| This card was inspired
by a cartoon that appeared on b3ta.com posted by a member with the
online handle 'epiphany,' I believe. The original cartoon does not show
in b3ta's archives, although the conversation where the drawing
appeared does. So I do not know for certain and I haven't written
epiphany to confirm. At any rate, thanks. Someone on b3ta wrote,
"monkeys cannot use a door." Then epiphany responded with a cartoon
resembling the second pop-up here. I split my sides laughing. The idea
of a monkey being insulted was so funny to me it stuck for days. I went
around saying "LIES!" at every perceived infraction then cracked up
laughing all over again. There was only one good way to make
this go away. Mail it to someone. But to whom? Nobody I knew had a birthday this month, who might appreciate this sort of nonsense. I don't know how I picked my GP. I recall his office a complete mess. It looks like a paper explosion in there. I mean it. He doesn't allow his staff to clear it either. It occurred to me that was one very serious mess. By serious, I mean life/death serious, the kind of crap a regular bloke despises having to read; insurance forms, things from the government, Medicare, Social Security, Drug companies, guidelines, rules, laws, lawyers, health charts, medicine. OMG, I feel ill just thinking about it. Imagine on top of that mountain a serious appearing envelope shows up from a client and instead of containing something serious it contains instead something so ridiculous and so totally inappropriate and unconnected with anything anchored in reality that you piss yourself laughing. That's what I'm going for here. There is no birthday or any event being acknowledged. Just a joke. This card was a bitch to make. I had an idea about how to get the double doors to work but I wasn't sure it was the best idea. There seemed several ways to go about it. I made one but wasn't completely happy with it. So I made another from an entirely different approach, then another from yet another approach. A fourth and fifth approach failed entirely after about eight attempts. After twenty attempts at getting something smooth and nice, all failures, I finally resorted to the original idea -- the actual original prototype. Near the end I was beginning to get sick of the thing. Honestly. I never want to see another monkey again. On the final card, I ripped out the mechanism twice attempting to fix the problems of the mechanism's performance without starting over but nothing worked. It kept getting thicker, more clumsy and worse. So I ripped it out a third time and inserted the original prototype after trimming it to fit. I just glued it on top of the ripped up paper instead of starting over with fresh stock. That's why it looks so messy and unprofessional. Hey, so it looks like a monkey did it, so what. That is the joke, after all. An unspoken rule of pop-ups is the mechanisms, if there are more than one, should work in agreement with each other. That is, the viewer should not have to reorient the position of the card or turn it in order to appreciate the mechanisms from page to page. I would have preferred for the monkey doors mechanism on the second page to stand up so that it would work on the same plane, the same line of sight, as the pop-up on the first page, but I couldn't get the doors to open satisfactorily. I'm still puzzled about how to do that. I keep imagining paper hinges that open doors when stretched and close when folded but I cannot yet completely visualize it. There must be a way to get a wall to stand up and doors to open with the movement of the card, then close properly, but I have not found it AND I TRIED! Maybe the card opening can cause the wall to stand like normally, but then the action of the wall standing up can transfer energy to cause the doors to open -- there's something to think about. But how to hinge the movement of a standing wall to open its own doors? I really do not fully understand the whole thing about the angles of ancillary hinges. Pop-ups are all about angles. Presently, it's a frustrating mystery to me. The cover is an image chosen from Google image search. The envelope is regular card stock.   |