Giphy is down!

My giffinator is down. That means I can't gif, not now anyway. Could it be too heavily trafficked, might it have crashed? Who knows. I have all sorts of vintage Santa cartoons, you know the kind I mean, that I want to excerpt in gifs, but I can't. So I am left to trawl web sites, such as a bizarre collection called giphy. Most of these I already have in some form or another, except for the multitude of titled Safety Last ones (and I still haven't found all of those).

These I have seen, but they pair up nicely, expressing my feelings about this time of year. If only it were possible to die temporarily, which is perhaps what drugs and alcohol are supposed to do.

REALLY Bad Santa photos: watch out for that balloon!

I have promised to share with you only the best, or shall we say worst, of the Bad Santa sites on Facebook. This is one of those scraped-off-the-sidewalk souls they used to use in department stores for a buck a day and all you could drink. But what happened to his gloves? His scabby bare hands all over those innocent children. . .

Truly terrifying. In the back of the station wagon is a sign reading, "Hey kids! Come get your free candy!" A menacing Santa stands there with rope or electrical cord in his hands, while the getaway driver keeps the engine warm.

Santa works in a radium mine!

I call this the Santa Does Citizen Kane shot. Note that his head is at crotch level.

Oh Santa, that was a ba-a-a-a-a-a-a-d balloon.

Why Watch Safety Last? This is shorter

Twelve Days of Rob Ford (Best of the Season)

Oh, oh, oh!

 http://bc.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=1057703&playlistId=1.1585000&binId=1.1184694&playlistPageNum=1

Wrenched

I don't know what I did yesterday, or at least I think I don't know. Last night it was evident something had happened, as I tried to sleep with a knife-blade stuck in my hip bones. Or maybe it was an axe. I don't usually get this sort of thing - oh, maybe once in a while. I hate to admit to arthritis or anything else, as secretly I think of illness (all illness) as "weakness". "Sickness is for mortals," my husband once said - no, he says it all the time, sending me up.

Now I sit in my not-so-great office chair, but at least better than the last one, with an ancient heating pad jammed against the vicinity of my left hip. It's too well-upholstered (the hip, not the chair) to do much good. The chair has a huge gap under the arm where, if it had something solid, the heat would go exactly where it needed to go. I have to hold it there with my left hand, constantly.

How did it happen? I'm not sure. I went to Erica's Christmas extravaganza yesterday, perhaps the sweetest moment of a grandmother's year - little kids in Oliver costumes, an 8-year-old girl playing Silent Night on a 3/4-size violin. This year, unlike other years, a little bit of (actual!) Christmas music snuck back into the proceedings. Last year there was just nothing, no Frosty or Rudolph, just a winter festival with completely unknown songs. Still nice, but unfamiliar, an obvious bow to political correctness.

Maybe there were complaints, who knows, which brought about the changes this year. In any case, there was Erica in the very front row, singing songs from Oliver: Food, Glorious Food, and Consider Yourself. Though these aren't strictly Christmas songs, all the sooty plate-banging Dickensian waifs somehow fit in beautifully. I had never seen my gorgeous granddaughter with her blonde curls all braided up, wearing a grey gingham dress and scuffy old tie-ups like something out of a storybook.

At the end of the concert I felt a rush of icy air, looked around, and saw double doors opening out to a very rare scene in this part of Canada: SNOW! I could practically hear Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney singing White Christmas. Then the girls, let out of school early, ran out into the playground. There was NOT ONE KID there - maybe it wasn't allowed, who knows - so they had the run of the huge place, dotted with giant snowballs and half-snowmen (can you believe kids don't know how to make them here?). When they finally hightailed it out to the play equipment, it was so slippery from frost that they shot out of the end of the slides as if forcefully ejected. Lauren (whose concert is today - double joy!) couldn't get up on the swing. The seat of her snow pants was too slippery.

"Nanny, lift me up," she said, and I did. Was it then that something snapped, or went out of alignment or what? I lifted her, gave her a few pushes (she's six and does not normally need such help, but bundled up like the Michelan Man, I had to get her going). I didn't notice anything until I got home, then -

Jesus! Or whoever! Someone was shoving a hot blade between two bones, and twisting. I knew taking any kind of pain medication would be futile, though I did it anyway, and I was right. I had "done something to my hip", the hip that tended towards arthritis that usually didn't register more than a twinge or a low-grade ache.

