I managed to make it to Peter Hefty's gig last night after my own. I walked in just as the three performers were saying goodnight. It's a new comedy club venture that they are promoting, and the Cape Canaveral Radisson was the first venue they tried out. This is a different concept. They promoted it and conducted it with a PG-13 theme. The room was large and almost full. This event was well-promoted, and the attendance seems to indicate that there is a market for a family-oriented comedy club.

I visited with Peter afterwards. Many members of the audience stopped by and congratulated him on his performance. He was on a roll.

We went from the show venue to the Radisson lounge. I worked there several years ago hosting a jazz jam session, and had a nice reunion with Tina, the bartender. Peter's colleagues were already there and we visited until Tina threw us out.

Peter and the boss tried to recruit me for their shows. Well, they encouraged me to give it a try. I don't know. What with George Bush leaving office and only PG-13 allowed, my one-hour show would be cut down to about half. Half a minute, that is.

Someone asked...

Why did I use a picture of Steve Axtell with Edna instead of a picture of me holding Edna. Well, that's a good question. Several cameras were snapping away all during the festivities, but apparently no one took one of me. At least, I don't seem to have made the party picture gallery posted on the club's website.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FLVents/

Well, maybe one where I had my back to the camera. It's understandable. Those cameras are expensive. Can't risk breaking one.

Taking some time off

I haven't added to this blog in a while. Nothing much has been going on around here with respect to ventriloquism.

I have a couple of projects on backlog in the workshop. Allergy problems are holding me back.

I attended a meeting of the Florida Ventriloquists Association last week and had a good time there seeing old friends and making new ones.

They asked me to perform. I had the Uncle Sweeter figure with me. You might remember him. I used this blog to describe the process when I built him three and a half years ago. I used a cheat sheet with outlined notes to remember some of his material. It's been a while since I worked, and the memory ain't what it was. Second thing to go.

Margaret Davis, our hostess, has a new Axtell figure. It's a middle-aged lady figure named Edna on Ax's website.

http://www.axtell.com/

Here's Steve with Edna:




Margaret is looking for some material to use with Edna and asked for suggestions. Edna has an expressive face. She reminds me of Mrs. Hickson, my seventh grade teacher. None of the boys liked ol' lady Hickson. Particularly having just come out of sixth grade with Miss Beverly Smithie, who was 22 years old and hot.

I picked Edna up and started ad libbing some lines. I think I was getting even with Mrs. Hickson by putting outrageous words in her mouth. That'll teach her to cancel my recess and make me clean the blackboards. Old bat.

Everyone including Margaret laughed at the lines, but they all agreed that Margaret couldn't use them. Margaret entertains in churches and at family functions. Oh, well. I tried.

I met ventriloquist Peter Hefty at the meeting. It was his first time at one of the meetings. He performed for us. He used a traditional hard-figure little boy character. Very funny.

Peter is working tonight at the Radisson in Cape Canaveral. That's near where my piano gig is tonight. I'm doing a single at a private party in a condo recreation room just down the street from the Radisson. If there's time afterwards, I'll stop in and see Peter on the way home.

2-axis Eye Movement, Part 3

In the next step, I trim the excess dowel from the backs of the eyeballs, drill holes in the dowels for the syncro bar, and insert brass sleeves in the holes to minimize friction when the eyes move from side-to-side.



Next I will glue the left vertical frame to the platform, shape the blinker linkage, and install a return spring and stops to control blinker movement.

After that there will be a long pause in progress reports while I repeat everything I've done to one eye for the other eye.

Nobody said this was going to be easy.

2-axis Eye Movement, Part 2

Before finishing the eye assembly I painted the eyelids. Once the eyeball is installed it cannot come out from between the lids, and painting the lids could result in some unwanted paint slopping onto the eyeballs themselves.

Here are the two lids painted and ready for an eyeball.


Observe that one vertical support is not on the platform. That will be glued in place when the assembly is complete.

Following are two views of the eyeball resting in the lower lid. You can see how it will move in all directions.


This view reveals the details of the iris as handcrafted by Tech-Optics.


The backs of both eyelids must be trimmed to allow the control post to move in a circle wide enought to allow the eye to move to its extremes on both axes but not so wide that the eyeball will fall out. It's a process of trial and error. Making small cuts at a time I was able to trim the eyelids without overdoing it.

The following four pictures show the eyeball and eyelid in various positions.










Before the assembly is ready to install in the head, there are several things to do. I must bend back the long horizontal brass rod that protrudes from the vertical support. Then I will trim it and bend its end into a small loop for the control linkage and return spring. Also the dowel that protrudes from the back of the eyeball must be shortened and drilled to accommodate the synchro bar component of the linkage.

Oh yeah. One more thing. I have to do all this a second time for the other eye.

