Brother

The E-xterminator

My dear laser printer finally seemed beyond repair. It had been sporting this label for years and I saved the label when I took the printer to the local solid waste district.

Perhaps what I was thinking with the sign was that I could use the printer to find bugs and eliminate them. It must have done its job well because I singlehandedly went through two or three toner cartridges with it. The black and white original design was made with an early version of Microsoft WordArt. Another inspiration for the message was the Terminator films.

By the end, the automatic feed wasn’t working so that I had to manually feed the paper into it. Also, the drum had some spots on it so that it left a few black spots on the prints.

It was a Brother HL-5240. The printer was released in 2005 and I still used it in 2024. Perhaps it could have kept going if I would have done some extra maintenance?

It was a real workhorse and got plenty of use out of it.

It’s Such a Beautiful Day

I learned about a film by director Don Hertzfeldt, “It’s Such a Beautiful Day.” Online descriptions of it are very glowing. It’s available on the Criterion Channel but I haven’t watched it yet.

I checked my library and their consortium doesn’t have that movie available, so I searched for Don Hertzfeldt and found the disks “The Animation Show” volume 1 and 2 coming from a touring show of animations from 2003-2008.

One of the animations is directed by Corky Quakenbush about the character Ricardo. Ricardo is about 4 and describes a few humorous events. He finds a pornographic coffee table book about Madonna (Madama) and ties up the cat like he saw in the book. Of course, his mom was not amused; she washed his mouth out with soap when he described the book. He describes a few more episodes in the brief animation. A YouTube copy of video The Adventures of Ricardo. As a four year old, he doesn’t understand everything but he’s really enthusiastic. The animation isn’t very sophisticated but it makes up for that with charm.

There’s also a trilogy of shorts by Adam Elliot on The Animation Show: “Brother,” “Uncle” and “Cousin.” They’re available on the Adam Elliot website. These have a droll description of a child’s relatives. Each of the trilogy features a pet graveyard and the observations that a child might make. Very matter-of-fact and to the point.

Another entertaining short from the collection is Rockfish directed by Tim Miller about a fishing trip of subterranean “fish” that take the protagonist on a ride, pulling him across the desert like a shark or whale might in the ocean.

One of the directors in the video is PES. He has a short film Fireworks that is an animation of a candy fireworks show. PES has an additional animation, Kaboom! that is presented as an extra feature on Animation Show 2. The Kaboom! short is about a war climaxing with an nuclear attack on a city. The city and all of the items in the video are created from different antique household objects. YouTube has other videos by PES that I had watched years ago but didn’t know the connection. PES has an account on YouTube and his website is pesfilm.com

There are additional disks, Animation Show 3 (2007) and Animation Show 4 (2008).