Corset Queens: a Victorian gallery

Catfight!!

       Go full-screen, you've got to hear that "meow"!

Cat Drag Race

Elizabeth Holmes: time's up

                                       Time's up.

I WANT THIS TROLL!

I. Want. This. Troll.

Don't ever start a collection, of anything, or this will happen.

What happened was - I don't know if I want to go back that far! Let's say I had a troll collection already, but somehow it was never complete. I felt guilty about every purchase I made, since we're on a very modest budget all the time.

AND THEN.

And then, today, rummaging in my wallet for my bus pass, I spied - a cheque. It had my name on it. I had almost forgotten I had it! And it had a tasty amount on it, too, very tasty.

The Canada Council for the Arts had sent it to me, not for a specific work but for contributing to "the arts" through publishing three novels and writing approximately 300 book reviews and over a thousand newspaper columns over a substantial period of time.

Pay.

I don't get pay from too many other sources. It also delighted me because it easily covered ALL my trolls, most of them costing five bucks and none of them more than forty (most of that being postage and handling).

I couldn't think of anything more apt than covering the cost of all my trolls with my Canada Council cheque. But do you realize what this means??

That's right. We're square, and I can once more feel guilty lusting after new trolls, looking on PicClick (an eBay search site) late into the night. My last "big guy" was most unusual, looked brand new which he couldn't be, and had a totally different configuration, as if made by another company. The troll world is odd and full of anomalies and huge gaps in information. I assumed however that he would be my last "big guy" and that if I got anything else, it would be a small Wishnik, simply because I didn't HAVE any Wishniks and it made a hole in my collection.

But I don't like Wishniks. I tried to like them. Their bulging eyes were pretty much their only outstanding feature. Most of them were old and the worse for wear, with sad clumps of hair coming away from the scalp. Some had no hair at all. The larger ones had hideous flat, elongated heads with huge ears and evil faces. No charm at all.

Wishniks were a direct knockoff of Dam trolls, which are still the gold standard for collectors, mainly because there are just more of them, at different price ranges, different manufacturing dates, and with vastly different designs. Wishniks are just, well, Wishniks. The ad that used to run when I was a kid irritated me: "Just let a Wish-nik/Let you come smi-ling through." They have double horseshoes engraved on the bottoms of their feet. 

Plus they just cost too damn much, $40.00 or more for a small troll in so-so repair.

Whether I get this "big guy" troll or not is undecided. There were a ton of photos on the eBay page, which was nice because sometimes you only get one grainy one, so I was able to make this wonderful animation. Often when I finally make my move, the troll is gone. Or I suddenly change direction and decide that I hate that troll and want something else.

THAT troll.

Post-mortem. Sigh. It happened again. Somebody bought that troll. That troll that was far too expensive for me, anyway. This is what happens when you start a collection. And the weird thing is, I've never collected anything in my life before!

Now I know why.

Horse joy: kicking up his heels

Twirly girls

Glory be to Dog, Part 2

                                   Fluffdog 2

I don't know if this is a gag or not

Of all the food abominations I have ever seen - and I consider myself an afficionado - this has to be the most grotesque. "Salad" takes on a meaning never even thought of before when you stuff a prune with cottage cheese and ram it into a doughnut. And serve it with mayonnaise.

I suspect a gag recipe here (speaking of gagging!), in part because it's just so extreme, and also because it stretches the idea of "salad" to the point of snapping. This was something they did a lot in those days. Usually it was anything encased in jello. The idea of the "manly" salad was also prevalent, with men chiding their wives that their salads were too "sissy".

Another giveaway is the spelling of "doughnut". "Donut" didn't come around until much more recently. It, too, is an abomination. The "serve with mayonnaise" seems to top it. But you never know! There used to be something called a prune Danish, and it actually had prunes in it. Why not just pour Ex-Lax all over your "donut" and EAT it?

