see family and get together with them, but this one was a mother...kids, dogs, parents everywhere. i dont know all the little kids names, and i dont know all the dogs names, so i couldnt tell who was yelling at who. i think there might have been a dog and a kid with the same name, because otherwise there was a dog with shitty table manners or a kid who wouldnt get off a rug

i tried setting up the projector in an office and getting a quiet 5 minutes but FUCK THAT, that wasnt happening...the door kept flying open and whiting out the movie, and i had to chase 2 or 3 cousins out every time i turned around. plus you could hear these kids screaming and bashing shit over the sound of the PROJECTOR. andy was a trooper and tried to quiet everybody down for a quick 5...no luck

i tried conning andy into letting me have the projector and going home with it, but he said the fam that was staying with him wanted to watch old reels together and shit...so it had to stay with him. it meant i had to stick around until all the kids were put down for the night and everyone else left...which meant i was stuck hanging around during CLEAN UP, meaning i had to help scrub about a billion dishes and wipe up the kids table and sweep their area and all that bullshit. i mean, i didn't HAVE to...but if youre gonna be there and asking for a favor, you cant sit around just reading a magazine waiting for everyone else to stop working so you can goof off...unless youre my gf. tyvm for all the help, lazy broad

i FINALLY got to shoot the film upstairs waaay late, and believe me when i tell you this shit is FUCKED UP. i dont know if its some kind of goof or serious propaganda or what, but it looks cool as shit, really wanna upload it.......

except i left my firewire cable at work

i got home and realized i cant upload from my camera, so ive been sitting on this vid since thurs night just waiting to get to work and show you guys this shit. its AMAZING. i googled a bunch of stuff and jumped around youtube and couldnt find anything like it, so i hope this is something new

as a matter of fact, i got SO excited, i got to work and realized i left my camera AT HOME

fuck fuck shittity fuck shit fuck rihkerwghp98h3jgksdbnkdshgu34hdskjbsdkfbjlsoipwg

so this shit doesnt happen to me again only in reverse, i already crammed the firewire cable in my bag and took my bag out to my car, so even if i forget EVERYTHING ELSE, at least ill be going home with it. hopefully ill upload it tonight. you guys are going to love this

new weekend sort of a drag, new film found

my friday night was dead dead dead because the gf had another "bargain hunt" planned. this time we were driving to sarasota...but i could sort of get behind it because supposedly afterwards we were going to go to this really nice beach and get some daquiris and just fun in the sun and shit...sort of like we did a few months back. if you tell me friday night is dead and cannot be BOOZED, im going to be an upset boy...and if you tell me its because we have to drive to another town to go to garage sales, im going to be pissed... but if you tell me theres going to be beaches, bitches, bikinis and BOOZE, i will put up with it

the gf had the trip-tik thing going on again. i swear she had 11 different places marked, and we had to get down there by 10 to cruise all of them. uuugggghhhh. still it wasnt so bad. sarasota used to be a place for wealthy people to retire, and over the years as one wealthy neighborhood kind of gets crapped up, a new one springs up, so you can basically hop from neighborhood to neighborhood every couple of years as the old people in each one start dying off in groups

this makes me seem kinda sick, and i swear im not THAT guy. its just that this town really DOES have a lot of cool stuff on the cheap. i remember going into a local goodwill and finding four crystal champagne saucers (like the ones you see in movies about the 20s) marked at $10. i dont think anyone knew they were crystal. so guess what i drink my cristal out of now? hell yeah

i feel bad about the families who let this stuff go on the cheap. they miss out on a lot of the money value. their moms and pops probably kept the stuff out of sentimentality, but unless youre going to keep the things for the same reason, getting rid of really awesome plates or knife sets for pennies just because "you already have a knife set or some plates" is really dumb. if youre going to sell off everything about your mom, get something for it, for fucks sakes

