Monday, April 28, 2014

Ribbit! (or: Hello my baby, hello my honey)





































































(The above article is some sort of propaganda for the frog industry. I've seen other articles that claim it's impossible to raise frogs anywhere in the United States, which is why 90% of them are imported from the Orient. Elsewhere I read that frogs ARE raised in the Southern United States, but "in secret". It's something they don't talk about. God knows why, I guess it's stigmatized to have to stick a nail through an amphibian's primitive skull. Not to mention eating their legs. Blecccch. Anyway, this is a transcript of the above newspaper article, followed by, as they say, "the REST of the story".)




Big Profits in Back Yard FROG Raising
A back yard is large enough to start the thriving business of frog raising. How to build up a big income with a very small investment is told in the following article. The white meat, with a taste similar to a tender, juicy squab, is greatly in demand.
by S. L. SCHUTT
WHEN Charlie, of the De Luxe Cafe, told me that he would have to discontinue serving frog leg dinners because his wholesaler couldn’t supply the frogs, I became vitally interested in an industry that has proven to be more profitable, entertaining, and healthful than any other I have ever known.




No frog farmer need search for a market, his crop is virtually all sold before it is raised. I could sell one hundred times my present production in a single week, and am expanding my ponds so, eventually, I expect to have 1000 acres utilized solely for giant bullfrog culture. I sell tadpoles at five to ten cents each by the hundred. They are used to stock farms and for aquarium purposes.
Frog Meat Is Delicious
Bullfrogs, that cost me less than one cent per year to feed, wholesale at $3.00 per dozen in large quantities. Smaller frogs, of which only the legs are used, sell for as high as seventy cents per pound. Each frog gives a pound of delicious white meat that has a taste similar to a tender, juicy squab. The whole frog is used, the front quarter being just as delicious as the legs.



Just one pair of breeders lay over 10,000 eggs each season; usually over seventy per cent hatch and develop into small frogs.
The advantage of frog farming is the fact that you can start practically anywhere and expand gradually as your profits mount. A vacant city lot, an old orchard or even a back yard can be utilized. Due to the cannibalistic nature of adult frogs, the frog farmer needs three separate ponds, segregating the breeders, tadpoles, and small frogs.
I have found a pond, 20×20 feet, water area, with bank space of six feet on all sides, to be capable of keeping six pairs of breeders. The water depth should not exceed 18 inches except for a pit in the center of the pond where the frogs hibernate in the winter time.
Confine With Poultry Wire
Ordinary one-inch mesh poultry wire four feet high with burlap sewed on the inside to prevent injury and to confine the smaller frogs, is the most sensible fence a frog farmer can use both for breeders and small frogs. Frogs breed from April until August.



At this time, the frog farmer must have a small pond about 10×15 feet planted with arrowheads, water moss and other aquatic plants, in readiness. The pond should be not less than three feet deep to take care of the thousands of tadpoles.
The egg mass must be immediately transferred to the small pond, using a scoop to handle them. In five days, each cluster becomes a wiggling, living mass of tadpoles. Tadpoles are scavengers, eating anything from table scraps to water moss.
In six to eight months, the tadpole begins to develop legs and in a short time is a small frog. At this time, its diet changes from that of a scavenger to being satisfied only with a live or moving food.


The growing pond for the offspring of six pairs should embrace about two acres, including shore line. Water in the two acre tract should cover not more than one-half of the entire area.
Feeding the Frogs
I have raised frogs on liver and other domestic meat but I found it impractical to consider this method of feeding on a large scale.
Small bullfrogs can be supplied with an abundance of insects, especially flies, by simply concealing several fish heads in the vegetation along shore. Common crabs, found in most any ditch or stream, and good food for frogs, can be placed directly into the growing pond where they will reproduce in enormous quantities.


When ready for marketing, the frogs are caught at night by blinding them with a search light. When the catcher gets a frog he puts it into a burlap sack with others. They are then put into small pens awaiting the dresser who grabs them by their rear legs and pierces the head with a nail by a downward stroke of the hand. The entrails are removed and the frog is ready for shipment in barrels of cracked ice. 