The other thing  I saw was an "ad" for Mickey Rooney's Potato Fantasy Restaurant, which turned out to be totally bogus. Totally, but it had me going there for a minute. No salads, no prunes, just a lot of potatoes.

Elizabeth Holmes: She Who Does Not Blink

I honestly don't know if I posted this video before. But if I don't know, how can YOU know? I've been on a bender lately with this celebrated sociopath/bloodsucker, mainly because her face in slow motion reveals everything about her. The smile in this gif/video (enhanced by recording it off my computer monitor with my old cam-corder) looks manic, if not maniacal, with the utter self-assurance and grandiosity of one convinced of her own immortality. 

The smile just goes on and on, unblinking, but when she DOES blink it's just as weird. It's a sort of Disney blink, the head turning minutely to one side and the curly black artificial lashes slowly fanning the air. It reminds me of those ballet-dancing ostriches in Fantasia. In fact, an ostrich would probably have more intelligence than this so-called genius. Guile she has, and cunning, but both of these are traits that cats have in abundance. And they also do that slow, predatory eye-blink that mesmerizes us so much, hypnotizing people into handing her $9 billion and breaking every regulation in the book.

Baby cat, baby horse, baby human. . .

I love these tiny videos with animals in them, but why is it always "baby horse", "baby cow", "baby dog", "baby cat"? Do people really not know the names of these things? There is much on the internet which seems badly translated from some unknown language. 

A peanut butter sandwich made with jam

This adorable gif of the adorable Emmy, as in emmymadeinjapan,was going to be a short YouTube video until I flew into a panic. Usually I know when I'm going to violate copyright, and stay well away from it. Now I'm not so sure. I think a gif is OK (isn't it? Especially on a blog no one reads.)

The whole reason for this paranoia is the "strike" against my account I got from "violating community standards of decency" with my Eadweard Muybridge animation, the same animation that appeared on several other videos which were allowed to stand. The video consisted of seven or eight frames of nude women, mostly shown from the back, with one woman playfully dumping a bucket of water over the other's head. I was warned that this was considered filthy pornography, and if I got two more strikes against my account, I was "out". I mean, now and forever.

So now I'm freaked out.

Never mind the jaw-dropping and even horrifying stuff I see on YouTube now, including a recent one about a woman who "FUCKS A DOG!" (and this news screamed at us by some millennial loser). Horrible, horrible stuff, because it's ugly. It's cheap and doesn't accomplish anything. I'd rather watch a person shit. I don't look for others of this genre and don't want to find them, but I am sure there are  some that are a thousand times more explicit than my two little frollicking Muybridge girls.

So at least we get this gif, this very cute snippet of Emmy looking at her peanut  butter sandwich seven times. I'm not sure why seven, but it's adorable. Most of her stuff is quite watchable and relaxing. I like her respect for other cultures, other eras, and other ways. She featured a series on prison recipes, real ones I mean, from  a cookbook written by a former inmate. The treatment was not mocking in any way ("Boy, all those guys in the slammer, they must get horny as hell" - I can just see it), or satirical or even funny, but respectfully fascinated at how people make do with limited resources. That's how Emmy approaches things. No spit-takes, no mugging (though she does put on funny accents once in a while and does a split-second "bit" at the very end), no screaming into the camera with her face half an inch away from the lens.

In other words, no cheap tricks. 

I hope this is the new YouTube, but I fear not. She's considered old school now. YouTube has been hijacked by the gamers, loud millennial slackers with the IQ of a gnat. Almost all of them are young males who experienced failure to launch, and sit home alone in their Mom's basement all day, perpetually playing  video games and "fapping" to pictures of their latest female android superhero. 

Nearly-identical vintage toys: compare and contrast

It strikes me, after the fact, that I need to include a BIT of explanation with these ads rather than just throwing them at you. Unlike me, you may not remember them. These are vintage ads for kids' toys that are practically interchangeable. I don't know if Digger the Dog came ahead of Gaylord, but both toys had very catchy jingles. Digger had an adenoidal little boy who, while almost unintelligible, was mighty cute. The men who wrote these (for they were almost surely men) were geniuses in their own small way, for their little ditties plied drill-bits into our brains that screw with our memory to this day.

As a child, I wanted a horse so badly that I'd "ride" anything. I would hang upside down from the railing of a gospel church door and pretend it was a horse. I would pop the legs off one of those tin TV trays, stand inside the legs, and pretend to gallop around. Never did I get anything as impressive as Marvel the Mustang or Blaze, which would probably cost more than most families were willing to pony up.

The pooping dog was not something I experienced or wanted, not being a Barbie afficionado. In my day, it would have been considered horrific, since back than nobody pooped. I mean nobody, not even dogs.

These have only the fact that they're robots in common, but they're cool. Why am I bothered by the thumbnail in the bottom one? Does it remind me of a TNT blast, or something more ominous?

In any case, I remember most of these ads, particularly Digger the Dog and Gaylord, who seemed to be almost the same product. Likewise Marvel the Mustang (who came with the unforgettable slogan, "What horse do?") and Blaze, though unlike Marvel, he didn't really go anywhere. Though boy and horse seemed to be barreling along, it was obvious that only the background was moving, while Blaze just bounced up and down in one spot like those awful horsey-things mounted on springs. Marvel, on the other hand, kind of shuffled along, front and back legs stuck out awkwardly like diagonal table legs. No winding. No batteries. But no horse ever "did" like that. 

(Wasn't there a Romper Room caterpillar that you rode that was something like that? Let me think. . .) 

The pooping dog is quite a bit after my time, but I do remember the stir it caused when Barbie came out with Tanner. The idea was repeated some time in the '80s (?) with Pax, my Poopin' Pup, a much fuzzier, cuter dog who nevertheless produced the same stuff. Put it in one end, and it comes out the other.

SPECIAL BONUS AD! This one may only faintly resemble Marvel the Mustang and Blaze, but it's a mechanical horse, what the hell! This one DOES take batteries. What horse do? This one does.

POST-PONY: Sometimes, it just all comes together. Looking for that Romper Room riding caterpillar (which turned out to be Inchworm, with a jingle too dreadful to repeat here), I found - a riding DOG, so much like a cross between Digger the Dog and Gaylord that it almost made my hair stand on end! Well, not quite. But it's interesting.

Elizabeth Holmes: Blah, blah, blah

Glyptodon!

Disco glyptodons

Coloring pages

Glypto Do's and Don'ts

GIFs

Glyptodon (from Greek for "grooved or carved tooth" – Greek γλυπτός sculptured + ὀδοντ-, ὀδούς tooth) was a genus of large, armored mammals of the subfamily Glyptodontinae (glyptodonts or glyptodontines) – relatives of armadillos – that lived during the Pleistocene epoch. It was roughly the same size and weight as a Volkswagen Beetle, though flatter in shape. With its rounded, bony shell and squat limbs, it superficially resembled a turtle, and the much earlier dinosaurian ankylosaur – providing an example of the convergent evolution of unrelated lineages into similar forms. In 2016 an analysis of Doedicurus mtDNA found it was, in fact, nested within the modern armadillos as the sister group of a clade consisting of Chlamyphorinae and  For this reason, glyptodonts and all armadillos but Dasypus were relocated to a new family, Chlamyphoridae.

Glyptodon Temporal range: Pleistocene (Uquian-Lujanian) ~2.500–0.011 Ma  PreЄ Є O S D C P T J K Pg N ↓
Fossil specimen at the Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Mammalia
Superorder:	Xenarthra
Order:	Cingulata
Family:	Chlamyphoridae
Subfamily:	†Glyptodontinae
Genus:	†Glyptodon[1] Owen, 1839
Species
G. clavipes Owen, 1839 (type) G. elongatus Burmeister, 1866 G. euphractus Lund, 1839 G. munizi Ameghino, 1881 G. petaliferus Cope, 1888[2] G. reticulatus Owen, 1845 G. rivapacis Hay, 1923[3]

GLYPTO-BONUS: One more animatronic/plug-in Glyptodon!

Elizabeth Holmes demonstrates her product

Which is exactly nothing.

Autochrome 2

Autochrome

Do you need to feel better today?

A YouTube classic which deserves to be seen again. What baffles me is how many people protest in the comments section about how "cruel" this is, about how badly-injured the precious little ducklings were. Pshah! These are rolling fluffballs whose downy little butts are barely touching the pavement. Feathered tumbleweeds. They quickly right themselves and go toddling off  after Mom. That's the whole point of the thing.

Elizabeth Holmes: up to her elbows

In what, you may ask? Why, in human blood. For this is the currency Elizabeth Holmes deals in.

These nanoclips from some of the more drooly videos about Holmes (prior to 2016, when she was finally assassinated by the truth) only add to my astonishment at the lengths she would go to in order to appear sincere. Here she is in a lab coat - and may I say, after reading Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, this woman has never been within ten miles of such a thing - earnestly at work purifying blood samples  and saving humanity at the same time. For that is what she lives for.

The fact that someone at Theranos would set up a dummy lab so that this dummy of a woman could pretend to be working in it isn't so surprising. What surprises me is how many people gushed over her, fawned, crowned her "the next Steve Jobs" (as if the first one wasn't  bad enough. Wasn't Jobs known for stealing other people's ideas?)

At any rate, I want to get off this obsession now and on to a more palatable one. But I just had to  share this with you. Note her robotic movements, android face, and other less-than-human features. It scares the hell out of me, it does. Think of it. She nearly had our blood.

Astonishing power

Elizabeth Holmes: Surprising Lies

Blogger's note. I am sorry to confront you with so many surprising facts all at once. I will attempt to refute them as best I can. This is from an extremely out-of-date article from back when Elizabeth Holmes was telling everyone she was a genius, and they believed her. I will attempt to refute these 21 surprising facts, or at least until I run out of steam or get bored and quit. (21? Are they  freaking kidding??)

21 Surprising Facts About Billionaire Entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes

See how much you really know about America's youngest female billionaire.

It's really only in the past year that we've come to know and admire the world's youngest female billionaire, Elizabeth Holmes. Her incredibly unusual business strategy had her flying under the radar for more than a decade as she built her revolutionary blood-testing company, Theranos.

("Flying under the radar" is code for "covering their asses so they won't get their asses thrown in jail".)

Now Holmes is ranked No. 1 on the Silicon Valley 100, Business Insider's list of the most prominent (and coolest) people in Silicon Valley.

Here are 21 surprising facts you may not have known about America's coolest multibillionaire:

(Note. "Coolest" means what?)

Ranked No. 110 on the Forbes 400 in 2014, Holmes topped the list of America's Self-Made Women in 2015 with a net worth of $4.7 billion.

Holmes was born in 1984. Considering her already incredible achievements, that in itself is surprising to many.

(Um. I was born in 1954, and nobody runs around in circles because of it. When you were born isn't all that significant when you've committed such an astonishing amount of fraud. All it proves is that it's never too soon to be a criminal.)

At just 9 years of age, Holmes wrote in a letter to her father, "What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn't know was possible to do."

While still in high school, Holmes completed three college Mandarin courses and sold C compilers to Chinese universities.

(Lies. Lies. Lies. She wrote that letter a couple of years ago. She quotes it during absolutely every interview. "See, everybody? See how I was a selfless, burning idealist even when I was a little, little girl?")

Holmes went to Stanford for chemical engineering, and during her time there, filed her first patent (for an advanced drug-delivery patch). She then dropped out of college just before her sophomore year.

She once traveled to Singapore to spend a summer working in the Genome Institute labs on groundbreaking SARS research.

(The proof? Poof!)

Holmes was exceedingly private in the first 11 years of building her company. She's made a huge splash since appearing on the cover of Fortune magazine last summer.

Her company name, Theranos, is a combination of the words therapy and diagnose.

(Note. I prefer the similar term THANATOS, which is Greek for death.)

Since launching in 2003, Theranos has developed blood tests to help detect dozens of medical conditions, including high cholesterol and cancer, using just a drop or two of blood drawn from a pinprick in your finger.

(No they haven't. There is no Theranos. There is no blood-testing technology. Elizabeth and her henchmen hacked a Siemens blood-testing machine and stole its data after realizing their own equipment was about as useful as a toaster.)

Part of Holmes's inspiration came from her aversion to needles; her mother and grandmother even fainted at the sight of needles.

(Not true. Just theatre. Made up. Went over well with crowds. Sociopaths like to drill their way into your heart with warm-puppy, vulnerability-based bullshit.)

Holmes assembled what can be described as an all-star board of experienced and accomplished people in the corporate world: George Schultz, Bill Perry, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, and Bill Frist, among others.

(Wait, well, that - yeah. Sugar Daddies, all. She batted her presumably-false eyelashes at them, wore tight sweaters - and by the way, those famous black turtlenecks were NOT in imitation of Steve Jobs, who wore crewnecks, which is a kind of t-shirt - and did whatever other favors they asked. Kind of makes you sick to think of 90-year-old men going all gaga over a sociopathic fake blonde.)

Holmes met Sunny Balwani, who would later become her company's COO, in Beijing the summer after her senior year of high school, during the time he was getting his MBA from Berkeley.

(According to Bad Blood author John Carreyrou, Sunny Balwani  is more like a bodyguard/thug or something out of a bad gangster movie. He does not possess the intelligence of a gnat. During that whole book, I never figured out what Sunny was doing there.)

Holmes is often compared to visionary Steve Jobs and told Mercury News she    launched her company after "thinking about what is the greatest change I could make in the world."

Like Jobs, Holmes wears a daily "uniform" of a black suit with a black cotton turtleneck.

Holmes has set her sights on more than simply dominating the blood-testing market; she wants to create a whole new market called "consumer health technology" that will see consumers more engaged in their health care.

(Oh Jesus, stop, stop, STOP! Her vacuous fake idealism is the worst of it. Holmes simply doesn't care. Nothing was real, none of it was real, and none of it bothered her in the slightest, including the very real danger that her fucked-up testing could cost human lives.) 

As of last year, Holmes had 84 patents to her name (18 U.S. and 66 non-U.S.).

According to CBS News, Holmes spends every waking hour in her office and doesn't even own a TV at home.

(And you believed her! In light of what we now know, I am beginning to wonder just what she did all day.)

In March this year, Holmes became the youngest person ever honored as a lifetime member by the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans.

(Oh boy - get one of those long-arm stretch-out things with the hand on it, and snatch that award back! Horatio Alger is all about "rags to riches", but since when are riches necessarily tied to human decency?)

According to The New Yorker, Holmes "can quote Jane Austen by heart, [but] no longer devotes time to novels or friends, doesn't date, doesn't own a television, and hasn't taken a vacation in 10 years ... She is a vegan, and several times a day she drinks a pulverized concoction of cucumber, parsley, kale, spinach, romaine lettuce, and celery."

(I want to see that celery.)

She abstains from caffeine, limits the amount of time she sleeps, and works seven days a week (Insights by Stanford Business).

(Doing what exactly?)

Holmes is notoriously secretive, and while she's been criticized by industry peers as such, insists she must protect her technology from the prying eyes of competitors.

(And. You know what else. Didn't work out, did it, Elizabeth?)

PUBLISHED ON: JUL 1, 2015

How things change in only a handful of years!

Can millennials count to twenty-five?

Sometimes I just get so tired. I don't want to diss millennials too much, because, after all, they are The Future. We're in their hands, or we will be, and there's nothing much we can do about it.

But if they work retail, shouldn't they be expected to - uh, ah, er - know something about money?

I think what may be happening is that they are shown how to scan a bar code, at which point their training is "done". This is called "buying something". The payment is a tap on a machine, so they don't need to worry about that either.

Money confounds them. They don't know what it is.

Being pensioners and fairly poor, we're the type to count out change for things, just so we keep track of what we are actually spending. All this has gone by the boards, like writing in cursive and learning to tell time from a clock face. (Both have been scrapped and are no longer taught in schools.) It's much more OK to jam a card in a machine, or (better yet) tap it, then sort of forget about the total while you shove the item in plastic and hurry on.

The concept of spending money - actual cash money - isn't real any more. Bank balances. Loans. Debt. What are they? It's all a sort of grey oblivion, until one day it catches up with you and you realize you are living so far beyond your means that you can't scrape up enough to pay the rent.

So. Today I had two pretty vivid examples of millennials who couldn't count. I mean, AT ALL. One was a young man, a very pleasant young man from another culture, so he's excused or partially-excused, but why on earth, during his training, did he never have to handle any money, let alone learn to make change? I guess Walmart just assumes no one pays any attention any more. It just "goes on a card", and you're finished. 

Typical of the older, poorer generation, I set a small item in front of him and put down a handful of assorted cash. There was a five dollar bill, a few toonies and a loonie, and a lot of new-looking quarters. (I only mention this because I wondered if this was why he found it so perplexing.) He looked at the  five, sort of put it to one side, hefted the toonies and loonie and began to poke his fingers into them (to count them, I assume). Then the quarters. There were  at least eight of them. He picked up one quarter. He sort of squinted at it, held it up to his eye, turned it this way and that. Flipped it over to look at the other side. Then he put that quarter to one side. Then he picked up the next quarter, inspected it carefully, turned it this way and that, and - 

On and on, each time, for eight quarters.

Of course, I (and everyone else in line) wondered if Walmart had a new policy of scrutinizing quarters, the way you would a fifty or even a twenty. Maybe shiny new quarters were counterfeit! Maybe I had a mint in my basement and feverishly turned out quarters all night long so I could fool Walmart and get my garden hose for free. But this just seemed surreal. He kept pushing the quarters around the counter like little silver curling stones. Finally he picked one up and held it by its edges for the longest time.

"Are these worth twenty-five cents?" he asked me. I assured him they were. 

Was this nickel confusion? Not likely. Every nickel in Canada has a beaver on it. They aren't the same size as quarters. They're thicker and smaller in diameter. But I doubt if he knew what a nickel looked like anyway. When he gave me my change, I just took it and left. Didn't even bother to look.

But that wasn't the end of it!

An hour or so later I went to a craft store to buy some different-colored sheets of felt for a project. They had gorgeous felt in the place, every sort of rich colour, so I picked out a lot of it. The price was two sheets for $1.25, clearly marked with a sticker on each sheet.

I bought sixteen sheets, which I assumed would be eight times $1.25. The cashier, young and sweet and (until I rang the bell) glued to her phone, dutifully began to ring up one sheet after another, after another, after another. The total was absurdly high. I realized she had charged me sixteen times $1.25.  I insisted it wasn't right and that the price was on the label, but the label was covering the bar code, so she had to actually ring it in rather than scan it. So she was completely confused.

Two for $1.25 was just too complex a concept to master. It HAD to be $1.25 each. That's what things cost, didn't they? One item, one price?

I knew she was upset because I was challenging her reality. I was nice about it, but I insisted I wouldn't pay double what the item actually cost. I had to lay out two sheets of felt and say, "These cost $1.25." Then lay out two more sheets of felt and say, "These cost $1.25." Finally she got it, more or less. We worked it out, but I still think she thought she was being nice about it to get rid of me.  

All she knew how to do was scan bar codes. That's what a clerk does now. Some of those self-checkout things allow you to use cash, but I've heard they're on the way out.

So I will be forced to card-tap, and no longer deal with a living, breathing, mistake-making millennial person. I wonder why that upsets me so much?