So I sit here now. I just went on Facebook, damn it - one of the worst habits I formed this year, after swearing I wouldn't use it. It had something posted like 25 Questions You Should Ask Yourself At The End Of The Year (That Will Probably Make You Feel Really Lousy For Not Accomplishing Any Of Your Personal Goals).  I see I have not taken adequate care of my body, have in fact said screw it most of the time while I try to cope with other things.

Losses. Some gains. Each stressful in their own way. Having to cut loose from a  formerly-close friend whose communications had devolved into boredom and bile. Worse, her integrity had failed, and she was sneaking around planning to leave her husband while insisting it was her grim duty to stay with him until he dies (he has Parkinson's, and she makes him feel bad about spending time with a buddy because my friend does not like the buddy, and wants to separate the two of them for reasons of her own. This means he can't go sailing any more, one of his favorite activities.)

Though we used to say we were sisters in all but blood, I find, to my shock, that I just don't like her any more, that her empty distress calls and perfunctory phone calls to make up for the abyss of her silence ("and how is so-and-so, and how is so-and-so," once asking after my DOCTOR whom she knows nothing about) leave me drained and disappointed. Those so-called conversations were no more intimate than talking with a stranger at an airport. Except for her huge dumps of venom, the whole thing had gone dead for me.

My part, I think, was to let it go on too long. Which I did, still hopeful. Contrary to conventional non-wisdom, hope is NOT the best thing in many situations. I did however land a book contract for Harold Lloyd, amazing to me, but also full of anxiety because now I am hearing that it is almost impossible to get any attention for a book, particularly literary fiction. But Rich Correll called, he really did, after years of futile attempts to get hold of him. Somehow-or-other he got my samples of The Glass Character and seemed to like what he saw, or at least the idea of it. I made the mistake of sending him the whole manuscript, which must have been overwhelming. After the editing process, I realized it wasn't even the same book and that the post-edited version was 100 times better, but by then. . .

So I don't know what to do here. I never do. Phone him again? In the new year? Ever?  I have a tendency to wear out my welcome after two calls. People don't want to deal with me, I guess. I lost Kevin Brownlow that way, after sending him an impulsive, gleeful link to my blog post.

Bad idea. But no one told me.

I can't write about all the rest of my life because this is probably boring enough. Part of my dream came true, but the rest of it looms and creates anxiety, terrible anxiety. I may still lose this dream, it may just drop into the abyss like everything else I've done. I don't know what I expect to happen, or how to handle what MIGHT be tiny little specks of hope that someone will notice it beyond the Canadian literary wilderness.

So I sit here wondering where I got wrenched, how, and why it's so hard for me to bend and straighten and walk. There will be no running around in the snow after the concert today, not for me anyway, no heavy lifting. What I've been given in my life has rained down from the heavens (supposedly, though maybe I did have something to do with raising kids who turned out to be wonderful parents). What I want: I feel like I have these pliers in my hands and am trying to pull out the back tooth of a hippopotamus.

It's not good to be ambitious, unless you are hard enough, unless you have the right stuff, and it looks like I don't. I always hang on too long. But if I let go, would there not be an even more formidable abyss below me? Would I ever stop falling?

These are the festive thoughts I have, at this festive time of year.

Bad, bad, BAD Santas: watch out, boys and girls!

I promise to post only the BEST of the horrible Santa pictures we see all over the internet this season. Or the worst. Whatever.

Death rays appear to come from this man's eyes. And what of the girl on the pony? Yes, she looks happy, but slightly glazed, as if her happiness is chemically induced.

Stoner Claus. 

One more weird thing, do you notice Santa's left and right hands seem to belong to two different people? He has the right hand of a six-year-old. Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!

Is it mental illness, do you think, or does this photo hark back to the time when indigents were rounded up to play Santa for a buck a day and all they could drink?

Someone should explain to this man that the moustache goes BELOW the nose. Or perhaps this is just Santa's idea of a ski mask.

This is my personal favorite, because it makes no sense at all. We will reserve comment on Santa, his demented stare and yellowing, moldy beard, but what in hell is that thing with the pink bowtie? The evil entity on the right is beyond describing. Could it be an Easter Bunny left over from the Third Reich? The Nazis celebrated Christmas too, didn't they? Are these from Himmler's family snapshots?

Feel like I'm made out of gingerbread

So this was the idea, the thing I was hoping to do: a little knitting project, short but sweet, cute enough to hang on the mantlepiece or pop in a stocking.

All I wanted was a pattern. A pattern like all the other ones I've snarfed up on the internet for free.