so anyway, i was picking around this one sale in a house that was probably amazing 25 years ago. neighborhood isnt much anymore, and i know the gf knew that, because thats where you get some really great deals, and she was seriously bloodhounding all over the place. i bitch, but i have the complete Who, Floyd, Beatles (american releases) and Zep on vinyl because of these things. so they arent all bad. but like i say, iwas picking around, and i found this HUGE film canister

i saw it and wanted to buy it because
a. it was about twice as big as the old reels ive mostly seen, not like some family cassette or something, it looked like it had some movie junk in its movie trunk
b. it was 5 dollars and
c. it had a cool label
i didnt even expect it to have shit in it. but it did, so i picked it up. what the hell

the label was sort of yellowy but it looked like someone had written it with a typewriter with big ROMAN letters all in caps. just this cool looking SA-149B. or 186B. or something. im not looking at it now. i just remember the SA. i dont remember typewriters stamping that big, but i guess i dont remember a bunch because apparently this dude remembered everything, there was a STACK of boxes about four wide, six longh and about six high and they were just newspapers. i coulda had them for a buck, but it would have cost me about ten bucks just to drive them to a recycle bin

the gf kept poking around for basically forever. i got bored and actually found two really nice picture frames. i don't know why they were selling them actually, because you don't get these anymore. they look carved and totally serious. but i got them for five bucks, and thankfully that takes care of birthday presents for mom and grandma this year

the moral of the story is: LS, dont let this happen to you...set boundaries...the kid is already setting them for you. have limits. and GFK, if you ever wind up not being a sexless dork extraordinaire, dont let this happen to you either. im not worried about max...hes too drunk to get a girl pregnant

ill let you know about the film whenever i get it worked out. for now remember to get daquiris if you can. daquiris on the beach with your girl in a bikini is the way to go if you have to go shopping

found films friday is fucking frustrating

i know its not friday. i just like fs

fffffffffffffffffffffor fucks sakes

didnt warn you guys about this upload since i got this a day before i knew i was going to be seeing my uncle andy to help him move some giant-ass rocks from home depot to his home backyard (its where his home his)...i figured i could kill two birds with one stone and get my hands on the projector and get this sucker uploaded ASAP while i was there

this is a pretty video. i love model planes, and one of my great uncles literally had a garage with a fucking squadron of them...so keeping that in mind, there isnt a lot here...not the way im used to

its grainy, so its hard to tell if theres a swoop from another plane going on before the cut...you see a bright slash of something, then a cut back to your protagonists plane. kind of uneventful, though maybe a dogfight specialist could get some aeranautical (sp?) juju out of it

i have to admit, i think im going to skip out on the film purchases from here on out. i know theyre cheap, but i dont think i can look at another shed or a t-bird getting waxed or (IM NOT KIDDING) a kids gums and teeth with and without braces...that was the worst thing ive seen ever. these things are cheap as shit, but the effort to find out how much they should be $2 takes a lot out of me...(they should be $2 when they shouldnt be $1, seriously)

if i had my uncles projectors in the apartment, it wouldnt be so bad. but driving to see family, play around with the kids, shoot shit with my uncle, maybe help him drill some holes in the garage and keep a level for the shelving...all those costs on top of the films are starting to make them less worth it

ill keep you posted if i see something cool, but most of the cool stuff ive seen has been about like all the stuff ive posted...not cool

found films monday - 1 person chutes, 0 dead, 0 fed

turns out my found films seem like standard family fare. looks like an xmas spread and then a trip to a local slide park or something??? does anyone know what that is? ok lemme break this shit down, slide first



i dont understand this stuff. i grew up with HEAT, so when we went sliding, we went with water. this looks like an overgrown playground...someone pumped the local slide on steroids...only you have to go down on a protective mat and go you straight down and thats all that happens. wtf?

when was this cool? i bet you even have to WAIT IN LINE to go down a slide straight...on a protective mat...nowhere...jesus i hope nobody had to pay for this. going here instead of a local park sounds like going to the library and paying to check out the same book you were going to get anyway...only the book is 2 feet tall!!!




