Sometimes the ds106 assignment just falls into your lap. Such was the case when I noticed that Cogdog tweeted to Jim Groom about a gentleman named Conrad that I’d mentioned in the latest installment of scottlo calling. Seems that Groom wanted to use one Conrad as an inspirational reference point for the ds106 ethos. Cogdog replied that the second Conrad might be a better fit. And for the sake of being contraire, I jumped in with a tweet telling them that they were both barking up the wrong tree and that the third Conrad is the pure embodiment of the ds106 mindset.
That’s when I decided to return to one of my favorite ds106 Visual Assignments: The Triple Troll Quote. For those not familiar with the TTQ, here’s the deceptively simple premise:
Find an image of a well known figure, add to it a famous quote by someone related in some way to the figure in the image and then attribute the quote to a third, related figure.
In this iteration, it seems to me that there are two points connecting the three would-be ds106 moral exemplars. The first is that they shared the same surname (one one of the three was born a Conrad). The second point of connection is referred to in the title of the post and will be left for the curious to pursue.
In doing this assignment, once I’d found a suitable image and quote via the internet, I turned to Photoshop. I find that working with text with the latest version of the GIMP is so frustrating that it’s not worth the effort. The canvas size for the image was extended 100 pixels downward and a black layer was placed under the Conrad image. The text for the quote uses the Oriya MN font which seems is a built-in font in OS X that I’d never noticed before.
Personally, the curious thing in this process is that all three Conrads have been on my mind in recent weeks:
- Falsely Attributed Troll: I’d recently read Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and had been toying with the idea of reading parts of it aloud for an audio project.
- Pictured Troll: Just this past week, while listening to Frank Edward Nora’s Macho Condor#1, I noticed audio excerpts from Robert Conrad going ballistic in an immortal telecast of Battle of the Network Stars from 1976. It was only in researching for this post that I realized that he’d been the star of most favorite TV show as a kid: James West in The Wild Wild West.
- Unattributed Troll: I did indeed mention William Conrad on a recent podcast. The quote above was actually spoken by the character he played in another of my favorite shows from the early 70′s: Cannon.
Keep the faith alive, brother Scottlo. I was having reams of 1970s TV flashback listening to the podcast where you mentioned Bill Conrad (and Cannon- I seem to recall that sleek long car was a Lincoln Continental) and also Mannix (I always recall the episode where he fell off a 2nd floor roof, landed, got up and kept chasing a bad dude).
For some other nostalgia, I was watching a great retro channel while at my sister’s house. ME-TV (http://metvnetwork.com/) and caught this great episode of the Rockford Files and was struck by how much of his schitck work was done via pay phones- I think there is some great assignment showing action heroes on payphones (and Redford’s phone hacking in 3 Days of the Condor).
I also caught this great episode of Columbo where Dick Van Dyke played agains his normal character as a high profile photographer who tries to stage a murder of his wife on another dude.
Classics never die. They just GIF on and on.
Thanks Alan.
I’m finding that as I approach old geiser-hood, the pop-culture memories from the early seventies bring a peculiar comfort. I’m looking forward to checking out ME-TV – it sounds right up my alley.
On a more somber note, I just noticed the spelling error on the TTQ image. I wonder if I should go back in to photoshop and fix it. Or maybe I coudl say it was intentional.