For Memorial Day (and for “Stinky,” our TM pal Flatus’ beloved Yi Kumcho, of course)

As one who has slaved over my share of web video editing chores, I am astonished by the skill in this ad for Getty Images covering the span of life with nothing but pictures, and in just one minute. This certainly challenges my favorite motto: Life is Long! (Randomly hit pause to see individual images.)

From the ad agency’s notes:

Copywriter Sophie Schoenburg and art director Marcus Kotlhar worked 6 months researching images, improving the script and building each scene so they would not only be understood, but would also touch viewers. Sometimes, for example, a scene would look perfect on paper, but the images chosen to depict it were not sufficient or did not perfectly match up to offer the right movement and sense. And hence the research had to be restarted. — Ad agency: Almap BBDO, São Paulo, for Getty Images

What does this look like to you? I’m thinking hammerhead shark (aerial view).

source: HuffPo Election Dashboard
 
Sort of glad we Eastcoasters missed yesterday’s solar eclipse. Looks creepy.

 
There goes another remake of “Manchurian Candidate” …
China firm buys AMC to form world’s largest cinema chain

As the dedicated journalist that I am, equipped with the finest research tools and unnamed sources around, sometimes I get all of my information from the CNN news crawl – those tantalizing morsels that creep across the screen allowing us to turn the sound off.

Here’s one that caught my attention yesterday:

News crawls are like tweets. They relieve us of complexity. And in this case, none is needed.

The Senate debating something that won’t happen is sort of what the rest of Washington has become, an exercise in futility – like trying to find a missing sock or watching for the pot to boil having forgotten to add water.

The deal with the Senate is that in an election year all they really want to do is argue, call each other names and repeat talking points their lobbyists wrote for them.

But to stage these smackdowns they have to pretend that pending legislation is on the table. So, all day yesterday they used phony budget bills that even some of the sponsors don’t intend to pass.

Give up the charade, senators. Just schedule arguing time – about nothing. Spare your staff the chore of writing up the bills and journalists the pointless task of reporting what’s in them.

Just wallow around the floor blaspheming and belching at one another. Leave the rest of us out of it.

If you ever do pass a budget, which hasn’t happened for three years, I’ll be looking for it on the news crawl.

I didn’t know the fine folks at Gallup had been measuring our happiness. But they say we’re getting happier — or at least not as unhappy as we once were. Score yourself with chart below.

Americans score better on all 10 of the Emotional Health Index measures in April than they did at the low point in September. The percentage of Americans who did not “worry a lot of the day yesterday” has improved the most. In April, 68.9% of Americans said they did not experience worry a lot of the previous day, up from 66.1% in September. Similarly, the percentage of Americans who said they did not experience stress was 59.9% in April, up from 57.6% in September. Self-reported “enjoyment” has also increased. The percentage who said they experienced enjoyment a lot of the previous day rose to 85.6% in April, up from the three-year low of 83.0% in September. — Gallup

As a gay man who has lived with my soul mate for 25 years I am stunned to hear our President endorse same-sex marriage. I am ready to ask David Blank to marry me. I hope he will accept. If not, we share a jumbo mortgage, and that’s a legal bond way beyond a marriage certificate.

Photo by Dale Blank