this ones even weirder to me. it starts off with this real eggheady guy who doesnt really look like hes in the christmas spirit of fun but instead real serious. like maybe hes trying really hard not to point out which box he wrapped for his brother...you know, the one with headgear in it. no dinosaur action figures or bb guns when love means orthodontistry. then again who knows. maybe this kid secretly collected daggers. that would be pretty badass. all i know is that hes the only thing happening, because next we pan to a table

thats it

forever

tables are neat and all, and i love a good set table when family is about to TEAR THE SHIT out of some roast beast, but we got nothing to work with here. i cant even make fun of cranberry sauce shaped like the can

finally at the end, we pan over to some hotness, but we get about two seconds of the hot lady. the hell???

i dont know whats going on here. in my family, you bring the camera out because everyone youre related to is an idiot. you have to show andy almost set himself on fire when he grills the salmon and puts some oil on it OVER THE FLAME. you have to show ariel hoppin around when shes wearing a tiara, because shes young enough that shell hop up and down if you tell her to, but then the tiara bops off and bonks her on the nose. you gotta show tim because hell blow smoke into the camera. and you gotta show dave because hell try to wave the camera off when hes taking the last of the coffee and TOTALLY isnt making any more because hes THAT guy and always will BE THAT GUY.

wheres that? i wanna see that, and im not even in the damn family

its a nice table, and that lady definitely BRINGS IT, and im pretty sure that kid has his heart in the right place, but finding these videos and just seeing things like tables, or someones shed (i found this one i didnt even bother uploading because it was literally three minutes of a guy crabwalking around his fucking SHED and filming it in pure grainy SURROUND) is really making me want to give this up. i know most of these buys at garage sales are a couple bucks a pop, but i could get a CASSINGLE by "Cutting Crew" for the same amount and still have something i could listen to in my truck

found some other stuff

ill try to get it uploaded ASAP, but the basic story is that the gf and i went out on another barfgain mission this weekend, and while she racked up the values, i picked through whatever else was there. i got a couple filmstrips, but they werent labeled, so i cant tell you anything...except that im sick and tired of being tired on my weekend. i cant imagine what its going to be like when we arent renting anymore and have to go bargain hunting AND take care of the house. when do i get my beer and madden? that should happen at least one night EVERY weekend. period.

Found a super8 film with a miniature steam train...

remember back here i was bitching about bargain hunting with the gf?? anyway, i finally go around to uploading this film junk i got at a garage sale



pretty basic stuff like i usually find...family picnics, etc...but this one has the granfather (i guess) giving everyone rides on a miniature steam engine...there was a photo of the train in a box of photos i got with the films too... 3 bucks, not bad.



sorry for spacing on this one so long guys...you know how it goes, life and work get in the way...two tears in the bucket, motherfuckit

i got older family in the area though. around the holidays it sort of sucks...maybe you want to stay in with the gf on thanksgiving and have turkey sandwiches and just make love three or four times and watch football and get fucked up...but instead youve got to drive out to uncle andys place and deal with rugrats and stuffing and toasts and drama. and FUCK...you cant drink a bunch of wine and go out behind the shed and maybe do a little petting out there, because those rugrats will FIND you

me and the gf actually DID try that one REALLY boring birthday get together out there. we were groping around behind the shed a bit one time and heard someone chunk-chunk-chunking out on the gravel and managed to straighten ourselves out at the last second, and good thing because it was my little cousin who's maybe five. we had to bluff what we were doing, so the gf started dropping gardening science...we wound up showing him how to care for rosebushes and identify weeds and teaching him how to garden, and showing him the irrigation system andy put in. it actually worked out and was a lot of fun...we felt proud to be the cool relatives who give it to the kid straight, saying "this is a chore a lot of the time, but plants are cool, and i bet your dad will like it if you help him out sometime," but obviously on the other hand i wouldve been just as happy if the gf and i had just been making out the whole time