I saw one I liked. This one. A cute little knit-man sitting in clover. The site, called Big Fat Crafty Mama or something like that, teasingly described how wonderful it was to knit Mr. Ginger, then said nothing about the pattern. Relentlessly, I hunted on.

This time of year can be horribly depressing, and this is why. This is a "craft", a "FREE" craft you can Do Yourself, but who would want to? Hanging this on your tree might scare away crows.

This is a vintage pattern, only useful as a curiosity, but what's this? Someone actually posted the above graph or chart or whatever-it-is, handwritten in pencil.  Just tell me how many rows to knit!

At some point, it just gets bizarre. I am NOT going to knit this. It's supposed to be a "hot water bottle cover", when hot water bottles haven't been seen for 97 years. My grandmother used one, and the plug would always come out and flood her bed. Personally, I think this is just an obese gingerbread man, having eaten too many cookies.

Perhaps this one is meant to be cute, but it isn't. Someone knitted a rectangle, then sewed in some lines for arms and legs, along with what looks to be leg-irons. This little man is entering the oven, and there isn't a thing he can do about it.

If you're going to make a costume as silly as a gingerbread man, why not make it a GOOD gingerbread man, a cute one like the little guy sitting in clover? Though the brown oven mitts are a nice touch.

Having given up on knitting, I found myself in the netherworld of gingerbreadism: screaming victims, ginger-people with obvious and quite huge genitalia. A gingerbread bacchanalle of sorts. Bring on the cocoa.

Oops, this guy's the wrong color, and I'm not sure you can eat him, but he'll work a powerful mojo on your enemies. I suspect the Haitians use the same pattern.

Guess somebody left him in a little too long.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm 

Who you callin' a nut-hook?

We never liked musicians anyway

Here it is, the musicianless musical instrument: an auto-eroticon, if you will, self-stroking or pounding. These all seem to have clever, if fusty-sounding names like maestoso and orchestrion and hark back to a time when people wanted to hear something musical without bothering to hire one of those sloppy, usually inebriated boors who knew how to play.

And so, an art form was born, melding the technology of automata (first built in the medieval era, with a very few, very freaky surviving examples) with things like organ pipes and drums. The mechanics of these things, sometimes visible like sewing machine workings, are truly incredible. Somebody must have worked it out. Restoring them was a process in itself, kind of like working on a '61 T-bird on the weekends.Where they would get the parts, I don't know.

The videos I've posted today are things I found years ago, then lost (couldn't find the name of the place anywhere, then when I randomly hit on it, 71 videos jumped out at me). They're taken at a place called the Siegfried Mechanical Musical Cabinet Museum in Rudesheim, which is in either Germany or Switzerland depending on your bias. The contraptions have a mildly Bavarian flavor to them, most of them, and some of their heartily Germanic ha-ha-ha anthems are so hearty they are personally disturbing.

I can see these things loaded on circus wagons or in the village square to celebrate an execution or something (because people really did - my parents told me once that it was considered festive in their day to go see a hanging). They were a way to bring people together to hear some truly hideous music, without having to pay anybody to play it. Does it get any better than that?

Is the German guy part of the show?

This is the sound of an orchestrion, one of those cleverly-named self-playing musical instruments at the Siegfried Museum. When I first heard it, I just thought it was weird, then realized it was a meld of at least four sounds: the orchestrion, a mechanical bird chirping insanely, someone ringing an obnoxious bell, and a guy yelling loudly in German. (Did anyone ever yell softly in German?) I was a little disappointed the orchestrion didn't have a "guy yelling loudly in German" setting. But it could have. Who knows.

(Post-blog observations. Watching this thing a little more closely, I notice something going on that reminds me of the Beer Hall Putsch. The place is stuffed with Germans, most of them having some sort of Oktoberfest celebration with beer and bratwurst. If you look carefully on the left, there is a man wearing a military beret. Something odd going on here. And why on earth does this Orgasmatron or whatever-it-is have a big mirror on the front of it? You could take selfies that way, of course, in the good old-fashioned way.)

The first computer

This is an old, old computer run by a sewing machine engine. It plays some sort of tune, a mystery, maybe like HAL in 2001 singing "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do".

(We won't talk about the guy pedalling this thing. He's out of sight. You don't want to see it.)

Post-blog observation: why are there venetian blinds on this thing? The possibilities are just too bizarre.

Bloody hell, what's THIS??

This is just so vulgar and terrifying, I had to share it with you today. It seems to grin at us like some twisted corpse, rattling and banging as it tries to decide what the tune is. There isn't one, and we have to listen for two whole minutes to find that out.

Invictus: Mandela Lives!

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley