Walt Disney’s brother thought he’d gone insane. In 1932, halfway through an 8-minute cartoon, Disney ordered the project halted. He wanted to start over in full color, using a process no studio had tried publicly yet, on money the studio didn’t have.
The cartoon was “Flowers and Trees,” the 29th entry in Disney’s Silly Symphonies series. Roy Disney and others argued against it. Color film was far more expensive than black and white. They’d just signed a new distribution deal with United Artists. If the gamble failed, the studio could go bankrupt in the middle of the Great Depression. Walt went ahead anyway.
The technology came from Herbert Kalmus at Technicolor. His “three-strip” system ran three film strips through a single camera, using a prism to split light into red, green, and blue, then merged them into one strip in the lab. The previous process had only captured yellow and green. This was the first time cinema could show what the human eye actually sees.
Disney didn’t just use the process. He locked it up. As part of the deal, he secured exclusive rights to use it in animation through the end of 1935. Max Fleischer, whose studio made Betty Boop and later Popeye, was locked out. Fleischer had to use an inferior two-color system called Cinecolor. His “Color Classics” series launched in 1934 as a direct answer to Disney’s Silly Symphonies, but the visual gap was obvious. Fleischer’s cartoons couldn’t get the same process until 1936.
“Flowers and Trees” premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on July 30, 1932, completed just days before showtime. Film Daily called it a “genuine novelty.”
That November, the Academy introduced a brand-new category: Best Short Subjects, Cartoons. Disney was nominated twice for the first prize, with “Flowers and Trees” and “Mickey’s Orphans.” He won with “Flowers and Trees,” making it the first animated film to win an Oscar in a category that hadn’t existed before. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2021, nearly nine decades later, for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Roy thought the whole thing was madness. Walt was right.
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Fire broke out at Utumishi Girls Academy in Gilgil at 2am. By 4am, Kenyans were already talking about it online.
At 6:30am, the Education CS showed up at a Prayer Breakfast at Safari Park Hotel. He stayed for 1.5 hours, eating mandazi, samosas and chapati, unaware that 16 learners had died.
He arrived in Gilgil just after 10am — over 8 hours after the fire started.
For those 8 hours, parents were stuck in agony, relying on scanty and unconfirmed posts online.
Any CS with common sense would have gone to Utumishi first, not an eating competition disguised as a prayer breakfast at Safari Park Hotel.
Ogamba must go!
Sixteen girls died in a fire at Utumishi Girls Academy.
Sixteen girls. Not just children. Girls. Young women with futures, with dreams, with families who sent them to school thinking they'd be safe.
While their parents were still identifying bodies, while smoke was still rising from the ashes, while Kenya was asking how this happened and why, someone was on television talking about Arsenal.
Not about the fire. Not about the dead girls. Not about why a school in Kenya can burn down so completely that sixteen young lives are just... gone.
Arsenal.
He was worried that President Museveni was upset he's an Arsenal fan instead of a Harambee Stars fan. So he took time out of his day to send a message to Museveni saying he supports both teams.
This is what we're dealing with. A leader who can find time for football diplomacy but cannot find five minutes to address why girls are burning alive in their school dormitories.
Sixteen girls. Dead. And the president is on TV talking about which football team he supports.
This is what happens when you have nothing to say. When there's no answer for the dead, you talk about something else. You make it about you. You make it about football.
How is this helping Kenya? It's not. Everyone can see it.
Dismas wa Tabu. Dreaming in installments. Billed in full.
Here’s proof that we need better layouts..
This 2,912 sq ft home in Thalassery, Kerala, fits a full family program; four bedrooms, private courtyard, lily pond, well, kitchen garden; not by building bigger but by building around three distinct functional zones organized from a central axis.
Exposed laterite walls. Clay tile roof. 35% of the wood and roof tiles salvaged from the old house that stood on the same site. Solar panels. Rainwater harvesting feeding the lily pond.
Nothing imported that didn’t need to be. Nothing wasted that could be reused.
Architects: TWO i Architects, Kannur, Kerala. Completed 2022.
The house your community has always built was never the problem. It was the decision to stop refining it.
More images in the comments 🧵
Let them have ice cream for breakfast.
THE most important thing is to preserve a child’s inner compass. This requires going against 99% of modern parenting advice.
Limit and rules give kids an incentive to lie to you, deceive you and hide things from you. They also undermine their trust in you, and - the kicker - undermine their trust in themselves.
Many, many adults do not know or trust what they want precisely because of the coercion they suffered as children.
Buck that trend. Drop all rules that aren’t essential for safety. Discuss a LOT, rather than impose.
Let them have ice cream for breakfast.
Duale and Oluga met IG Kanja on August 6th at Afya house (Senior health officials and police bosses). Duale affirmed govt will fully equip the New 1.2 Billion police Hospital at Mbagathi through NESP. 7 months later they are on boarding the same police to a private facility.
WEZI
Fellow Kenyans, I need you to help me reset, rebuild and restore Kenya.
I have chosen to run a campaign that is funded by you, ordinary Kenyans.
I am appealing to you to make a donation to the campaign.
If my campaign is funded by donations from you, the everyday Kenyan, then it becomes OUR campaign. And I will be accountable to you, the everyday Kenyan.
You can donate any amount.
Simply log in to
https://t.co/Qnx8YlRZfQ.
Or go to Mpesa Paybill: 4164137
Account Number: 4164137
#TuSkume
Audit findings on NSSF bond investments:
—Bonds worth KES 12.0B were purchased at a premium of KES 500.7M without satisfactory explanation, sometimes exceeding coupon rates.
—Bonds valued at KES 5.1B were sold below par, resulting in capital losses of KES 789.2M.
—Similar bonds were bought at premium and sold at discount within the same period, causing a capital loss of KES 272M.
So let me get this right.
It's been 484 days since they started robbing SHA from our salaries.
SHA which, for many, is equivalent to monthly food money, fuel money, even rent for some.
Then 22, 727, 272.72 (yes, 22 million) has been looted per day?!!!!
As a PAYE worker I demand we abolish SHA
We can’t be deducted 2.75% of our Gross pay only for it to end up in people’s pockets & then we are forced to fundraised for our sick people
Hapana, nimechoka kuibiwa
11 billion??? Salary inakuja ikiwa nusu, KRA wanacome up na ways to sniff money from all sources , just for it to go missing?????
Healthcare is shit, education is shit, economy is shit.
Hii ni pesa yenu inafund individual lifestyles mkiteseka??????
I think this government's biggest undoing, and what makes it so supremely hated, is their insistence on being expensively incompetent, when history has shown that incompetence is remarkably affordable.
The government spent Ksh 104Billion to build this SHA system because the central argument against NHIF was that there was too much fraud around it.
The initially proposed NHIF system upgrade was set to cost around Ksh 5Billion. Expensive, yes, but certainly not 104 Billion.
Now we've lost another Ksh 11Billiion despite that investment.
Assuming we were meant to lose the 11Billion through NHIF anyway, what exactly was the point of paying an extra 104 Billion to facilitate that theft??