i dont dislike my family at all, and thank fuck the gf thinks theyre pretty cool, but going there can suck because of family drama and because you cant really unwind...someone will always blow up about something or needle someone else and make you grind some fucking teeth because you have to be more mature than they are and just not make a scene. going there for one night of your weekend can be pretty draining and unfun...sort of like your gf waking you up early on saturday to to hunt bargains...unsexy

not that that has anything to do with anything right now

i swung by andys place this weekend because i know he has a good video camera (and i dont) and also because hes sort of OCD and has all the old family film projector stuff going on. if youve got an old reel of your cousin naked in a playing pool and eating grass and want to embarrass her in front of her fiancee, andys usually got something to play it on

i raided his upstairs closet and got out the projector and this weird collapsable podium or whatever, and he let me use a super8 to film what we projected. good times. as OCD as he is, hes always been cool with me...i think he knows that i might be sloppy about me but will never be sloppy about someone else's stuff...especially not with a favor. i keep a favor, i pay it back

like i said, i promised this...here it is a little late...but its cute and sort of nice to watch. i made the effort so DIG IT

so i got this film canister and a boring weekend

the gf is stubborn. way more stubborn than me, if you can believe it. the weathers been pretty good lately, so she made me go out both days this weekend looking for "bargains"

i fucking hate every part of this

first things first: you cant get drunk if youre bargain hunting. theres no staying up late with her and hoping she gets a little drunk and slutty and willing to let you do it real nasty together. none of that...just straight to bed...uggggh

second things second: forget drinking alone and playing some video games. because she wants to get up early, that means YOU get up early...its like no weekend at all. you cant open a sixpack and just let er rip. yeah ok, im cool with doing something sunday morning, but at least leave me friday night to get fucked up and play some madden and maybe do some shots and call my friends a little too late and go "yaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" into the phone or something. no dice. MUST. BE. AWAKE. EARLY. BOTH. DAYS. like i said, not even a weekend at all

third things third: instead of driving around and going to a ballgame or going to look at something cool, we go look at where things arent. like HIGH PRICES!!!! fucking kill me

im not even making this up, she has a fucking MAP - like she GOOGLED OR MAPQUESTED ALL OF THIS - of all the different yard/garage/away/rummage/whatever sales everywhere...she wakes up at like 7 am and looks on craigslist and the newspaper and just finds all these things and puts together a trip-tik like AAA for how to get to all of them the fastest. we have to get to all of them before noon

i really hate doing this, not just because id rather drink UNTIL 7 am but because its creepy...i dont like looking through other peoples lives. the fuck they do to me? - nothing. i dont want to rummage through their happiness and take shit away...i dont want to be a part of it. i think it sucks that sometimes they have to sell it off, but leave me out of it...i dont need the connection. the gf doesnt worry about this. i think she just sees dollar signs, and thats weird because she doesnt care about money with me and has never complained about how we live

i just dont want to butt in on people...but between the economy sliding and property tax here and the senior citizens dying off naturally, there are a LOT of these kinds of sales. people either want to get out or they checked out, either way you get to flip through all this personal shit that someones family really should be taking instead...but clearly they dont really want it and want to make money off of it...so if you see some shit thats cool enough to make you kick some bucks back at them, i guess its ok

so like i said the gf dragged me to fucking a million of these this weekend, and i was at one of these sunday in a town called ruskin. it sounds like the outside of a weird vegetable...like, no you have to peel off the ruskin. thank god i have a dvr and there werent any football games on early in the day that i really gave a shit about, because i already wanted to kill someone. but it was ok for all that i guess

anyway i found a cool film canister labeled WH-TRAIN and there was this narrow drawer like an old card catalog filled with pictures, and there were a lot of train pictures in it. i think its just going to be family fun stuff, but ill post it and let you know as soon as i can transfer and upload this stuff

hope you guys had decent weekends