They Came from Hell: the strangest dolls in advertising




I apologize for this, but I had to load it up-front to get you used to the flavor of this post. My obsession with old comic book ads knows no bounds, and on my recent trawl I found some pretty good ones - push-up bras made of baling wire, memberships to secret mystical societies, ads for starting your own frog ranch, circuses for a dollar starring a performing "actual live" chameleon, etc., along with classics like Grog Grows Own Tail and the chihuahua in a teacup plaintively asking, "Will you give me a home?"




But I ruthlessly cut these out of the mix when I saw the number of creepy doll ads. Like clowns, there is something inherently squickish about the doll as an object, human yet not human, and often grotesque even in its supposed cuteness. "Lifelike" is the word that comes up again and again to describe a lifeless object.

I won't get into "reborn" dolls either, often made of rubbery silicone so that their arms and legs jiggle and quiver. Some of these actually have heaters in them, heartbeats, and miniature sound systems to emit baby noises (though Edison obviously got there first). No one wants to think about the next innovation.






I've written about these incredible '60s artifacts before, but there's an update which shocked me. I used to wonder about this ad, how they could ever get away with it, and what "Lilliputian cuteness" meant (I wasn't into Swift at age eight). I tried to picture a hundred rubber dollies a few inches high, but after a while the whole thing was shoved away in a back room of memory.


Then, the wonder of the internet led to this revelation:





Someone had actually ordered these, all those years ago, and kept them in their original box. These reminded me of those little plastic ornamentations you find in cocktails, only thinner, more toothpicky. And yes, it looks as if there's quite an array of them, but the thing is, calling them "dolls" is a real stretch. Apparently in one incarnation, they came with paper clothing, but it's hard for me to imagine how that would work.

And then I found this. . . 




This is obviously the same product, but all of a sudden they're five bucks! The type is too small to read, but presumably they had dropped the Lilliputian bit. I have no idea what year this version came out. But it's ripoff times five.




There's a whole category of moving dolls, the type that emit the most godawful grinding-gears sound as they inch along. 







Some of these look like cheats. I think you have to stand behind this one and "walk" it, so it's incapable of independent movement. And any doll that costs 50 cents - I don't know. Maybe, like the 100 dolls for a dollar, she's really only an inch high, a prototype version of nanotechnology.






Botteltot just has such a strange name. You'd think the manufacturer could come up with something better, more descriptive, such as Cindy Pees-a-lot. And I just don't get Toodles. Nobody costs 44 cents, with a 19-cent "layette". Maybe, like the Walking Doll with the checkered skirt, she came with boxtops from Joy Liquid - or whatever. 




We don't have to know what the text means, which is good, because I don't. The sad purse-mouthed expression on Grasitas's face kind of says it all. And that sure is a strange diaper.




Noma the Electronic Doll is manufactured by Effanbee, which somehow makes me uncomfortable. Noma was the brand of our old Christmas lights, the ones that used to electrocute you or give you third-degree burns. Though the ad gives the impression that Noma walks, she doesn't. But she prays, which is maybe a good thing for everyone.




Does this doll resemble Regan from The Exorcist, or Carrie, or - Good God! Feel my ribs? Hear my voices? Somebody call Stephen King.




Here is a ventriloquist's dummy - always a staple of the Twilight Zone series of the '60s - who not only talks (in your own voice, of course) but SMOKES. And he's under three bucks,so what can we lose, except maybe sleep?




And here is Sandy, endowed with Rubber Wonderskin and hair you can "wave", along with the usual accoutrements (bottles with rubber nipples, etc. - though with hair like that, she can't be the right age for diapers). Someone must have believed this advertisment would attract Mommies enough to want to shell out four dollars (C. O. D.!) to scare their daughters half to death.




The Edison Talking Doll was a flop. It stopped talking after little girls had cranked it a few times, and once the public saw its inner workings, they were too creeped out to want it. The whole concept was flawed from the beginning, but I don't think it mattered to Edison. It was just another way of getting attention for his REAL phonograph, which he stole from a guy in Germany. The Berliner Talking Doll just doesn't have the same ring to it.




Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

Amazon.com

Chapters/Indigo.ca


Sunday, April 27, 2014

Key of Awesome: Pet Shop



The more you watch this, the funnier it gets. Really good parody of a song I don't like!

Harold Lloyd: somebody up there likes me


Blogger's Note. The long drought is over! Finally, a review - and not only that, the kind most authors would kill for. And the fact that it's by  Matt Paust (posted on his Mutable Blog as well as Facebook) just makes it better, in my eyes, and more worthy of posting here. It's my novel and I'll brag if I want to.








The Mutable Blog

it can change on a whim

Sunday, April 27, 2014


Carpet Ride to Magicland

In case the name doesn't ring a bell, he's the guy with the straw hat and Woody Allen glasses, in the suit, dangling from a clock on the side of a building so far above a busy avenue the cars below look like ladybugs on wheels.



 Harold Lloyd.

Movie comedian of the silent 1920s. Called himself the “Glass Character” because his trademark glasses were fake. No glass in them. The guy was a nut. Blew one of his hands to Kingdom Come fiddling with what he thought was a stage prop bomb. It was real. Deliberately gave himself powerful electric shocks to get his hair to stand straight up. Did his own stunts—the clock dangle, the shocked hair, pretending to trip and stagger on building ledges up in the sky, netless—a brave, some would say foolhardy, genius. Nut.

Knowing this and being acrophobic, I can't watch his movies anymore. It even scares me to look at the photos. I'll let Margaret Gunning watch the movies and look at the photos, and I'll read her reports. Well, then again, I don't have to anymore. I've read her book, The GlassCharacter. It's all in there.



Margaret, poor girl, is in love with Harold Lloyd. It started out as just a fascination with soundless images. Love snuck up and struck her dumb somewhere amid the exhaustive research she was conducting for a book about what was then still just a fascination. Love. Alas. Margaret is happily married and has two lovely daughters and four darling grandchildren, yet is far too young to leap the gap into the day when her beloved Harold held sway with the girls of a baby Hollywood. Fortunately, for her and for us, she's a novelist. She has the skill to weave the magic carpet to carry her backward in time to those days of yore, those Harold heyday days, and set her gently down along the path the love of her dreams must follow should he wish a rebirth in the imaginations and hearts of admirers forevermore. She's woven that carpet. It's large enough to take us with her on that long strange trip. I rode along on a test flight. We made it back, and I'm still agog.

When we stepped off the carpet in la la land I saw that Margaret had changed. No longer the familiar author of two of my favorite novels—Better than Life, and Mallory—she'd become sixteen-year-old Jane Chorney, a virgin and erstwhile soda jerk in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a terrible crush on movie idol Harold Lloyd. Soon after we landed, Margaret /Jane (and later “Muriel”, as you will learn) decided to pack up her meager belongings, cash in her chips (two cents shy of fifty bucks) and head to Hollywood and into the arms of her eternal love. I might have tried to instill sense in her were I anything more than invisible eyes and ears. Unfortunately I had lost my voice and corporeal substance upon alighting in the Santa Fe dust.

So it was off to Hollywood via a wearying, bumpy bus ride, Margaret/Jane/Muriel full of glitzy dreams and innocence, and me hunkered weightless, mute and unseen on her delicate shoulder.

I won't say more. I took no notes and had to avert my gaze any number of times during moments that really were none of my personal concern.


The Glass Character is Margaret/Jane/Muriel's story, not mine. What I did see and hear, 
and learn during our holiday in history is captured with such lucid, insightful poignancy I 
can't help but wonder if Margaret didn't in fact remain there, dictating her journal to a 
holographic image of herself in the distant future tapping on a keyboard somewhere in a 
place called Coquitlam, B.C.


Signifying nothing








"Meow, meow, meow, meow
Meow, meow, meow, meow
Meow, meow, meow, meow
Meow, meow, meow, meow
Meow, meow, meow, meow
Meow, meow, meow, meow
Meow, meow, meow, meow
Meow, meow, meow, meow"

- Baxter

(Translation: "I want chicken, I want liver, Meow Mix, Meow Mix, please deliver")


Saturday, April 26, 2014

Mother's Little Helpers (or: "doctor please, some more of these")


The text reads:

ANOTHER STRIKING TRIBUTE TO PHOSFERINE TONIC WINE

"I take Phosferine Tonic Wine at 11 a.m. and at 3 p.m., also as a nightcap, and believe me, I derive from it wonderful nights of sleep. I get up very fresh in the morning, having lost that tired feeling and after taking a couple of bottles I am now a different woman. Phosferine Tonic Wine stimulates, energizes and tones the whole system, and is a wonderful nightcap."

(Signed) Mrs. D. Islwyn Lewis

(I note in the fine print that this woman hails from Swansea,Wales, Dylan Thomas' home town. That explains a lot.)

And how about this. . .




Yes, for superior vacuuming skills, it's DEXIES!


"BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!"





Text reads: 35, single and psychoneurotic. The purser on her cruise ship took the last snapshot of Jan. You probably see many such Jans in your practice. The unmarrieds with low self-esteem. Jan never found a man to measure up to her father. Now she realizes she's in a losing pattern - and that she may never marry.

Valium (diazepam) can be a useful adjunct in the therapy of the tense, over-anxious patient who has a neurotic sense of failure, guilt or loss. Over the years, Valium has proven its value in the relief of psychoneurotic states - anxiety, apprehension, agitation, alone or with depressive symptoms.

Valium 10 mg. tablets help relieve the emotional "storms" of psychoneurotic tension and the depressive symptoms that can go hand-in-hand with it. Valium 2-mg. or 5-mg. tablets are usually sufficient for milder tension and anxiety states. An h. s. dose added to the t. i. d. dose often facilitates a good night's rest.

Oh how I wish I could see those photos more clearly, as I think they demonstrate the sad downward spiral of Jan's life as she dates men who are lower and lower on the social totem pole. At the end, she's taking handfuls of Valium with some drunken and probably gay purser. But hey, if it helps her sleep. . .




Yes, I can just make out some of the captions: Jan and Dad, 1955. Tom, Jan, Ruth and Steve, 1957. Joey, 1959. Jan and Ted, 1961. Jan and Dad, 1962. Jan and Charlie, 19(?). Jan and Danny/Benny, 1966. Jan and Dad, 1969. Jan, 1970.

Whoawww now! This is saying even more than I thought it was! This is a little girl who is hung up on her Daddy. So obviously she needs to be chock full 'o Valium in order to cope, if not survive. Yes, there was a time when her life looked hopeful, when she had lots of friends and even boy friends, but say, didn't she seem to go through an awful LOT of boy friends? Did this mean she was a raving slut, or a pussy-zippered prude? The ad implies that none of these nice young fellers was quite good enough for her - shame on her for being so picky, or could it be - could it be there is actually "something wrong" with Jan, something so awful we dare not speak its name?




I'm just thinking, TEN milligrams? I've been told that drugs that end in "pam" are all in the same family and do more-or-less the same thing. If you were swallowing tens regularly, it wouldn't be long until you were an emotional zombie. I have to take clonazepam for leg cramps at night, and the prescription is HALF A MILLIGRAM. That's right. I have never taken more than that because it wouldn't do me any earthly good, and because I don't want to feel groggy and out-of-it in the morning. I WANT my emotional storms, thank you very much.




But just think of all the women who were addicted, who were lost. It hasn't changed enough to suit me. Women in the psychiatric system are still patronized and treated with more disdain and disrespectfulness than men with similar disorders. They're wrongly or over-medicated, with a cookie cutter approach: just throw this at her, or that. Seroquel seems popular now, but you wait, it'll be another flavor in a year or so.

And nowhere does it mention the possibility that real relief of her "symptoms" will only come by breaking through to a more courageous, more authentic life. Which generally means telling the doctors to go piss up a rope. Because they don't know anything about us anyway, do they?

For more absolutely insane ads that patronize women and paint them as screamimg meemies with no legitimate cause to complain, just click on the magic link, below!

http://www.bonkersinstitute.org/medshow/fem.html

(And sorry about that Mornidine. It's another name for Thalidomide.)


Friday, April 25, 2014

On the brink




This is without a doubt my favorite moment from Safety Last (and I just broke down and bought the Blu-Ray version, which is so sharp and clear I think we see things we weren't even supposed to. In fact I bought a Blu-Ray player just so I could play it.)

Anything I could write now would not help The Cause, which is I don't know what at this point. Any advice I have been given is so bad and offputting that I want to just put my head under the pillow.

I still enjoy Harold and always will. He is an addiction, but quite a pleasant one, with no serious side effects. Unlike a great many poets, I am not likely to fall prey to the seductions of Happy Hour. And to be honest, I think I wrote a pretty good novel, not "about" Harold but "around" him. Where it goes is anyone's guess, but I'll always have Paris.




