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Late last week, film director Kevin Smith pulled an anti-Silent Bob by unleashing a barrage of HateTweets (Is that a word? No? It should be!) against Southwest Airlines for kicking him off a plane because he was too fat. Although they later apologized, Southwest stuck to its gun by labeling him as a "safety concern."
I don’t know about you, but looking at the photo above, Southwest may have a point here.
Just kidding – actually that’s just Kevin Smith "avatized" by Robert Paulson, who has now avatized a bunch of other celebs:
Hey all, I’m the Avatizer. Yeah, that one. I started doing these photoshops the weekend Avatar came out cause I liked the movie and thought it’d be fun to do a few of these. Well people seemed to like them and requested more and soon a few became a dozen and and then a bunch until I ended up with over a hundred of these things seemingly overnight.
As you can probably tell, my early ones are very rough, mainly because I didn’t have much experience with photoshop when I started so I’ve had to essentially learn how to do this as I go along. Each manipulation can take as little as 20-30 minutes to as much as 4 or 5 hours (especially when I wasn’t quite sure how to do it). Now each one takes roughly an hour and a half to do, depending on how detailed the resolution is and whether their are arms/hands/legs to do too. If you want a general idea of how I do it, check out this timelapse video I did for my Ellen Page edit.
Links: Avatized Pics Flickr Set | Kevin Smith on Twitter
Last month, Pamela Root and her son Adam got kicked off a Southwest flight when the 2-year-old toddler got unruly during a pre-flight safety instruction. Later, Southwest apologizes and gave her vouchers for her inconvenience (though not for the decision to yank her off the flight).
Amy Alkon of Advice Goddess Columns disagrees with Southwest’s apology. She wrote this op-ed at the Los Angeles Times on how parents with unruly kids are "stealing from the rest of us":
There is a notion, reflected in numerous blog comments about the incident, that other passengers should "just deal" and "give a kid a break." This notion is wrong. Parents like Root and others who selfishly force the rest of us to pay the cost of their choices in life aren’t just bothering us; they’re stealing from us. Most people don’t see it this way, because what they’re stealing isn’t a thing we can grab on to, like a wallet. They’re stealing our attention, our time and our peace of mind.
More and more, we’re all victims of these many small muggings every day. Our perp doesn’t wear a ski mask or carry a gun; he wears Dockers and shouts into his iPhone in the line behind us at Starbucks, streaming his dull life into our brains, never considering for a moment whether our attention belongs to him. These little acts of social thuggery are inconsequential in and of themselves, but they add up — wearing away at our patience and good nature and making our daily lives feel like one big wrestling smackdown. [...]
I know, I know — because I am not a parent I cannot possibly understand how hard it is to keep a child from acting out. Actually, that probably has more to do with the way I was raised — by parents I describe as loving fascists. As a child, I was convinced that I could flap my arms and fly, but the idea that I could ever be loud in a public place that wasn’t a playground simply did not exist for me.
I hear claims that some children are prone to tantrums no matter how exquisitely they are parented. If this describes your child, there’s a solution, and it isn’t plopping him in a crowded metal tube with hundreds of people who can’t escape his screams except by throwing themselves to their deaths at 30,000 feet.
What do you think? Was Amy right? Link
(Photo: Karen T. Borchers / Mercury News)
