Cartoonize yourself Cartoonize myself

Given the gabillions of words in our English language, cartoonize is not one of them. Someone smarter than this author thought it up, but it has yet to be accepted into the dictionary. At least dictionary.com overlooks it.

Evidently it's a verb. Using it in a sentence:

"Cartoonize yourself!"

The subject is an implied "you" as in "You cartoonize yourself!". The verb is "cartoonize" and the word "yourself" is a gerund or a preposition or a dangling participle or some other inconsequential word that's just put in so the sentence will make sense.

We assume that "cartoonizing yourself" implies making yourself into some semblance of a cartoon. Consider the epic film Space Jam, in which noted thespian Michael Jeffrey Jordan tumbles down a rabbit hole and into an animated feature film. Certainly this represents one example of involuntarily cartoonizing oneself.

• Mow the lawn
• Put out the dinosaur
• Install Windows 7
  
• Cure Cancer
• Cartoonize myself
  

Hearken back to classic TV sitscoms of the 1970's. Noted thespian John Travolta portrayed eternally conflicted Vinny Barbarino on ABC's Welcome Back Kotter. Responding to Mr Kotter's interminable stream of bon mots, Travolta gave us the never to be forgotten insult "Up your nose with a rubber hose." Perhaps he should have rolled out a strong rendition of "Go cartoonize yourself." Who can say where his career would have ended up.

Something special this way comes. Cartoonizing oneself must surely include some redeeming social value, else so many online cartoonizing services would not offer free participation. Deep down in our psyches we all want to look like a cartoon. The process hides blemishes. Receding hairlines vanish in a tangled thicket of tousled auburn locks. Noses retreat to normal proportions.

At least we think so.

Do we have a cartoonizing conglomerates? Are cartoonizing requests bundled into crates and shipped off to a massive multinational corporation specializing in abstracting human faces? Does that unmarked van parked in the neighbor's driveway contain freelance cartoonizing specialists working on contract to fulfill the massive worldwide demand for colorful visage renderings?

We think so. Good luck proving us wrong.

Massive amounts of computing power are consumed for calculating cartoonized complexions. Voluminous volumes of requests push helpless CPUs to the brink of overload. The next time you click the "Cartoonize me" button, give a care to computers running red-hot simply to make you look pretty.

Rendering graphics, even cartoon graphics, requires millions of decidedly non-cartoonish instructions CPU instructions to be executed. Really smart computer programmers toil in anonymity to produce the logic that gets it done. it's not magic, although the result appears magical.

Look down the cartoonizing road and speculate what might be zooming at us with the speed of a quad core Pentium. 3D cartoonizing, perhaps? Will we need cartoon glasses?

• Classic films will be cartoonized.
• Evening news will be cartoonized
• Congress will be cartoonized. Never mind, too late.
  
• Real life will be cartoonized.
  
• South Park will be cartoonized.
  

Some images courtesy of http://www.freedigitalphotos.net and Francesco Marino.