p.s. strindberg & helium web animation

[arguchik]

a friend emailed me this link:
http://www.strindbergandhelium.com

i laughed my ass off...hope you do too!

Comments

[evacado.livejournal.com]

"Bleeeediiiinnnngggg!" "Miiiserrrryyyy!" SO funny, thank you.

[arguchik.livejournal.com]

you're welcome! glad you enjoyed it. i'm not too familiar with strindberg--i know he "wrote stuff," but i don't quite get his connection to the elements (helium, iron, and sulfur) and alchemy. i guess a lot of those "dead white guys" had their fingers in multiple scientific, political, philosophical, and literary pies...so he probably had a lab in the basement or something. but it's still funny. morose, melancholic guy haunted by a floaty pink balloon. :-D

[beneluxboy.livejournal.com]

Yes, very funny! The Wikipedia article on Strindberg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strindberg) says (among other things):

Strindberg was married to three women... Though he had children with all of them, his hypersensitive, neurotic character led to bitter divorces...

Strindberg was admired by the working classes as a radical writer. He was a Socialist (or maybe more of an Anarchist) and his daughter Karin married one of the leading Russian bolsheviks...

He was a multi-faceted author; often extreme. After his death, some psychoanalysts have speculated that his contradictory and difficult character was due to his fear of his own latent homosexuality. Others invoke his early family life. His father, Oskar, was a small-time merchant. His mother, whom he called the servant, was originally his father's housekeeper before their marriage.

It also says that he was an alchemist— it was the late 1800s. And some of his plays are compared to those of fellow Scandinavian Ibsen.

Imagine how surreal your life would be if you had a small pink balloon floating around repeating key words in a high-pitched voice. :) "I'm fine, but a little sleepy." "Sleepeeeee!" "I'd like a double-tall non-fat latte." "Lattaaay!" "This section needs to explain the problem of cache coherence between the CPU cores when prefetching to the L1 cache." "Prefetch!" "I'm sorry, officer, I didn't realize that I was speeding." "Speeding!" "Let's do another set on the leg press." "Anotherrrr!" "I really love you." "Love yoooooo!"

[arguchik.livejournal.com]

aha--he *was* an alchemist! no wonder he was depressed... that sort of explains the connection to helium, but i'm wondering if he made some kind of discovery about that element, its properties or something.

thanks for doing the legwork! i was thinking about it, but hadn't gotten around to it yet. fascinating stuff. i love that he was an anarchist. (anarchist...alchemist...what's the diff? lol)

i love the little kid's accent in the toon with his kids--and that he calls him "herr strindberg." i wonder if the kids in that toon correspond to strindberg's actual kids.

[lirrin.livejournal.com]

*snicker* Once played a Star Wars RPG where my Ewok character served that exact function. Annoyed the people I targeted to no end. :)

[beneluxboy.livejournal.com]

It seems like I've heard tales of other 19th century families in which the children addressed their father by titled surname, but none of these are coming to mind now.

Maybe his discovery with helium was that, if he inhaled it, his voice became unbearably cute.