It's just too bad the news is always so dire around publishing. It shouldn't be, because the truth is people are always going to crave a good story. It gets their minds off their lives, and once in a long time there's an insight, a connecting point that stays with the reader, maybe even tells them something important.

I write because I have to write. It's what I do. Have always done. We're a team. In some ways it's the only thing that makes me feel like myself, makes me feel better when the world closes in. Which it does, sometimes.

This novel was such a labor of love, a highly unlikely thing, like having a baby at age 50. Similarly, I had mixed emotions about writing another book after what I thought of as the failure of my first two. What, try to get pregnant again? Are you out of your mind?




But there it was.

This is the point at which things begin to get complicated. I wasn't born to hustle, and actually loathe the very thought. I can't get into complicated schemes like endorsing someone's work just so they will endorse mine. Don't they cancel each other out? At the same time, I love taking part in readings and other writers' events, and enjoy doing interviews and talking to people about my book. So what's the problem?

It's like I have a son, and I think he's potentially a very talented son, but I can see he's not going to do well. Something will happen to him. I know that's a gloomy attitude and I know I could be wrong. I also know he has much to contribute, and I hope he has a chance to do so.




In closing, ahem, let me quote an article by Russell Smith from the Globe and Mail. I suppose I should have been all huffy and insulted by this piece, but I thought it was one of the best and most honest things I'd read about publishing in a very long time:

There are big winners and there are losers – the middle ground is eroding. Publishers are publishing less, not more. Everybody awaits the fall’s big literary-prize nominations with a make-us-or-break-us terror. Every second-tier author spends an hour every day in the dismal abjection of self-promotion – on Facebook, to an audience of 50 fellow authors who couldn’t care less who just got a nice review in the Raccoonville Sentinel. This practice sells absolutely no books; increases one’s “profile” by not one centimetre; and serves only to increase one’s humiliation at not being in the first tier, where one doesn’t have to do that.

So again, what is to be done? What does any artist do in the age of the blockbuster? Nothing, absolutely nothing, except keep on doing what you like to do. Global economic changes are not your problem (and are nothing you can change with a despairing tweet). Think instead, as you always have, about whether or not you like semicolons and how to describe the black winter sky. There is something romantic about being underground, no?








Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

Amazon.com

Chapters/Indigo.ca


Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Since I got nothing done today. . .




It just seems I spend my life waiting. The only real feedback I've had on my new novel The Glass Character is from friends and family, and, well. . . It's not that they don't count at ALL, but let's face it, their bias is plain to see.

It's hard to hold on to anything they say.  I'm not getting much in the way of detail, just the same "I really enjoyed your book. I liked it better than the other two" (and it seems that, as time goes by, the other two steadily get worse). I wish I knew what part of the story people liked. I wish I knew what characters they loved, hated, or were bored with.




Since none of this is forthcoming, at least not yet, I try to content myself with Blingee, an alternate to gif. I'm beginning to realize these backgrounds look sort of like the Ed Sullivan Show when Janis Joplin or Jefferson Airplane came on: there'd be this pulsating, psychedelic goo projected behind them and it would sort of mush around in time to the music.

This is a form of play for me, a way of losing myself, and boy do I need it now. I want this book to succeed, big-time. I don't know how I'll do it. I'll try magic, wishbones, voodoo, anything. But I realize how capricious is success in any endeavour. It's not a matter of trying hard, or persevering, or even of talent. It's supposed to be "who you know", but my own efforts at who-you-know-ing haven't panned out so well. It all breaks down in the execution.




It's hard to place your book in the hands of people who can determine its success or failure. There are hardly any copies left in my box now, I've given away so many, even to exotic locations in Great Britain, from which I have almost no hope of hearing.

But we have come this far by faith. I remember when I wondered if I would ever write seriously again. Just getting through a day was a gargantuan task. Slow step by slow step, year after year after year, I brought myself and Harold to this point, and by God I am determined to continue until one of us wins.




Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

Amazon.com

Chapters/Indigo.ca

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Harold, cute, on train, yelling




Harold, in car, car on train, does not know why, cannot get off, confused, scared, panic-stricken, hair flopping around, glasses, tie, GOD.