2-axis Eye Movement, Part 1

This project began on two fronts. When I repaired Chuck Norwood for Bill DeMar, I was fascinated by Ray Guyll's ingenious design for eyes that move on two axes, side to side and up and down.

The following article discusses my thoughts about building such mechanisms.

When he saw what he had done...

The second front is my own main figure, Dexter Dorsey, built by Tim Selberg in 1987.


Dexter has moving eyes, but they move only from side to side. He also has no blinkers. I decided to try to install 2-axis eyes similar to those of Chuck Norwood but with shell rather than leather blinkers.

First I needed some eyes. Dexter has large beautiful blue eyes, larger then usual irises with realistic detail. I contacted Tech-Optics, the folks who made Dexter's eyes. Here's a link.

http://www.tech-optics.com/

Jim at Tech-Optics made matching eyes for me. Here is one of them.


Notice no vertical hole for an axle. That's how I wanted it. I decided that using two axles would be too complex. I wanted something simpler. It seemed to me that if a figure had upper and lower eyelids, the eye could rotate freely inside them. I drew this sketch.


Next, I needed upper and lower eyelids. The upper lid will raise and lower. The lower lid will be out of sight, serving as a concave tray in which the eyeball turns in all directions.

I know how to make upper shell eyelids. I explained that process several years ago in this page:

http://www.alstevens.com/ventriloquism/vacuum.html

Making a lower eyelid is the same process. Just put the second lid on the bottom. Here are two lids I made held in place with some painter's tape to ensure that they fit and that the eye will indeed rotate on all axes.


The lower lid is permanently mounted on a wooden tray shown here.


And here is the eyeball in place in the lower lid with the upper lid resting on it.


To complete the assembly, I built an eyelid frame for the eyelid linkage to raise and lower the upper eyelid. The frame is made of 1/16" brass rod. I used a jig that I made specifically for this purpose.


Here's the frame ready to install in the assembly.


I used a wooden sphere to guide and shape the eyelid frame into place. This was to avoid getting too rough with the real eyeballs. Also, the sphere has a hole drilled to allow precise fitting of the frame into two upright braces in which the frame mounts. Here's how I did that.


Here's the frame mounted without the eyelid.


And here's the eyelid glued to the frame.


We're getting close. At least on one eyeball. The next installment takes us to the next level. Check back later for more details.

Protected Internet Photos

Would you like to know how to add pictures from websites to your picture collection? Usually it's easy. Right-click the picture, choose "Save picture as..." and save the picture to your Documents/Pictures folder or wherever you want it.

But some websites won't let you do that. They employ netfoolery to disable the right-click function so you can't grab their stuff. Their proprietors think that works, and they even pay online services to provide the protection.

My websites used to have such protection measures built in. I implemented them myself because I can. Then I realized that no matter what I did, some smartass like me could get around it. So, I removed the thinly veiled protection.

What it comes down to, is if you can display it in pixels on my screen it's mine if I want it. Kind of like stealing satellite signals. If you bombard my house with electrons, and I am smart enough to decipher their meanings, I can and might.

So, here's how to circumvent picture protection on a PC, fellow libertarians.

1. Open the webpage that has the picture you want.
2. Make sure you have the highest resolution copy of the picture fully in view on your screen.
3. In the upper right corner of your keyboard, find the key that says, "Print Scr/Sys Rq" or something similar.
4. Hold down the Shift key and press that key. You have just copied an image of the entire screen into your computer's clipboard.
5. Close the webpage.
6. Open Start/Accessories/Paint
7. Choose Edit/Paste. The Paint accessory now has an image of the webpage's screen.
8. Use Paint's rectangle tool to define a rectangle around the picture part of the screen image.
9. Choose Edit/Copy
10. Choose File/New. You can discard the previous file, the one with the entire screen in it.
11. Choose Edit/Paste

There it is, the picture you aren't supposed to have as a Paint document. Now save it into your Documents/Pictures folder.

My good deed for the day.

El cheapo styrene

Some of you know of my procedure for making blinker shells from sheet styrene by
using a vacuum table:

http://www.alstevens.com/ventriloquism/vacuum.html

I buy styrene in small sheets from a hobby store about 30 miles south. It's a
popular material that model railroaders use to make scenery, buildings, etc.

A few weeks ago I went to buy more, and the hobby shop had closed. Another mom and pop store bites the dust. Rats. I'll have to buy styrene online. That's cheaper (no
60-mile round trip), but I have to wait. Usually I don't realize I need styrene
until I need it.

Back home I went out to get the mail. I walked past the recycle container in the
driveway. An empty cat litter container was in there to be recycled. Hmm. I took
it into the workshop and measured its thickness with a micrometer. Very close to
the .060 size I use for styrene blinkers. I cut a square out of the side of the
container and stapled it to the frame just as I did with styrene. I cooked it
and vacuum-formed it and guess what. It works.

I can make blinkers now for virtually zero cost. (We have a lot of cats.)

Other plastic product containers might work, too. I'll have to experiment some.

The FLOP system: Learning what the competition charges

Today is my birthday. I use the occasion to announce the release of a product that every ventriloquist in the world needs.

Everyone knows that ventriloquists won't tell other ventriloquists how much they charge. Or if they do quote a fee, they lie.

(This is the secret shame of the business. No one would have thought that ventriloquists, of all people, would ever be less than truthful about anything. It pains me to let the cat out of the case, er, bag.)

This circumstance is an impediment to novice ventriloquists trying to break into the business. They cannot determine the going rate. They don't know how much to charge. It is also a competitive disadvantage to the professional performer who wishes to underbid the competition.

To solve this problem I developed a system called the Fee Learning and Outing Program (FLOP) with which you can instantly learn the highest and lowest rates charged by your fellow ventriloquists.

Development of FLOP involved extensive research. For ten years a team of data collection specialists have been calling agents and ventriloquists around the world pretending to be looking to hire a ventriloquist. Each specialist had a performance type in which they specialized. Birthday parties, banquets, libraries, etc. The specialist requests and negotiates for a quote.

From this research we developed the FLOP Online Storage Data Interchange Cooperative (FOSDIC), with which subscribers can instantly retrieve the fees quoted by ventriloquists, and, in many cases, the amount finally agreed upon. This additional feature reveals to those wishing to hire a ventriloquist the extent to which many ventriloquists will negotiate.

To implement FLOP, we hacked the websites of all active ventriloquists. Hacking websites was the least challenging part of the project. It seems most ventriloquists use one of two passwords to access their servers. They use either their main dummy's name or the word, Farfel. Our team of twelve computer hackers was unable to determine the origin of this odd word.

To access FLOP, a subscriber opens the website of the ventriloquist in question, places the mouse over the crotch of the dummy, and simultaneously triple-right-clicks the mouse while holding down the minus key on the numeric keypad, the Caps Lock key, the F12 key, and the door to the 5.25" floppy diskette drive.

(Remember, FLOP software was developed ten years ago on a home computer. We're working on an upgrade.)

If the dummy's crotch is not visible, use the ventriloquist's.

A popup window appears.

(There might also be a popup advertisement window for Victoria's Secret, particularly if you put your mouse on the ventriloquist's crotch. Ignore the popup. So to speak.)

Enter your userid, password and the cube root of your hat size. (Sorry, you'll have to compute that number on your own. Our team of programmers has not figured out how to compute a cube root.) Once you are granted FLOP access, the window then displays the ventriloquist's fee structure, adjusted for inflation.

It also includes links to any and all published reviews of the ventriloquist's past performances, including those printed in church bulletins, written on venue restroom walls, and posted on the blogs of left-wing extremists.

If you are a Premiere VIP Member, you can display a graph showing how the ventriloquist's rates have changed over the years. Note that the graph does not go past October, 2008. Contemporary screen resolutions do not support increases such as Jeff Dunham's or drops such as recorded for the entire rest of the community.

An additional link downloads the complete library of issues of Barker Magazine including all text and graphics from the entire run of the publication. If you have a 1200 baud modem, be patient; it takes approximately 12 seconds to download the zip file.

The FOSDIC archives are available in a data dictionary titled, FLOP's Yesteryear Dictionary (FLOPYDIC).

The success of the FLOP project will determine its future. If enough folks subscribe, we will add to it other performance types. We've already begun prowling the web in search of mime, balloon twister, and face painter websites.

(Did you ever listen to the audio clips on a balloon twister's website? Makes my skin crawl. Lucky for us there are no audio clips on mime websites.)

Footnote: I began the FLOP project almost ten years ago. The question of performance fees came up on the then-legendary and contentious, monopolistic ventmail discussion group. No one there would post their fees, except one member who quoted $7.42 for a five-minute act with a Juro doll. The Doll did not move or speak during the act but merely sat still while the performer read all the lines from cue cards stolen from Col. Bill Boley's garbage can.

(It turned out that not only was the fellow not really a ventriloquist, but the doll's jaw string had retracted into the head, and the fellow did not know how to retrieve it. The ventfigures discussion group did not exist then, and he had no one to ask.)

The act was named Herman and Herman. Those who had seen the act reported a certain degree of confusion as to which character spoke which line. Most requested a refund. Herman and Herman are not included in the FOSDIC data collection research. They were deleted when Herman retired from show business to become caretaker of the family's pet memorial garden and strawberry business.

Good news, etc...

The bad news is twofold. Small businesses around the USA are having trouble making ends meet. Postal rates have gone up.

The good news is that the appearance of junk mail in my snail mailbox has gone to virtually zero.

Has anyone else noticed this?